Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(57)

“Looking for evidence,” she said. A stitch gave way, and a tendril of shadow wormed into the dark. She shredded it. “I wanted to see how Kos owns the sky.”

He pointed up. “What are those?”

“Demons. Don’t worry about it.”

“Sounds like I should.”

Vines of light wound about the wound, and sharp darkness tore her bindings from within. “I’m running a lot of poorly structured data through the system. Too much of that and the nightmare snarls. Demons are like us, really—but their worlds work on different logic than ours. Points of divergence let them cross over without a summoning contract, without limits. You have to work hard to make one of those in physical space, but analytical engines aren’t continuous. If I break the simulation, they can get in.”

“That sounds bad.”

She swooped toward the body, and brought him with her. “Annoying, mostly, here in n-space. If they breach, we pull out, shut the simulation down, start again. So long as we don’t bring them back to the supposedly real world with us.”

“Is that possible?”

“I’m warded, so they can’t crawl into me—not without a fight. You, though—”

There came a massive pulse against the curvature of nothing. Her stitches distended and the wound opened like a mouth, only instead of teeth it was full of eyes.

“Hold on a second,” she said. “I’m almost done.” Great tubes sprouted from the god’s body, vessels bearing His power, His blood out into the world. The city formed around them, like the impression of a body beneath a rubber sheet.

“Tara,” Abelard said, afraid. Great hands tore the folded newspaper of the dream down the center. Logical consistency stretched like taffy. She hurt, and ignored the pain. Kos’s power blushed through the ghost-glass city’s sky. Drawing closer, she saw the blush was in fact a candyfloss haze of hooks wrestling with a Great Unseen.

Demon thorns pulled the edges of the world-wound wide. Beyond spread a noonday kaleidoscope of blunt angles and teeth, a story in which she had no part, which would consume her and her world alike. Four bridge-wide stitches remained, and fractal blights wilted their edges. One gave a sound like a bass string breaking. Three left. Two, soon.

“Tara!”

But that Great Unseen, the mystery against which Kos struggled to own the sky—she recognized it. Drew close to the hooks. Squinted. And saw a series of numbers in the tangle of each hook, and glyphs: Kos Everburning v. Red King Consolidated.

The last stitch broke with a bone-shivering A-sharp. The whole sky split at once. Arms that were tongues that were spears flew down.

But Tara and Abelard were not there anymore, and then the world was not, either.

Orbs of Tara throbbed flutterstep beneath wingskin as if rocked in pleasure. Eyes, she opened them. Air, she breathed it, and the dust it held. Ears, she heard with them the silence of a large paper-filled room, and the panting of a terrified monk. Skin, with curves of the stuff she felt the grain of a stone floor under her. She should install a bed in the archives someday.

Oh, and she had blood too, and a mind, and emotions not yet fully understood, one of them a distant cousin of compassion. Abelard. She sat up. Mountains of leather-bound codices and racks of scrolls swayed like willows blown in the storm of her unsettled mind. He sat cross-legged across the silver bowl at the archive center from her. He held his cut finger in one hand. The singed coppery smell of burned blood rose from within the bowl.

She stood, though her legs seemed unfamiliar devices. Leaning against her thighs, she orbited the bowl. “You okay?”

He stopped praying. “I thought it would be easier when He was alive.”

She pulled him to his feet, though her own balance wasn’t perfect and she almost toppled them both into a case of scrolls. “He’s more complicated alive than dead.” Back in this world they agreed was real, she could ditch the capital letter. “You cut your finger yourself?”

“Pierced it. With a needle.”

She winced.

“Don’t worry, I burned the needle first.”

“Use alcohol next time.”

“Are those things—”

“The demons?”

“Will they be there the next time you go into the dream?”

“No. I shut it down completely. That notional world doesn’t exist until I need it again. Why did you come looking for me?”

“I need your advice,” he said. “About God.”

As they walked through paper mountains toward the lift, he told her about his conversation with the Cardinal. She pressed the button and waited as motors surged behind closed doors. “You want to know if I think you should do it.”

“The Cardinal’s right. Lord Kos might listen to me. But isn’t it hubris to give a God advice?”

“You’re asking the wrong person,” she said, “when it comes to avoiding hubris. My teachers thought gods were a quaint affectation.” She remembered the goddess in her room, wearing her face. Remembered, too, Daphne’s flightless bird. “If the outside world thinks Kos will come to Seril’s rescue whenever she’s in trouble, that’s bad for both of them. Debts falling due, margin calls, flights of wicked angels in the skies, spiritual armageddon.”

“So you think I should do it.”