Four Roads Cross

by Max Gladstone

He pressed his lips together, shook his head.

  She slumped beside him. “You really.” She was breathing hard, and not from the run. “You really should let me know what can kill you.”

  “I’m.” His first try was wet and windy at once. He spit blood onto the pavement. “I’m not exactly sure. Extended sunlight, probably. Decapitation. It’s not like there’s a manual. And only dumb kids go around trying to off themselves.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s an existentialist thing.”

  “Never did trust philosophy.” A pause, in which she failed again to find her breath. “You didn’t know you’d survive that?”

  “I’ve had my throat slit before. I don’t experiment, but other people always seem happy to oblige.”

  “Pirate.”

  “Cop.”

  She shrugged. “Thanks.”

  “Hells. Now we have her, you have an excuse to take her ship. That’s the real prize. Rescue the people she’s smuggling, save the day. And I needed to work on my tan.”

  She punched him in the arm. He winced.

  Inside her, the pit still yawned, and beneath that pit, another, deeper.

  7

  The goddess addressed Cat in the shower, in her mother’s voice.

  Catherine, why do you turn from me?

  Oh, I don’t know if I turn from you as such, she replied as she shampooed. We have a close working relationship.

  You live inside my body, yet we don’t talk like I do with my children.

  I barely had my life figured out working with Justice. Then you came along.

  You visited back alley bloodsucker dens for the thrill of being drunk. Does that constitute having your life figured out?

  I didn’t say I had it figured well. Just figured. She soaped down, rinsed off, turned into the shower spray. I was raised to think you were dead, and a traitor. Your children were my childhood ghosts.

  That isn’t my fault.

  She shut off the water, reached blind for her towel, and rubbed herself dry.

  I can help you. We can be closer than the structure of Justice allows. You are a priestess. You have made a vow. You could perform miracles.

  Miracles aren’t my job.

  The voice did not answer. Somewhere beneath her feet, the moon smiled.

  She had a fresh change of clothes in her locker, and as she put it on she convinced herself she felt clean.

  * * *

  She was halfway through the paperwork on the morning’s raid when a duty officer—Cramden, she thought, beneath the Suit—came to tell her Tara Abernathy was looking for her. “Send her back,” Cat said, and watched him go, smooth and assured, rippling silver.

  She hadn’t made progress on the paperwork when the door opened again. She looked up from the form, exasperated. “How do you spell ‘ceiling’?”

  Tara wrote the glyphs in air with her fingertip and shut the door behind her. “Long day?”

  “Two long days,” she said, “and it’s only one thirty. It’ll be four long days before I’m done.”

  “I need you at a meeting tonight.”

  “Can’t. I have an operation. And this.” She fanned the forms.

  “Paperwork,” Tara said, skeptical. She paced the confines of Cat’s office, and “confines” was the right word: a cubbyhole of the Temple of Justice intended for solitary monastics meditating on their Lady. A bas-relief of a robed woman occupied one wall, its eyes notched out with a clean chisel strike. What light there was shafted through high slit windows; there had been more direct sun before they built the bank next door. “Why do you need after-action reports? Justice is in your head.”

  “Paperwork makes us more than just another gang. In the year since Seril came back, it’s grown more important than ever. She has opinions—Justice didn’t.”

  “Justice claimed she didn’t. Study her arrest record and you’ll see patterns emerge. Not nice patterns, either.”

  “At least she was fair.”

  “She arrested me for treason. You’ll excuse me if I don’t share your estimation of her impartiality.”

  “Slow down, college girl. You broke a lot of laws, even if you stopped bad people from doing worse.”

  “You, and your Blacksuits, almost got us all killed. Or enslaved.”

  “You hypnotized me and sent me into a vampire’s sickroom, knowing I’d shove my arm in his mouth. I’m only here at all because he has more self-control than either of us.”

  “You—” Tara’s voice went sharp and hot, and she wheeled on Cat with one hand raised. But she stopped herself, and closed her mouth, and sat at last in the chair across from Cat’s desk. “You were telling me about the paperwork.”

