Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(82)

Tara kicked off her shoes and lay back. The table adjusted to her body’s contours. Abelard drilled his finger into the tabletop, then watched the wood flow to fill the pit he’d made. “Come on,” Tara said. “We don’t want to keep her waiting.”

Abelard reclined.

“Do you sleepwalk?” the tech asked.

“I don’t think so.”

Tara shook her head.

“Good.” She adjusted a few levers and turned a few wheels beneath the bed. “Any preexisting medical conditions? No smoking, please.”

Abelard set the cigarette, still burning, on the table.

“Thank you.” From a drawer in the wall the tech produced two paper-wrapped wreaths and slit the paper with a knife. “Completely sterile. Hold still.” The circlets were stainless steel and hinged. Sharp prongs jutted inward.

Abelard squirmed as the needles settled against his skin. “Is this necessary?”

“Yes,” said Tara and the tech at once.

She’d done this before, but still she drew her breath when the tech bent over her. The circlet crimped her hair as it closed. Stupid design—probably built by balding Technicians to balding spec. The circlet’s spikes needled her skin.

“Very good,” the tech said. Had they chosen her for her accent? It should have soothed, but nothing set Tara so on edge as the sense she was being soothed. The tech’s fingers pressed firm, soft, and cool against her wrist. The woman was paid to touch people, and did so with as much routine disregard as one would expect. Tara wondered—not a prurient interest, just abstract curiosity—whether the tech had to set all that aside when she lay with a lover, the way Craftswomen learned to discard habits of boardroom argument at home. Were this woman’s hands always her instruments?

Abelard laughed when she took his pulse.

“Hold still,” the tech said. “You’ll feel a tickling sensation.”

Then the needles went in, and the pain started.

*

Fangmouthswallowinggroundingoutgearsanddigestedtopulpbyathicketofthorncurledshapes

to wake from the dark dream of herself in a well-appointed office where, told to sit, she sat

Walkforwardtosomethingyouthinkisfreedomdownahalllinedwithrazorsangledin

and with every step the razors near, halfway down the hall and they press against your skin, dimpling flesh, and you can’t turn back because the light beyond the door at the end of the hall is so beautiful you could fall into it forever, at last, happy—there’s a monster behind you but you’re not afraid of monsters, even ones like this sculpted from childhood centipede fears, hooked legs too large for that enormous body and moving fast, a primal terror that barely makes sense because when save in the farthest mouse-shadows of history did your ancestors have to fear spiders? No, monsters do not scare you. But to face them, to defend yourself, would be to turn from the light at the end of the razor hall, which you cannot do. Your life waits there for you. Light washes you like water, like the tears you weep, like—Mom—rare as a father’s approving smile, it’s there and only your own skin is stopping you so you

step

into

the

razors

and

the

razors

bite

and you scream, you bleed, they’re inside you, cold lines rasping bone, but you’ve done this to yourself and having come so far what’s another

step

or

scream?

As Tara struck the deep and primal unifying terror, unseen machines channeled her through that fear, tore her to a gurgle of white noise like grinding glass and seashore rush and trills on a sharped violin.

And she was through.

Panting. Crouched. Naked.

She made herself clothes: the cream-colored suit Shale bought her. Arranged her hair. Looked down through glass into a city.

She crouched under Rampart Boulevard in Alt Coulumb’s Central Business District. Skyscrapers plummeted to a vanishing point beneath her. Men and women and golems and snakelings and skeletons strolled below, their feet inches from hers, separated by a translucent pane of crystal perfectly flat on Tara’s side. They did not realize they walked upside down. Robes, slacks, and dresses draped in the usual way. Braids did not fall up. A carriage rolled past. She heard nothing.

Stomach and world turned somersaults together. She looked up in hope of relief.

Bad idea.

She stood on what seemed a crystal plane, beneath which Alt Coulumb jutted down into blue sky. But the plane was in fact a shallow bowl rising in slow swell on all sides, here slashed with ocean froth, there scraped with green, the crystal curve at vision’s edge so tall it would shame the tallest mountain Tara had ever seen—no, not the bottom of a bowl at all. She craned her neck back and back, and far above the walls arched and joined to a domed roof, and up there she saw stars that were streetlights and stars that were also stars.

She stood in the empty inside of the globe.

She felt the architecture of this dream. She could scream into the void. She could pound the glass with enough force to crack planets and burn stars. It would never break. The world’s hollow heart was her empire and her tomb.

But she was not alone.

Abelard lay beside her, moaning. He flickered in and out, by turns old and young, corpse shriveled, rotten, infant, empty robe, man-shaped inferno.

The dream’s third occupant stood with her back toward them—a slender woman in a dark suit, with short storm-white hair. This was a strange angle from which to see Elayne Kevarian. With her back turned, she might be anyone.