Four Roads Cross

by Max Gladstone

  That brought her up short. In surprise she almost let an overhead pylon strike her in the face. “You don’t see why I’m so mad about this. You don’t see why I’m so mad?” She spotted him two blocks back, climbing a skyscraper. She leapt off the train, wings spread, but by the time she brought herself around he’d vanished again. She flew forty stories up a jewel-faceted tower and perched at its peak, steadying herself against one of the needlelike protrusions Tara called nightmare antennas. Terrors clawed at Aev as she held it, like a kitten testing its claws. Not for the first time Aev wondered what exactly had broken inside Tara Abernathy’s mind that let her judge her way of life normal.

  Where, in the streets below, in the alleys and dead ends, in the shop windows and blacktop street ball playgrounds, where was her wayward son?

  She remembered her debates with the Lady about carving him. We’re strong, Aev had said, almost too strong, and fierce. Perhaps we need a young one who’s fast, who can move unseen in shadows, a king of infiltrators and sneaks, a messenger no door will bar.

  Should have made him clubfoot and slow, and ironed out that infuriating spark of personal initiative.

  (Not really, but some days she wished.)

  There. Two skyscrapers over, by a tower with a starburst logo and the legend GRIMWALD HOLDINGS—Shale was a winged black slice against garish ghostlit colors. She launched herself into space, mouth wide to drink the moon.

  He hid in shadows, so she searched every shadow. He flew and she flew faster. He reared and she doubled back. No crowd could conceal him, no bolt-hole was deep enough to hide.

  But he was fast. She’d carved well, with the Lady in her hands.

  And he must have known this would happen, that midway through the chase her rage would unclench and leave her simply running, flying, as she had done centuries ago when Alt Coulumb was a small town and she its sole guardian. He must have known, because when she cornered him on a low roof between two skyscrapers near Uhlan and Brakenridge—when she slammed into him and they tumbled together on gravel, spinning, tearing gouges in tar paper, a ball of claws and teeth, and she ended the tumble on top, legs pinning his wings to the roof—he bared his throat to her and said, with an imp’s smile she never could harden herself against, “Good chase, Mother.”

  She sat back on her haunches astride him. “You don’t even understand”—that last word even more a growl than usual in Stone—“why I’m angry.”

  “Can you get off me?”

  She bared teeth.

  “It’s hard to talk this way, is all.”

  One wingbeat drew her to her feet. He stood more slowly, exaggerating submission. She’d seen him kip up from worse falls. “Your stunt risked the Lady’s life.”

  He picked gravel out of his ears and brushed more from the hollow between his neck and collarbone. Across the street, a billboard man with improbably orange skin blew smoke rings into the night. The rings, swelling, faded to air. “Let’s not do this here.”

  He flew slowly, painted greens and oranges and browns by billboards and streetlights. She followed. A late-night worker gaped from a high window at them both, and Shale waved. Aev landed after him, on an observation deck beneath a towering nightmare antenna. The city lay below, river flowing down to bay and blackly glittering ocean. Out there, Captain Pelham’s crew guided the captured Dream and its foul cargo to port.

  “I’ve seen the view before, Shale.”

  “But it’s no less beautiful for your knowing it,” he said. “They pay to come up here these days, the humans I mean. In the forty years since we left the rooftops, they’ve learned to love them.” He patted coin-op binoculars mounted at the observation deck’s edge. “Five-year-olds press their faces to this lens and stare out to the edge of the world.”

  “Wearing skin has fogged your mind.”

  “The Lady made me to walk among them, with your hands. Will you blame me for that?”

  “I blame you for your meathead stunt tonight.”

  “I know those girls. Their father’s a broken man—all the anger inside his skull has left a calculus of hate. We want followers for our Lady. Do we serve Her by deserting her people?”

  “You did not intervene in the market to serve Her.”

  “She asked me to go there.”

  “You petitioned Her! You wheedled and convinced because you didn’t want to let that girl down. You had to be the hero. And now we all might die because of your pride.”

  “As if I’m the only one.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You saved the reporter.”

