Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(81)

“And fail,” the thunder said.

“Quests take time she doesn’t have. And when she fails, Alt Coulumb will be ours.” She clasped her hands and shook them as if preparing to cast a die. “Either way, gentlemen, I look forward to the next few days.”

The storm tolled satisfaction, and high dark clouds laughed, grim and vicious and proud, though not so grim nor so vicious nor so proud as Madeline Ramp.

*

“Okay,” Tara said. “Let’s get to work.”





41

“Thanks for coming,” Tara told Abelard as they rode north to the Alt Coulumb offices of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao.

“You really think this will work?”

“Maybe.” A pothole jarred them. “If the Cardinals hadn’t played so close to the vest since Seril came back, we wouldn’t be scrambling now.”

“Churches don’t change overnight,” he said.

“We’ve had a year.”

“A year is overnight for a church.” He leaned back into velvet cushions and crossed his arms, smiling around his cigarette.

“Why so smug?”

“You said ‘we.’”

The carriage let them off at the base of a forty-story glass thorn unmarked by gargoyle prayers and veined with elevator shafts. The building had no door, but one opened anyway when Tara approached.

Black marble and chrome walled the lobby. There were no security guards visible, visible being the operative word. Tara noticed, while they waited for the elevator, that striations in the marble moved when she wasn’t looking.

“That one looks like a mouth,” Abelard said. “So does that one.”

She said nothing. The elevator dinged.

On the ride up, she said, “The next few days will be hard for you.”

He lit a second cigarette with the ember of the first. “I’ll do what I can. Trust in the Lord and His work. I wish I could go with you.”

There was something swollen in her throat. Lousy time to come down with a cold. “I’ll be fine. We both will. This will work.” He didn’t ask how she knew, for which she was grateful.

With a ding, the doors rolled back, and they emerged into a glass maze.

Anywhere else, Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao’s local office would reside in a skyspire floating over the city. Craftsmen drew strength from starlight and needed buildings that could rise above cloud cover and clinging smog. Alt Coulumb’s flight interdict made such crystal palaces impossible, so the firm’s interior designers adopted an aesthetic echoing the heavens they were denied.

Glass walled the foyer, and glass hallways led to glass conference rooms and offices. Some panes were smoked translucent, others matte black; employees could adjust opacity as needed. The receptionist (a suited man with thin dark hair and the thick frame of an athlete who had abandoned his sport) sat at a translucent glass desk; his lower body was a textured black blur.

Tara’s skin felt so tight she feared it might split. What was she afraid of? This was just an immensely powerful firm she’d snubbed by quitting.

“Tara Abernathy,” she said to the receptionist, “and Technician Abelard of the Church of Kos Everburning, for Elayne Kevarian.”

The receptionist rifled through a book whose writing tangled and rearranged as the pages turned. “She’s not in the office. And she’s dreaming.”

“It’s urgent. Any way you could slot us in?”

“Your name, again?”

“Abernathy.”

He flipped to the rear of the book, consulted an index, changed back, frowned, scribbled a note on a slip of paper, and slid it into a pneumatic tube.

Far beneath the wooden floor, in a chamber walled with concrete, silver, polycarbonate steel, and sound-deadening foam, rows of dreamers lay chained to tables, gagged and blindfolded. The gags muffled their screams and kept them from gnawing off their tongues. An attendant took the receptionist’s note from the pneumatic tube, bent beside a dreamer, removed the muff from her ear, and whispered the message there. The woman went rigid, twitched, and with the quill pen bound to her free hand scribbled a response on a roll of paper that spooled beneath her pen nib. The attendant razored the response free, returned to the vacuum tube, and—

Tara knew the process—she’d never been much of a nightmare jockey, but one did familiarize oneself with the basic tools of one’s profession—but she was glad she didn’t have to watch. Blood and piss didn’t mesh with professional attire. But that, as the Iskari said, was war. No arguing with efficiency: in under a minute, the pneumatic tube vomited her answer. “A technician will join you shortly.” A complex Craftwork sigil occupied the center of his desk, all correspondence runes and irreproducible angles. He traced a glyph-line sequence, and green fire trailed his fingertip. “Have a seat.”

“Maybe we could leave a message?” Abelard whispered.

“We can still talk to her. We have to jump a few hurdles first, is all.”

“What kind of hurdles?”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll be fine.”

The tech escorted them down a smoked-glass hall to a chamber of tables with tops molded to fit the usual human extremities. “Lie here,” she said, with a slight Camlaander lilt, “side by side, if you please.”