Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(63)

“Can’t you”—Jones wiggled her fingers—“make light?”

“You don’t want to see what lives on these walls.”

They climbed. Jones did not question the few sharp decisive sounds Tara made, or the occasional flash that ensued when she killed something vicious. Tara reminded herself to speak with the goddess—firmly—about the general unsuitability of temple traps and rat kings and hand-size poisonous spiders to modern temples.

As they neared the twelfth floor, Tara found that she could see. The darkness silvered, less cavelike and closer to the dark of starlit cornfield night, swelling with form, navigable despite obscurity.

“I thought you wouldn’t make light. Powers man was not meant to know and so on.”

“This light isn’t mine,” Tara said. “It’s the courtesy of our host.”

Silver chiseled geometry from the dark. They ascended steep stairs. Ahead, the tunnel ended.

Tara expected the roof of the day before, the broken dome and stone-strewn platform beneath the wrecked orrery. What she found was different.

Solid moonlight completed the broken arches and patched and polished the pitted metal. The roof was clean. In its center rose a granite throne flanked by curving horns claw-carved from the rubble that once littered the platform. The carving lacked mortar: gravity locked each piece in place. The work would have taken a human sculptor months without magic or machines, but Seril’s children were their own magic, and their own machines.

Gargoyles awaited them.

They stood in a loose circle around the throne. Wings crested monstrous shoulders. Aev, nearest, looked down at the human arrivals with the same composure Tara’d seen on Abelard’s face praying, and mistaken for haughtiness. Shale, at the circle’s rear, watched Tara, uneasy, trusting. A year ago Tara couldn’t have identified the meaning behind his fangs. She could now—and the other gargoyles’ expressions too, the determination on the face of tusk-toothed Gar and the haughtiness of scale-skinned Scree, the nervous twitch in great Grimpen’s cheek.

None of which mattered beside the light that occupied the throne.

The goddess wore a cloak of majesty. There were many faces within her face.

Tara stepped out of Jones’s way. The Crier emerged into the light. Her pen rested against notebook paper. Ink seeped from its tip.

Tara tried to conceal her satisfaction. She thought she did okay.

Jones lowered the notebook and approached Aev. Tara followed, flanking, in case of ambush or gonzo journalism.

“Ms. Jones,” she said, “this is Aev, who leads Seril’s children.”

“We’ve met.”

“You are in much better health than when last we spoke,” Aev said with a wry rumble.

“Is this the part where you give me instructions? Don’t offer or accept anything? Don’t make any bargains?”

“The Lady is eager to meet you,” Aev replied. “Any deals you make with her are yours to keep. She will communicate in your mortal tongue.”

“Thanks for that.”

“Can I get you anything before we start? Water, coffee? Doughnut?”

Jones blinked. “Water, thanks.”

“Water will be found.”

Shale walked to the rooftop’s edge and dove into space.

“Of course,” Jones said. “You don’t need water yourself.”

“Our few needs are met by moonlight, earth, and rain. He will return.”

“Thanks.” Jones flipped forward in her notebook until she reached a page not blotted with the ink of her surprise. “Let’s go.”

Aev ushered her toward the throne.





32

Abelard, fire-flooded, spread through his city, burning in ecstasy of communion, remembered his confession to Tara in the temple boiler room. And Kos remembered it too, because Abelard was part of him as he was part of Abelard.

Yet Abelard was still the man he had been a year before, tumbling into darkness, dead, only to learn the darkness into which he fell was burning. That fire buoyed him up. The Lord caught him, time and again, as Abelard caught Him in turn. They fought for each other.

Cardinal Gustave burned in the Temple of Justice, full of rage and futile hope, hair blown in smoke and hurricane winds. Cardinal Gustave fell. Cardinal Gustave, Abelard’s anchor, who held church and faithful in his iron conviction’s grip—dead, after betraying his Lord for a reason he thought was right.

Peel off the old man’s face like a player’s mask, and Abelard saw himself.

I must not become Gustave. I must not believe that I know best how God should be in the world. But Gustave was a wise man, and good. If he could turn from You unsuspecting, what might I do?

What was Gustave’s fault? Pride, in thinking himself wiser than his fellow priests, wiser even, at the end, than God? But pride stemmed from a deeper source. If pride was flame, what was fuel?

Fear. Fear Kos would reject him. Fear his iron would rust from within.

In the end, it had.

Where does that leave us? he prayed. What can we do in the face of fear?

What else, came the whispered reply, but love and trust.

Were the words his, or did they belong to Kos? What was he, anyway, but a piece of this burning web spun from a city’s dreams? He joined to Him by faith, by the burning of incense, by prayer, by kneeling before a fire. Where did Abelard end and God begin? They grew from each other.