  Aev walked to the high railing, vaulted over, and let herself fall.

  She grabbed the roof’s edge and jerked to a halt above the windows; her talons scarred the concrete, leaving grooves that caught moon- and city-light.

  “Mother?” Shale asked from behind her.

  She said nothing.

  He lowered himself over the edge and hung beside her in the calm of the wind.

  “I have risked us all,” he said after a while.

  “No,” she said. “And yes. You’re right. Last night I tried to let her suffer. I thought: this reporter tempts fate and tests Seril. Let her save herself. I made myself watch her suffering, because I owed that much at least. But in the end I only hurt the ones who hurt her. I am angry at you because I am angry at myself, and I am angry at myself because I cannot fault my actions—or yours, though they send us teetering across a narrow bridge.”

  “I was proud,” he said. “And I did not want to disappoint her.”

  The ledge crumbled beneath Aev’s grip. Concrete dust rained down sixty stories. She caught a chunk large enough to cause damage when it reached ground level, crushed it to sand, and let the sand drift. “Humans would not find this calming,” she said.

  “Fear is different for each being that fears.”

  “And stone fears change,” she said. “Change for us is a permanent unmaking. But our Lady is of the moon, and change is Hers: new life from death, waxing from waning. She waxes now, and we tremble. This may be blasphemy, but it is also right, for though She is Herself, we are still stone.” With her free hand she indicated Kos’s black tower. “Great Kos stands alone and strong. He has power, and privilege by virtue of his power. But His power comes, as ever, from mortal fuel—and so mortal strictures bind him. We are free, and poor, and dangerous—to our enemies, but also to ourselves. In my anger and fear, I might have hurt you. I am sorry.”

  Shale did not answer.

  Aev heard a scraping sound, and smelled the sharp tang of spent lightning.

  She looked down. A cold blue blade jutted from a window beneath them. She watched it slice a circle in the glass. A human head emerged from the hole, black curls bobbing. Then the head disappeared, only to pop back through the glass facing up. Tara Abernathy looked frustrated. Then again, she often did, at least when Aev saw her. “Aev! Didn’t expect to find you here.”

  “Ms. Abernathy. Good evening.”

  Beside her, Shale tensed.

  “Shale,” she said. “I’m sure Ms. Abernathy means well.”

  “Her good intentions rarely come with deeds to match.”

  “Cut off a guy’s face once,” Tara said, “and he’ll remember for the rest of his life.”

  “It left an impression.”

  “And you’ve thrown us all into the fire tonight. We’re even, maybe. I hoped we could start fresh.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Poetry lessons.”

  21

  “I need a drink,” Cat said once Raz’s sailors moored Dream and Bounty both and reefed the sails and jagged the mainmast and scuppered the jibjaw or whatever it was they’d been up to while she packed Dream’s crew into Blacksuit wagons. “And before you get clever, I don’t mean the kind where I’m the beverage. Care to chaperone?”

  Raz signed a few forms and handed them to his ship’s clerk. “You want me to come along and make sure you have no fun? Happy to oblige.”


  “More like play designated hitter.”

  “Is that a sports thing?”

  “It’s like a designated driver, only if I’m too drunk to hit someone, you do it.”

  “Sounds fun,” he said. “My Alt Coulumb nightlife’s a half century out of date, and the last time I chose a bar in this city I ended up brainwashed. You know a place?”

  She bared her teeth at him, though hers were somewhat less pointy. “I can think of a few.”

  * * *

  Tara stood beside Shale on the skyscraper’s roof. Aev had left them—flitted off to brood on the abyss. They watched the horizon and the water, neither wanting to speak first.

  Shale gave up the contest. “You can’t fly.”

  “I can,” she said. “Just not in Alt Coulumb, thanks to your ever-so-progressive local interdict.”

  “The skies belong to the Lady,” Shale said. “It would be a perversion for you to fly through them.”

  “That’s what counts as perversion for a gargoyle? You must have a boring sex life.”

  “Reproduction works differently for us.”

  “I bet.”

