Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(24)

Rafferty and his daughters stood in the circle’s center, the girls on the dais where Criers sang their news, Rafferty pacing before them. He wore a red coat and walked with the swagger stick he sometimes carried. Uncombed hair fountained from his scalp.

The others stood around the inner edge of the circle, uncomfortable. “I thought you’d keep him out of trouble,” Sandy said when Matt reached her.

“I did,” he said, knowing he hadn’t.

A Crier stood across the circle from Matt and Sandy—a woman wearing a narrow-brimmed hat and a long coat, watching.

Rafferty began without preamble. “We all heard the news. Stone Men are snouting into our business, breaking our laws, preaching false gods.” Uncertain nods. “And the Blacksuits do nothing. They make like nothing’s happened. I will show you the truth. My daughters have seen the Stone Men. My Ellen will call them. The Stone Men will come, and we’ll all see. Blacksuits can’t ignore that.”

“What,” someone called from the crowd, “if they don’t come?”

“Then the Criers are lying, and my girl is. But she’s not.” Ellen tensed so much at that she might have been a mannequin. How had Corbin brought them here? Wheedling? Promising? Shouting? He didn’t hit them, Matt thought. Hoped.

“We can’t let him do this,” Sandy said. “With the girls.”

“The girls said yes.”

“That was bullshit at lunch, Matt, and it still is. They’re terrified. They can’t say no to him. You saw it. I thought you’d talk him down this afternoon.”

“I didn’t hear you try.”

“He doesn’t listen to me.”

“Nothing for it now.”

“Nothing but to hope this works,” she said. “With so many people watching, he can’t back down if it doesn’t.”

Rafferty paced around the lantern, casting shadows.

“Well, then,” he told Ellen. “Go on. Pray.”





14

Tara slipped into the boiler room of the Church of Kos and landed soundless in shadows. Enormous metal tanks, basins, and pipes swelled in angry twilight to fill the vast chamber. Gauges ticked up. Valves opened and closed. Hydraulic fluid surged through pipes. Steam hissed. Far away, a great gear wound and wound. She smelled copper and concrete and burned air, which did not bother her. She felt the presence of a god, which did.

“Abelard?”

She heard footsteps behind a huge compression tank and moved toward them. The red and the rhythm and the smell reminded her of walking through a giant heart, and the impression was not far from truth. These boilers and generators and coils translated Kos Everburning’s heat into the power on which his people relied. She understood the dynamics of their faith, but its machines were alien to her. Growing up in the country, a girl awed by tales of the urban horrors her grandparents fled to live as tillers of soil, she’d known no device more complex than farm equipment. When she ran away from home to seek those horrors herself, she found teachers who preferred sorcery to mechanism. Generators and pipes remained strange to her. In a way, she was trespassing now more than she had the year before, when she walked on the flesh of the dead god himself.

He hadn’t been dead, of course. Which was part of their current problem.

Rounding the tank, she saw more pipes, more valves, more pulleys and belts and shifting gears, oil-slick surfaces none of which had the decency to keep still and let her find the man she sought.

She peered beneath the physical world. All this metal was quite simple on the level of Craftwork: tricks to convert energy from one form or vector to another. To her gaze the machines pulsed in heartbeat time, and there, in a nook ten feet off the ground, nestled between a wall and a steam tank, was a man’s spinning soul.

“There you are.”

“Can anyone hide from you?” His voice echoed.

“Not like that,” she said. A ladder led up to his nook, concealed behind a bundle of thin pipes. The rungs were warm. “Kos could hide you if you asked; He couldn’t do the same for me, because of my glyphs.”

“No hide-and-go-seek for necromancers.”

“Oh, we play. We hide in bargains and loopholes and fine print.” Tara crested the ladder and pulled herself into the niche between tank and wall. Abelard sat within, legs curled against his chest, arms crossed on his knees. Beneath him lay a thin pallet, and across from him a small altar. Tara tested the floor for dust, and sat. “You sleep here?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “How do you sleep?”

“Well,” she replied. “On my back.”

“I mean, you see things with your eyes closed.”

“So do you. Light filters through the lids, creates patterns, that warm pink edge to darkness. You can’t turn off your skin, can’t close your ears, but you sleep fine.”

“Not these days,” he said.

“Why did you leave the meeting?”

“Did I miss much?”

Here in the half-lit dark, she felt like she could say anything. “Same story as ever. Don’t like the news? Question the bearer.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It could be worse. Sometimes clients play dumb—they go to you for expertise, then argue with your conclusions. Back in Edgemont I hung out my shingle and dealt small-time magic, before Ms. K found me. You know what phrase I learned to hate more than any other? How bad can it be?” She leaned her head against the cool rock. Hair bunched and coiled against her skull. “You should have stayed. You could have helped them understand.”