Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(66)

Priestess.

But the scholastic method was a conditioning all its own. Any break in the pattern of thought she’d learned was a moral failing, an intrusion of dark powers to be met with suspicion and fear.

Daphne held the flightless bird in the temple gardens.

We’re so alone, she thought. We touch one another too firmly and wound or break, or else we pull away. We tell stories in which we are lone noble heroes, until we stand face-to-face with a goddess and see something older and bigger than each of us because it is each of us, our souls touching, the subtle interaction at a distance of minds with minds, when we reach the edge of loneliness and teeter uncertain at the brink.

Or else, old teachers’ voices whispered, you kneel because you lack the strength to stand.

Jones asked the Goddess a question Tara could not hear.

But she heard the answer: “Yes.”

*

The night before, when had Cat crouched on the roof’s edge, Aev told her: first we invite the wind into our wings. Without the wind, we cannot fly.

It sounded stupid. Mystical mumbo-jumbo, self-evident, of course you needed the wind to fly, that was how wings worked.

Raz took her hand. She invited the wind.

She’d tried last night, three times, and three times fallen, plummeting ten stories until Aev swept down to catch her. No room for failure now. Wings wide.

Two beats buffeted the deck. The Suit did what she asked, when she asked, but she felt like a climber with a finger grip on a narrow ledge: the wind was there, but she could not pull herself atop it.

The demons reached the port-facing rooftops, gaining altitude.

You can’t muscle yourself up from this position. Change the angle. Use your body, not your arms. Swing.

She bent her legs, gathered Raz to her, and leapt.

He squawked, undignified. The deck receded below, the ship rocking from the force of her departure.

She began to fall.

Come on, wind, she thought. I need you.

Her wings filled. She saw deep currents rising from the city, colored red below red: heat, a path she could use. Beneath her—beneath her!—lay Alt Coulumb, port streets she’d patrolled, the warehouse where she cornered the gargoyles the year before, Pleasure Quarter alleys down which the younger woman she had been staggered sickly and strung out hunting for an easy fix, and there, ahead, the tower of Kos Everburning. A moon shone on her spread wings, and another on the skyline, atop a tower in the Ash, where Seril held court.

Raz laughed, his arms around her, his grip tight with monkeyfear of falling.

She laughed, too, fiercely. To fly was glorious.

The demons sped north and east. Cat hunted them.

*

Thus Jones, in the light of an unfamiliar goddess:

“Would you consider yourself a refugee?”

“A survivor. It took me forty years to reach home, and then only in a reduced condition.”

Jones stood in silver light. The world shifted as she shifted angles, like a hologram postcard. One blink, one turn of the head, and she stood before a woman whose face she almost recognized, not quite Mother, not quite her, not quite Grandma. Another blink, another turn, and the roof was gone and the sky too and the woman, replaced by a frothing silver sea.

But Jones still held her notebook.

“Your gargoyles attacked Alt Coulumb after you died.”

“I was not dead. I was dismembered. Parts of me were stolen. But I lived, reduced, with and through my children. Fallen, I went mad. So did they. It took us a long time to learn to think again.”

“Why did you come back?”

“I belong here,” she said. “My love is here, as are my people. Justice fails many. She follows rules without question. The night must have a compassionate face.”

The crucial question: “How do you operate with Justice, then?”

“She was built from stolen pieces of my corpse. Now that I have returned, we are one and two. Her children are freer than they were, thanks to me. The system is more flexible. In her old, rigid form, Justice was vulnerable. We are better now.”

Gabby’s pen trailed shorthand scrapmarks on paper. She’d expected visions, mind-racking battles on a symbolic plain, gnomic pronouncements issuing from a vent in the earth. This was good copy.

“How do you respond,” she asked, “to allegations—”

Then the goddess screamed.





34

Shale flew toward the tower, water cask in hand, above the tracks of a southbound train. He hadn’t exactly rushed to find the reporter a drink. Honor guards were well and good, but why not linger on the return trip, to stop a mugging and right an overturned carriage?

Far away he heard his brothers and sisters sing, though the humans below did not. When he wore flesh he accepted its limits; few of Seril’s children knew how tinny and limited were the sounds Alt Coulumb’s softer citizens heard. (And how strange human words for what they could not hear—subsonic, as if there was no sound below the narrow band those odd small ears could catch.) He hummed along, and beat time with his wings.

The demons struck him in midair.

He felt the impact first, three blows against his legs, and on his back between his wings—then piercing pain. He roared in shock and rage and dropped, in that second, the cask. It tumbled, he tumbled, while his mind worked out (thought came slowly, as if someone had turned down the metronome that beat the world) the truth of the situation: he’d been attacked. Illogical, impossible to be struck in flight in his Lady’s city, but— He furled his wings and fell past blurring windows and shocked human silhouettes, then stretched his wings to brake. The burrowing thorns in his back tore free, and a crystal thing shimmered under him, falling, shard edged with four broad thin wings and a sharp proboscis.