Four Roads Cross (4 page)

Growing up in the country, Tara had assumed that once you built a building you were done—not the farmhouses and barns and silos back in Edgemont, of course; those always needed work, the structure's whole life a long slow deliquescence back to dust, but surely their weakness came from poor materials and construction methods that at best nodded toward modernity. But a friend of hers at the Hidden Schools studied architecture and laughed at Tara's naiveté. When Tara took offense, she explained: skyscrapers need more care than barns. Complicated systems require work to preserve their complexity. A barn has no air-conditioning to break; free the elementals that chill a tower and the human beings within will boil in their own sweat. The more intricate the dance, the more disastrous the stumble.

The abandoned towers in the Ash were simple things, built of mortar, stone, and arches, like Old World cathedrals. If Alt Coulumb fell tomorrow, they'd still stand in five hundred years. Their insides rotted, though. Façades broke. Shards of plate glass jutted from windowsills.

Tara approached on foot by daylight through the Hot Town. Kids loitered at alley mouths, hands in the pockets of loose sweatshirts, hoods drawn up in spite of the heat. Sidewalk sweepers stared at her, as did women smoking outside bars with dirty signs. Girls played double dodge on a cracked blacktop.

But when she reached the Ash, she was alone. Not even beggars lingered in these shadows.

The tallest tower lacked a top, and though black birds circled it, none landed.

Tara closed her eyes.

Outside her skull, it was almost noon; inside, cobweb cords shone moonlight against the black. This was the Craftswoman's world, of bonds and obligations. She saw no traps, no new Craft in place. She opened her eyes again and approached the topless tower.

Sunlight streamed through broken windows. Jagged glass cast bright sharp shadows on the ruins within. Tara looked up, and up, and up, to the first intact structural vault seven stories overhead. The intervening floors had collapsed, and the wreckage of offices and apartments piled twenty feet tall in the tower's center: splintered rotted wood, chunks of drywall, stone and ceramic, toilet bowls and countertops and tarnished office nameplates.

And of course she still couldn't fly here, damn the jealous gods.

A few decades' abandonment hadn't weathered the walls enough to climb, even if she had equipment. She'd scaled the Tower of Art at the Hidden Schools, upside down a thousand feet in air, but she'd had spotters then, and what was falling to a woman who could fly? She considered, and rejected, prayer.

There had to be an entrance somewhere, she told herself, though she knew it wasn't true.

On her third circuit of the floor, she found, behind a pile of rubble, a hole in the wall—and beyond that hole a steep and narrow stair. Maybe they hired cathedral architects for this building. Old habits died hard.

She climbed for a long time in silence and the dark. A fat spider landed on her shoulder, skittered down her jacket sleeve, and brushed the back of her hand with feathery legs; she cupped it in her fingers and returned it to its wall and webs. The spider's poison tickled through her veins, a pleasant tension like an electric shock or the way the throat seized after chewing betel nut. A rat king lived in the tower walls, but it knew better than to send its rat knights against a Craftswoman. They knelt as she passed.

Twenty minutes later she reached the top.

Daylight blinded her after the long climb. She stepped out into shadowless noon. Clutching fingers of the spire's unfinished dome curved above her. Blocks of fallen stone littered the roof. Iron arches swooped at odd angles overhead, stamped with runes and ornaments of weather-beaten enamel.

She turned a slow circle, saw no one, heard only wind. She slid her hands into her pockets and approached the root of one arch. It was not anchored in the stone, but beneath it, through a gap in the masonry, as if the arch had been designed to tilt or spin. She recognized the runes' style, though she couldn't read them. And the enameled ornaments, one for each of the many interlocking arches—

“It's an orrery,” she said. “An orrery in your script.”

“Well spotted,” a stone voice replied.

She turned from the arch. Aev stood barely a body's length away, head and shoulders and wings taller than Tara. Her silver circlet's sheen had nothing to do with the sun. Tara had not heard her approach. She wasn't meant to. “I knew you lived here. I didn't realize it was your place, technically.”

