Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(30)

Even the Crier’s pencil stopped scratching.

Matt forced himself to his feet.

The top half of Rafferty’s stick lay broken on the ground. The man himself had drawn back, hunched around his center, clutching the remnants of the cane. Sandy wasn’t bleeding. The girls were safe.

A Stone Man confronted Corbin Rafferty.

He did not resemble the monsters of Matt’s imagination or his father’s stories. The Stone Man was thinner than Matt expected, carved with lean muscle like a runner or dancer. His face was narrow and short muzzled with a bird’s quizzical expression, and his wings were slender and long. Maybe their kind came in as many shapes as people.

“Shale!” Ellen sounded happy for the first time in the years Matt had known her.

Rafferty recoiled. One crooked accusing finger stabbed toward the statue. “There! You see. They sneak around our city, taking what’s ours!”

The gargoyle’s—Shale’s—expression didn’t change like a normal person’s. It shifted, like windblown sand. “We take nothing,” he said. “We help.”

“We don’t need your help.”

“If someone asks,” the gargoyle said, gentle as a footfall in an empty church, “should I refuse?”

Rafferty spun from the gargoyle, to Matt, to Sandy, to Ellen. Whatever he sought from them he didn’t find, because he revolved on Shale again, still holding the broken cane.

Then he ran toward the gargoyle and stabbed his chest with the splintered end of his stick. Matt tensed, waiting for claws to wet with blood.

The gargoyle took Rafferty by the shoulders.

The moon came out.

Before, the moon had been a slender curve. No longer. An orb hung overhead, and there was a face within it Matt recognized from a distant past that never was, and since it never was, never passed. Shadows failed. Silver flame quickened within paving stones.

Alt Coulumb lived. There was a Lady in it, and She knew them.

Matt was not a religious man—he sacrificed on time and paid little heed to the rest—but this, he thought, must be how the faithful felt: seen all at once in timeless light.

There was no source to this light, but Corbin Rafferty stood at its center, transfixed, reflected on himself in that moonlit time.

The moon closed.

Corbin’s knees buckled and he fell.

Clocks started again, and hearts. Blood wept from the wound on Matt’s face.

Matt thought the gargoyle was as shocked as anyone, and awed, though he covered it fast. “Blacksuits are coming,” he said to them all but mostly to Ellen. “This is their place. I must go.”

He left in a wave of wings. Sandy limped to Matt and touched the skin around his wound; her fingers stung. The girls watched, quiet, still, as Corbin Rafferty wept.

The gargoyle was right. Soon the Blacksuits came.

And the Crier wrote the whole thing down.





17

Tara collapsed on her walk home.

She’d been turning the Seril problem over in her mind—gods and goddesses, faith and credit, debt and repayment and Abelard’s despair and the gargoyles atop their ruined tower. Swirled round with sharp-toothed dilemmas, she marched past the shadow people who drifted down the sidewalk toward home or gym or bar. A beggar held out a cup and she tossed him a coin with a few thaums of soul inside. Might as well be kind while she could afford it. Soon none of them might have the luxury of generosity.

The man thanked her with a wave of a soot-caked hand as she swept past. Strings of curses ran together inside her skull. Streetlights cast bright puddles on the pavement.

Brighter than usual, in fact, and of a different color too, as of molten silver. Far off, a giant struck a mountain with a hammer in heartbeat time. She stumbled. Eyes closed, she searched the lightning-lit world of Craft for the source of her sudden weakness, but saw nothing—and beneath the nothing, a tide. Her knees buckled, and she fell beyond herself into a sea of churning light whose waves sang a chord no choir could have matched. And she saw— The market square, unfamiliar faces. Matthew Adorne, bleeding. The fierce man from the produce stall wept beneath a moon that was also a face she knew—mother and tiger at once. And Shale stood before them both, Shale overshadowed by his Goddess, Shale the clawed vector for a Lady who refused to hide.

Something soft struck her whole body at once, as if she’d fallen onto a featherbed from a height.

Rough fingers touched her cheek. Her vision focused and refocused until it carved the beggar from the moonlight haze. The lines of his face mapped a territory of confusion and concern. “Miss?”

“I’m fine,” she said, and realized she was lying on the sidewalk, staring up at the moon. When she tried to stand, the world spun sideways.

“You fell.” His breath smelled harsh and there was liquor in it.

She took quick inventory: skirt and stocking torn by impact, jacket dusted with road, a scrape on her cheek. Unsteady sitting, and more unsteady rising. Her soul, that was the problem: her soul ebbed out, a few hundred thaums gone, like leaves into a fire. “Did you feel that?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Thank you.” She pushed a few more thaums into his hand, but he forced them back.

“You need help.”

“Which way to Market Square?”

“Left at Bleeker,” he said, “but the stalls are closed.”