Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(128)

I prayed to the Lady before She returned. When the dreams came, I honored them. I spoke to Her, because the night hears whispers louder than a roar.

Some people here found Her in terror, in torture. I found Her in the undoing of a knot into which a lion’s roar tied me.

She saved me, and transformed me. She was my door to faith.

My father lives. He will roar again. But now I have the night.

*

Ellen’s voice carried through the crowd in defiance of all acoustic principle. The faithful souls were jigsaw puzzle pieces turning in the god-realm’s airless dark, and Ellen’s words guided them to one. Or they were filings and she the magnet, or they particles in suspension and she the crystal seed, or, or—

Dr. Hasim stood by the stage, haloed with a flickering light as if he stood before a bonfire. Green rivulets overflowed his form and his face, illuminating the head of a long-billed bird around or beneath his own. His companions had other shapes, and bonfires of their own, some dim, some fierce. Their hands, or the hands of the gods who shared their bodies, or both, combed story into story, faith into faith, folded the crowd into Ellen and her into them.

“Pray with me,” Ellen said, and Gavriel Jones did.

Praying, she felt the goddess’s pain.





66

Sunset veiled the forest beneath the Keeper’s mountain. Below, the Two Serpents Group lit lanterns and manned barricades. Its people knew what was coming, because Tara had told them.

From her height, Tara saw the forest move.

Shadows detached from the trees—wolves and bears and hawks. Groundwater contamination hit hardest at the food chain’s highest links; squirrels and field mice limped while the wolves ran smooth, faster in death than life. Birds arrowed through the purple sky.

Dead things flowed up the mountain slopes. The Keeper called them home, as she called to ancient sailors’ compass needles—the earth stolen from her had seeped into these beasts, and now they returned to rest.

They left trails of rotted flesh, and when they found a niche that fit, they curled there and slept. A wolf pillowed its chin on its paws like a dog beside a fire and wept metal tears that soaked into cracked stone.

A fingernail of shadow took flight from the Drakspine and approached.

No. Tara must have had the distance wrong. It couldn’t be that big. There were dragons in the world, of course, but not here.

She caught her breath when she recognized the sweeping wings.

The condor landed above her, settling onto a rocky throne. The bird was twice her size, with pinions long and black and red. Worms turned beneath its crest.

It was beautiful.

The condor looked down, and Tara looked up. The Keeper had called her children home. How much of the goddess lived in each of them? Could Shale hear her through this bird?

“I’ll come back for you,” she said.

The condor nodded, or bobbed its head. The sun’s last light caught its eyes.

Okay, Tara prayed. Sun’s down. Moon’s up. Whenever you’re ready.

I’m sorry, the goddess replied. We’re experiencing technical difficulties at the moment.

*

The gargoyles lasted longer than Daphne expected. Stone did not tire as did flesh. Lacking any well-mannered metabolism, their muscles could not be poisoned by the by-products of their use. Good thing Daphne did not tire, either.

At last a gargoyle slipped—she caught it in a shell of infinite space, held it still, and pierced. The goddess scrambled to free Daphne’s prisoner, too late—Daphne snared two more, and then a fourth. The goddess tried to burn Daphne from the world, but the circle blunted that attack. Needles of red light pierced gargoyle throats, and the power she tore from them was sweet.

The fight against Wakefield had been a Craftswoman’s struggle: structures of proof and argument falling before Daphne’s knife only to re-form in answer to each cut. That work was elegant; this, routine. All she had to do was repeat, again and again, the simple, incontrovertible fact that gargoyles could die.

As could their goddess.

It would not do to yawn before the Judge. So when the machine Daphne had become finally snared the gargoyle queen, when the Stone Men and Women weakened, she pinched her earlobe between thumb and forefinger—a stopgap remedy an herbalist once suggested she try to keep alert.

That cleared things up nicely.

Blood dripped from her earlobe onto her suit. One more bill for dry cleaning.

*

Fire flared on the sanctum altar. Nestor fell. Bede knelt by his side and cradled the old man’s head.

Rage swelled in Abelard. He smelled blood, and Craft, and blasphemy.

He’d spent a day opening his mind to God, and now felt His fury.

Cardinal Aldis groaned. Veins stood out on the backs of her hands, and at her temples. She fought—they all did—to contain God’s wrath.

Lord Kos could burn the Craftsmen from the sky—exposing Himself as He protected Seril. To survive, He’d have to kill them all, to press the battle to the world’s corners, to fight and win a God War on his own. Impossible.

He might try anyway.

Moans of pain, grinding teeth, shattered prayers, Father forgive, blessed by flame, transfigured into sacred ash—their voices burned with the Godhead, their twiglike fingers clutched to stay a charging boar.

Bede had caught Nestor when the old man fell. No one had yet stepped up to lead the prayer. Cardinals babbled, drunk on vintages of rage grown rich through years of cultivation.