Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(69)
And his friends, and His, were in danger.
—Help them, he prayed.
There came a sound so enormous Abelard mistook it for thunder.
Later, thinking back, he would realize how much it resembled knuckles cracking.
*
Tara was not, probably, about to die—appearances (demon beset and bleeding, one arm limp at her side, suit mostly shredded) to the contrary.
She owed the Hidden Schools ten souls of tuition, which made it just the low end of worthwhile to keep her—alive might be a stretch, but at least roughly compos mortis. There were, of course, consequences to being bound to unlife by a single obligation. It distorted the psyche, discarded bits of consciousness irrelevant to the bond. Craftsmen who kept their bodies into old age had stolen—or borrowed—enough from the universe that the universe wanted a return on its investment. Reinforce those obligations with extensive personal leveraging, premortem prep, and the creation of phylacteric trusts, and an individual could endure the flesh-bone transition mentally intact, depending of course on one’s philosophy of consciousness.
Die in overwhelming debt to a single provider, though, and less freedom remained to you. A Tara resurrected to repay her student loans would not remain interested in Alt Coulumb. There were stories of dead indebted Craftswomen processing contracts in beehive crypts beneath the Badlands, reviewing foundational wards in sleepless monotony. She’d never heard anyone confirm these rumors. Nor had anyone denied them.
So, while these demons might not exactly kill her, her likely fate was not pleasant.
Her senses filled the rooftop, spread through the shadows her Craft cast. She fought through pain. Cat flailed beneath a pile of demons. Raz ran to help her, ignoring the pieces of himself he left behind on claws. Tara caught a demon in an ontological twist—watched it trip and thrash to reassert its own existence, though the twist refused to accept the testimony of a nonexistent being. Before she could kill it, another tackled her from behind. Claws pierced her shadow guard, down and in, and she roared with the pain and so did Seril— Then, on the rooftop, there was light.
More than light.
Fire.
She smiled as the demons burned.
35
“You might want to watch this,” Daphne said, and passed the binoculars.
Ms. Ramp raised them, squinted, adjusted focus, and scanned the horizon until she found the tower. “Well, that’s one way to resolve our—”
Daphne was looking at her boss, not the tower, so she only saw the firelight upon the woman’s face. By the time she turned, the fire had faded to cinders upon stone.
Ramp lowered the glasses and blinked. “Godsdamn.” She screwed her eyes shut, and tears leaked from their corners. “Never mind.” She waved at the balloon’s burner. The flame there shriveled, and they sank. “Shame.”
Above, the moon shone brighter than before.
“I really do like this city,” Ramp said. “Good theater. Better Old World restaurants than you’ll find anywhere else in the New. And there’s a special feeling to the light. I don’t know if you’ve ever sat in a sidewalk cafe on a spring morning with a view of the sanctum—nice cup of coffee after full meal, nothing to do but sip and digest. Then the sun hits the sanctum’s peak, around nine or ten depending on the date and which cafe you choose—and there are only really four anyone should choose in this city. The tower reflects a pure spark of sunlight in the center of the sky, the union of a star that existed millions of years before the gods, and a city only humans would be mad enough to build. Hold that cooling coffee in your mouth, black and thick, and watch the reflection. It looks like it will last forever.” She sighed. Daphne had never heard her sigh before. “It doesn’t. But we always hope, don’t we? Still, the place will recover once we’re done with it. And the theater might not even suffer. Actors are good as roaches for survival. You know, during the Camlaan Blitz, they performed a musical about the life of Ursus in the subway tunnels?”
“I didn’t know,” Daphne said.
“Good reviews. Shame I missed it. But, you know, a city doesn’t bomb itself.”
*
Matt waited in the hospital. Corbin Rafferty slept curled around himself, covers crinkled by his body. Matt felt uncomfortable watching him. He hadn’t often seen another man sleep. Rafferty’s position reminded him of Claire’s on the couch.
The hospital room had two chairs. Claire sat in one, Matt in the other. The light was off. Matt didn’t think he had slept, but there was no way to mark time here, with the curtains drawn. He read a few magazine stories about places that did not exist as far as he was concerned, about people whose problems might as well have been made up. He went to the bathroom. Wandering the halls, he found a pot of weak tea and cups made of a pale foamlike substance that sat badly against his skin and tasted like aerated bone. He returned.
Claire watched her father.
Corbin woke.
Just a snaking beneath the sheets at first, a protrusion of knee from covers. He thrashed against synthetic pillows. Claire’s sudden tension made Matt look. Rafferty’s eyes were open, staring straight up as if a sword hung over his bed. No sword, though, only a pitted moonscape of drop ceiling.
“Father,” Claire said.
Matt thought he answered “Daughter,” but the word was really “Water.”