Four Roads Cross

by Max Gladstone

  “The Cardinal’s right. Lord Kos might listen to me. But isn’t it hubris to give a God advice?”

  “You’re asking the wrong person,” she said, “when it comes to avoiding hubris. My teachers thought gods were a quaint affectation.” She remembered the goddess in her room, wearing her face. Remembered, too, Daphne’s flightless bird. “If the outside world thinks Kos will come to Seril’s rescue whenever she’s in trouble, that’s bad for both of them. Debts falling due, margin calls, flights of wicked angels in the skies, spiritual armageddon.”

  “So you think I should do it.”

  “From a Craftswoman’s perspective, sure. But no Craftswoman would be caught dead kneeling to a god.” It sickens me, Daphne’d said. Was Tara a Craftswoman anymore? She had her glyphs. She had her power. What else was there? “You have to weigh the options yourself. But the Cardinal’s right about the danger.”

  The lift arrived, bearing a trio of maintenance monks headed down. One of them, a large woman, worked the beads of her rosary until the lift reached the twelfth floor, and the trio left together. Abelard did not speak until they reached ground level and stepped into an empty hall. “I know you’ll do the right thing,” Tara said, “whatever that is. You might as well stop fretting. You’re not binding yourself to a contract, or incurring debt.”

  “You’re more confident than I am.”

  “That’s what friends are for.”

  “Thank you for last night,” he said, “for the encouragement. I was selfish when we talked. I didn’t realize how hard this is for you.”

  There was a cold breeze in the narrow hall. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re out here on your own. I have the church, and Kos. Cat has her force. You should have a firm, Craftswomen and Craftsmen at your side. But you don’t. It’s just you, and you’re not even from here. You’re so good at what you do that it’s easy for me to think you don’t need anything or anyone. But that’s not true. Whatever you were doing in the library, it was dangerous.”

  “Not for me.”

  “What if your wards didn’t work as well as you hoped? What if the demons were stronger?”

  “It was a calculated risk. My calculations skewed when you dropped in, that’s all.”

  “I’m not questioning your abilities.”

  “That sure sounds like what you’re doing.” A door opened and closed. Footsteps trickled over the nave’s stone floor. A men’s choir sang. The sound seemed to come from everywhere at once. Tara couldn’t make out the words, but the harmony was close and smooth. She made herself smile. “I can do this,” she said. “I just need to be smarter than everyone else. So what else is new?”

  “Cat and I are here for you. You’ve spent the last year working and sleeping, outside of one poker night that didn’t go well. If you wanted to, you know, have a beer, or anything—well, I’m here. That’s all I wanted to say.”

  Her watch chimed. “I have to go.”

  “See you later,” he told her retreating back.

  29

  Daphne met Ms. Ramp on the roof of the Alt Coulumb Arms a half hour before sundown, on schedule. Ramp was eating pistachios from a bag. They cracked in midair in front of her, and the nutmeat floated to her mouth. The shells crisped to ash and rained as a fine powder to the roof.

  “How did you find your meeting with our dear Ms. Abernathy?” Ramp said.

  Daphne sighed, and set her briefcase on the gravel. “Went about as well as you expected. I don’t get it. The Tara I knew would never be satisfied with these conditions.” The brass latches popped and the briefcase clamshelled open, whereupon she opened it a second time, space unfolding from within until a three-meter pallet heaped with fabric and rope lay before them. “You think they got to her? Religious experience triggers an endorphin rush, which leads to dependency. Gods push inside your head. Like distributed Craftwork, but for everything at once.”

  “Possible.” Ramp knelt, gathered striped fabric in both hands, and dragged it back over the gravel. “But you can’t assume mind control every time someone’s goals differ from your own.”

  “She wanted to get out of her hick town. She wanted to be somebody.”

