Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(113)

“To spare the subject pain?”

“That’s a nice side effect, but the real benefit’s for the surgeon. Patients thrash when you cut them open. The body fights intrusion. Muscles clench and skew the scalpel.” Another peristaltic tremor passed underfoot. False sunset lit the curving tunnel wall ahead. She smelled ozone and salt and bone. Something creaked. She hoped it was not the wall. “If your theory’s right, we’re performing surgery on a mountain. How do you sedate a rock?”

“I don’t know.”

“Exactly,” she said, and then: “How long do you think we’ve been following this tunnel?”

“I—” He stopped. “I don’t know.”

“Neither do I.” She showed him her watch. “Either we’ve lived through the last hour three times over, or she’s adjusting time for reasons of her own.”

“Are we still on schedule?”

“I have no idea.” She stuffed the watch back in her pocket, not bothering to conceal her frustration. “What’s fast here might be slow out there, or the other way round. The mountain’s reflexes are fiercer near the wound. Which is why it’s good and bad we’re getting close.”

“You expect trouble?”

Which was when they turned the corner and saw the bone-thing.

“You could say that.”

Their goal lay at the tunnel’s end: the largest gallery yet, daylit almost with crystal and flame. Tara ignored that for the moment.

The bone-thing filled the tunnel mouth. Creaking, chattering, tangling and unwinding, it was no one shape entirely: an enormous bat’s skeleton propped with smaller bones, needle-sharp tail links of cave mice and translucent ribs from dead blind fish, a surface monster’s horned skull bleached by centuries. Wings tipped with curved claws flexed. Crimson lightning arced within the cage of its chest. Claw toes screeched chalk-white lines against the tunnel floor. Its jaw opened to roar, but no sound came.

Shale stepped forward, but she held out her arm to block him. “Surgery. No anesthetic. The more we fight down here, the worse it goes for us.”

He growled. She knew how he felt.

The bone-thing pounced. Claw wings filled the tunnel.

Tara closed her eyes.

Fractal silver schema rushed toward her, the bone-thing a story told by the mountain’s need. Tara’s first aesthetic reaction was contempt. If she had submitted such sloppy work at the Schools, she’d have spent a week helping golems dig up corpses to remind her the costs of brute force.

Her second aesthetic reaction, though, was pleasure. Such baroque profusion of power! The bone-thing was so dense she could barely see its individual strands. Crufty dynamism at its best. No calculating mind would make something so excessive. But the bone-thing was made, for a purpose, which you could see if you knew where to look— Help me it hurts it hurts it HURTS—

So all she had to do (though quickly, because the clawed critter’s crossed half the distance between us already and only a fool trusts the arrow-flight paradox to keep her safe) was seize and redirect that purpose. I can ease the pain, if you help us.

She offered a simple contract to the bone-thing.

It fell in a clattering cascade. Wing tips drew sparks from stone walls as it tumbled. It landed in a crouch, so close it could tear out her throat before she blinked.

It did not.

It knelt.

She set her hand on the skull between its horns. Her fingers traced the bone’s grain. “Think I’ll call him Oss,” she said. Glancing over her shoulder, she caught Shale staring. “Come on. Let’s finish this before more show up.”

Oss drew its wings aside to let them pass, and followed.

*

Tara had hoped the next gallery might be the last, and for once reality conformed to her wishes without sorcerous encouragement. The chamber into which Shale and Oss followed her was the largest they’d yet seen, cathedral tall, thicketed with arches and outcroppings of red crystal. Ghostly fire danced on its walls and floor. She was no geologist, but even ignoring the rest of their excursion so far she would have suspected there was something unnatural about the cave.

Aside, that is, from the man impaled by lightning in its center.

He hung like a fly in an enormous spiderweb, or a specimen mounted on pins of light: three feet off the ground in the center of a lightning column, limbs splayed rigid, eyes shut. More lightning shafts danced from his body to the crystal in the walls and back, lancing him only to fade and lance again. She remembered Hidden Schools’ descriptions of brains, and the way a god looked splayed out in operant space beneath the knife.

Glyphs burned crimson on the man’s skin, sharper and cruder and more extensive than she’d ever seen. His entire body was a single system designed by some twisted thaumaturge—no patterns, no machine tooling, just pictograms carved into his flesh by hand. She tried to imagine the pain of such work, the distortion of the mind, the risk of soul-rot from so much Craft. Who would dare?

“Is that him?” Shale asked.

“Altemoc,” she said. “I think so. Matches the pictures. And those around him on the floor”—prone bodies covered by ghostflame—“must be his crew. Let’s go.”

She entered the lake of fire, and its flames shied from her feet. Beneath, where she expected rock, was a pane of what looked like diamond. Beneath the diamond coiled immense ropes of demonglass.