Four Roads Cross

by Max Gladstone

  * * *

  “I don’t know how you stand it here,” Daphne said to Tara as they walked down the stone paths of the Sacred Precinct, full from a Business District lunch for which Daphne’d paid. Which was only rational: Daphne was the one making a firm salary.

  This wasn’t how Tara envisioned their reunion. They’d talked over lunch—salad, lobster ravioli in a butter sauce, a glass of wine for each—but the conversation stayed light. New books read. Old friends, roommates, rivals moved on to positions of influence. Val worked with Halcyon Vega at Varkath Nebuchadnezzar, which seemed an odd choice since everyone expected she’d go straight into necromancy. No surprise to anyone Chris Li talked his way into a Judicial clerkship, though both had their doubts about how a Xivai beach bum born and bred would adapt to a year in Trälheim. Tara lost herself so deep in the conversation she could almost ignore the ticking clock in the back of her mind, counting the time she should have been at work. By the time the check came, they had broken through the shell of their shared history to find the silence beneath.

  So Tara led them to the Sacred Precinct, to stone-edged gravel paths. Around them, monks and priests strolled in hooded silence. Two old nuns laughed across the grass. A bearded man counted rosary beads on a bench.

  “Daffy,” Tara said, changing the subject, and Daphne chuckled at the nickname. “What’s the last thing you remember from the Schools?”

  “I don’t know.” She kicked the gravel hard enough to leave a trench; small rocks bounced off the toe of her shoe. Mess up the leather doing that, Tara thought. Daphne’s family had enough nice things she’d never learned to care for them. “It’s all muddled. My last clear memory’s junior year spring break. My junior year, not yours, when we went to the Fangs.”

  “That’s clear for you? Blood and hells. I lost a day in that mess.”

  “You, me, Julian, Chris, Val, Mike Ngabe. Playing soccer on the beach. You got mad at Mike for something—”

  “I fell,” she said. “He laughed at me.”

  “So you built an affinity between the ball and his sunglasses. Broke his nose.”

  “I didn’t think it would hit him that hard. And I was drunk.”

  “After that it’s muddy.” She picked up two rocks and juggled them as they walked: a trick, she’d told Tara many times before, of throwing the second when the first began its descent. Tara never mastered the timing of the fall. “I remember working in Professor Denovo’s lab. Really tremendous fascinating stuff, vivisecting gods, experimental faith dynamics.” Tara remembered that tone of voice: the drunkenness of discovery. The rocks Daphne juggled were small; Tara could not hear their impact on her skin. “He liked my work. I remember his smile.” Tara clenched her jaw to keep herself from saying something stupid. “And I remember cutting things open, peeling flesh like a kid opening a birthday present. Working ten hours at a stretch hunting a slice of new knowledge. Draining myself so far I didn’t feel I was moving so much as being moved, like a puppet with a hand inside me. I remember grays. I remember lots of gray, toward the end. Not recognizing my face in the mirror. Waking up in bed in a strange body.” She caught both the rocks and squeezed. Glyphs sparked on her fingers, and a fine dust rained onto the gravel.

  “Daphne, I’m sorry.”

  She opened her hand. Dust coated her palm, surrounding a small sculpture of a sparrow with wings stretched. Its tiny head revolved. Wings flapped, but the sparrow could not fly.

  “It’s the local gods,” Tara said. “They don’t let things fly that they don’t own.”

  She held out her palm and Daphne passed her the bird. Tiny talons pricked her skin; it chirped. “I didn’t see what was happening to you until too late,” Tara said. “He was in my head, too. When you collapsed, when they took you home, that shocked me sober. I snapped out of his control. I got revenge, or tried. I burned his lab. They kicked me out. I thought you were gone.”

  “I woke up a year ago, in my house, with a headache. I spent weeks in the garden watching flowers. It took a long time to piece myself together. The chance of getting a job was low, but then Ramp came with an offer from Grossman and Mime. They were interested in everyone who worked with Professor Denovo. A lot of our friends ended up there. Ramp is a tough boss, but she has a sense of humor and enjoys her work, which is more than I could say for many Craftswomen.”

