Four Roads Cross Read online

  The gargoyle drew the muggers close to her mouth. Gabby heard her voice clear as snapping stone.

  “You have done wrong,” the gargoyle said. “I set the Lady’s mark on you.”

  She tightened her grip, just until the blood flowed. The man on the left screamed; the man on the right did not. Where her claws bit their necks, they left tracks of silver light. She let the men fall, and they hit the ground hard and heavy. She knelt between them. “Your friend needs a doctor. Bring him to Consecration and they will care for him, and you. The Lady watches all. We will know if you fail yourself again.”

  She touched each one on his upper arm. To the gargoyle it seemed no more consequential than a touch: a tightening of thumb and forefinger as if plucking a flower petal. The sound of breaking bone was loud and clean, and no less sickening for that.

  They both screamed, this time, and after—rolling on the pavement filth, cradling their arms.

  The gargoyle stood. “Bear him with the arms you still have whole. The Lady is merciful, and I am her servant.” She delivered the last sentence flat, which hinted what she might have done to them if not for the Lady’s mercy and her own obedience. “Go.”

  They went, limping, lurching, bearing their broken friend between them. His head lolled from side to side. Silver glimmered from the wounds on their necks.

  And, too, from scars on the alley walls. Not every mark there glowed—only the deep clean grooves that ran from rooftops to paving stones, crosshatch furrows merging to elegant long lines, flanked here by a diacritical mark and there by a claw’s flourish.

  Poetry burned on the brick.

  The gargoyle approached. Her steps resounded through the paving stones. She bent and extended a heavy clawed hand. Gabby’s fingers fit inside the gargoyle’s palm, and she remembered a childhood fall into the surf back out west, how her mother’s hand swallowed hers as she helped her stand. The gargoyle steadied Gabby as she rose. At full height, Gabby’s forehead was level with the gargoyle’s carved collarbone. The gargoyle was naked, though that word was wrong. Things naked were exposed: the naked truth in the morning news, the naked body under a surgeon’s lights, the naked blossom before the frost. The gargoyle was bare as the ocean’s skin or a mountainside.

  Gabby looked into the green stone eyes. “Thank you,” she said, and prayed too, addressing the will that sent the being before her: Thank you. “The stories are true, then. You’re back.”

  “I know you,” the gargoyle replied. “Gavriel Jones. You are a journalist. I have heard you sing.”

  She felt an answer, too, from that distant will, a feeling rather than a voice: a full moon over the lake of her soul, the breath of the mother her mother had been before she took to drink. “You know who I am and saved me anyway.”

  “I am Aev,” she said, “and because I am, I was offered a choice. I thought to let you pay for your presumption. But that is not why we were made.”

  “I know.” The pain in her chest had nothing to do with the broken rib. She turned away from the mass of Aev. “You want my loyalty, I guess. A promise I won’t report this. That I’ll protect and serve you, like a serial hero’s sidekick.”

  Aev did not answer.

  “Say something, dammit.” Gabby’s hands shook. She drew a pack of cigarettes from her inside pocket, lit one. Her fingers slipped on the lighter’s cheap toothed wheel. She breathed tar into the pain in her side.

  When she’d drawn a quarter of the cigarette to ash, she turned back to find the alley empty. The poems afterglowed down to darkness, like tired fireflies. A shadow crossed the moon. She did not look up.

  The light died and the words once more seemed damaged.

  She limped from the alley to the street. A wiry-haired man fanned a tin box of coals topped by a grill on which lay skewers of seasoned lamb.

  Gabby paid him a few thaums of her soul for a fistful of skewers she ate one at a time as she walked down the well-lit street past porn shop windows and never-shut convenience stores. The air smelled sweeter here, enriched by cigarette smoke and the sharp, broad spices of the lamb. After she ate, even she could barely notice the tremor in her hands. The drumbeat of blood through her body faded.

  She tossed the skewers in a trash can and lit a second cigarette, number two of the five she’d allow herself today. Words danced inside her skull. She had promised nothing.

