Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(16)

“They don’t sound bloodthirsty.” Matt lowered his own voice in hope Corbin would match him. Why shout? The rooftop was empty as usual; hells, the whole place was empty this early in the day, with all the office drones at the paper shifting they called work. Every man and woman gathered around the table, Matt and Ray Capistano and Ray’s boy and Sandy Sforza and her girl and Corbin and his three daughters, had put in a fuller day than the suited kids who’d taken to renting Quarter rooms in the last few years, the alchemists’ assistants and junior accountants, payroll associates and lesser Craftsmen and other sacrificial lambs of the Central Business District, could conceive. A market man’s life was hard: rise at three thirty, truck out hours before sunup to meet the farmers and load the wagons. Two hundred pounds of eggs weighed as much as two hundred pounds of anything. Truck back into town in time to meet restaurant buyers and then stand a solid seven hours offering goods for sale. Some men worked harder, sure. Once the construction boys and dockhands clocked out at sunset, dust-caked and sweaty, they’d have earned their beers, but in the meantime Matt and his comrades were emperors of the roof.

And empresses, Sandy would add.

But Corbin raged on. “You don’t know from Stone Men, Matt. My dad fought ’em when they went mad back in the Wars. Lost an arm. They’ll snap you in half if you blink wrong. And you heard the godsdamn Crier.” Corbin washed down his burger with more beer. His daughters sat beside him, tight, silent. Claire, the oldest at seventeen, carved her chicken into squares and speared the squares with her fork; for her, food was a battle you fought so you could fight other battles later. Ellen, middle child, ate quickly and carefully as a bird, and kept her head down; Hannah, youngest, faked the same attitude, the same downturn, but when her father wasn’t looking, her gaze slipped up and left to rest on Ray’s son’s mouth. Matt wondered often about their lives—Rafferty was a man for drinks and a bar fight in time of need, not one you trusted with your home address. “They’re fouling our rooftops. Chasing through our alleys. Flouting laws.”

“And since when have you,” Sandy said as she grabbed a chicken wing, “given a dog’s cock for laws flouted or otherwise, Corbin Rafferty? I’ve heard you say at this very table”—knocking with her fingers on the wood—“that it’s this city’s laws that ruin us.”

“Once I say a thing, you’ll stalk me with it to my grave, Sforza.”

“And stab you through the heart with it to make sure you’re dead, and good riddance to the world.” She laughed; Rafferty’s girls didn’t, and Rafferty himself laughed too loud.

“If we are to sacrifice at all,” he said, “we should be repaid. Monsters on our own rooftops, and the lot of you don’t mind?”

“Likely just tall tales,” Matt said. “Crier says they’ve been here a year. I never seen one.”

“But Matthew,” and that was Ray, leaning back on two legs of his chair, balanced as perfectly as the log cabin of chicken bones on his plate. No one could leave so pleasant a mess as Ray. “Of course you haven’t seen them. They come to those who need help, and when was the last time you needed any?”

Matt drank. “Don’t see the problem,” he said, after. “Even if they are here. So long as they help people.”

“Maybe someone doesn’t want help,” Corbin said. “Maybe what helps you, hurts me.” He tossed a wing bone down as if casting thunderbolts upon a sinner. “If the Stone Men are back, Lord Kos ought to shatter them. We need Blacksuits on every roof.”

Ray snatched a celery stalk and knifed its hollow full of blue cheese. “You haven’t been to church often this year, have you, Corbin? Plenty of sermons about coming to terms with old enemies.”

“You mean they’re going soft.”

“I mean none of us knows the whole story. Stone Men don’t touch my business. Why should I worry about them?”

“A man ought to own his city.”

“In a single question,” Ray said, “I can prove incontrovertibly the Stone Men are no cause of concern for folk like us, who keep our beaks down: Have we ever seen these creatures?”

Matt followed Ray’s gaze around the table: Ray’s son, face buried in his second burger, shrugged and shook his head and chewed. Sandy Sforza drank her beer and shook her head as well. Sandy’s daughter Lil was staring at Ray’s boy’s barbecue sauce–streaked face with a sickened expression entirely unlike Hannah’s, but when she realized the others were watching her, she said, “No.” The gazes slid to Matt, who grunted no, as did Corbin.

“There you go,” Ray said. “If they’re in the city or not, what’s it matter to us?”

Slow jowly nods around the table. Corbin cracked his knuckles, frowning.

“We’ve seen,” an unsteady voice began, then stopped. Matt looked over in time to see Claire Rafferty draw her hand back from Ellen’s shoulder. Ellen’s pale cheeks colored red, and she returned her gaze to at her plate, as if she’d never spoken.

“Girls,” Corbin said in the voice he adopted while trying to sound nice, or at least less angry. It rarely worked. “What have you seen?”

“Nothing,” Claire answered, cold. “Father.”

“Don’t lie to me.”