  Cat assembled the sheets into a pile. “Seril’s bound by the same rules as Justice—but she’s conscious, and her perspective warps things. We’ve stepped up the plainclothes officer program as a result. Used to be intelligence gathering only, moles and vice, but now it’s expanded to a double role, intelligence and oversight. The guys with families don’t like it—if they show their faces, they’re exposed to revenge and old-fashioned blackmail. Those of us who don’t have as much to lose, step up.” She dropped the papers into a wire tray. “So, much as I miss our pleasant chats, I’ll pass on the meeting.”

  “The gargoyles are exposed,” Tara said.

  “I heard. You talked to Gabby Jones down at the guild?”

  “She won’t pull the story. She’s right not to. It is the truth, even if it’s the wrong truth.” Tara scraped one fingernail down her chair’s leather armrest. “We need to regulate the damage, which means keeping Seril and Aev’s people under wraps. I got most of them to promise to cut out the vigilantism, but Shale won’t, and Aev won’t let me stop him. So Alt Coulumb has to be the safest city in the world, starting tonight.”

  “I’m beginning to get the impression this isn’t just about me coming to your meeting,” Cat said.

  “You have a lot of Blacksuits booked for an operation tonight. Cancel the op. Put them on the street instead.”

  “No.”

  “This is a big deal, Cat. We need the city safe tonight.”

  “This morning Raz helped us catch an indenture-trader in a drug bust. That gives us grounds to seize and search her ship, to save those people. If we don’t take them tonight, her crew has standing orders to sail out of reach. You want that on your conscience?”

  Cat wasn’t good at reading people, but even she could see the yes in the set of Tara’s shoulders, in the angle of her head and the tension at the corners of her mouth. And even she could see the woman recoil from that yes. “No,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s the right thing to do,” Tara told Cat, and herself.

  Neither of them spoke for a while.

  “Tara,” she said at last, “is it normal to hear gods in your head?”

  “I’m not a person of faith,” Tara replied. “Sort of the opposite.”

  “You know how these things work, though.”

  “From the outside. But no, it’s not usual.”

  “Seril talks to me, sometimes.”

  “The gods.” Tara steepled her fingers, and in that gesture she recalled Ms. Kevarian, Tara’s teacher, mentor—and Denovo, too, the monster whose student Tara had been. “They aren’t part of time and space like we are. They’re second-order effects of humanity. We feel them. When we pray, or take the field against them, we … bind them into time. But they don’t do small talk. In general, only saints can hear their voices.”

  “So I’m talking to myself.”

  “I doubt it. We’ve changed. Take you, for example: you were a bit rudderless a year ago.”

  “Hey,” she said, but didn’t mean it.

  “And now you’re tied to a being who’s nothing but direction. Maybe that makes the difference. And Seril’s a smaller god, not spread between as many worshippers. So each one means more to her. Or maybe she thinks you’re a saint.” Tara shrugged. “I kill gods and gua
rd them, and raise them from the dead when they die. I don’t pray.”

  “But you’re hearing voices, too,” Cat said.

  Tara drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. The wall clock ticked. She nodded, once.

  “At least I’m not going mad alone.”

  Tara stood. “Meeting’s at seven, at the Temple of Kos. Can you come? Please?”

  “We sail at eight.”

  “It won’t take long.”

  “Why do you want me? This whole thing’s above my pay grade.”

  “We saved the city,” Tara said. “We’re responsible for it now.”

  “I wish someone had told me before I decided to save it.”

  Tara laughed without sound. Then she shook Cat’s hand and left.

  8

  The Paupers’ Quarter market closed at one, and afterward, as ever in time of crisis, Matt Adorne and the other market elders met for lunch at Cadfael’s Bar and Grill.

  “It’s a travesty,” whitebeard Corbin Rafferty raged, punctuating his tirade with a long swig of dark beer. “We sacrifice to God and we pay dues to Justice. And in return they let godsdamn Stone Men,” his voice shaking, “Stone Men haunt our streets. Bloodthirsty.” He stuffed his mouth with burger, bit down hard, and gnashed. “We have to do something.”

