Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(87)

Tara pushed back the velvet curtain. They rode past a broad dark space walled with brick: a park or a graveyard. Shale would know which. Wind shifted leaves like clouds above the wall. If there were graves, she could not see them.

Leaving a city was like peeling off a sticky bandage: no matter how fast you tried to go, a few grimy traces still lingered on your skin. Even after buildings gave way to open fields, Tara still didn’t feel as though they’d left Alt Coulumb. The skeleton of a burned house stood watch over swaying wheat.

“The moon roads would be faster,” Shale said. “All places are one where Seril’s moon shines.”

“The red-eye will get us to DL by sunrise, and I don’t want to take any more of Seril’s power than I have to. If we need her roads later, we’ll use them.”

They crested the western ridge and took a right turn through a spur of the Geistwood. Stars shone clear in the dark. Tara tasted their light. In Alt Coulumb, where human fires blunted the stars, wielding Craft felt like doing surgery wearing wool mittens. Out here, the mittens fell away, and her scalpel was sharp as ever.

“Was that really why you refused?” Shale asked.

“What, you think I’m unnerved by the thought of Seril carrying me through the god-realm? Conventional air travel’s safer, more comfortable, and almost as fast.”

The trees failed and the cab descended a long shallow slope to the airfield. Crystal fangs surrounded a blacktop paved with some distant volcano’s ash.

A dragon crouched on the runway.

Even at this distance, its scale beggared thought. The road passing beneath the dragon’s left wing to the embarkation hall seemed no thicker than a hair at this distance. Word problems: Based on that proportion, estimate the size of the creature on the tarmac. Determine the width of those black shining scales, the curvature of those teeth.

Trick question. No number could match the beast. Math did not follow the mind down such dark roads.

The dragon faced west. The tail gave an earthquake twitch. Broad chains crisscrossed its back, supporting the gondola. The observation deck across its shoulders perched on hydraulics to keep level as the wings beat. Vast slitted eyes cast spotlight circles on the ground.

“Safer,” Shale said, doubtful.

A bus rattled past them, bound cityward and uphill, carrying only an old woman in dark glasses, her hands crossed over a carpetbag.

*

Gavriel Jones ducked under the police line and entered the topless tower in the Ash where she had almost died the night before.

She picked her way across ground-floor rubble. At the entrance to the long, dark, winding stair she hesitated, though she would never have admitted any reason for the pause beyond a wish to finish her last cigarette.

The climb was easier than she remembered. Moonlight leaked through chinks in the tower’s mortar, but did not relieve the darkness.

A long time later she emerged onto the tower roof.

Last night she’d found a troop of gargoyles waiting here. Troop probably wasn’t the correct noun. An intimidation of gargoyles? And a throne, and a Lady atop the throne. The interview of a lifetime, half-finished.

The troop was gone. The throne lay broken, one great horn snapped off at the base. Demonglass had melted like dew, leaving scores on stone to mark last night’s battle.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

She did not, to her credit, jump. Her Hot Town alley savior emerged from behind the broken throne: broad-shouldered and tiger-faced Aev. Curled beneath her wings, she’d blended with the rubble. Clawscratch mapped her skin.

Gabby remembered Aev wrestling with demons last night, remembered the moonlight that wept from her wounds.

“The rooftop is not safe.” Aev rounded the dais. Dust shivered at her footsteps. “We drained this stone too much for you to trust it.”

“You’re still here.”

“We have spent much of our faith here,” she said. “We made this space holy, thin and timeless. Someone must guard it, though the stone here is no longer strong enough to heal us.” She touched the scars across her chest. “I remain. The others sought holes in the soil, deep shadows in the water, abandoned warehouses where they can recover.”

“Will they?”

“One has passed,” Aev said. “Karst. You did not know him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We will carve another in his honor,” she said. “If we live so long.”

“You don’t—die—often.”

“We do not age in your manner. Few accidents harm us. We fall in battle, or never. But that is not so rare as you may think.”

“This is my fault,” she said.

“Did you let demons into Alt Coulumb?”

“If I hadn’t reported on you, none of this would have happened.”

“Or it would have happened later.” Aev sat on the dais and laid one hand on a fallen horn of stone. “You might as well call this my fault for saving you, when you entered the Hot Town. My child rebuked me for that. We are both creatures of obligation, Ms. Jones: I was built to serve. You haven’t walked the path of a cause until you molded yourself to its form.”

“Why did you save me? You knew what I was.”

“They were hurting you.”

Gabby kept quiet for a while. “Seril isn’t here.”