Four Roads Cross (49 page)

“The gargoyles.” She remembered Aev's rumbling voice, the certainty with which she spoke before her Goddess's wrecked throne. “Yes.”

“You talked with them—and with Her. You've heard Her voice, written songs to praise Her, and worked miracles in Her aid. You're part of us. It's okay to be afraid.”

The girl's face was very pale.

Jones remembered the smell of burning flesh and singed hair in a square much larger than this one, a long time ago. She looked away.

“I have to go,” Ellen said, and lifted the jug.

 

63

The sun set over Alt Coulumb.

Though the sky was burned, though Craft imposed its own schedules on the world, the sun still set and unveiled the stars. Craftworkers welcomed stars, after all. From these they took their food.

The court hung in midair, ringed by crystal towers, overseen by the Judge, above a layer-cake world: the physical city, and beneath it the argument-city of planes and burning wires where plaintiff's and defendant's Craft mixed, and beneath even that the raw noumenal Truth. Probes and accusations peeled back layers and stitched shut wounds. Fire wreathed Alt Coulumb, but the city was not consumed.

Of course not. This was war in a purely spiritual sense, war against gods as the God Wars should have been, no mucking about with civilian casualties. Clean. Fierce. Contained.

Not war at all.

This was surgery, with stars the operating theater lights.

Daphne watched moonrise—or, a piece of Daphne did. She was built of shells within shells, like the city. The moon rose fat and sweet as a ripe apple. She could taste the apple's juice on her tongue. Saliva wet her mouth, and she swallowed acid.

Innermost observer-Daphne, walled off from body and endocrine emotion, wondered how this trial would appear from the ground. The shell surrounding that innermost watcher was not Daphne Mains at all, but a substitute made of tense strong worm-flesh and gnawing teeth. One layer closer to the surface, there was another piece of Daphne again, screaming.

She had been screaming for a long time.

She was built of shells, and shells, and shells, and around all these a final sheath of skin containing a thing that was and was not Daphne Mains. Her teeth were sharp. Soot smeared her face, and blood. Her jacket was torn, her skin burned and cracked. Worms wriggled through her flesh, around bones that were not bones. She extended many arms, and breathed, though she did not need to.

Wakefield stood on empty air across the circle, wearing an expression mixed from smirk and smile and dead skull's grin. The immaculate suit was maculate now. Wakefield's discarded mask rested upon the unfloor. Blood dripped from many wounds and dried under manicured nails.

“At this point,” Madeline Ramp said, “we believe Kos Everburning's weaknesses have been adequately explored. It is time to turn our attention to the moon goddess, Seril Undying.”

“The court recognizes this request.”

Wakefield's dead smile lost some of its mortal character. “In which case, I must cede the floor to Seril's own representatives.”

“An irregular approach, Counselor.”

“The two entities are separate, Your Honor. Opposing counsel would like nothing better than to establish that Kos can be relied upon to defend Seril. If I, retained by the Church of Kos, stood for Seril as well, would that not prove Ms. Ramp's and Ms. Mains's points for them?”

“We certainly would not complain,” Ms. Ramp said.

The Judge removed her glasses and polished them on her robe. “Every case this court tries, it asks itself whether it is too much to hope that for once counsel would rely on the strength of their arguments, and leave grandstanding for somewhere that still has grandstands. It seems we are to be disappointed once more.”

“Apologies, Your Honor,” Wakefield said.

“Who will replace you, Counsel?”

“Tara Abernathy represents Seril Undying in this matter.”

“Ah,” the Judge said, as if this explained everything. “The woman expelled from the Hidden Schools.”

“Graduated,” Wakefield said. “Technically. She is a Craftswoman in good standing.”

The Judge raised her hand. “Then let her appear.”

The sun's last splinter passed beneath the horizon. The moon hung full.

In the ensuing pause, Daphne beneath her shells noticed how still the city seemed. They were not far up: there should have been noise, rumbles of traffic and murmurs of distant conversation. Instead she heard only a cathedral silence.

