Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(21)
“It’s easier to say in Stone.”
Of course. What else would be easier in Stone? Poetry? Wrath? Prayer? “Why do you have your own language anyway?” Cat asked instead. “There’s only like thirty of you, and you were built—made—”
“Shaped, we say, or carved. And we were not always so few. We were made of Alt Coulumb, not born of it, so the Lady gave us our own tongue. You could speak it too, if you opened your heart to Her.”
“Not likely,” she said, but Aev didn’t rise to the bait. “How many of you were there?”
“Two hundred fifty-six, as of the eighth carving. Some fell in the Wars, and after. Some perished in exile. There is a grove in the Geistwood where many stand who gave up hope of seeing home again. They set aside the quickness of their body and sank their roots into living stone. They will not move for a turning of the world.”
“Gods.”
“We who hoped endured, and returned to aid a city that fears us. But now our very existence has placed our charge at risk.”
“Your charge. You mean, us.”
“Yes.”
Cat had grown up hearing stories of Stone Men. You weren’t supposed to call them that now, but cradle tales and bedtime stories cut into bone. Unnatural creatures, her grandfather said. Smoke tinted her memories of the man, scarred and weather-cracked and half blind, his voice heavy with faithful decades of cigarette ash. He told her stories of Seril’s death, of her children’s mad grief, of talons and blood. And today she stood, grown, in a cramped stairwell, before their leader.
Aev was beautiful—not like art was beautiful, which was fine by Cat since she lacked taste for art, but beautiful like a thing made for a purpose. Her talons were sharp, her teeth were long. How many had she killed in the Wars?
“You waited here for me,” Cat said. “Why?”
“You saved us all. When we returned, we almost died at Denovo’s hands, at the hands of Justice whom he warped against us. You resisted. You broke the chains that bound your soul, and stopped him. But you have avoided us in the months since.”
“You’re intimidating.”
“We scare criminals and fools. We pose you no danger.”
“I—look. I’m a straightforward gal. Tara’s the one for all the”—she waved her hand in a vague circle between them. “You know, scheming and plotting. I like things I can see and punch. Kos powers Alt Coulumb, and priests tend his machines. Fine. The Blacksuits work with Justice—and Seril, now—to help people. You guys, I don’t know how you fit.”
“Neither do we.”
Cat held a smart reply ready on her tongue, but it slithered down her throat instead to nestle cold and prickly in her chest. “What do you mean?”
“We had a place here once,” she said, “but our home has changed. Now we skulk in shadows, for our presence endangers those our Lady shaped us to protect. We are servants denied service. Even the little we do, it seems, is too much. We were not made to be secret ministers. If we hide forever, what difference remains between us and the frozen ones who wait in the Geistwood grove?”
Cat looked into Aev’s eyes and saw herself distorted looking back. “You have any plans for the next few hours?”
The huge head cocked to one side, and the fanged mouth compressed to a thin smile. “I intended to lurk.”
“Want to come for a ride?”
12
Alt Coulumb’s docks lost none of their savor at night. In the handbook of the Palatine Perfumers’ Guild, the recipe goes like this: Mash a global civilization of some four billion human beings and another, say, half handful billion others into a fine paste. Pound that mash against a mile of coastline and let dry in the sun, then steep the resulting extract in fish oil and engine grease. Salt heavily with sweat and spray. Zest the ambition of a thousand tradesmen and -women and small-business owners, from the rug-crouched silver seller to the mustachioed and gaptoothed iconmonger and the clutch of tattooed young women who sold dreamdust at the docks for the Farwright Syndicate. Add three-quarters of this zest raw, then gently blowtorch the remainder to lend that brutal sour edge of hope betrayed, since some ships never come in even for those who wait daily by the docks ’til long past dusk. Round out the odor with a long list of prosaic cargo: saffron, sandalwood, and cinnamon, paper, steel, demon-haunted manufactured goods, long planks of magisterium and sheafs of synthetic dragonscale (inferior in all respects to the real thing, save only for the practical point that the synthetic variety need not be harvested from a dragon), bananas by the crate and oranges by the tube and soybeans by the ton, green bottle after green bottle of wine, and of course the flat nothing-scent of the airtight vessels made from the processed bones of eons-dead monsters in which alchemists stored their toxic earths and strange silvers. Garnish—lightly—with what the Palatine Perfumer’s Guild’s contributing writers describe, in a rare and generous bout of euphemism, as “effluvia.”
The handbook includes a sidebar note indicating that, like most such purely descriptive recipes, the journeyman should regard this as a test of his own nasal and artistic fortitude, as well as his extraction skills. Sales, if any, will be small.
Cat gnawed the last meat from a skewer as she climbed the gangplank from the docks to the Kel’s Bounty. “Law on deck!” the bos’n called, and she sketched a salute to the array of not-quite-savory characters that turned to her. By day the Bounty was a ship like any other, mortal-crewed with sailors from throughout the known world, with a slight bias to Archipelagese. The night crew hailed from a wider range of ports of call.