  “It doesn’t bother you that she used to work with Denovo?”

  “He was a good teacher,” she said. “A hard driver, but you’d have to be to get as far as him.”

  “He sapped your soul. He bound us to serve him. Our minds pointed where he wanted them to point.”

  Something clicked closed behind Daphne’s face. “What did he do that everyone you’ve ever worked with hasn’t? People bind each other. That’s all the Craft is.”

  “You went home in a coma.”

  “I chose to work hard. If my body couldn’t handle it—”

  “That’s what I’m saying, Daphne. You didn’t choose.”

  “Fine,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  Tara wanted to take her shoulders and shake her, but she didn’t. The bird flapped its wings and sang frustration. “You’re happy where you are?”

  “Are you?”

  “Of course. I’m helping my friends. I’m protecting my city.”

  “Seriously, Tara?” She pointed up. The Sanctum of Kos towered overhead, huge and black, buttressed and bubbled with lifts and turrets and bay windows. “Working for a god? It’s cool you have so much authority, but don’t you see this is a dead-end gig?”

  “Alt Coulumb’s an important place, and I’m working for the biggest game in town. Doesn’t seem dead end to me.”

  “You can’t even fly here. Working in-house at a church, hells, they’ll never pay you half what you’re worth. What kind of career prospects do you have? Will you take holy orders or something?”

  “I don’t plan to.”

  “There you go. I mean, I’m sure you think you can do good work here. But did you really leave Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao for this?”

  “I saw what my life at the firm would have been. Traveling from city to city without knowing any of them, having clients and colleagues and puppets instead of people. Alt Coulumb’s more than a convention hotel, a handful of boardrooms, and the nice restaurants the firm will pay for. I have friends here. They need me.”

  “Friends,” she said, “don’t command gods, or raise the dead, or drink the light of shadows or hunt nightmares or make deals in blood or anything you trained for. I know what you went through to reach the Hidden Schools. Years of wandering the desert working shit jobs, learning whatever hedge magic you could from sun-blind witches and confidence tricksters, all to pass the entrance exams. And once you made it, you worked harder than any of us. Why throw it all away?”

  “Because it was rotten. Our teacher was hurting you. Hurting us.”

  “That’s not right and that’s not even what I mean.” Her voice rose, and her arms too. Glyphs on her skin glowed and gravel whirled beneath her feet. “You’re so—” But Daphne didn’t say what Tara was. She let her arms fall. The gravel stilled, leaving spiral grooves centered on Daphne’s scuffed shoes. “Damn, I’m sorry. You ran. You were better than all of us, every single one of us, and you ran. I know the in-house rates gods pay, and I know the rent in Alt Coulumb, and the thought of you of all people sitting in a coffin-size studio stressing whether you can pay down your loans this month—it sickens me. If half the stories I heard about what you did last year during Kos’s resurrection are true, you could have written your ticket at Kelethres Albrecht or any other firm. I can’t believe you see your future here, protecting god-botherers from their own dumb mistakes.”

  “You want to offer me a job.”

  “I want to help my boss. But I asked her, and if you’re looking, we could make room. Not in this matter, of course.”

  “I’m not looking for work,” she said. “I know what you’re trying
to do. And it’s sweet, Daffy. Tempting, even. I wouldn’t have understood what I’m saying now either, a year ago. I don’t blame you for being who you are, and wanting the things you want. You’re a master of the universe. Congratulations. I thought I wanted that, too. Turns out I didn’t.”

  “The schools’ collections department doesn’t care what you want.”

  “There are trade-offs, sure. I won’t deny that every few days I want to grab the Council of Cardinals by the neck and shake them until their heads do the bobble doll thing. But I’m doing good work.”

  “That’s a god-botherer’s line.”

  “The Wars are over,” she said. “It’s not us versus them. There’s room to work in the middle.” She held out her hand. A little help here?

  Silver flowed through her mind and down her arm. The bird sculpture hopped twice more, and on the third hop, flew.