  “They don’t sound bloodthirsty.” Matt lowered his own voice in hope Corbin would match him. Why shout? The rooftop was empty as usual; hells, the whole place was empty this early in the day, with all the office drones at the paper shifting they called work. Every man and woman gathered around the table, Matt and Ray Capistano and Ray’s boy and Sandy Sforza and her girl and Corbin and his three daughters, had put in a fuller day than the suited kids who’d taken to renting Quarter rooms in the last few years, the alchemists’ assistants and junior accountants, payroll associates and lesser Craftsmen and other sacrificial lambs of the Central Business District, could conceive. A market man’s life was hard: rise at three thirty, truck out hours before sunup to meet the farmers and load the wagons. Two hundred pounds of eggs weighed as much as two hundred pounds of anything. Truck back into town in time to meet restaurant buyers and then stand a solid seven hours offering goods for sale. Some men worked harder, sure. Once the construction boys and dockhands clocked out at sunset, dust-caked and sweaty, they’d have earned their beers, but in the meantime Matt and his comrades were emperors of the roof.

  And empresses, Sandy would add.

  But Corbin raged on. “You don’t know from Stone Men, Matt. My dad fought ’em when they went mad back in the Wars. Lost an arm. They’ll snap you in half if you blink wrong. And you heard the godsdamn Crier.” Corbin washed down his burger with more beer. His daughters sat beside him, tight, silent. Claire, the oldest at seventeen, carved her chicken into squares and speared the squares with her fork; for her, food was a battle you fought so you could fight other battles later. Ellen, middle child, ate quickly and carefully as a bird, and kept her head down; Hannah, youngest, faked the same attitude, the same downturn, but when her father wasn’t looking, her gaze slipped up and left to rest on Ray’s son’s mouth. Matt wondered often about their lives—Rafferty was a man for drinks and a bar fight in time of need, not one you trusted with your home address. “They’re fouling our rooftops. Chasing through our alleys. Flouting laws.”

  “And since when have you,” Sandy said as she grabbed a chicken wing, “given a dog’s cock for laws flouted or otherwise, Corbin Rafferty? I’ve heard you say at this very table”—knocking with her fingers on the wood—“that it’s this city’s laws that ruin us.”

  “Once I say a thing, you’ll stalk me with it to my grave, Sforza.”

  “And stab you through the heart with it to make sure you’re dead, and good riddance to the world.” She laughed; Rafferty’s girls didn’t, and Rafferty himself laughed too loud.

  “If we are to sacrifice at all,” he said, “we should be repaid. Monsters on our own rooftops, and the lot of you don’t mind?”

  “Likely just tall tales,” Matt said. “Crier says they’ve been here a year. I never seen one.”

  “But Matthew,” and that was Ray, leaning back on two legs of his chair, balanced as perfectly as the log cabin of chicken bones on his plate. No one could leave so pleasant a mess as Ray. “Of course you haven’t seen them. They come to those who need help, and when was the last time you needed any?”

  Matt drank. “Don’t see the problem,” he said, after. “Even if they are here. So long as they help people.”

  “Maybe someone doesn’t want help,” Corbin said. “Maybe what helps you, hurts me.” He tossed a wing bone down as if casting thunderbolts upon a sinner. “If the Stone Men are back, Lord Kos ought to shatter them. We need Blacksuits on every roof.”

  Ray snatched a celery stalk and knifed its hollow full of blue cheese. “You haven’t been to church often this year, have you, Corbin? Plenty of sermons about coming to terms with old enemies.”

  “You mean they’re going soft.”

  “I mean none of us knows the whole story. Stone Men don’t touch my business. Why should I worry about them?”

  “A man ought to own his city.”

  “In a single question,” Ray said, “I can prove incontrovertibly the Stone Men are no cause of concern for folk like us, who keep our beaks down: Have we ever seen these creatures?”

  Matt followed Ray’s gaze around the table: Ray’s son, face buried in his second burger, shrugged and shook his head and chewed. Sandy Sforza drank her beer and shook her head as well. Sandy’s daughter Lil was staring at Ray’s boy’s barbecue sauce–streaked face with a sickened expression entirely unlike Hannah’s, but when she realized the others were watching her, she said, “No.” The gazes slid to Matt, who grunted no, as did Corbin.

