Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(68)

Somehow these demons were tied to the indentures Seril voided. If She fell, they’d be free—to go home, or to wreck the city, or worse.

In Tara’s voyage on foot through the Badlands, she’d crossed miles of desert that bore unbound demons’ taint: geometries that shifted to her desires as she passed, showed her palaces with tooth-lined doors. Hummingbirds hung frozen in the air, not yet dead. They would pass an age of the world in their dying.

That would happen here, if the demons ate Seril.

She called down starlight. The demon she had stabbed scuttled toward her again. She redefined the atmosphere around it. Individual particles of air were tiny, but considered as a class rather than as individuals, as a blanket shrouding the planet, air weighed a great deal. (This trick wouldn’t work against normal matter, which understood its own rules too well, but demonstuff was a stranger here.) The demon spasmed as it sawed the edges of her—admittedly specious—argument. Given time it would recover. So she stepped forward dancerlike and drove her knife through the top of its head.

The creature exploded to steaming dust.

She stumbled into the space where it had been, weak from conjuring. Not enough starlight here for proper magic, and the moon was spoken for.

The roof boiled with battle. Demons fed from gargoyles and grew stronger. Seril’s children fought, bleeding but fierce. The struggle’s score was bass and treble with no midrange—torn stone and broken glass. Blood ran down Tara’s cheek. She did not know when she had been cut.

In the center of the roof Seril spun, dim and demon torn.

The demons attacked Her children. Seril sustained the gargoyles as they fought, and She fought on their behalf: moonlight trapped one demon-bug in silvery crystal, and time slowed for another. But there were so many, and as the gargoyles fell, the demons drank, and Seril weakened. This was how you fought a goddess: tore her between obligations until She spent herself in Her people’s service. You built unwinnable scenarios and forced her into zero-sum games.

The gargoyles fell.

Tara wasn’t kitted for war, lacked glyphs and weapons. But the demons were focusing on Seril and Her children. They’d ignored Jones for the most part, even as she attacked them with a collapsible club she’d produced from within her coat. If they ignored Tara, too, there were bindings she could work, procedures for demon outbreak. If she could talk fast enough.

She raised her hands and began to chant.

A sharp weight struck her. She spun in glass and blood and torn shadow, ripped herself free. She bled.

Demons flanked her.

Of course. They didn’t care about Jones. But Tara, may all gods burn and bleed, was a priestess now.

She bared her teeth and made her blade long to fight.

*

By the time Cat and Raz and Shale reached the broken tower in the Ash, the moon was almost dead. Demonic waves washed the tower top. Claws of drowning gargoyles rose from the glass, tearing wings, breaking arms, but the demons were stronger than before.

They took strength from the goddess as they ate her.

Tara fought shadow-clad. Aev’s great arms seemed sluggish. Seril’s light showed dim through demonglass.

Cat felt her pain through Justice.

“We can’t help,” Raz said. “Not against that many.”

The other Blacksuits said: we’re coming, but we won’t be there in time.

The Goddess said: I need you.

Shale dove, trailing silver from his wounds and wind from his wings. He disappeared into the flood and froth.

We can’t help, she said. But we can fight. I’ll set you down. Bring the other Blacksuits— “No,” he said. “We go together.”

They flew into the sea of knives.

*

Abelard watched Seril lose her war.

It was a small war as such things went, but even the smallest wars were vicious. Demons broke. Gargoyles fought, impaled. Tara slashed, cut and slowed but lightning-wreathed. Cat and Raz joined battle, tearing demons off Aev’s back so she could help her brothers and sisters—and the Blacksuits neared—but they would be too late. Seril was falling apart.

He felt the wheel of her thoughts twist on its axle.

God burned, watching.

—Why don’t you help? Abelard asked.

You asked me not to.

—They’ll die.

You were right. Are right. If I help them, it will hurt us all. (Each word formed from a hundred voices molded by a potter’s hand from the turning clay of the city’s minds.) If I help, I risk my people, who do not know Her as I do, and do not love Her as I do.

—We can teach them.

Can we? Can they learn to love her in time?

Abelard did not know. Yes, he prayed.

You feared, before, that I did not trust you. Here we are. You asked me to let Her stand alone. Ask me again, and I will.

—You don’t play fair.

I don’t play at all, He replied. None of Us do. Ink has been spilled on the subject. Did you fear I mistrusted you, or did you fear what my trust in you would mean? I offer you a choice. No tricks. I will save them, or not, as you ask.

Abelard’s soul strained beneath those words, which were more than words, as if he were trapped between the bolt and hole of an enormous lock.

Bede had asked him to talk Kos out of doing exactly this. The Evangelist was not a bad man. He knew much Abelard did not, and his faith was deep. But so was Abelard’s.