  “Nice,” Daphne said. “But it proves nothing. Gods took away your wings. Of course they can give them back and call it a miracle.” But her smile was a younger woman’s smile, a smile like the one Tara remembered.

  “I was trying to be symbolic,” Tara said. “Hells. I know you want to help me. Thanks. Same goes for you. If you’re ever looking for a change—”

  “If I want to crash my career into a mountainside, I’ll give you a call.”

  “Deal. I have to get back to work, but there’s a place over by Seventeenth with great frozen lemonade—good for a pickup before an afternoon of doc review.”

  “Thanks,” Daphne said. “It’s good to see you, Tara.”

  They walked back through the garden. The stone bird flew widening circles overhead.

  28

  Five hours of archival research later, Tara hung in the astral void above a living god.

  Kos Everburning, like all his divine ilk, did not quite exist in the usual, physical sense of the term—but human minds weren’t good at comprehending n-dimensional noosphere entities, half-network and half-standing wave, propagating in all directions at once through time. They could, of course. Tara had worked out the theory from first principles back at the Hidden Schools, the derivation of divine anatomy from raw data being a particular favorite of problem-set-dependent TAs. But nightmare matrices did the math for you these days, if you didn’t mind shifting some particularly difficult problems to universes where they happened to be easier. Then, back-convert the mess to three spatial dimensions with a fixed arrow of time—and, since everyone who’s going to deal with this particular simulation will be a Craftswoman well versed in anatomy and forensics, add a filter to present the data analogically in terms of corpses. Just don’t go too far, since a simulation this detailed is a new cave chamber inside the old philosopher’s cavern, and if you’re not careful you might tunnel into another chamber already occupied by capital-letter Things.

  Even convenient fictions can delve too greedily and too deep.

  Tara’s head ached, and she was in desperate need of a second lemonade. She’d started after lunch with a deep dive into the Court of Craft across town, where carts guided by rat brain brought her volume after volume of notes and ledgers. Claims there matched her notes from last night’s survey, but she needed more, and so returned to the sanctum to pace above Kos Everburning’s body.

  The diagnostic Craft she used had been built to display Alt Coulumb’s God in cross section through time: a three-dimensional flip-book showing a naked continent-size man whose limbs hung limp in a dark sea, whose face shone too bright to look upon. It was meant to deal with well-structured archive data.

  It wasn’t made to model the living operations of the God.

  She watched him—watched Him, the capital letter inserting itself slyly despite her insistence that adulation of a client was counterproductive.

  She heard Him breathe.

  His heart beat and blood surged in His veins. She’d thought to walk on His skin, to take inventory from up close as she had when He was dead, but the closer she drew the harder it was to keep her heart from matching time with His, to keep His heat from suffusing her.

  Even at this distance—a mile up in notional space, far enough away that she could see His edges—Kos distorted the surrounding world. So much so, in fact, that she almost didn’t notice when the simulation tore.

  A ripping sound filled the synthetic dark as great wounds gaped in the fabric of unreality.

  Multifaceted eyes stared through diamond slits, and spider legs clawed the void. She called on her Craft, forged chains of light to stitch the cut universe back together.

  When she was relatively certain she wouldn’t die in the next few minutes, she searched for the problem’s source.

  She didn’t have to search long. She recognized the scream.

  Abelard had taken shape in the nightmare half a mile beneath her, spinning over the Body, arms pinwheeling in a futile attempt to steady himself. The glowing tip of his cigarette trailed circles around him.

  She stopped his spin with a thought and a slight tweak of the dream’s parameters.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

  “How you get used to that, I will never know.” He brushed stray hairs back into his tonsure, and straightened his skewed robes. “Um. I seem to be upside down.”

  “Gravity’s relative to your body here. Your modesty’s safe. You really should go.” She righted him with a twist of her forefinger.

  “I hoped we could talk,” he said when he recovered.

  The stitches with which she sealed in the sky surged as the Things beyond adjusted their attack. “This isn’t a good time.”

  “What are you doing, anyway?”