  “There you go,” Ray said. “If they’re in the city or not, what’s it matter to us?”

  Slow jowly nods around the table. Corbin cracked his knuckles, frowning.

  “We’ve seen,” an unsteady voice began, then stopped. Matt looked over in time to see Claire Rafferty draw her hand back from Ellen’s shoulder. Ellen’s pale cheeks colored red, and she returned her gaze to at her plate, as if she’d never spoken.

  “Girls,” Corbin said in the voice he adopted while trying to sound nice, or at least less angry. It rarely worked. “What have you seen?”

  “Nothing,” Claire answered, cold. “Father.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “Ellen’s telling stories,” Hannah said.

  “I’m not.” The second time Ellen spoke, she sounded less hesitant. Still, she spoke into her plate, afraid, Matt thought, to face the table, and especially her father, who watched her with an expression darkened by the beers he’d drunk. “You saw him, too. You both did.”

  Claire took Ellen’s wrist.

  “Girls.” Corbin’s tone changed, and they turned toward him like iron filings when a magnet drew close. “Let Ellen talk.”

  Ellen paled, and Matthew wondered not for the first time, and not for the first time stopped himself from wondering, what life was like inside the Rafferty house.

  “Tell me,” Rafferty repeated.

  “There’s a prayer,” Ellen said. “We all know it. We all dreamed it. And I used it.” Rafferty leaned toward his daughter, his brows knit tight, the blade of his jaw unsheathed. “I didn’t ask for anything,” she said. “I never would have, but I was scared for you.”

  “Ellen.” Claire’s voice, sharp, a shutoff. “This isn’t the time.”

  “Two months back you weren’t home, hadn’t been since the day before. The second night we decided, all of us, that we should look.”

  Sandy laughed, and Ellen fell silent. The glare Corbin shot Sandy was vicious, though not so vicious as the one with which she answered him. Corbin turned back to his daughter. “Go on.”

  “We started early and went to the addresses on your matchbooks. No one had seen you. We got lost. The streets kept turning around.” Which meant they’d
been in the Pleasure Quarter, Matt thought, though Ellen wouldn’t say as much: the Pleasure Quarter, where the city’s shattered-glass grid tangled to a briar patch of nameless avenues—the paths of long-dead cows codified by concrete. Playground, the market boys called it, the kids without stall or family who carried and carted for tips: walk in flush with soul, walk out empty save for memories of red light that dulls tears and washes flaws from skin. Matt imagined three Rafferty girls wandering through that maze at night. A sphinx smile darted across Hannah’s lips.

  But Ellen was still talking: “I said we should try the prayer, ask for help. Hannah and Claire didn’t want to. It was my idea.”

  Thankful eye flicks from sister to sister, which Matt recognized only because the Adorne household of his boyhood communicated in the same code, five siblings united against the Old Man.

  “You prayed,” Matt said, because Corbin would have said worse.

  Ellen looked up from her plate. “I cut myself, bled, and prayed. Then the statue came.”

  Left and right down the table, all sat in their own silence: sisters scared, Corbin in rage-tinted wonder, Ray eager, Sandy skeptical, Lil awed either by the story or the equally fantastical occasion of the Rafferty girls speaking. Ellen sounded drunk on memory. “He looked like the stories say, with eyes like jewels and wings of stone. He gathered us up. His arms were thin, but he was strong. Not like a person. Strong like an arch.” Those last words broke the spell she had cast upon herself, and her fear returned. She glanced to her father, and back down. “He flew us home. Fast, over the rooftops, and high. They can fly, even here, so they must be right with God, mustn’t they? He said if you weren’t back by morning we should get the Blacksuits. He said if we were ever in danger, we should call him again. He looked worried for us. Then he left. You came back”—this to her father—“when we were all asleep. You were sick the next day. That’s all.”

  “Is this true?” Corbin asked. The other two girls had sat very still through the telling.

  “It’s true,” Claire said at last.

  “But—” Hannah started. Claire looked at her but didn’t speak. She stopped.