“It isn't,” Aev said. “Not anymore. When Our Lady fell in the God Wars, much was stolen from her, including this building.”

“I thought temples weren't your style.”

“We are temples in ourselves. But the world was changing then, even here. We thought to change with it.” She reached overhead—far overhead—and scraped a flake of rust from the iron. “Even your heathen astronomy admits that the rock-which-circles-as-the-moon is the closest of any celestial body to our world. We thought to cultivate Our Lady's glory through awe and understanding.”

“And then the God Wars came.”

Aev nodded. “Your once human Craftsmen, who style themselves masters of the universe, have slim regard for awe or wonder, for anything they cannot buy and sell. So deadly are they, even hope becomes a tool in their grip.”

“I'm not here to have that argument,” Tara said.

“Our temple would have been glorious. At night the people of Alt Coulumb would climb here to learn the turnings of the world.”

“Where are the others?”

Aev raised her hand. The gargoyles emerged soundlessly from behind and inside blocks of stone, unfolding wings and limbs—worshippers who were also weapons, children of a dwindled goddess. Thirty or so, last survivors of a host winnowed by the war to which their Lady led them. Strong, swift, mostly immortal. Tara did not want to fear them. She didn't, much.

Still, preserving her nonchalance took effort.

The Blacksuits could stand still for hours at a time. Golems spun down to hibernation. Only the faintest margin separated a skeletal Craftswoman in meditation from a corpse. But the gargoyles, Seril's children, they were not active things feigning immobility. They were stone.

“I don't see Shale,” she said.

“He remains uncomfortable around you. Even you must admit, he has his reasons.”

“I stole his face for a good cause,” Tara said. “And he tried to kill me later, and then I saved you all from Professor Denovo. I think we're even.”

“‘Even' is a human concept,” Aev said. “Stone bears the marks of all that's done to it, until new marks erase those that came before.”

“And vigilante justice—was that carved into you, too?”

“I see you heard the news.”

“I damn well heard the news. How long have you been doing this?”

“Our Lady sent her first dreams soon after our return to the city. A simple offer of exchange, to rebuild her worship.”

“And your Lady—” Tara heard herself say the capital letter, which she didn't like but couldn't help. She'd carried their goddess inside herself, however briefly. “Your Lady controls Justice now. She has a police force at her disposal, and She still thought this terror-in-the-shadows routine was a good idea?”

Aev's laugh reminded Tara of a tiger's chuff, and she became uncomfortably conscious of the other woman's teeth. “Justice may belong to Our Lady, but when She serves as Justice, She is bound by rules, manpower, schedules. Your old master Denovo wrought too well.”

Tara's jaw tightened at the word “master,” but this wasn't the time to argue that point. “So Seril uses you to answer prayers.”

“Seril is weak. For forty years the people of this city have thought Her more demon than goddess. Her cult has faded. Those who hold Her rites—rocks into the sea at moon-death, the burning of flowers and the toasting of the moon—do not know the meaning of their deeds. So we give them miracles to inspire faith. Lord Kos and His church preserve the city, but Seril and we who are Her children work in darkness, in the hours of need.”

“Some people wouldn't like the idea of a goddess growing in the slums, feeding off desperate people's blood.”

“We have stopped muggings, murders, and rapes. If there is harm in that, I do not see it. You have lived in this city for a year—in the Paupers' Quarter, though its more gentrified districts—and it took you this long to learn of our efforts. Is that not a sign we have done needed work? Helped people otherwise invisible to you?”

Gravelly murmurs of assent rose from the gargoyles. Wind pierced Tara's jacket and chilled the sweat of her long climb.

“Seril's not strong enough to go public,” she said.

“Our Lady is stronger than She was a year ago, as She would not have been if we listened to you and kept still. Some believe, now—which is more success than your efforts have yielded.”

“I've spent a year chasing leads and hunting your old allies, most of whom are dead, and that's beside the point. It sounds like you waited all of ten minutes before you started playing Robin-o-Dale. You didn't even tell me.”

“Why would we tell you, if we knew you would disagree with our methods?”

“I am your Craftswoman, dammit. It's my job to keep you safe.”

