Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(135)

Glass closed her around, reflected her against herself, remade.

Tara remembered the Keeper in the mountain, her fear, her triumph in torment. She could do the same. Give this demon something to eat instead of Alt Coulumb and its gods, instead of Abelard and Cat and Aev and Raz and Bede. Something still mostly human. Something that could die.

Something like her.

She’d walked within the Keeper, seen her heart. She thought she knew the trick of it.

A cage of her hair. A lake of her blood. A mountain of her bone. A maze of her mind.

Invite the demon into the terror palace of her dreams, and, before it could break free—fall.

There were wards around a Craftswoman’s dreams, glyph walls to prevent intrusion, subroutines to scrub parasites away. She turned them off. She opened her gates.

The demon swelled above her, a spider taller than buildings.

A chain around your neck, a skull’s imagined voice whispered in her ear. I was right.

No.

“Come on,” Tara said, and bared her teeth, and let the demon in.

*

Raz saw Cat fall. Her wings caught air, slowed her, but she crashed onto a neighboring rooftop. He smelled her blood through silver.

Above him a demon blossomed. He’d seen these before, or things like them. City smashers. Undefined, indefinable. Craftsmen had used them as weapons when the Wars turned bad.

Cat lay still.

Raz put the blood jade between his teeth, bit, and drank.

It tasted sharp.

All of a sudden even the demon in the sky seemed slow.

He put his hands into his pockets. This wasn’t what he’d imagined at all, but it made a kind of sense.

He walked up into the air, humming softly to himself.

*

Tara offered—

*

Demonglass scythed toward Raz, slow as an opening flower.

He ran his hand along the blade’s edge. It felt rough. When he drew his fingers away, he saw the edge had dimpled his skin.

He flicked the glass, which broke.

The demon had an outer skin, which he stepped through. Inside, he found its angles mostly wrong, so he righted them.

In the demon’s center hung the remnants of a woman. He walked toward her.

*

—herself, and the demon—

*

Daphne saw the man approach, humming tunelessly.

The demon tore her, demanded her, but she was its door, and consuming her it would consume itself.

So she remained.

The man approached. The demon roared.

He cocked his head to one side, listening.

“I’m no good at this sort of thing,” he said. “Want an explanation, you’d be better off asking Tara, or Lady K.”

He was very close to her now.

“You’re dangerous because you’re undefined, because the world doesn’t know what limits to place on you. Now, the thing to which I just joined myself—it’s very old. Older than gods. Nothing lasts this long unless it’s quite simple.”

He sounded sad.

“You know the joke, that there are two kinds of people in the world, the ones who think there are two kinds of people and the ones who don’t? This is the former. As far as it’s concerned the whole world’s made of things it’s eaten, and things it hasn’t yet.” He bared his teeth. “As far as it’s concerned, you’re not undefined at all. It knows just what to do with you.”

His fangs went in. Glass cracked around her.

We can choke him, the demon said, and Daphne realized it was talking to her. He can eat us, but he does not know if we can die. You’re the only part of us that can. Endure, and we can clog him with ourselves, we can sate even this hunger. Stay strong. Work with me, and we’ll have glory you cannot imagine. And the pain will stop.

Daphne’s broken memories held a man in suspenders with a pleasant smile, who cupped her cheek and said the same words to her in a voice so sweet and steady she could not help but listen.

This time, she turned away.

*

—Died.

Tara waited for the crack in the world she knew was coming. It didn’t.

She gasped. She hovered, empty, in air. Alive. Free.

Demonglass cooled and hardened. Weaker pieces shattered—boiled off to unreality and tumbled to the pavement as drops of wet confusion. A three-legged arch remained, towering above Alt Coulumb. It caught the moon, and shone rainbows on the earth.

Gargoyles and Blacksuits flew; the Judge let her diamond shield dissolve. Ramp was gone.

At its apex, the glass arch held a single flaw. Tara could not look on it directly—the light it shed hit her eyes wrong. She thought it was a woman’s silhouette.

*

Jones felt the change in Market Square—they all did. The world was dying, but then it wasn’t, and a glass arch bloomed to the north. Jones had never seen anything like it, which in her experience meant her next step should be run to a safe distance and take notes.

She stayed.

Then they heard the cheers—from the sky, from the surrounding buildings, and at last from their own throats, cheering before they knew why, tumbling over one another, rolling and laughing and pointing at the arch and the moon at once smiling and impossibly full. Onstage, the Rafferty girls embraced. Jones saluted Aev and her people, up there in the sky. Then someone tackled her from the side and kissed her, and to her surprise (she wasn’t a casual girl, ask anyone) she kissed back.