  “And she’s ended up in Alt Coulumb, which is hardly a hick town. She is a person of local importance. I bet she even thinks she’s doing the right thing, in that wonderfully abstract language young people use, as if there were a ‘right thing’ independent of context, interest, or timing.” She fluffed the fabric. A cloud of packing dust cracked from its taut surface. Daphne connected a hydrogen tank, and the balloon inflated. “If you build a roof without walls, it will fall. Build walls before foundation, and they will collapse. Lay a foundation without digging out the soil, it will crumble. Does that mean it is wrong to build roof or walls or foundation? Not at all. Whenever we build, we must dirty our hands first.”

  The balloon bellied up, straining against the ground lines Daphne tied. In the gilded afternoon, its white-and-red curve seemed obscenely medical. Daphne pondered the exact source of her fear of that shape. A memory bubbled from deep nightmare: her hand sawing silverskin from a knob of flesh. But the hand wasn’t hers at all. The flesh, though—and somewhere, in the dark, she heard a man’s laughter. Her knees went slack. She slumped against the balloon, which bobbed and swung.

  “Daphne. Come back to me.”

  “I don’t,” she said. “I can’t.” The ghosts of laughter wouldn’t fade.

  Cool gloved fingers touched Daphne’s temple through the layer of sweat. Daphne felt a small blade enter the side of her neck and twist, and she heard a dubious hum. The seesaw pitching of the world resolved, and colors lost their bite. “There,” Ramp said, and drew the blade away. A drop of blood dried on her gloved fingertip. “I’m sorry if meeting Tara was too much for you.”

  Daphne forced her back straight and unclenched her hands from the ropes. Synthetic fibers had left crisscross tracks on her palms. “It’s fine. I feel.” There were words somewhere to match her feeling. She touched her neck. The wound was gone. “I feel bad for her. She’s fallen so far.”

  Madeline Ramp examined the blood on her glove as it dried, as if she could read the remnant stain like tea leaves. “Daphne,” she said in the same soft voice, “Ms. Abernathy won’t join our cause just because we ask her to. If her loyalty’s misplaced, we will have to fight her—break her down and bring her into the fold. Do you think you can do that? If not, you can sit this one out. You’ve done so much.”

  At those words, the ground under Daphne gaped. She could fall back into purposeless void—into pondering the milk-swirled depths of teacups as women in pale dresses moved around her and whispered: Don’t take the tea, you’ll upset her. A mother wept somewhere, a mother who might have been hers.

  All that smeared memory of tea and milk and hospital gowns had ended with five words: I have work for you.

  “I can do this,” she said.

  “Good.” Ramp vaulted into the basket and extended her hand to Daphne. “Come, then. Let’s dirty our hands.”

  She cut the anchor lines, and the balloon rose over Alt Coulumb.

  * * *

  Tara found Gavriel Jones in the plaza before the Crier’s Guild entrance, on the southeast corner of Providence and Flame. Guild spires cut the scudding clouds above the gathered audience: nobles and merchants and bankers mixed with cabdrivers and off-duty construction workers in dusty coveralls. Hot dog and pretzel carts did brisk trade at the square’s edge.

  Alt Coulumb’s people had come for the news.

  “Crowded,” Tara grumbled after she shoved past stevedores and stockbrokers to reach Jones by the stage. “I thought we had a deal.”

  “We do,” Jones said. “But rumor travels faster than truth. People hear what’s said between the lines. I hope your exclusive’s worth the delay.”

  A hush capped the crowd’s murmur, as if a conductor had given signal. The Guild’s front doors opened and two lines of velvet-robed choristers emerged in step. At the squar
e’s edge a man argued with a hot dog seller, and traffic clanked and clattered as usual, but the silence by the stage was so deep Tara could hear each singer’s footfalls. Onstage, they curved into a shallow U. A singer in darker robes stepped forth, raised her hand. Tara heard a pitch but saw no pipe.

  That morning’s song had been a stripped-down version of the Paupers’ Quarter fight, sans goddess: incantation more than melody, like the call-and-response hymns from Edgemont services. The simple line emphasized the words, which were the point.

  At least, Tara had thought they were.

