Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(7)

“Who are your sources?”

One of Jones’s lower front teeth had been broken off and capped with silver. “Do you really think I’d answer that question? If people are worshipping Seril, a church rep is the last person I’d tell.”

“I don’t need specifics,” Tara said.

“I met a girl in a bar who spun me a tale. She worked delivery, and some hoods jumped her and stole her satchel. Way the contract was written up, she was liable for everything inside. Small satchel, but you know Craftfolk. Whatever was in there, it was expensive—the debt would break her down to indentured zombiehood. She knew a story going around: if you’re in trouble, shed your blood, say a prayer. Someone will come help. Someone did.”

“What kind of bar was this?”

That silver-capped tooth flashed again.

“So you write this on the strength of a pair of pretty blue eyes—”

“Gray.” She slid her hands into her pockets. “Her eyes were gray. And that’s the last detail you get from me. But it got me asking around. Did you listen to the song?”

“I prefer to get my news straight from the source.”

“I did legwork, Ms. Abernathy. I have a folder of interviews you’ll never see unless a Blacksuit brings me something stiffer than a polite request. Women in the PQ started dreaming a year ago: a cave, the prayer, the blood. And before you scoff, I tried it myself. I got in trouble, bled, prayed. A gargoyle came.” Her voice lost all diffidence.

“You saw them.”

“Yes.”

“So you know they’re not a danger.”

“Can I get that on the record?”

Tara didn’t blink. “Based on your own research, all they’ve done is help people. They saved you, and in return you’ve thrown them into the spotlight, in front of people who fear and hate them.”

Jones stood—so they could look at each other face-to-face, Tara thought at first. But then the reporter turned round and leaned back against her desk by Tara’s side, arms crossed. They stared out together over the newsroom and its orange human-shaped bees. Typewriter keys rattled and carriage returns sang. Upstairs, a soprano practiced runs. “You don’t know me, Ms. Abernathy.”

“Not well, Ms. Jones.”

“I came up in the Times, in Dresediel Lex, before I moved east.”

Tara said nothing.

“The Skittersill Rising was my first big story. I saw the protest go wrong. I saw gods and Craftsmen strangle one another over a city as people died under them. I know better than to trust either side, much less both at once. Priests and wizards break people when it suits you. Hells, you break them by accident. A gargoyle saved me last night. They’re doing good work. But the city deserves the truth.”

“It’s not ready for this truth.”

“I’ve heard that before, and it stinks. Truth’s the only weapon folks like me—not Craftsmen or priests or Blacksuits, just payday drunks—have against folks like you. Trust me, it’s flimsy enough. You’ll be fine.”

“I’m on your side.”

“You think so. I don’t have the luxury of trust.” She turned to Tara. “Unless you’d care to tell me why a Craftswoman working for the Church of Kos would take such an interest in crushing reports of the gargoyles’ return?”

“If the gargoyles are back,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “they might raise new issues for the church. That makes them my responsibility.”

Jones looked down at the floor. “The dreams started about a year ago, after Kos died and rose again. There were gargoyles in the city when Kos died, too. Maybe they never left. It sounds like more than the gargoyles came back.”

Tara built walls of indifference around her panic. “That’s an … audacious theory.”

“And you began to work for the church at about the same time. You sorted out Kos’s resurrection, saved the city. Maybe when you brought him back, you brought something else, too. Or someone.”

Tara unclenched her hand. Murdering members of the press was generally frowned upon in polite society. “Do your editors know you make a habit of baseless accusations?”

“Don’t treat us like children, Ms. Abernathy—not you, not Lord Kos, not the priests or the gargoyles or the Goddess Herself. If the world’s changed, the people deserve to know.”

Time’s one jewel with many facets. Tara leaned against the desk. A year ago she stood in a graveyard beneath a starry sky, and the people of her hometown approached her with pitchforks and knives and torches and murder in mind, all because she’d tried to show them the world was bigger than they thought.

Admittedly, there might have been a way to show them that didn’t involve zombies.

“People don’t like a changing world,” she said. “Change hurts.”

“Can I quote you on that?”

She left Gavriel Jones at her desk, alone among the bees.





5

Every city has forsaken places: dilapidated waterfront warehouses, midtown alleys where towers close out the sky, metropolitan outskirts where real estate’s cheap and factories sprawl like bachelors in ill-tended houses, secure in the knowledge their smoke won’t trouble the delicate nostrils of the great and the good.