“Perhaps you would have known of our affairs,” Aev said, “if you spoke with the Lady once in a while.”

Moonlight, and cool silver, and a laugh like the sea. Tara shut the goddess out, and stared into her own reflection in Aev's gemstone eyes.

“You're lucky they still think Seril's dead. I want a promise from all of you: no missions tonight. And I need you, Aev, at a council meeting soon as it's dark enough for you to fly.”

“We will not abandon our responsibilities.”

“This is for your own good. And Seril's.”

Aev paced. Her claws swept broad arcs through the air. Tara did not speak their language enough to follow her, but she recognized some of the curses.

“No!”

The stone voice did not belong to Aev. The gargoyle lady spun, shocked.

A gray blur struck the roof and tumbled, tearing long grooves in the stone with its landing's force. Crouched, snarling, a new form faced Tara: slender and elegant compared to the hulking statues behind him, majestically finished, limbs lean and muscles polished, but no less stone, and furious.

Tara did not let him see her flinch. “Shale,” she said. “I'm glad you were listening. I need your pledge, with the others', not to interfere.”

“I will not promise. And neither should they.” Aev reached for Shale, to cuff him or pull him back, but he spun away and leapt, with a single beat of broad-spread wings, to perch on the broken orrery arch, glaring down. “We are teaching the people of Alt Coulumb. They've come to believe—in the Paupers' Quarter, in the markets. They pray to our Lady. They look to the skies. You'd have us give that up—the only progress we've made in a year. You ask us to turn our backs on the few faithful our Lady has. To break their trust. I refuse.”

“Get down,” Aev snapped.

“I fly where I wish and speak what I choose.”

“We asked Tara for her help. We should listen to her,” Aev said, “even when her counsel is hard to bear.”

“It's just for one night,” Tara said.

Shale's wings snapped out, shedding whorls of dust. He seemed immense atop the jagged iron spar. “For one night, and the next, and the next after that. We've crouched and cringed through a year of nights and nights, and if we cease our small evangelism, with each passing day the faith we've built will break, and faith once broken's three times harder to reforge. I will not betray the people who call on us for aid. Will you, Mother?” He scowled at Aev. “Will any of you?” His gaze swept the rooftop gathering. Stone forms did not shuffle feet, but still Tara sensed uncertainty in shifting wings and clenching claws.

Aev made a sound in her chest that Tara heard as distant thunder. “I will swear,” she said, fierce and final. “We all will swear. We will not show ourselves. We will let prayers pass unanswered, for our Lady's safety.”

Tara felt the promise bite between them. Not so binding as a contract, since no consideration had passed, but the promise was a handle nevertheless for curses and retribution should Aev betray her word. Good enough.

“You swear for the Lady's sake,” Shale said, “yet, swearing, you turn from Her service, and from our people—you turn from the overlooked, from the fearful. Don't abandon them!”

“And I will swear,” said another gargoyle, whose name Tara did not know. “And I.” And others, all of them, an assent in grinding chorus. Tara gathered their promises into a sheaf, and tied the sheaf through a binding glyph on her forearm. That hurt worse than the spider's poison, but it was for a good cause.

“Broken,” Shale said, and another word, which must have been a curse in Stone. “Surrender.”

“Shale,” Aev said. “You must swear with us.”

“You cannot force me,” Shale said. “Only the Lady may command.”

He leapt off the tower. Wings folded, he needled toward the city streets—then with a whip crack he flared and glided up, and off, through Alt Coulumb's towers.

Tara gathered her Craft into a net to snare him, hooks to catch and draw him back. Shadow rolled over her, and she cast out her arm.

But a massive claw closed around her wrist, and Aev's body blocked her view of Shale's retreat. Tara's lightning spent itself against the gargoyle's stone hide.

“I can stop him,” Tara said. She pulled against Aev's grip, but the gargoyle's hand did not move. “Get out of my way.” Growls rose from the other statues, obscured behind the grand curve of Aev's wings.

“His choice is free,” Aev replied. “We will not let you bind him.”

“He'll spoil everything.”