  But words were not the point of the Criers’ song that night. Tara heard a theme stated in the bass and restated, discordant, by other voices, describing the Paupers’ Quarter gathering. The music swelled, shards of melody grating against one other, when Shale arrived. And then, the piece trembled on the verge of decoherence—she was not musician enough to give what happened its proper name. Harmonic fragments locked into a new, shining tone, a strange expanded inside-out chord, a brilliance. She caught her breath to keep from weeping.

  Exhaustion, she told herself. Heightened emotions from two days’ hard work.

  She knew she was lying.

  No single word betrayed Seril or broke Jones’s promise. But Shale—although four decades of suspicion had primed the crowd to call him a monster—brought them glory through this music.

  The choir held the chord, shifting like the light a full moon cast through diamond. Then came the dying fall, a restatement of the initial themes to summarize the night’s events.

  Tara’s eyes were hot. Entirely due to the intensity with which she’d watched the stage. Of course.

  The song ended. The audience stood rigid as if a current ran through them.

  Applause came in torrents.

  Tara turned to Jones. The journalist had her hat cocked back, her chin up, her hands in the pockets of her overcoat. The corners of her mouth turned up.

  “Between the lines.” Tara had to shout to be heard through the cheers.

  Jones shrugged. Every line on her face said, satisfied. “I’ve waited a long time for something to fit that music.”

  “You wrote that?”

  “A year back. Finally had cause to use it.”

  “That was”—she searched for the right word—“more generous than I expected.”

  “You keep trying to cast me as a villain, Tara.” Jones looked like a wine connoisseur after a fine sip of a joyful vintage, holding the sensation’s ghost in her mouth and mind as it faded. “I’m not. Our goals are different, that’s all.”

  “Come on,” Tara said. She checked her watch. Fifteen minutes gone. She wasn’t sure whether she was surprised the song was so long, or so short. Clock time didn’t map to music. “I have a friend who wants to meet you.”

  * * *

  Claire stocked the stall and kept it herself all day, without father or sisters, complaint or apparent fatigue. She even smiled when she thought Matt wasn’t looking, though not more than once or twice an hour and never more curve than the blade of a paring knife. The produce moved. She kept the books and collected soulstuff for the family shrine. Sandy dropped by after the fiercest wave of customers passed to talk with Claire. Claire answered her politely—not that Matt was eavesdropping, only they were close enough he could hear her tone of voice.

  Sandy visited his stall next. “You well?” Capistano’d come by too and asked the same question, but when Matt answered yes, the other man did one of those nods you could do only if you had a neck as long as his, where the whole head moved independent of the body like a spring-spined toy doll, and left. Sandy stayed. “And the girls?”

  “Them, too.”

  “I came over here to tell you off for letting Claire come to work,” she said. “But I won’t.”

  “Wouldn’t stay behind. Strong kid.”

  She gave him a sideways expression he couldn’t read.

  “You should get your shocks fixed, on your truck. Ray’s cousin knows a guy.”

  “You said that last night.”

  “I did.” Though he didn’t remember. “Thanks, Sandy.”

  He took Claire to Cadfael’s that afternoon. They ate in a silence that seemed deeper than the silence of the morning mist and country roads. She ate little, and though she looked at his beer when the waitress brought him one, she ordered tea.

  “I’ll go see Father tonight,” she said. “Sandy says they took him to Branch Staffords. He’s still asleep.”

  “Good of her to look into that,” he said. “I’ll go with you, if you want company.”

  She chewed each bite of chicken breast ten times before she swallowed. “I do. Thank you.”

  They took the cart back to the garage near Matt’s apartment and walked home. A light sea breeze cleared the air of smoke and damp. Hannah and Ellen and Donna weren’t home. Donna had left a note: she’d taken the girls with her to work.

  “They won’t be home ’til late,” he said. “We could pick them up before we head over.”

  “No,” Claire said. “They don’t need to come with us.”

  So as the sun fell faster, they rode the trolley southeast to Branch Staffords Hospital, three blocks of red brick cubes with tall curtained windows. As they descended to the curb Matt saw a ripple in the top-floor curtains and looked up into a face staring down: dark eyes and an open mouth. Claire led him across the street. An orderly in the first building directed them to a second, who directed them to a building back behind the parking lot. Crossing the parking lot, Matt watched his feet. He did not want to see the dark eyes and the open mouth again.

