Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(10)

Tara did not let him see her flinch. “Shale,” she said. “I’m glad you were listening. I need your pledge, with the others’, not to interfere.”

“I will not promise. And neither should they.” Aev reached for Shale, to cuff him or pull him back, but he spun away and leapt, with a single beat of broad-spread wings, to perch on the broken orrery arch, glaring down. “We are teaching the people of Alt Coulumb. They’ve come to believe—in the Paupers’ Quarter, in the markets. They pray to our Lady. They look to the skies. You’d have us give that up—the only progress we’ve made in a year. You ask us to turn our backs on the few faithful our Lady has. To break their trust. I refuse.”

“Get down,” Aev snapped.

“I fly where I wish and speak what I choose.”

“We asked Tara for her help. We should listen to her,” Aev said, “even when her counsel is hard to bear.”

“It’s just for one night,” Tara said.

Shale’s wings snapped out, shedding whorls of dust. He seemed immense atop the jagged iron spar. “For one night, and the next, and the next after that. We’ve crouched and cringed through a year of nights and nights, and if we cease our small evangelism, with each passing day the faith we’ve built will break, and faith once broken’s three times harder to reforge. I will not betray the people who call on us for aid. Will you, Mother?” He scowled at Aev. “Will any of you?” His gaze swept the rooftop gathering. Stone forms did not shuffle feet, but still Tara sensed uncertainty in shifting wings and clenching claws.

Aev made a sound in her chest that Tara heard as distant thunder. “I will swear,” she said, fierce and final. “We all will swear. We will not show ourselves. We will let prayers pass unanswered, for our Lady’s safety.”

Tara felt the promise bite between them. Not so binding as a contract, since no consideration had passed, but the promise was a handle nevertheless for curses and retribution should Aev betray her word. Good enough.

“You swear for the Lady’s sake,” Shale said, “yet, swearing, you turn from Her service, and from our people—you turn from the overlooked, from the fearful. Don’t abandon them!”

“And I will swear,” said another gargoyle, whose name Tara did not know. “And I.” And others, all of them, an assent in grinding chorus. Tara gathered their promises into a sheaf, and tied the sheaf through a binding glyph on her forearm. That hurt worse than the spider’s poison, but it was for a good cause.

“Broken,” Shale said, and another word, which must have been a curse in Stone. “Surrender.”

“Shale,” Aev said. “You must swear with us.”

“You cannot force me,” Shale said. “Only the Lady may command.”

He leapt off the tower. Wings folded, he needled toward the city streets—then with a whip crack he flared and glided up, and off, through Alt Coulumb’s towers.

Tara gathered her Craft into a net to snare him, hooks to catch and draw him back. Shadow rolled over her, and she cast out her arm.

But a massive claw closed around her wrist, and Aev’s body blocked her view of Shale’s retreat. Tara’s lightning spent itself against the gargoyle’s stone hide.

“I can stop him,” Tara said. She pulled against Aev’s grip, but the gargoyle’s hand did not move. “Get out of my way.” Growls rose from the other statues, obscured behind the grand curve of Aev’s wings.

“His choice is free,” Aev replied. “We will not let you bind him.”

“He’ll spoil everything.”

“We are not bound save by our own will, and the Lady’s.” Again Aev made that thunder sound. Her claw tightened—slightly—around Tara’s wrist, enough to make Tara feel her bones. “Even Shale. One child, alone, cannot cause too much trouble.”

“Want to bet?”

“Police the city more tonight. He will have no prayers to answer.”

“That’s not enough.”

“It must be.”

She remembered a dead man’s voice: you have fused a chain around your neck.

Tara’s wrist hurt.

“Fine,” she snapped, and let her shadows part and her glyphwork fade, let mortal weakness reassert its claim to the meat she wore. Her skin felt like skin again, rather than a shell. The world seemed less malleable.

Aev let her go. “I am sorry.”

“Come to the meeting tonight,” she said. “I’ll see myself out.” She turned from the gargoyles and their unfinished heaven into darkness.

Somewhere a goddess laughed. Tara didn’t listen.





6

Catherine Elle and Raz Pelham sat in a dirty white golem truck in a parking lot across the street from a two-story building that was trying very hard to be nondescript.

She peered through a narrow gap in the curtains over the windows. “For smugglers and slavers, they’re not so good at this.”

“These guys just make the dreamglass,” Raz said. “The trafficking’s Maura’s job.”

“Still. Our den of villainy’s first floor is a sleepy little pizza place with a guy reading at the counter. One cook. They’re barely trying. I doubt they even have pizza. They’d get the biggest shock of their lives if I walked in and ordered a slice.”