Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(121)

He touched a bruise on his cheek. “Now I know why you hit me so hard.”

“You have a punchable face.”

“That explains a lot.” He held out his hand. The scars there took fire. “Good luck, Ms. Abernathy.”

“Tara,” she said. Small concession for a small concession.

“Tara.”

They shook, as did the world.





61

Corbin followed Umar down empty Ember Street. He did not look up at the impossible sky, but could not escape it by looking down. Weird lights cast weird shadows. Twisting reflections shimmered from shop windows, from parked carriages, from skyscrapers, from the muscles of Umar’s back.

Corbin rarely ventured this far into the Business District, domain of witches and madmen in jackets that should have been straight. But he knew it was not supposed to be like this: streets and sidewalks bare, workers huddled in offices or homes. Several blocks away a Blacksuit shouted Remain calm. The danger will pass.

The danger did not look like it would pass to Corbin. He could not tell how much time had elapsed since he left the hospital. There was no sun, or else the sun was everywhere.

Umar did not seem bothered by the sky, by the emptiness, or by his bare feet. Corbin’s soles were dirt crusted now, his steps ginger. “Where are we going?”

“Here.” Umar pointed as they turned left. Corbin felt a chill that had nothing to do with the atmosphere.

A white marble colonnade supported a peaked roof. White steps descended from double doors to the street. A robed statue of a blindfolded woman stood atop the steps, one arm raised, holding scales.

“There should be paint,” Umar said. “Many colors. The white is a mistake.”

“Why are we going to the Temple of Justice? Will it help us against”—he still could not think of the moon without cringing—“her?”

“I need a weapon,” he said.

“You can’t break into a temple.”

Umar pointed to the sky. Corbin did not look. “Justice is busy.”

“There are three Blacksuits on those stairs.”

“We will not use the front door,” Umar said. “Follow me. Or not.”

He did.

Umar led him down an alley to an office building stitched by skyways to the temple and surrounded by a tall fence. Umar vaulted the fence and somehow severed the barbed wire at its top. Corbin climbed after him, landed harder than he’d hoped on the other side, and hopped after Umar, brushing gravel from the pads of his feet. He knew better than to speak, though he also should have known better than to follow.

Still. Revenge.

Umar broke the chain off a loading dock door with the heel of his hand. Behind the door, steps led into a darkness made deeper by dim light. Umar climbed down.

Corbin looked up out of habit, to search the sky for guidance. At that moment, the world’s colors inverted, reddened, and failed; everything became matte black with edges suggested by thin lines like those a razor left through paint. The illusion, if illusion it was, could not have lasted a second, but when it ended he had a sense it had endured much longer—that something had gone out of the reasserted world, some note stilled he’d been hearing so long he no longer knew how silence sounded.

He ran into the basement and pulled the doors shut to close away that sky.

The basement was not built to reassure. Bare pipes dripped onto bare concrete floors. Piled boxes closed him in, their cardboard stamped with serial numbers and bar-code glyphs. No Umar. A door in the far wall stood open.

He slid through the door into a hallway broad enough for four men abreast. Voices carried around a corner. “Freeze!” He heard bare feet, running.

A crossbow bolt tore down the crosswise hall, leaving a crackle of spent lightning. Corbin peered around the corner in time to see Umar vault a desk at the hallway’s end and punch the guard in his throat. They fell together. Umar’s hand tightened into a fist, then descended with the sound Ray Capistano’s cleaver made when he cut steak.

Umar stood, holding keys. He tried one key in the lock of the door behind the watchman’s desk, and when it didn’t work he tried another.

“They’ll hunt you down.”

“They are busy.”

“They’ll come for you when it’s done.”

“If they find me.” Corbin had grown used to Umar’s doubled voice, but that laugh still twisted in his chest.

The fifth key worked.

They walked between two wire cages, behind which rested neat arrays of shelves: a library of danger. Corbin did not recognize most of the contents of those shelves, and when he did, he wished he didn’t. A diamond-bladed sword bloomed with purple light, and a paper tag marked its gold hilt. Beside it lay a pipe with a rusty stain at one end, likewise tagged. Bags of powder in many colors. A single six-sided die. A spike-knuckled glove slicked with greenish oil. A deck of playing cards. A pair of red slippers. A sheaf of blasting rods. Tagged, tagged, tagged, tagged, tagged. That was the first floor.

On the next level down, each shelf held a single object surrounded by a blue Craft circle. Nothing here struck him as unusual in form: a book bound in pale tan leather. A corduroy blazer. A bow tie. A silvery mechanical wand with a green gem at one end. An unadorned ring. A knife with a wooden handle. A clay cup.

The knife whispered like a woman, not like any woman but like June in bed when they were young together, before everything. The wand sang. The blazer pulsed when he looked at it too long.