  “Are you okay?” Claire said.

  Fine is what he meant to say, but what he did was, “My mother passed here, three years ago. That was her room.” Third floor from the top, second from the left, north wing. “We expected it, but she didn’t go clean.”

  “I’m sorry.” She held her hands in front of her skirt.

  The east wing orderlies consulted a book heavier than most scriptures Matt had seen.

  “Relation?”

  “I’m his daughter,” Claire said. “Matt is a friend of the family.”

  They rode up three floors in a white lift that smelled of alcohol. Matt leaned against the rail to the rear of the lift. Claire touched nothing.

  Rafferty lay in a bed. He did not move. “He had a rough night,” the nurse said. “He’s unconscious, but you can watch him if you want.”

  “Thank you,” Claire replied. “This is all we need.”

  The man left them in the room together. There were no bags and drips, no tangled wires, and fewer of the foul smells Matt remembered from his last visit.

  “I don’t need you,” Claire said. “Go, if you want. I know the bus route back to your place.”

  Matt’s mother had not known where or who she was when she died. There had been love in the room, but bile and blood, too. It was a bad echo of birth, her eyes dark as the inside of her mouth. She did not understand what was happening. For Matt, the memory was one more weight to carry, and there was no place in him where it could rest easy, this ungainly thing that clunked and rattled but would not break.

  “I’ll wait,” he said.

  30

  Raz opened the captain’s cabin door on Cat’s third knock. He paused when he saw her and shook his head as if she’d slapped him. “Who let you on board?”

  “Davis,” she said.

  “Davis.”

  “Don’t blame her. I’m on official business.” She raised the scroll Tara gave her. “Salvage agreement for the Dream. We need to sign it there.”

  “Let Davis sign it. She’s co-captain.”

  “She wasn’t in command when the salvage took place. We don’t want any loopholes.”

  “Give me a minute to square this lot away,” he said, and turned to his crew. Even angry, Raz moved beautifully—perhaps a particular grace emerged from his anger. The crew scattered before him like goats before a lion. Bounty’s early evening business took l
ess time to settle than she expected, probably due to the fact that Raz was three, four times faster than most humans. He blurred around the edges.

  “Let’s go,” he said when he was done.

  She passed him the scroll, which he skimmed as they walked over. “I don’t understand this.”

  “Tara says if we took the Dream under Coulumbite authority, we can’t wake up the people in her hold. If we claimed her under a different authority”—with a meaningful nod toward the new-risen moon—“we can wake them, just like that. But since you were involved, you need to sign.”

  He reread the scroll, examined it front and back. “Okay.”

  “Any questions?”

  “Do whatever you want, and justify it later if you don’t like the consequences. Sounds like your kind of plan.”

  “That was beneath you,” she said. Dream’s gangplank was down. She climbed first, and he followed her. The cry came: “Captain on deck!” The skeleton who’d given it saluted them with a clatter of finger bone against skull.

  Raz returned the salute. “Come on. Let’s finish this.”

  * * *

  Abelard joined vigil early. Outside the sanctum window, the blued sky deepened to black. Around him, the Sanctum of Kos Everburning beat like a heart. Hydraulic fluid pulsed through pumps. Steam sang down pipes. He lit incense in the Everburning Flame and knelt before the chromed altar with hands outstretched. Firelight glazed the faces of long-dead saints, women and men of faith who’d raised Alt Coulumb from river mouth port to metropolis, who’d shed their blood for God, who’d let the Lord’s heat work through them. As a novice, he dreamed of following their path.

  Some felt he had.

  He had been convenient to God back then, that was all.

  But he could earn his place.

  His voice framed the prayer. He’d knelt here so often the words seemed to speak themselves. These days he struggled to keep his heart in the ceremony, to feel the ritual as praise rather than a series of rehearsed steps.