Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(129)

But Abelard was no Lord of the Church. He was younger, and less confirmed in anger.

His knees shook as he stood. Hands reached for him, voices rose to reproach his temerity. He climbed to the altar and turned to face the Cardinals. Their stares fixed him like a butterfly to a board.

Surely it was harder to die and rise again than to lead the Cardinals in prayer.

Surely.

He held out his hands and spoke the words.

Glory to Your Flame—

*

The machine that was Daphne Mains advanced to the circle’s edge. The gargoyle queen strained against her razor web.

“Your Honor,” Daphne said. “Kos’s off-books relationship with Seril is doubly insidious. Kos’s exposure to her undermines his own operations and poses a serious threat to global thaumaturgy. Even when limited by contract, such off-books dependencies are dangerous. This bond, however, depends not on obligation or performance but on a reasonable facsimile of sentiment. Of love.”

She gestured, and Aev floated toward her in the air. The gargoyle reared against her bonds. A crack opened in her left bicep, so deep that moonlight flowed through.

“The Craft recognizes noncontractual relationships between competitors only. As Justice Iron Hand affirmed in the Antitrust Cases, thaumaturgical dynamism requires the existence of free entities in competition. There is no direct competition between Kos and Seril. The equipoise of opposites leads to stagnation. Nor does this theological juxtaposition even qualify as equipoise, for the positions of these opposites are not equal. Kos shelters this moon goddess, this memory of a dead age, in her weakness. He has embroiled his creditors and shareholders in a risk with no demonstrated reward—a risk that might well be infinite, for no matter how Seril is attacked, he will always come to her rescue. And rescue will be required, because she is weak.”

Aev roared.

“Objection,” Wakefield said, “on relevance.”

The Judge frowned. “Counsel. Please decide. Do you stand for Seril, or not?”

“I do not. But as Ms. Mains’s argument touches on my client, I believe I am entitled to speak.” With one hand Wakefield indicated the gargoyles, the crystal towers, the broken sky and cringing city. “We hardly seem to have stood on courtroom procedure thus far.”

“Proceed.”

“Ms. Mains has introduced evidence documenting Kos’s previous onetime infusions of soul into the moon goddess Seril. But two instances do not establish a pattern.” Wakefield pointed to the snared gargoyles. “These theatrics might have been saved for a juried case. Despite the torment Ms. Mains is inflicting on Seril at the moment, my client has not intervened. I for one would appreciate it if Ms. Mains either arrived at a point, or stopped wasting our time with procedural pretense and cut to the villainous guffaws. If she wishes a mustache to twirl, I imagine the city below contains a costume shop willing to provide one.”

“Counsel has a point, Ms. Mains,” the Judge said. “What do you plan to accomplish by tossing these war machines around my courtroom?”

The moonlight that dripped from the gargoyle queen’s wounds smelled like honey and would taste so sweet. Daphne ached to cross the circle and tongue the broken stone. “I am sorry for the delay, Your Honor. My argument requires one further step.”

“Take it.”

“I will show you how vulnerable this off-books relationship makes Kos,” she said. “Now.”

She held her hand palm down and curled her fingers into a small, tight fist. Her knuckles cracked.

Glass-blue tendrils dug into the gargoyles’ limbs. They roared with voices of stone.

And the machine beneath whose shell Daphne, weeping, lay—it sipped Goddess, and shivered.

*

Cardinal Librarian Aldis turned her gaze on Abelard and for once he did not flinch. Her voice joined his. The others followed. Bede, kneeling, cheeks wet, beside the dais, cradling Nestor as Abelard had cradled another imperfect servant in another dark time, also prayed. Their voices were one voice from many throats.

And out from the ashes of deep time

Did answer to our still greater need—

Abelard knelt. The city was their army, and he sprinted at the vanguard toward a great Known, a fire bigger and deeper than time.

He was the city. A church group gathered in the basement of the Slaughter’s Fell chapel where he held service the night before, and he was their cooling coffee and their prayers. Three sooty children in crates dockside whispered prayers to candle flame, and he was with them.

So was He.

And He was furious.

*

There is no drug in all the worlds like a goddess’s taste: an all-body high, a skin-crawling vein-throbbing rush richer for its transgression. Soulstuff not drawn from the natural world, not borrowed or traded from human minds, but raw meaning, ontological satisfaction heated ’til it bubbles in a spoon and shot into the arm with a needle lathed from a child’s fingerbone. Even Daphne-beneath-shells, Daphne-observer, felt that, lapped at it even as she hated the hunger each taste instilled in her.

Daphne-outside, though, the fighter, the monster built to win—she loved this. Power surged through the engines that comprised her. Maestre Gerhardt had written: gods are beings with which human communities exist in relationship.

Fine. One relationship was that of diner to meal.

Seril flagged. Soon Kos would come, and she would have him too.