Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(119)

Corbin pried off the guard’s shoes, pulled down his pants, and started to unbutton the shirt. Umar had already vanished through the stairwell door. Corbin tore the rest of the buttons from the guard’s shirt and followed, hopping into pant legs. “How are we going to do it?” he shouted to Umar. “How can we hurt her?”

The ground floor was a mob of running orderlies, shouted commands, cries of pain and need. Ghostlights flickered. Periodic silences shattered the noise to nonsense. Umar broke the crowd like a tugboat’s prow broke waves—poorly, with a lot of froth and commotion. When they reached the fire exit, Corbin tensed, ready to run, but Umar touched the alarm box, said words another silence ate, and opened the door.

The alarm did not protest their exit into the alley.

They were free.

Corbin looked up.

He was a simple man. He bought vegetables from farmers, and sold them. He worked with simple men who prayed for blessings on their crop, who plowed with oxen and fertilized with cow shit and sweat. Not for him the death-tainted fields of Central Kath, zombie workers and demon-haunted scythe machines and alchemical poisons. Corbin Rafferty, and his girls, avoided all that. They kept the soulstuff they earned in the same altar his great-grandfather carved from the heartwood of a tree he felled. Corbin drank—who didn’t?—but he never touched dreamdust. The last few days were easily the strangest of his life.

So he had no words for what he saw overhead.

A silver wheel burned in the center of the sky—its exact center, no matter where he looked, as if the city he inhabited was only a reflection of some deeper city to which the wheel belonged. A seamless curtain of fire stretched from the wheel, burning in all the colors fire really was but people never said: purple and green and black as a week-old wound. Needles of light pierced the fire. But the needles were also enormous worms, eating the fire with mouths of crystal teeth. And in the center of the wheel he saw another wheel, in which a star of black and a star of white danced, moving so fast they left tracks in air. When the tracks met, the world turned, and the silent thunder pealed—and in that emptiness he heard words that made no sense yet were more real than the air he breathed.

—as maintained in the quarterly report, which if Your Honor will be so kind as to—

Somewhere a hammer struck a wooden table and made no sound because the sound it made was silence.

He knelt. He could not look at that sky. And worst of all was the chattering inside him, that if he just looked up long enough he could understand everything, why June left and why he hurt and what he should have said—

A hand caught his shoulder. There was no tenderness in the touch.

“Follow,” Umar said.

Corbin wept. “I can’t.” He gestured openhanded at the sky. “Look at that. It’s so big.”

Umar did not look. “I do not need you,” he said. “But you can aid me. And in return I will let you hurt her. No god is so great that small weapons cannot bring her low. I will make you mistletoe. Without me, you will rail for eons outside her temple and end trapped in nightmares. Be of use to me, or surrender yourself to her.”

Needs warred in him: safety, revenge, control.

Corbin would have done anything to turn from that bleeding, burning sky. If Umar, or the thing that rode him, told Corbin to tear his eyes from their sockets, he would have hooked his thumbs and gouged.

But this was better. This way, the moon would die, and he would own himself again.

Corbin followed Umar through empty streets. Concrete tore his bare soles.





60

Tara woke in an army-green fog. Two blinks, three, focused the world, added edges and depth and form to color. Words came next: tent, cot, sun. Shale. Once she worked past monosyllables: mission.

She sat up fast, blinking blood-motes away.

“Here,” someone said. She reached for the voice, found a glass of water, and drank until the water froze to ice and clicked against her teeth. Frost feathered from her grip on the glass.

She heard a man laugh, and swung round on the cot to face him. She was clothed—shirt untucked, slacks torn and wrinkled, and unshod, but dressed enough for modesty if not for armor. She set down the glass and glared across the tent at Altemoc. “What’s so funny?”

He sat in a folding chair, ankle crossed over knee, cane propped against his hip. His fingers trailed over the frog crouched on a silver globe that served for his cane’s handle. “You reminded me of someone,” he said. “How’s your head?”

“Outside of the tap-dancing elephants, I’m fine.” Exploring, her fingers found a scabbed cut beneath her hair. She asked the question she’d been dreading: “What day is it?”

“You’ve been asleep two hours.”

“I grayed out. I shouldn’t be up for days. If ever.”

“I gave you soulstuff. You’re fine.”

“What was the contract? What did you offer? What did you ask me for?”

“Nothing.” He raised his hand. Green fire danced down his scars and faded. “That’s not how we work.”

“You offer services free of charge.”

“Not exactly,” he said, and spun the cane. “Our beneficiaries aren’t the ones who pay. A Deathless Queen on a throne of melted swords asks us to heal a War-made plague in a border village. The plague poses her no threat, but she doesn’t want the people of that village dead.”