Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(105)

Raz recovered first, which pissed her off. He offered her a hand. She ignored it and stood on her own.

Around them the dust curtain settled, unveiling an ancient city.

What she’d taken for a stone flat was in fact a plaza ringed with column-fronted, wedge-topped buildings. She remembered the style from textbook woodcuts, though those ruins had never been crusted with coral and seashells. Towers rose beyond the temples.

Vampires surrounded them.

They hung in water, red eyed and alien, half-visible at this depth even to her. Were they living, she could have seen their heat. They were not. Coins glistened in wide red watching eyes. She looked up and saw no surface overhead. The hunters returned, blood-wreathed, spears and teeth sharp. Dolphins swam alongside. Sonar clicks played over Cat’s skin.

Raz swam into the center of the crowd. His hands moved, not just for swimming. Sign.

A woman emerged from the crowd. She might have been thirty or three thousand. Seaweed trailed her limbs. The signs she addressed to Raz were crisper and more elegant than those he offered in reply. Whatever their language, he spoke it only haltingly.

The conversation continued for tense and quiet minutes. Raz frowned after the woman—the priestess—responded to his third statement with a hook of her finger as if inviting. Their exchanges grew sharp. The priestess bared her teeth. Cat doubted this indicated progress.

Excuse me, Cat said.

A ripple passed through the crowd. Heads turned toward her.

I’m sorry if we interrupted you, she said. I’m—we’re—from the surface. My name’s Cat; Raz brought me here because he thought you could help.

Silence, full of clicks and curiosity.

My Goddess, she said, is in danger. Her enemies want to kill Her. She needs strength to fight them off. Raz hoped you could help us.

The priestess swam toward Cat like a snake would swim. Long braids trailed her. She stopped just beyond Cat’s reach. Her feet did not touch the seafloor. The priestess’s head cocked to one side, as if she’d been presented with a joke and was deciding whether to laugh.

Do you understand me?

The priestess nodded.

They pushed you down here centuries ago. They’re trying to push my lady out now.

The priestess opened her arms and twirled a circle, taking in the city and those who swam around her.

Cat was about to ask what she meant, when she heard the singing.

Water might garble ordinary speech, but song carried.

—What God

—Shall we seek

—Save the Blood?

They laughed.

—Let us see

—Your need

The priestess held out her hand and raised her thin lips to reveal fangs more beautiful than any Cat had ever seen.

Cat reached—

The glamour broke. Raz interposed himself between them in a blur. Through the weight of water, she heard him hiss.

Cat touched him on the shoulder.

Raz. It’s fine.

The priestess nodded, once.

Raz looked back at her, scared.

I can do this.

She did not know what to call his expression as he swam aside. Despair, maybe, or hope.

She offered her wrist to the priestess, who accepted, and bent her head.

Her teeth dipped through Suit and skin with equal ease.

A line of incandescent pleasure shot through Cat’s heart, spread out and up and so much more dangerously down, to her crotch, through arms and legs, fingertips, toes. Joy rattled the cave of her skull. Her thoughts came to pieces in a single pulse.

Her taste of Raz in the ruined tower had been strange, surreal, exciting, but Cat had felt like this before. She knew to ride the feeling. She did not collapse or go mad. She’d felt weaker versions of this rush in Paupers’ Quarter backstreets or on the Business District’s rain-slick rooftops.

The priestess was not drawing her, thank gods. Cat felt enormous hunger behind the woman, old and overwhelming, deeper than the ocean. The priestess tasted Cat’s soul, that was all, savoring her need, and through her the Suit’s, and Seril’s.

Cat followed that taste back and in, to a network of which the priestess was but a piece—the blood of all assembled here in the sea’s night ran through her, and hers through them, joined to a throbbing heartbeat greater than any one alone and wiser, a mind that shook her to ecstasy with its faintest touch. She could offer herself to that hunger, fall into its perfection, let herself be hollowed out and worn as a glove by God— No, she told the hunger.

The priestess lifted her fangs from Cat’s wrist, and the connection broke.

Cat fell. She tried to gasp, by reflex, and choked when the Suit did not let her.

After timeless time, she calmed.

The priestess’s head declined and rose again, in a slow, gentle nod.

The priestess drew a line across her own wrist with her thumbnail. A stream of blood snaked through the water and curled into a cloud rather than dispersing. The priestess took the cloud in her palm, and squeezed. When she opened her hand, she held a smooth oval of red jade that caught the not-light strangely. She offered it to Raz. He drew back at first, as if the sun lay in her palm. Then he looked at Cat, and sagged, and accepted.

It was done.

Cat had wondered how they would return to the surface—Raz could swim on his own, but even the Suit might tire with the strain of bearing its own weight back. Two from the congregation—the girl who drank the star kraken, and a slender man who had been Dhisthran before he became this—bore her skyward.