Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(65)

She spread her arms in front of Raz. In one hand she held her truncheon. Her other hand’s fingers lengthened into claws.

Come on, she told them in the Suit’s silver-coated nightmare voice. Maybe demons had bad dreams too. Show me what you’ve got.

They stared at her, opened mandibles, wriggled razor mouthparts.

She tightened her grip on the truncheon.

The demons’ wings snapped wide, and as one they flew.

They boiled toward the opening of the hold, still growing. Claws scrabbled against timber, and they were out. She ran after them. With a leap she caught the slowest demon’s trailing leg; if she’d touched it barehanded its edges would have laid open her palm, but the Suit let her hold it, let her catch its wing too, both of them spinning above the deck of the Dream. The demon’s head rotated on its neck; fangs snapped, but she was too close for them to bite deep. Its claws, though, could. They tightened like a diamond-tipped vise. One talon tore a line in her Suit. The fluid flowed free of its claw to mend the gap, but not before its talon plunged beneath, exploring her flesh.

She wrapped her arms around the demon’s belly and squeezed. Glass squealed, popped, shattered. The Suit closed her wound. She fell, turning, turning, and slammed into the deck. Glass shards rained onto her, melting as they fell. Above, unfolded demons flew. Their wings rainbowed streetlamp light and beat dragonfly fast, gaining altitude, flying inland.

“Ma’am?”

The skeleton-sailor bent over her, head cocked to one side. Concern. How interesting that she could read the man’s, no, woman’s, expressions. Maybe you had to learn, once you became a skeleton, how to act so people could tell what you were thinking. Like guiding a puppet.

She remembered this feeling from back before Seril’s return, when the Blacksuit was still Black. The fog of assurance, the Suit guiding her reeling mind to detached logic.

She stood. The Suit blunted the pain in her side, kept pressure on the wound, guided blood to proper vessels.

Across the city, Justice called her children. Under attack. All units. Suits patrolling backstreets paused midstep and turned skyward, preparing to run. But they couldn’t fly.

One hand crested the edge of the hold, then another, and Raz pulled himself onto the deck. Regrown skin closed the cuts in his scalp. He did not need to breathe, so he wasn’t breathing heavy. He ran to her, held her, his hand tight enough on her arm she could feel it through the Suit’s narcotic haze. “Are you all right?”

She wasn’t used to laughing through silver. You?

“Fine.” He turned to the skeleton. “There are injured people in the hold. Help them.”

We have to go. Her mind raced through the matrix of Justice, assembling scenarios, considering data. Scraps: the sleepers woke when Raz signed the contract bringing them into Seril’s domain. Demons sought freedom. These were bound, now, by Seril’s rules alone—and if she died, they’d be free. Limitless.

“You’re hurt.”

Not much. She stood. Come on. The other officers won’t be able to stop them in time.

“We can’t either.”

You can learn, Aev had told her last night, on that rooftop. Well. No time like the present.

Yes we can, she said.

And, in silence, to the moon: you wanted me to pray, dammit. You wanted me to need you. Here you go. Here I am.

The smooth silver of her back rippled, and bulged, and birthed wings.

When she turned to him, he was looking at her differently.

She held out her hand. Are you coming?





33

The goddess condensed to human shape as Jones approached. The moonlight whirl receded behind a surface too slick and shimmering for skin. Gargoyles sang, a chorus whose treble notes flirted with the lowest range of human hearing. Theater? No, Tara saw stone faces fixed with holy effort: rising into prayer, lending the goddess the platform of their minds to help her address this faithless mortal.

So Seril had told the truth: Tara was, in some sense, a priestess.

You’ve fused the chain around your neck, and handed them the dangling end.

Dammit.

Tara saw traces of her own features in the face Seril assumed: her cheekbones, and a line of jaw more her mother’s than her own. Perhaps she saw only what she knew to see. That was often the way with gods.

Part of why she didn’t like them. Craft was clear: no wiggle room with ink and blood and starlight. A deal worked, or did not. Rights relinquished could not be willed back. Absolute truth issued from signatures on paper. Subjectivity was for people who couldn’t hack it objectively.

She had thought like that when she first came to Alt Coulumb. Still did, most days. But then why had she removed her glyph from Shale?

Jones slowed as she neared the throne, like the Ebon Sea philosopher’s arrow that crossed first half the intervening distance, then half that, then half again. She stared into Seril’s face.

At the foot of the throne she hesitated, and looked away. Tara saw a bright wet line on Jones’s cheek.

Tara knew the feeling. She’d felt that way herself last year when the gargoyles introduced her to their Lady. Cynical analysis: gods prompted this neurochemical reaction as a form of self-defense. Awe each human you encounter. Seduce them with ultimacy. If she examined herself the way the schools taught her, she could see classic signs of subversion—a drastic change of behavior upon exposure to a divine being. Broken by blessing. The libraries of the Hidden Schools held volumes about conversion, indoctrination, torture. She remembered the woodcuts of rats in mazes and babies raised in boxes.