*   *   *

Cat and Raz crouched on a Business District rooftop, looking up. The court's wheel hung naked in the sky. No lightning lanced from it, no shadow spread to devour the newly risen stars.

“You're okay?” He touched a bruise on her arm.

“It's fine,” she said, but did not draw her arm back. “Dockside trouble this afternoon. Big fight among the foreign sailors.”

“Rioting?”

“Not as much as you'd expect. Small disasters kept us busy. Fires. A bit of looting down by the university, kids being kids.”

“Looks like it's time,” he said, with a nod to the sky. “That was Tara's cue.”

“I know.”

“No word from her?”

“Not since the last nightmare two days back.” She ran her fingers through rooftop gravel. “Seril says she'll be here, if we can hold the line.”

“How long?”

This was the part she didn't like. No, strike that. Made it sound like there was only one part she didn't like. “Three hours.”

“Gods.”

She didn't give the obvious reply.

“You see why I try to have as little to do with the mainland as possible.”

“If you wanted me to believe the ocean was any better, you never should have shown me what goes on beneath.”

“I have a whole thing,” he said, “a speech, really, about how the ocean doesn't lie to you.”

“That's nice.”

“What if Tara doesn't show?”

She touched the goddess statue on its chain around her neck. “Then we'll fight.”

*   *   *

Shadows globed the circle. The Judge frowned. “Ms. Abernathy is not in evidence, Counselor.”

Wakefield nodded. “I apologize. I was not informed of her delay.”

“Will you stand for Seril, then?”

“Beyond my remit, I'm afraid.”

“In which case we'll have to continue without counsel for the defense.”

Ramp's smile might have been a toothpaste ad. “Our pleasure. Ms. Mains?”

Daphne opened her claws, called upon her power—and stopped.

Spotlights burned her, blinding, so many colors they blended into white. Stone wingbeats filled the sky. The night moved—not with Craft, but with gargoyles.

She'd seen them before, though never all at once, never so near, never with wings spread and gem eyes burning. From a distance they were admirable weapons. Up close—

Some part of Daphne Mains was always screaming. But her innermost core, which felt nothing at all, still wondered at their form and strength.

A gargoyle hovered outside the circle, wings spread, fangs bare. A silver circlet shone from her brow. Enormous meathooks and machines of Craft pierced the Judge and grafted power to her. Authority radiated from the gargoyle, because of who she was.

The world held powers older than the Craft, Daphne thought.

None greater, though.

“I am Aev,” the gargoyle said. “Leader of Seril's children. We have come to defend our Mother.”

Wakefield looked nonplussed. Even the Judge shifted uncertainly on her throne.

Daphne smiled razors, raised her hands, and called upon dark powers.

And then the night was claws and teeth and wings.

 

64

The square fell silent when Ellen climbed the Crier's dais.

Gabby watched her from the blanket she shared with Mandy the university janitor and Xiaofan who worked in data entry for an uptown Craft firm and a Hot Town beggar girl who didn't tell Gabby her name when she asked. The rest of the crowd watched, too.

Ellen was not used to public speaking. No matter how you prepared there was no way to know how you would feel the first time you spoke and a few hundred people listened. Mercenaries talked the same way about battle: there are those who grow accustomed, those trained to it, and those born. No one learned they were the last until they shed blood.

Ellen had worked a miracle the last two days, by assembling so many people, and performed actual miracles as well, but she had a small voice and swayed under the crowd's attention.

“Seril needs us,” Ellen said. “The battle takes all Her strength. Aid will come, but She has to build a bridge to bring it here.”

She pressed her hands together.

“We're different people,” she said. “We all have different visions of Her, but She is the same. Help us, if you can. If She's meant anything to you, let Her draw upon you now. Please.”

I'm just going to watch, Jones told herself.

That's all. Watch, and listen.

Like last time, before the fire.