  She realized she was humming, a slow, sad melody she’d never heard before that meandered through the C-minor pentatonic scale, some god’s or muse’s gift. She followed it.

  Her watch chimed one. Still time to file for matins, if she kept the patter simple.

  3

  Tara was buying eggs in the Paupers’ Quarter market when she heard the dreaded song.

  She lived three blocks over and one north, in a walk-up apartment recommended by the cheap rent as well as by its proximity to the Court of Craft and the market itself, Alt Coulumb’s best source of fresh produce. Now, just past dawn, the market boiled with porters and delivery trucks and human beings. Shoppers milled under awnings of heavy patterned cloth down mazed alleys between lettuce walls and melon pyramids.

  As she shouldered through the crowd, she worried over her student loans and her to-do list. The Iskari Defense Ministry wanted stronger guarantees of divine support from the Church of Kos, which they wouldn’t get, since a weaker version of those same guarantees had almost killed Kos Himself last year. The Iskari threatened a breach of contract suit, ridiculous—Kos performed his obligations flawlessly. But she had to prove that, which meant another deep trawl of church archives and another late night.

  Which wouldn’t have felt like such a chore if Tara still billed by the hour. These days, less sleep only meant less sleep. She’d sold herself on the benefits of public service: be more than just another hired sword. Devote your life to building worlds rather than tearing them down. The nobility of the position seemed less clear when you were making just enough to trigger your student loans but not enough to pay them back.

  Life would feel simpler after breakfast.

  But when she reached the stall where Matthew Adorne sold eggs, she found it untended. The eggs remained, stacked in bamboo cartons and arranged from small to large and light to dark, but Adorne himself was gone. Tara would have been less surprised to find Kos the Everburning’s inner sanctum untended and his Eternal Flame at ebb than she was to see Adorne’s stand empty.

  Nor was his the only one.

  Around her, customers grumbled in long lines. The elders of the market had left assistants to mind their booths. Capistano’s boy scrambled behind the butcher’s counter, panicked, doing his father’s work and his at once. He chopped, he collected coins with bits of soul wound up inside, he shouted at an irate customer carrying a purse three sizes too large. The blond young women who sold fresh vegetables next to Adorne, the stand Tara never visited because their father assumed she was foreign and talked to her loud and slow as if she were the only dark-skinned woman in Alt Coulumb, they darted from task to task, the youngest fumbling change and dropping onions and getting in the others’ way like a summer associate given actual work.

  Adorne had no assistant. His children were too good for the trade, he said. School for them. So the stall was empty.

  She wasn’t tall enough to peer over the crowd, and here in Alt Coulumb she couldn’t fly. A wooden crate lay abandoned by the girls’ stall. Tara climbed the crate and, teetering, scanned the market.

  At the crowd’s edge she saw Adorne’s broad shoulders, and tall, gaunt Capistano like an ill-made scarecrow. Other stall-keepers, too, watched—no, listened. Crier’s orange flashed on the dais.

  Adorne remained in place as Tara fought toward him. Not that this was unusual: the man was so big he needed more cause to move than other people. The world was something that happened to black-bearded Matthew Adorne, and when it was done happening, he remained.

  But no one else had moved either.

  “What’s happened?” Tara asked Adorne. Even
on tiptoe, she could barely see the Crier, a middle-aged, round-faced woman wearing an orange jacket and a brown hat, an orange press pass protruding from the band. Tara’s words climbed the mounds of Adorne’s arms and the swells of his shoulders until they reached his ears, which twitched. He peered down at her through layers of cheek and beard—raised one tree-branch finger to his lips.

  “Encore’s coming.”

  Which shut Tara up fast. Criers sang the dawn song once for free, and a second time only if the first yielded sufficient tips. An encore meant big news.

  The Crier was an alto with good carry, little vibrato, strong belt. One thing Tara had to say for the archaic process of Alt Coulumbite news delivery: in the last year she’d become a much better music critic.

  Still, by now a newspaper would have given her a headline reason for the fuss.

