Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(8)
Alt Coulumb’s hardest harshest parts lay to its west and north, between the Paupers’ Quarter and the glass towers of the ill-named Central Business District—a broken-down region called the Ash, where last-century developments left to crumble during the Wars never quite recovered, their land rights tied up in demoniacal battles. Twenty-story stone structures rose above narrow streets, small compared to the modern glass and steel needles north and east, but strong.
Growing up in the country, Tara had assumed that once you built a building you were done—not the farmhouses and barns and silos back in Edgemont, of course; those always needed work, the structure’s whole life a long slow deliquescence back to dust, but surely their weakness came from poor materials and construction methods that at best nodded toward modernity. But a friend of hers at the Hidden Schools studied architecture and laughed at Tara’s naiveté. When Tara took offense, she explained: skyscrapers need more care than barns. Complicated systems require work to preserve their complexity. A barn has no air-conditioning to break; free the elementals that chill a tower and the human beings within will boil in their own sweat. The more intricate the dance, the more disastrous the stumble.
The abandoned towers in the Ash were simple things, built of mortar, stone, and arches, like Old World cathedrals. If Alt Coulumb fell tomorrow, they’d still stand in five hundred years. Their insides rotted, though. Fa?ades broke. Shards of plate glass jutted from windowsills.
Tara approached on foot by daylight through the Hot Town. Kids loitered at alley mouths, hands in the pockets of loose sweatshirts, hoods drawn up in spite of the heat. Sidewalk sweepers stared at her, as did women smoking outside bars with dirty signs. Girls played double dodge on a cracked blacktop.
But when she reached the Ash, she was alone. Not even beggars lingered in these shadows.
The tallest tower lacked a top, and though black birds circled it, none landed.
Tara closed her eyes.
Outside her skull, it was almost noon; inside, cobweb cords shone moonlight against the black. This was the Craftswoman’s world, of bonds and obligations. She saw no traps, no new Craft in place. She opened her eyes again and approached the topless tower.
Sunlight streamed through broken windows. Jagged glass cast bright sharp shadows on the ruins within. Tara looked up, and up, and up, to the first intact structural vault seven stories overhead. The intervening floors had collapsed, and the wreckage of offices and apartments piled twenty feet tall in the tower’s center: splintered rotted wood, chunks of drywall, stone and ceramic, toilet bowls and countertops and tarnished office nameplates.
And of course she still couldn’t fly here, damn the jealous gods.
A few decades’ abandonment hadn’t weathered the walls enough to climb, even if she had equipment. She’d scaled the Tower of Art at the Hidden Schools, upside down a thousand feet in air, but she’d had spotters then, and what was falling to a woman who could fly? She considered, and rejected, prayer.
There had to be an entrance somewhere, she told herself, though she knew it wasn’t true.
On her third circuit of the floor, she found, behind a pile of rubble, a hole in the wall—and beyond that hole a steep and narrow stair. Maybe they hired cathedral architects for this building. Old habits died hard.
She climbed for a long time in silence and the dark. A fat spider landed on her shoulder, skittered down her jacket sleeve, and brushed the back of her hand with feathery legs; she cupped it in her fingers and returned it to its wall and webs. The spider’s poison tickled through her veins, a pleasant tension like an electric shock or the way the throat seized after chewing betel nut. A rat king lived in the tower walls, but it knew better than to send its rat knights against a Craftswoman. They knelt as she passed.
Twenty minutes later she reached the top.
Daylight blinded her after the long climb. She stepped out into shadowless noon. Clutching fingers of the spire’s unfinished dome curved above her. Blocks of fallen stone littered the roof. Iron arches swooped at odd angles overhead, stamped with runes and ornaments of weather-beaten enamel.
She turned a slow circle, saw no one, heard only wind. She slid her hands into her pockets and approached the root of one arch. It was not anchored in the stone, but beneath it, through a gap in the masonry, as if the arch had been designed to tilt or spin. She recognized the runes’ style, though she couldn’t read them. And the enameled ornaments, one for each of the many interlocking arches—
“It’s an orrery,” she said. “An orrery in your script.”
“Well spotted,” a stone voice replied.
She turned from the arch. Aev stood barely a body’s length away, head and shoulders and wings taller than Tara. Her silver circlet’s sheen had nothing to do with the sun. Tara had not heard her approach. She wasn’t meant to. “I knew you lived here. I didn’t realize it was your place, technically.”
“It isn’t,” Aev said. “Not anymore. When Our Lady fell in the God Wars, much was stolen from her, including this building.”
“I thought temples weren’t your style.”
“We are temples in ourselves. But the world was changing then, even here. We thought to change with it.” She reached overhead—far overhead—and scraped a flake of rust from the iron. “Even your heathen astronomy admits that the rock-which-circles-as-the-moon is the closest of any celestial body to our world. We thought to cultivate Our Lady’s glory through awe and understanding.”