Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(56)

“There are trade-offs, sure. I won’t deny that every few days I want to grab the Council of Cardinals by the neck and shake them until their heads do the bobble doll thing. But I’m doing good work.”

“That’s a god-botherer’s line.”

“The Wars are over,” she said. “It’s not us versus them. There’s room to work in the middle.” She held out her hand. A little help here?

Silver flowed through her mind and down her arm. The bird sculpture hopped twice more, and on the third hop, flew.

“Nice,” Daphne said. “But it proves nothing. Gods took away your wings. Of course they can give them back and call it a miracle.” But her smile was a younger woman’s smile, a smile like the one Tara remembered.

“I was trying to be symbolic,” Tara said. “Hells. I know you want to help me. Thanks. Same goes for you. If you’re ever looking for a change—”

“If I want to crash my career into a mountainside, I’ll give you a call.”

“Deal. I have to get back to work, but there’s a place over by Seventeenth with great frozen lemonade—good for a pickup before an afternoon of doc review.”

“Thanks,” Daphne said. “It’s good to see you, Tara.”

They walked back through the garden. The stone bird flew widening circles overhead.





28

Five hours of archival research later, Tara hung in the astral void above a living god.

Kos Everburning, like all his divine ilk, did not quite exist in the usual, physical sense of the term—but human minds weren’t good at comprehending n-dimensional noosphere entities, half-network and half-standing wave, propagating in all directions at once through time. They could, of course. Tara had worked out the theory from first principles back at the Hidden Schools, the derivation of divine anatomy from raw data being a particular favorite of problem-set-dependent TAs. But nightmare matrices did the math for you these days, if you didn’t mind shifting some particularly difficult problems to universes where they happened to be easier. Then, back-convert the mess to three spatial dimensions with a fixed arrow of time—and, since everyone who’s going to deal with this particular simulation will be a Craftswoman well versed in anatomy and forensics, add a filter to present the data analogically in terms of corpses. Just don’t go too far, since a simulation this detailed is a new cave chamber inside the old philosopher’s cavern, and if you’re not careful you might tunnel into another chamber already occupied by capital-letter Things.

Even convenient fictions can delve too greedily and too deep.

Tara’s head ached, and she was in desperate need of a second lemonade. She’d started after lunch with a deep dive into the Court of Craft across town, where carts guided by rat brain brought her volume after volume of notes and ledgers. Claims there matched her notes from last night’s survey, but she needed more, and so returned to the sanctum to pace above Kos Everburning’s body.

The diagnostic Craft she used had been built to display Alt Coulumb’s God in cross section through time: a three-dimensional flip-book showing a naked continent-size man whose limbs hung limp in a dark sea, whose face shone too bright to look upon. It was meant to deal with well-structured archive data.

It wasn’t made to model the living operations of the God.

She watched him—watched Him, the capital letter inserting itself slyly despite her insistence that adulation of a client was counterproductive.

She heard Him breathe.

His heart beat and blood surged in His veins. She’d thought to walk on His skin, to take inventory from up close as she had when He was dead, but the closer she drew the harder it was to keep her heart from matching time with His, to keep His heat from suffusing her.

Even at this distance—a mile up in notional space, far enough away that she could see His edges—Kos distorted the surrounding world. So much so, in fact, that she almost didn’t notice when the simulation tore.

A ripping sound filled the synthetic dark as great wounds gaped in the fabric of unreality.

Multifaceted eyes stared through diamond slits, and spider legs clawed the void. She called on her Craft, forged chains of light to stitch the cut universe back together.

When she was relatively certain she wouldn’t die in the next few minutes, she searched for the problem’s source.

She didn’t have to search long. She recognized the scream.

Abelard had taken shape in the nightmare half a mile beneath her, spinning over the Body, arms pinwheeling in a futile attempt to steady himself. The glowing tip of his cigarette trailed circles around him.

She stopped his spin with a thought and a slight tweak of the dream’s parameters.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“How you get used to that, I will never know.” He brushed stray hairs back into his tonsure, and straightened his skewed robes. “Um. I seem to be upside down.”

“Gravity’s relative to your body here. Your modesty’s safe. You really should go.” She righted him with a twist of her forefinger.

“I hoped we could talk,” he said when he recovered.

The stitches with which she sealed in the sky surged as the Things beyond adjusted their attack. “This isn’t a good time.”

“What are you doing, anyway?”