  The song of Gavriel Jones, the Crier sang.

  Tells of a New Presence in our Skies.

  Oh, Tara thought.

  Hot Town nights burn silver

  And Stone Men soar in the sky

  Pray to the moon, dreams say

  And they’ll spread their wings to fly.

  A tale’s but a tale ’til it’s seen

  And rumors do tend to spin

  I saw them myself in the Hot Town last night

  Though telling, I know I sin.

  Tara listened with half an ear to the rest of the verse and watched the crowd. Heads shook. Lips turned down. Arms crossed. Matthew Adorne tapped his thick fingers against his thicker biceps.

  Seril’s children were playing vigilante. A Crier had seen them.

  The song rolled on, to tell of gargoyles returned to Alt Coulumb not to raid, as they had many times since their Lady died in the God Wars, but to remain and rebuild the cult of their slain goddess, Seril of the moon, whom Alt Coulumb’s people called traitor, murderer, thief.

  Tara knew better: Seril never died. Her children were not traitors. They were soldiers, killers sometimes in self-defense and extremity, but never murderers or thieves. To the Crier’s credit, she claimed none of these things, but neither did she correct popular misconceptions.

  The city knew.

  How would they respond?

  There was no Craft to read minds without breaking them, no magic to hear another’s thoughts without consent. Consciousness was a strange small structure, fragile as a rabbit’s spine, and it broke if gripped too tightly. But there were more prosaic tricks to reading men and women—and the Hidden Schools that taught Tara to raise the dead and send them shambling to do her bidding, to stop her enemies’ hearts and whisper through their nightmares, to fly and call lightning and steal a likely witness’s face, to summon demons and execute contracts and bill in tenths of an hour, also taught her such prosaic tricks to complement true sorcery.

  The crowd teetered between fear and rage. They whispered: the sound of rain, and of thunder far away.

  “Bad,” Matthew Adorne said in as soft a voice as he could make his. “Stone Men in the city. You help the priests, don’t you?”

  Tara didn’t remember the last time she heard Matthew Adorne ask a question.

  “I do,” Tara said.

  “They should do something.”

  “I’ll ask.”

  “Could be one of yours,” he said, knowing enough to say “Craftsman” but not wanting, Tara thought, to admit that a woman he knew, a faithful customer, no less, belonged to that suspect class. “Scheming. Bringing dead things back.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The Blacksuits will get them,” Adorne said. “And Justice, too.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Excuse me, Matt. I have work.”

  So much for breakfast.

  4

  One does not need an expensive Hidden Schools degree to know the first step in crisis management: get ahead of the story. If that’s impossible, at least draw even with it. Tara, who had an expensive Hidden Schools degree, hunted Gavriel Jones.

  The Crier’s Guild was more hive than office. Stringers, singers, and reporters buzzed like orange bees from desk to desk, alighting coffee mugs in hand to bother others working, or pollinate them with news.

  “Late report by nightmare telegraph, lower trading on Shining Empire indices—”

  “You hear the Suits busted Johnny Goodnight down by the docks, taking in a shipment?”

  “No shit?”

  “—Haven’t found a second source for this yet, but Walkers looks set to knock down those PQ slums for her new shopping center—”

  “Still missing your bets for the ullamal bracket, Grindel’s about to close the door—”

  “—Loan me a cigarette?”

  “Do you really want it back?”

  They didn’t let people back here, exactly, but Tara wasn’t people. She forced her papers into the receptionist’s face—I’m Ms. Abernathy, Craftswoman to the Church of Kos Everburning, we’re working on a case and want to check our facts, without pause for breath. Then she held the receptionist’s gaze for the ten seconds needed for the word “Craftswoman” to suggest shambling corpses and disemboweled gods. Not that most gods had bowels.

  Useful mental image, anyway.

  The young man grew paler and directed her to Jones: third desk from the back, on the left, one row in.

