Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(37)
Ash dripped from Abelard’s cigarette onto his robe. He brushed the ash away and stamped out the cinder, leaving a gray smear on the carpet. “Sorry,” he said.
“Overdue for a wash.”
He knelt and tried to scrape the ash out of the fibers of the rug. “You don’t have some spot treater? I mean, sorry, but it does stain.”
“You have an interesting way of ignoring questions.”
He stopped scraping, and stood instead, hands in pockets, weight shifting from foot to foot. Smoke drifted from his cigarette. “You want me to convince Lord Kos not to support Seril if She needs Him.”
“That’s the most elegant solution, as our partners learn of the goddess’s return. I will assure them she stands alone—aside from her involvement in Justice. Her obligations are not our Lord’s. She is a separate entity. There may, naturally, be tests of that position, as Ms. Abernathy said this evening.” The fingers de-laced. “Seril is not strong enough to stand on her own—or to refuse His aid if He offers it. We need to convince Him to leave her to defend herself. I’d go to Him, but since Gustave’s treachery He has been more reserved with the Council of Cardinals than ever.”
“Can you blame him?”
“This is not a question of blame. It is a question of what is, and what must be.” The incense on the altar burned low. Bede replaced it. “I know how this looks. You distrust me, as does my Lord. I do not relish being held in such low esteem by a bright young priest and by the Master I serve, but these are strange times and I forgive you both. But, Abelard, this is the only way I know to save us.”
“Tara’s research—”
“Is a long shot. You know this, as does she. We cannot rely on her success. Not every hard decision is an evil plot.”
Abelard took a long, slow drag on his cigarette. God was in the smoke, and God was in his heart, and God was in the blood that burned through his veins and the air into which he exhaled, and others too, all through the city, a constant heartbeat. To live was to be loved was to burn.
—the world, o monks—
He remembered how cold he had been without that fire.
“I’ll talk to Him,” he said. “But I can’t guarantee He’ll listen.”
“I ask no more,” the Cardinal Evangelist replied.
20
Aev chased Shale over rooftops and down dark alleys and from skyscraper to skyscraper. The whelp was small and weak, but fast—a flash of stone in motion behind a pinnacle, a glint of emerald from an antenna. He changed to human shape once and almost lost her in a crowd in the Pleasure Quarter, until she spotted him slinking down a peep show alley without regard for the fleshlings gyrating meatily in the red-lit windows. She swooped to cut him off at the alley’s end, but he must have seen her—his stone ripped free of flesh again and in three seconds he’d reached the rooftops. In four he was gone, leaving in his wake a shocked dope peddler and a number of fleshlings who’d ceased, however briefly, those meaty gyrations.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he roared back at her in Stone, over the rattle of the elevated train down which he ran, leaping from car to car. Within the cars, screams and shouts—panic at heavy footfalls on metal roofs. “They needed help. The Lady willed me to go. I don’t see why you’re so mad about this.”
That brought her up short. In surprise she almost let an overhead pylon strike her in the face. “You don’t see why I’m so mad about this. You don’t see why I’m so mad?” She spotted him two blocks back, climbing a skyscraper. She leapt off the train, wings spread, but by the time she brought herself around he’d vanished again. She flew forty stories up a jewel-faceted tower and perched at its peak, steadying herself against one of the needlelike protrusions Tara called nightmare antennas. Terrors clawed at Aev as she held it, like a kitten testing its claws. Not for the first time Aev wondered what exactly had broken inside Tara Abernathy’s mind that let her judge her way of life normal.
Where, in the streets below, in the alleys and dead ends, in the shop windows and blacktop street ball playgrounds, where was her wayward son?
She remembered her debates with the Lady about carving him. We’re strong, Aev had said, almost too strong, and fierce. Perhaps we need a young one who’s fast, who can move unseen in shadows, a king of infiltrators and sneaks, a messenger no door will bar.
Should have made him clubfoot and slow, and ironed out that infuriating spark of personal initiative.
(Not really, but some days she wished.) There. Two skyscrapers over, by a tower with a starburst logo and the legend GRIMWALD HOLDINGS—Shale was a winged black slice against garish ghostlit colors. She launched herself into space, mouth wide to drink the moon.
He hid in shadows, so she searched every shadow. He flew and she flew faster. He reared and she doubled back. No crowd could conceal him, no bolt-hole was deep enough to hide.
But he was fast. She’d carved well, with the Lady in her hands.
And he must have known this would happen, that midway through the chase her rage would unclench and leave her simply running, flying, as she had done centuries ago when Alt Coulumb was a small town and she its sole guardian. He must have known, because when she cornered him on a low roof between two skyscrapers near Uhlan and Brakenridge—when she slammed into him and they tumbled together on gravel, spinning, tearing gouges in tar paper, a ball of claws and teeth, and she ended the tumble on top, legs pinning his wings to the roof—he bared his throat to her and said, with an imp’s smile she never could harden herself against, “Good chase, Mother.”