  “Looking for evidence,” she said. A stitch gave way, and a tendril of shadow wormed into the dark. She shredded it. “I wanted to see how Kos owns the sky.”

  He pointed up. “What are those?”

  “Demons. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Sounds like I should.”

  Vines of light wound about the wound, and sharp darkness tore her bindings from within. “I’m running a lot of poorly structured data through the system. Too much of that and the nightmare snarls. Demons are like us, really—but their worlds work on different logic than ours. Points of divergence let them cross over without a summoning contract, without limits. You have to work hard to make one of those in physical space, but analytical engines aren’t continuous. If I break the simulation, they can get in.”

  “That sounds bad.”

  She swooped toward the body, and brought him with her. “Annoying, mostly, here in n-space. If they breach, we pull out, shut the simulation down, start again. So long as we don’t bring them back to the supposedly real world with us.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “I’m warded, so they can’t crawl into me—not without a fight. You, though—”

  There came a massive pulse against the curvature of nothing. Her stitches distended and the wound opened like a mouth, only instead of teeth it was full of eyes.

  “Hold on a second,” she said. “I’m almost done.” Great tubes sprouted from the god’s body, vessels bearing His power, His blood out into the world. The city formed around them, like the impression of a body beneath a rubber sheet.

  “Tara,” Abelard said, afraid. Great hands tore the folded newspaper of the dream down the center. Logical consistency stretched like taffy. She hurt, and ignored the pain. Kos’s power blushed through the ghost-glass city’s sky. Drawing closer, she saw the blush was in fact a candyfloss haze of hooks wrestling with a Great Unseen.

  Demon thorns pulled the edges of the world-wound wide. Beyond spread a noonday kaleidoscope of blunt angles and teeth, a story in which she had no part, which would consume her and her world alike. Four bridge-wide stitches remained, and fractal blights wilted their edges. One gave a sound like a bass string breaking. Three left. Two, soon.

  “Tara!”

  But that Great Unseen, the mystery against which Kos struggled to own the sky—she recognized it. Drew close to the
hooks. Squinted. And saw a series of numbers in the tangle of each hook, and glyphs: Kos Everburning v. Red King Consolidated.

  The last stitch broke with a bone-shivering A-sharp. The whole sky split at once. Arms that were tongues that were spears flew down.

  But Tara and Abelard were not there anymore, and then the world was not, either.

  Orbs of Tara throbbed flutterstep beneath wingskin as if rocked in pleasure. Eyes, she opened them. Air, she breathed it, and the dust it held. Ears, she heard with them the silence of a large paper-filled room, and the panting of a terrified monk. Skin, with curves of the stuff she felt the grain of a stone floor under her. She should install a bed in the archives someday.

  Oh, and she had blood too, and a mind, and emotions not yet fully understood, one of them a distant cousin of compassion. Abelard. She sat up. Mountains of leather-bound codices and racks of scrolls swayed like willows blown in the storm of her unsettled mind. He sat cross-legged across the silver bowl at the archive center from her. He held his cut finger in one hand. The singed coppery smell of burned blood rose from within the bowl.

  She stood, though her legs seemed unfamiliar devices. Leaning against her thighs, she orbited the bowl. “You okay?”

  He stopped praying. “I thought it would be easier when He was alive.”

  She pulled him to his feet, though her own balance wasn’t perfect and she almost toppled them both into a case of scrolls. “He’s more complicated alive than dead.” Back in this world they agreed was real, she could ditch the capital letter. “You cut your finger yourself?”

  “Pierced it. With a needle.”

  She winced.

  “Don’t worry, I burned the needle first.”

  “Use alcohol next time.”

  “Are those things—”

  “The demons?”

  “Will they be there the next time you go into the dream?”

  “No. I shut it down completely. That notional world doesn’t exist until I need it again. Why did you come looking for me?”

  “I need your advice,” he said. “About God.”

  As they walked through paper mountains toward the lift, he told her about his conversation with the Cardinal. She pressed the button and waited as motors surged behind closed doors. “You want to know if I think you should do it.”