  They’d thrown desks like these out of the Hidden Schools in Tara’s first year, chromed edges and fake wood tops that didn’t take the masquerade seriously, green metal frames, rattling drawers and sharp corners. Thrown them, she remembered, straight into the Crack in the World. If you have a hole in reality, why not chuck your garbage there? At the time they’d also thrown out a number of ratty office chairs like the one in which Gavriel Jones herself reclined, one muddy shoe propped on the desk. The Crier held a pencil in her mouth and a plainsong page inverted in her hand. She straightened the foot that propped her, then relaxed it again, rocking her chair back and forth. Her free hand beat syncopation on her thigh. A cigarette smoldered in the ashtray on her desk. Tara frowned at the ashtray and the smoke. She might work for Kos, but that didn’t mean she had to approve of the weird worship the fire god demanded.

  Or maybe the Crier was just an addict.

  “Ms. Jones.”

  Jones’s hand paused. She stopped rocking and plucked the gnawed pencil from her teeth. “Ms. Abernathy. I took bets on when you would show up.”

  “What was the spread?”

  “You hit the sweet spot.”

  “I’m getting predictable in my old age.”

  “I won’t pull the story,” Jones said.

  “Too predictable.”

  “At least you’re not getting old. Not like the rest of us, anyway.” Jones pointed to the paper-strewn desktop. “Step into my office.”

  Tara shifted a stack of blank staff paper and leaned against the desk. “You’re starting trouble.”

  “We keep people informed. Safety’s the church’s job. And the Blacksuits’.”

  “You didn’t see the Paupers’ Quarter market this morning when they sang your feature.”

  “I can imagine, if it’s anything like the rubbernecking we had up north in the CBD.” She grinned. “Good tips today.”

  “People are angry.”

  “They have a right to be. Maybe you’re an operational atheist, but most folks don’t have the luxury. We’ve had problems with gargoyles before. If they’re back, if their Lady is, that’s news.” Jones had a way of looking up at Tara and seeming to look—not down, never down, but straight across, like a pin through Tara’s eyeball. “We deserve to know how, and why, the city’s changed beneath us.”

  “Who are your sources?”

  One of Jones’s lower front teeth had been broken off and capped with silver. “Do you really think I’d answer that question? If people are worshipping Seril, a church rep is the last person I’d tell.”

  “I don’t need specifics,” Tara said.

  “I met a girl in a bar who spun me a tale. She worked delivery, and
some hoods jumped her and stole her satchel. Way the contract was written up, she was liable for everything inside. Small satchel, but you know Craftfolk. Whatever was in there, it was expensive—the debt would break her down to indentured zombiehood. She knew a story going around: if you’re in trouble, shed your blood, say a prayer. Someone will come help. Someone did.”

  “What kind of bar was this?”

  That silver-capped tooth flashed again.

  “So you write this on the strength of a pair of pretty blue eyes—”

  “Gray.” She slid her hands into her pockets. “Her eyes were gray. And that’s the last detail you get from me. But it got me asking around. Did you listen to the song?”

  “I prefer to get my news straight from the source.”

  “I did legwork, Ms. Abernathy. I have a folder of interviews you’ll never see unless a Blacksuit brings me something stiffer than a polite request. Women in the PQ started dreaming a year ago: a cave, the prayer, the blood. And before you scoff, I tried it myself. I got in trouble, bled, prayed. A gargoyle came.” Her voice lost all diffidence.

  “You saw them.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you know they’re not a danger.”

  “Can I get that on the record?”

  Tara didn’t blink. “Based on your own research, all they’ve done is help people. They saved you, and in return you’ve thrown them into the spotlight, in front of people who fear and hate them.”

  Jones stood—so they could look at each other face-to-face, Tara thought at first. But then the reporter turned round and leaned back against her desk by Tara’s side, arms crossed. They stared out together over the newsroom and its orange human-shaped bees. Typewriter keys rattled and carriage returns sang. Upstairs, a soprano practiced runs. “You don’t know me, Ms. Abernathy.”

  “Not well, Ms. Jones.”

  “I came up in the Times, in Dresediel Lex, before I moved east.”