Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(124)

Took you long enough.

The situation here was more complicated than I thought. Shale— We will come back for him.

If any of us live that long. I have the contract, but I can’t get to Alt Coulumb in time.

Tara, the Goddess said, and touched her cheek from the inside.

You could take me by the moon roads.

The moon is one everywhere.

When there’s a moon.

When it rises, we’ll bring you through.

There’s three hours’ time difference between the west coast and Alt Coulumb. Ramp will attack at moonrise on your end. Can you last that long?

A pause ensued, of wind in high places. I think so.

Then Tara truly began to pray.

*

The crowd in Market Square had grown.

Jones assembled tables, Jones unrolled carpets, Jones heated water for tea, Jones ran to a corner chemist’s for medicine, but most of all Jones took notes. She moved among the faithful and spoke with those willing to speak. An Aokane Holdings desk clerk had come because her daughter told her about the gathering. Two men who kept shop in Hot Town visited around noon to crowd-watch and stayed to tend fires and distribute food. A woman in a wheelchair, wearing Iskari medals and a service jacket and old enough—just—to be a God Wars vet, rolled herself into the market, to the front of the crowd by the Crier’s Dais.

No one watched the sky.

Jones had seen all this before, back in Dresediel Lex, as the gods woke in the Skittersill Rising. She’d walked among the crowd before the riots started; later, she watched from afar as the fire fell. She wanted to run. She stayed.

“These people aren’t safe,” she told Ellen, when she caught the girl carrying a jug of water to people huddled on blankets at the crowd’s rear. “Do you see what’s up there?”

“Of course,” she said.

“They could kill us all without breaking a sweat.”

Water sloshed over the jug’s lip and wet Ellen’s hand. Her arms were thin, but they did not shake from the work. She looked very young to Jones. “She needs everything we can give.”

“I’m here to report,” she said. “To write your story and sing it later.”

“You’ve met Her children.”

“The gargoyles.” She remembered Aev’s rumbling voice, the certainty with which she spoke before her Goddess’s wrecked throne. “Yes.”

“You talked with them—and with Her. You’ve heard Her voice, written songs to praise Her, and worked miracles in Her aid. You’re part of us. It’s okay to be afraid.”

The girl’s face was very pale.

Jones remembered the smell of burning flesh and singed hair in a square much larger than this one, a long time ago. She looked away.

“I have to go,” Ellen said, and lifted the jug.





63

The sun set over Alt Coulumb.

Though the sky was burned, though Craft imposed its own schedules on the world, the sun still set and unveiled the stars. Craftworkers welcomed stars, after all. From these they took their food.

The court hung in midair, ringed by crystal towers, overseen by the Judge, above a layer-cake world: the physical city, and beneath it the argument-city of planes and burning wires where plaintiff’s and defendant’s Craft mixed, and beneath even that the raw noumenal Truth. Probes and accusations peeled back layers and stitched shut wounds. Fire wreathed Alt Coulumb, but the city was not consumed.

Of course not. This was war in a purely spiritual sense, war against gods as the God Wars should have been, no mucking about with civilian casualties. Clean. Fierce. Contained.

Not war at all.

This was surgery, with stars the operating theater lights.

Daphne watched moonrise—or, a piece of Daphne did. She was built of shells within shells, like the city. The moon rose fat and sweet as a ripe apple. She could taste the apple’s juice on her tongue. Saliva wet her mouth, and she swallowed acid.

Innermost observer-Daphne, walled off from body and endocrine emotion, wondered how this trial would appear from the ground. The shell surrounding that innermost watcher was not Daphne Mains at all, but a substitute made of tense strong worm-flesh and gnawing teeth. One layer closer to the surface, there was another piece of Daphne again, screaming.

She had been screaming for a long time.

She was built of shells, and shells, and shells, and around all these a final sheath of skin containing a thing that was and was not Daphne Mains. Her teeth were sharp. Soot smeared her face, and blood. Her jacket was torn, her skin burned and cracked. Worms wriggled through her flesh, around bones that were not bones. She extended many arms, and breathed, though she did not need to.

Wakefield stood on empty air across the circle, wearing an expression mixed from smirk and smile and dead skull’s grin. The immaculate suit was maculate now. Wakefield’s discarded mask rested upon the unfloor. Blood dripped from many wounds and dried under manicured nails.

“At this point,” Madeline Ramp said, “we believe Kos Everburning’s weaknesses have been adequately explored. It is time to turn our attention to the moon goddess, Seril Undying.”

“The court recognizes this request.”

Wakefield’s dead smile lost some of its mortal character. “In which case, I must cede the floor to Seril’s own representatives.”