Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(123)

Madder still: to find, after a long run through twisting alleys, an open post office. To follow Umar in, watch him empty the steel chest’s contents into a cardboard box, tape the box shut, and write an address Corbin could not read. A clerk waited behind the desk, cheek puddled around his knuckles, bored, as if the day were sunless due to rain. The clerk looked twice at Umar’s bare chest, but only twice. “Anything fragile, liquid, perishable, or hazardous?”

“No,” Umar said, and paid what he was asked.

“What the hells did we just do?” Corbin shouted at him when they were safe in the empty street again, if anywhere beneath that sky could be called safe.

“We sent the package,” Umar said. “Now, you will lead us.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Seril has touched you.” Umar touched Corbin’s forehead. “We have seen to the weapon. Now we must strike. Some within this city pray to her. She hides herself from me, but you can follow her. Lead me to them, and she will suffer.”

The words opened Corbin’s mind. He had been lost in the dream of Umar, carried in the big man’s wake. But Corbin heard the prayers Umar meant, the moonlit surf that washed through his nightmares. He heard his girls’ voices in that song. The world was mad. Great powers broke his family apart. Umar would help him stop all that.

He staggered west, following a distant song.





62

Tara climbed the mountain to meet her Goddess.

She walked steep trails until she found an iron ladder riveted to living stone. The ladder’s rungs chafed her hands. Fortunately she kept her nails short, and wore sensible shoes.

By three rungs she’d climbed past the treetops. Pines grew tall in these western woods. She’d never been northwest to Regis or the Maw, but people said the trees there were taller than mountains, older than the Imperium, older than most gods: broad, deep, ancient, and invulnerable.

The higher you climbed, the smaller you felt. The mining camp below might have been a toy for an older child—no one would trust a toddler with parts so tiny.

She tore her jacket as she pulled herself onto a ledge. If she made it home, she’d look a sight before the court: wrinkled and ripped and bruised, sweat-caked, hadn’t showered in days; one advantage of slacks over skirts was that it wouldn’t be obvious she had not shaved either. Appearance mattered in court. Everything mattered—everything you did, everything you were, told a story to the Judge, to the opposing counsel, to the world.

She wished there was time to climb back down, make ablutions in camp, fix her suit. But while appearances mattered, court dates mattered more. There was no way for her to fly to Alt Coulumb in time, which left one option she did not like.

Her briefcase floated up and settled beside her. Its weight crushed chalky gravel to powder. The deal lay within, a few printed pages bearing her signature and Altemoc’s.

She removed her shoes. Crossed her legs. Tried to still her mind, and failed.

Back on the east coast, the team of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao must have spent the day wrestling with Daphne, and with Ramp, defending Kos. Abelard and the church would marshal faith, liturgy, and song in their support. Blacksuits patrolled in case of riots or opportunistic crime. They held. She hoped.

She would know if Seril was dead.

She breathed out.

She’d worked for the goddess since last year. But that was a clear relationship, services rendered for a salary. What she was about to do transcended contract.

She remembered sprinting, ten years old, through cornfields in a rainstorm as deadly winds spun overhead, her arms outstretched, her body thrown so far forward she was less running than catching her falling self with every step—flying, only with feet between her and the ground. She chased the joy of power, the glory of taking without asking, of forcing the world to dance. She knit her will into the world. There was no drug sweeter than control. Few orgasms compared.

You do not love what you cannot use.

And while she hated Alexander Denovo, while she had dreamed of killing him only to make him wake and die again, sometimes in dark nights she wondered what had been the greater horror: to have her will subverted, or her dream of control turned against her?

Not that it mattered.

She was not trained for prayer, but prayer was needed now.

Wind swayed trees. The writer Gefjon spent summers in a mountain retreat watching forests for fires. Gefjon’s woods might have looked like this from a height. She was in the right country, more or less.

Tara’s mind spun. Power let the mental loop close too soon: desire collapsed into reality and freed itself to seek further satisfaction. She had chased the freedom power offered from Edgemont cornfields to the Hidden Schools and Alt Coulumb. She’d freed herself from everything but her need.

She had asked Altemoc—Caleb—to help. She had no leverage over him, no carrot to offer, no stick to force compliance. She asked, and he gave it to her.

She focused on the forest, but it was too big to see all at once. On the trees. On one tree. On a branch of the tallest trunk, waving in a stiff breeze.

Shale lay entombed beneath her. She sat atop him, as when they flew through Alt Coulumb’s skies.

When she touched the stone, it felt like his skin.

All stone was stone, a doorway for the Goddess.

She asked for Her by name, and felt the answer through her flesh.