Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(116)

When the world stilled, Shale hung in the light, and Altemoc lay crumpled on the ground.

Tara ran to the man; he groaned. She slapped him on the cheek. No response. Twice, three times, leaving sharp white finger tracks on ocher skin. His eyes opened, neither fixed nor focused. She heard a deep groaning, cracking sound. The ground beneath them shook. So did the walls.

“Who—”

She slapped him again for good measure.

“Hey! Who the hells—where—”

“Introductions later. We need to get out of here.”

He groped for the fallen cane and struggled with its aid to his feet. His shoulders bent into a U. “My people.”

They were waking up, slowly. She scanned the chamber for a tool, and saw, shattered to pieces but still clattering for someone to fight, Oss. Still hers.

Assembling him would take too long—gaps opened in the floor, and the walls were closer together than they had been. The cave system was reconfiguring to fit Shale. But Oss’s bones still moved, and they would serve.

Oss’s pieces scuttled to lift the fallen crew. A wing separated into centipede spines, wrapped limbs and lifted; a claw propped up another. Arm bones prepared themselves to roll. Multiplicitous phalanges supported a fallen woman. They skittered toward the door as the cave collapsed. “Come on,” she said. “My friend back there made a bad deal with a mad goddess to save you. And I may have threatened her, just a bit.”

He blinked. “You’re crazy.”

“You always question the sanity of women who’ve just saved your ass?”

He smiled, too broad, and almost fainted. She grabbed him by the lapels. “No time for that. We need to move.”

Shale stared down on them through the lightning. Hells burned to ash in his eyes.

Run/ she said through him.

They did.





58

Abelard kept dawn vigil on the morning of the war. Bede and Nestor and Aldis and the rest of the Council of Cardinals gathered in the sanctum to kneel, knees permitting, before the flame. Their chant swelled. Stars pinpricked the gray-blue sky. Eastward past the docks, a pale pink glow heralded the sun.

Crystal palaces flew south through the Business District, wreathed in sparks and rainbows. Their edges bled starlight. They should not be here, not in Alt Coulumb, free city of gods and men. Even the Hidden Schools had breached the city’s airspace only once, while his Lord was dead.

These skyspires were not scavengers or opportunists. They came to kill.

No. That wasn’t quite true.

The spires were weapons built to break cities, but even the fiercest weapons were only tools. About the spires, before them—so small they should have been invisible at this distance but were not, were instead singular points radiating darkness—hovered Craftsmen. Their fingers rested on rune-marked triggers.

Abelard blinked. He lacked training in the Craft, but God let him see its traces. He was glad he lacked training. Were his sorcerous vision more acute, he would have been blinded by the burn.

Hellfire webbed the black. Bonds of power tied the invaders—the opposing counsel—together. And two shapes hovered at the center of that infernal rose: a spider of crystal and thorn, and something else, a roil of worms and teeth.

Daphne Mains and Madeline Ramp, vanguard of the opposition.

“Impressive, aren’t they?” Cardinal Evangelist Bede stood by his side. He squeezed his hands as if working dough. “Each member of Ramp’s commission has sent observers to watch us fall. All this because I did not sign their deal.”

The Cardinal, Abelard realized, was scared. Abelard had no reassurance to offer.

So he was surprised when he found himself saying, “They’ll be disappointed.”

“Do you think so?”

He hadn’t before he spoke, but he remembered Slaughter’s Fell, the depth of faith in that young girl as he marked her forehead with ash above her glasses. Even the church’s smell seemed golden. “I believe in this city. I believe in Tara. I believe in our Lord, and His Lady.”

Bede’s head declined, and rose again. “Thank you.” He squeezed Abelard’s shoulder and went to kneel with the other Cardinals.

And thank you, Abelard prayed. The words had been his, and the urge to speak—but a greater power calmed his fear to let them pass his lips.

He felt the fire beneath Alt Coulumb and within its people.

He turned to the altar. Craftsmen would fight the external battle. Theirs was the inner war.

Nestor stood before them. For once the old man did not clear his throat before he spoke. “Let us pray.”

Kneeling, Abelard joined himself to God.

*

Madeline Ramp and Daphne Mains stood on air. A city lay at their feet and a host at their backs.

“Pleasant morning,” Ramp said.

Beautiful, in fact. The air sweet with coming triumph. Pleasure climbed Daphne’s backbone and nestled behind her heart. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Are you ready?”

“I am.” She hadn’t realized it until asked.

A silver circle surrounded them, and beyond it stood the Judge, clothed in the shadows of her office. She burned too black to bear.

Daphne squinted and turned away; Ms. Ramp’s second eyelids closed.

“I call these proceedings to order,” the Judge said in a voice that should have broken the ground and let devils spew forth. “We consider the matter of Associated Creditors and Shareholders against Kos Everburning of Alt Coulumb, and Seril Undying of the same.”