Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(108)

“Wouldn’t you be pissed if someone bored holes into you?”

“Not angry,” he said. “Hurt. A person who’s hurt guards her wound. The mountain curls around the place where the blade went in. It would explain why we can’t find Altemoc—he sought the injury, made it worse, and she’s enclosed him.”

Tara stuffed the map into her jacket pocket and turned to Shale in the gloom. “I can’t fight something this big.”

“You don’t have to fight,” Shale said.

“How else do we make her let us in?”

“Ask,” he said.

“I just did.”

“No. Ask her.”

“You are making no sense.”

He laid his palm against the wall. “You Craftsmen have odd ways of being. You force the world to your will, and you force your wills on one another. Your power’s built from bonds and obligations. There are other ways.”

“The world doesn’t just … do things because you ask.”

“Have you tried?”

She raised her arms to the ceiling. “Hi! We’re here to help. Take us where we need to go!”

Nothing happened.

She fixed Shale with a stare she’d used to curdle milk.

“You could use a less sarcastic tone of voice. And say ‘please.’”

She did not let up the stare for a few seconds.

She closed her eyes. That made it easier.

“Hi,” she tried. “You don’t know me, and you don’t have reason to trust me. But if you show me where it hurts, I think I can help.”

Silence.

Oh, what the hells. “Please,” she said.

Rock ground rock. A thunderstorm smell stained the air. Strong wind struck her in the chest. She tried to steady herself on the wall— And failed, because there was no wall beside her anymore.

A tunnel gaped to her right, its black walls covered with enormous painted figures that glowed the same red as the mine’s crystal veins.

“Not one word,” she told Shale.

He offered none.

They descended together.





54

Cat waited in line for the sunset service at the Church of Sacred Ashes in Slaughter’s Fell. The locals had come out in force, heavyset men in pit-stained work shirts and women with worn fingers. A mom in denim slacks caught her youngest by the arm and yanked her back from the street. Cat stuffed her hands in her coat pockets, hurting for a smoke, a drink, a fang, avoiding the blank stares of black windows in whitewashed houses. She watched the houses so she didn’t have to watch the people. A scar-cheeked young man beside her offered her a cigarette, which she declined though she wanted to say yes.

It had been a long day after a long night.

Church doors opened and they filed in.

Parishioners packed the pews. As many stood in the back as found a seat. Cat scored one of the last pews, though the benches were so tightly packed she might have rather stood, or popped wings to give the locals a taste of real divine intervention. She squeezed between a bearded man in a golem mechanic’s shirt—CAPISTANO SERVICE & REPAIR, grease stains included—and a dark-skinned girl with bushy hair, thin wrists, and thick glasses, who, after her mother hipped her into the pew beside Cat, slid the prayer book from the wooden pocket, and buried herself in the order of solstice ceremonies, high rite, second version, summer colophon. The evening congregation was a brew of hushed voices, pressure, and too-close bodies’ heat. Cat smelled shoe leather and popcorn, oil and engine grease, aftershave, deodorant, perfume, and the bodies all that aftershave, deodorant, and perfume were meant to cover.

The people filled the church floor, but they did not fill the church. Arches made the roof seem taller than the sky.

On tiptoe she could just glimpse the cage-throne for the god’s fire on the altar.

“Huh,” she said.

It wasn’t burning.

“The altar?” That was the man beside her, the mechanic, Capistano. “They don’t keep it lit in Deliquescence. Guess you don’t come often.”

“It shows?”

“Safe guess. You think church’s this busy any given day? Lot of people scared tonight.”

“I haven’t done much churching since I was a kid,” she said.

Moon-whisper, soft and still: You worship through your work.

“It’s easy.” Not the mechanic—the girl to her right, her eyes large and liquid behind glass. She raised the book. “They’ll tell you what page to read. You say what it says in italics, like here. If you don’t know how to say it, I can help.” Because in this part of the city it wasn’t fair to assume everyone who came to church could read. And Cat was wearing Feller drag, jeans and jacket and worn boots, top two buttons of her shirt undone, a tear at her knee and a fray at her cuff. This was how she dressed growing up, how the kids she collared on patrol still dressed. Not much changed in Slaughter’s Fell, though what change would look like here she didn’t know. Suited uptown kids like those pricing out the locals up near the PQ market wouldn’t fix anything, for sure.

“Thanks,” she said, which carried farther than she meant. A hush fell over the assembly.

She followed the girl’s gaze to the altar, and the priests.

Old Carmichael stood in the center. Cat recognized none of the acolytes who followed her, and wondered if she’d come to no purpose. But the old woman spread her hands and intoned, “Behold His fire,” and from stage left (did priests call it stage left? altar left?) Abelard emerged, bearing in his cupped hands a burning coal. He set the coal inside the altar’s cage-throne. The flame danced. The choir sang. He took his place.