  Shale shifted uncomfortably. “Our poetry can only be read from the air. How will you read it if you cannot fly?”

  “I was hoping you’d carry me.”

  “You trust me to do that?”

  “No,” she said, with more nonchalance than she felt. “But I figure dropping me would cause more trouble than it’s worth. And after all you’ve done tonight, you owe me.”

  A calculating silence ensued.

  “I have apologized for the face thing,” she said. “Every time I’ve seen you. Except for this afternoon, when you were on too high a dudgeon for me to get a word in edgewise.”

  “You’ve seen me maybe three times in the last year.”

  “I thought you needed space to heal.”

  “After you cut off my face.”

  She rolled her eyes. “There’s not even a scar.”

  “Where should I hold you?”

  Tara had not given much thought to that question. “Around the waist, probably.”

  “Very well.” He grabbed her about the waist and jumped off the building.

  Psychiatrists and headshrinkers from realm to realm associate dreams of flight with sex for a reason. The thematic and mechanical differences are obvious—fewer bodily fluids tend to be involved in flight if all goes well, and the typical flight’s also short on funny faces. But there’s a breathless novelty to the first touch of both that experience tends to mellow. A flightless being’s first takeoff introduces her to a new dimension; the twentieth time her case team boards a dragon gondola to some mid-Kathic city that barely rates a dot on the map, the rush fades. Spend enough time away from skies or sheets, though, and the novelty returns.

  It had been a long while since Tara last flew.

  At first the sensations blurred together: rush of wind, lurch in stomach, pull of gravity, talons pressed against her ribs, terror of the monkey brain realizing its body has jumped from an impossibly tall tree toward a branch it can never, ever catch—

  And then the quaking of her obliques, because she hadn’t thought through the consequences of her entire weight resting against Shale’s hands. The gargoyle’s claws pressed into her diaphragm. Far below, streetlights bounced and circled, and streets wove together. “This isn’t comfortable,” she wheezed. “Maybe if I were to lie on your back?”

  “It wouldn’t be steady. There are wings there.”

  “Hm.” She puzzled through the issue as well as she could while hanging doubled over from a gargoyle’s claws.

  “How did you find me?” Shale asked.

  She’d hoped he wouldn’t ponder that particular detail. “I left a tracking glyph under your skin last year.”

  He dropped her.

  She screamed at first, no denying that. Best get the scream over with and turn one’s attention to the inciting issue, to wit: falling. Not quite enough altitude for the soul-parachute trick, too far from neighboring buildings for magnetism to help. She spun as she fell, which made things harder, the world by turns sky and walls and rapidly approaching road and walls and sky again—she spread her limbs, twisted to counter the spin and control her horizon line—she could lasso the buildings, or else Shale, if she could get a bead on him when she spun skyward again—

  She hit stone far too soon, which was an unpleasant surprise, but she wasn’t dead, which she found more agreeable. The stone she’d struck was moving, and warm to the touch. When her senses righted themselves, she realized she lay on Shale’s back. His wings beat three, four times—the ripple of his shoulder blades’ muscle reminded her of lying on an inflatable raft in surf on her spring break trip to the Fangs back in school—and they rose again. She swore in five languages, then started to slip; panicked, she caught his hold of his wing, which veered them abruptly left until she let go. At last she locked her arms around his neck, and her knees at his flanks. He was taller than her, which helped. His wings pressed against her sides on the updraft, but not tight enough to hurt.

  “Jerk,” she said.

  “Witch.”

  “Fair.” She laughed. They spiraled higher into the night.

  * * *

  Matt and Sandy Sforza almost came to blows over the question of who would host the Rafferty girls. Neither wanted to let them go home alone. Sandy thought they’d be more comfortable with a woman, but the room Sandy and Lil shared was barely large enough for the pair of them, let alone three guests. Matt’s place was closer to the edge of town, and his boys could share a room, though Simon would complain.

  All of which would have meant nothing if the Rafferty girls didn’t want to go with Matt, but when he asked, Claire said yes. She’d tended to Ellen and Hannah after their father collapsed, after the Stone Man left, after the Blacksuits came.