But the sky broke, and burned, and froze. Craftsmen fought gods for the city's future. In Dresediel Lex, she'd watched, and after the slaughter she left—crossed a continent to flee the memory of crisped skin and seared flesh and the chemical stink of gripfire. In twenty years she'd made this city her own, fought for its people with the only weapons she knew, with voice and pen and conductor's baton.

If Seril lost, the city would break. The voices would stop—the God-sent dreams, the brief intimations of a city striving toward justice. Chains would bite the gods' flesh, and bind.

Gabby was afraid.

She would have struck anyone else who suggested it, but she could not strike herself. She was afraid. These girls fought—easy for them. They did not know what loss might mean. By staying quiet, staying small, staying on the sidelines, you could outlast even that madness in the sky. People who did not fight, survived.

And Aev was in the sky, dying. Aev, who saved Gabby from danger she'd taken on herself.

She prayed.

There must have been words for this back before the Wars, but Gabby didn't know them. She directed her mind to moments her life touched the Lady's, silences in which she felt a presence, an intimation, a still voice from still water, a whisper from stone. Not Kos's all-embracing, all-consuming love, not the voice that left you ashes, but something cool and deep and lonely. She was asked, and she gave.

The silence lived with stories. Jones felt them: a square of people offering themselves. Trade was a pale echo of this feeling, of raw self offered up to Someone who knit it to a whole.

There were so many tales.

Hundreds clashed and recombined in the market, bitter with suffering, gingered with joy. They drew sparks when they struck. Every person here knew the Goddess in a different way. They lacked tongues to name Her, myths and prayers to fit Her. They offered themselves with love or humility or fear or pain, and if the Goddess accepted them all, She would break herself to shards.

Joining those shards was a priestess's task, and Ellen was not ready.

She shook with strain. Scoured by private terrors, the girl could not shoulder her congregation's burden, could not filter their pain through herself.

What had Gabby expected? For Ellen to knit a people from scattered threads beneath a demon-haunted sky?

She felt the first stirrings of despair.

Then she heard footsteps.

“Excuse me,” a man said behind her.

Gabby turned.

A group of people wearing mismatched clothes had entered the market from the south. Their leader, a tall, thin man with a graying beard, approached the dais beside Ellen, working his way through the congregation while his fellows spread out to ring the crowd. He held out his hand, and Ellen accepted.

“Hello,” he said. “You may call me Dr. Hasim. I am a Doctor of Divinity, which means I heal gods. Your Lady saved me, and she saved my friends. We offered Her our help in turn. She asked us to come here, to tell you Her stories, and pray Her prayers with you. She is a Lady of great age, with as many stories as She has faces.”

“Tell us, then,” Ellen said, and Jones heard her relief, her desperation.

“No.” Hasim did not turn from Ellen, and though he did not shout, his voice filled the market. “Gods do not know how best to help themselves, any more than human patients do. I know old stories, written for a different time. You must tell Her tales yourself.”

“I can't,” she said. “All our stories are different.”

“All people are different,” Hasim said. “They are also more or less the same. In your tale, they will hear their own.”

Ellen let his hand slip. She looked out over the crowd.

Gabby held her breath. Claire stood rigid beside the stage.

“My father,” Ellen said, “roars.”

 

65

War is a hard problem. Even simple physical conflicts have so many moving interlocking systems, physical and moral and technological, meteorological and geographical and historical, that attempt to name their edges far out into the borders of complexity theory. Craftwork battles leap over those borders and swim in the chaos beyond. Courtly wards and rules contain that chaos like rolled-up towels on a bathroom floor contain gushing sewage.

Good thing Daphne Mains was built for battle.

Part of her was, anyway. Somewhere within the shell game of her soul, she observed the seams of her construction: her hands drew glyphs in air precisely as a machine tooling metal, and words in a dozen dead tongues spilled from her lips without trace of affect. Back in the Hidden Schools she'd had no talent for languages, progressing slowly from rote memorization through info-gap exercises with classmates to actual contact with contorted other-dimensional horrors. Each syllable had cut her throat from the inside, as if the words themselves were demonglass.