Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(102)
“I was joking,” she said, “about vampire gods.”
“I wasn’t.” He pointed down into the depths. “Good thing you sink in the Suit. We’d have had to bring weights otherwise.”
*
“We can run,” Dr. Hasim said when they were safe behind a locked door. “Or we can stay and help these people fight. We must choose.”
The refugee council gathered in an empty on-call room Hasim had persuaded the orderlies to lend them: Aedi who’d worked with him in the Refuge for a decade; Akhil who collapsed on their doorstep five years back, having wandered half-blind out of the Wastes shrunken as a dried fig; Zola who handled the shrines’ day-to-day management; quiet Mohem to whom the Refuge’s younger guests looked in their troubles.
Mohem, to his surprise, was the first to speak, her voice velvety with rare use: “We are all here, and gods too. Seventy-one awake, and twenty-eight still sleep. Of those, twenty-four dream shallow enough for me to taste. Four are too far gone for me to hear their voices.”
Zola had found herself a clipboard and everyone proper clothes, though the fabrics were coarse and the styles ill-fit and ill-fitting: Hasim wore twill slacks three sizes too large, a belt in which he’d awled an extra hole, and a cotton shirt with ill-considered checks. Zola had not said how, in a building where people died regularly, she acquired the clothes.
She consulted her clipboard. “Our debts appear to have been canceled.” Murmurs around the circle. Akhil looked up from his stitching. “We have a soul apiece, offered by the Goddess Seril. I applied for credit at HBSE and First Camlaander, without success. By freeing us, the Goddess has placed us in thaumaturgical limbo: we are members of Her community, under Her protection—but the broader Craftwork world does not acknowledge Her existence.”
Akhil had been, among other things, a tailor before his town fell, and was adjusting his Zola-found shirt to fit. He pulled his thread taut, pursing a long seam’s lips. “Then there’s the chorus in the sky.”
“What do you make of that?” Hasim said.
Akhil tied off the thread and cut it with a scalpel liberated from a nursing station. “The city is in danger. These aren’t the days, and this was never the land, for a God so leveraged to Craftsmen to address His people directly. He’s afraid.”
Zola turned pages on her clipboard. “The locals love Kos, but few remember Seril as anything but a threat. Their faith is structured for a diad, but they don’t have the praxis.”
Akhil cocked his head to one side. “How do you know what the people think? We’ve scarcely had a chance to leave this building.”
“A hospital—” She frowned, set a hand to her mouth, shook her head. Hasim recognized that expression. The word had pulled at the cuts on her lips. “A hospital tangles many lines. Nurses have one background, doctors another, and everyone falls sick sometime. People talk, especially when they do not think one speaks good Kathic. I have limited my vocabulary in public spaces.”
Mohem rubbed her upper arms. “We could run to the ghost cults in Alt Selene. A train leaves tomorrow.”
Akhil pinched, and pierced, and drew the needle. “Would that not violate the terms of our redemption?”
“There are no terms.” Zola flipped back to the first page. “Seril refused to recognize our indenture. Her soul-gift is simple grace. We owe her nothing.”
“If she falls, the indenture may seize us again.”
“We can be safe under a new guardian before that happens. I know it sounds ungrateful, but this is not our fight. Someone—presumably Grimwald Holdings—attacked us, and we woke here. Seril stands against our enemies, but she will fall. We have”—Zola checked the wall clock—“thirty-two hours to find a better bulwark. Alt Selene’s ghost cults offer generous asylum terms. Alternatively, we could sue for Kosite asylum in the Court of Craft, claiming Seril is subsidiary to Kos, and he inherits her obligations.”
“Which would aid the Craftsmen who attack Her,” Hasim said. “I dislike that idea.”
“We have to protect ourselves, Doctor. And our Partners.”
“And so the choice remains,” he said. “Run or fight.”
Zola leaned back in the chair and caged her long fingers. “I say run.”
“As do I.”
Zola turned in surprise to Akhil, who shrugged as if their agreement were not a momentous occasion.
Mohem pressed her lips into a line as she thought, and when she decided, they unfolded and filled with color again. “The Refuge took me in, back in Agdel Lex. I helped it in return. Seril took us in. I think we should help her. We fight.”
“I agree,” Hasim said. “She needs us as much as any broken deity who ever stumbled to our doorstep. What are we for, if we desert her now? Fight.”
One by one they turned to Aedi. Aedi spoke seldom when she was not praying, and when she spoke she did not use her own words, drawing instead from scriptures the source of which mystified even Hasim. In the Refuge, as each new destitute arrived, Aedi sat reading beside them, working the prayer beads woven into her hair between knuckle and thumb. She was older than Hasim, and wiser. He did not know how great was the gulf between them in either category, but since they first met, he had grown to suspect it was considerable.
Aedi’s braids snaked over her shoulders when she nodded, twisted left and right when she shook her head. They snaked today. “There will be war,” she said, “even in the dry places of the earth.”