  Sandy gave them a lift in her wagon; she still lived, and parked, near the market, though the last decade’s rising rent had forced her and Lil to carry their lives on their backs snail-like from apartment to apartment until they bought their present coffin. Matt did not know if she stayed for the commute, or for her pride. Sandy’s people had lived near the market since they first came from Telomere; so had Matt’s, but he’d got in too many fights over the old ways with his old man back when his old man was the type to fight with fists to care much for history. Bruises and swelling obscured the ways things had “always” been.

  Matt’s father claimed the way things had always been went back to the Old Empire, to legions marching in conquest for their blood-cult masters. As far as Matt was concerned, that always ended when the Adornes shipped out from the Old World. Some people in Alt Coulumb had an always of equal age—the families who’d lived here since first light—but growing up, Matt realized that in spite of the stories his dad spun, his always was just the way the world had worked in the twenty years from the day he became a man to the day the city outpaced him. Old Adorne couldn’t understand that the Paupers’ Quarter near the market had become a place where uptown nobs and smart-dressed folk like Ms. Abernathy lived for the cheap rent and what realtors described as the “charming street scene.” Dad once said anyone in a suit who walked west of Sixteenth deserved what was coming to them.

  Matt himself was nearing the end of his always. The city his sons knew, he didn’t. Maybe that was why you had kids these days, when you didn’t need them to work the farm: so you could learn from them how to live in peace after your always ended.

  He sat next to Claire and across from Ellen and Hannah in the back of Sandy’s cart. Ellen had fallen asleep on Hannah’s shoulder, and Hannah herself slept against a flour sack, and Claire stared behind them into traffic, cross-legged and awake. She rocked with the rhythm of the wheels. Sandy’s left front shock needed work. Ray’s second cousin was a mechanic, did his novitiate with the church before he decided he liked marriage more than metal, and found Mike. Maybe Matt could talk to Ray, ask him to have his cousin give Sandy’s shocks a
look some night. While Sandy slept, of course, because he doubted she could pay and he knew she wouldn’t take charity.

  Matt let his thoughts run because he had no idea what to say to Claire, and because the silence had wormed between his lips and down his throat into his stomach where it rolled with each rattle of Sandy’s left front wheel.

  Matt had never spoken with the girls alone, though he’d worked beside them for years. He knew their father well enough, but the man was a colleague and his daughters were his business.

  But the man had hit Matt with a stick, and Sandy, when he wasn’t any drunker than he had been before in Matt’s presence and (gods) even at Matt’s urging. The medic had shined a light in Corbin Rafferty’s eyes, numbed the cut on his scalp and stitched it closed, and the whole time Rafferty hadn’t moved.

  “I don’t know what happened,” Matt said. “I’ve never seen your dad act like that before.”

  “I have,” Claire said.

  “I mean, I’ve seen him drunk.”

  “That’s not drunk,” she said. “It’s what happens when he’s sobering. He hits whatever’s near. Breaks furniture.”

  “He hits you?”

  “He hasn’t,” she said. “Yet. We keep away. Lock ourselves in our rooms.”

  “You don’t need to say anything you don’t want to.”

  “And you don’t need to hear anything you don’t want to,” she said. “You never have before.”

  He thought about blindness, and said nothing.

  “Thank you for offering us a place to stay,” Claire continued. “Ellen will be grateful.”

  He wasn’t sure how to take that, so he left it.

  * * *

  The doom that came to Chez Walsh looked like Cat in leather and denim, with Raz in tow. Raz still wore his whites; Cat had stopped by the temple to change, and left him waiting under the gaze of a goddess who was no longer blind. Cat didn’t go out often these days, but she still kept clothes in her locker.

  “Promising,” Raz said when she led him down the Pleasure Quarter alley. Puddles of gray water reflected buzzing rooftop ghostlights and brightly colored billboards bearing images of smiling men, one of whom—a toothpaste ad—had been aftermarket modified with a spray-paint ball gag and the tagger’s circle-trumpet glyph.