Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(91)

The gut dread stopped.

She stood beside the dragon’s eye. It was taller than she was, and not completely closed. A curve of hunter’s moonlight showed beneath the lid.

The eye opened.

It glistened, wet, immense, slit-pupiled like a cat’s. The dark beyond the pupil seemed sharp, as if there were facets inside.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she said. Dragons did not eat people often, certainly not ones they’d agreed to carry.

The dragon watched her as they flew west.

She looked up, because down was too far and so was out, and back and to either side only confronted her with more dragon. The space between the stars comforted her, thick and rich as good chocolate. She’d spent too long in cities. Even the stars above a Craft-ruled metropolis could not match a country midnight. Her eyes adjusted, and the universe emerged. Meeker stars assembled into constellations for which she knew a hundred names, and at last the galactic bow curved above, milky and mottled with indistinct millions. “Nice night.”

—Yes.

Sound below sound composed the voice. She did not fall, nor did she yelp, though she almost did both. Even a Craftswoman could fake only so much composure set beside, well.

“I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”

—There was song before, and there will be song after.

“I see.”

—I play no role in cabin service. If you have trouble, please direct your concerns to the crew.

“I don’t,” she said. “Or at least I don’t have any trouble they can fix. I needed a walk. Were you singing?”

—Meditating.

“Dragons meditate?”

—You do not carry all your soul within yourself.

“I’d go mad. The more you have, the faster your mind spins. It comes apart. That’s what banks are for.”

—Imagine how it feels to have a hoard.

“Oh,” she said. “So you meditate to handle it?”

—Some lose themselves in riddle games or chess or weiqi. Some tell tales or explore. Some dream new worlds. I still the spinning.

“I could use some of that myself.”

—Yes.

“And you carry people from place to place.”

—Yes.

“Why?” After she spoke, she felt a stab of fear that drawing the dragon’s attention to the ludicrous fact of its employment might cause the creature to shrug free of chains, cabins, and gondola alike.

—Are you interested in the particulars of my case, or in general philosophy?

She did not know how to answer, so she said nothing.

—You wonder at power yoked to service. You wonder because you have come into power young and are learning that power comes through the acceptance of a bond. But if to have power is to be bound, then what is power?

“I wouldn’t have put it that way,” she said.

—I bear these people because Craftsmen, broadly speaking, do not love what they cannot use, and destroy what they do not love. So I make myself useful in some minimal way, as do others of my kind.

“Because you’re afraid of us?”

—No. Because I enjoy flying far and fast, and I find this work more pleasant.

“Than what?”

—War.

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said. “But don’t you find it sad that you have to live like this? That you can’t just hum in a cave somewhere?”

—No.

She waited.

—I find it funny.

“What?”

—We are what we ever were: huge, strong, and ancient beyond your reckoning. We have crossed vast gulfs of time and space. And you think (the subsonic dread returned in sharp pulses rather than the earlier sustained note, and her mind named the dread pattern laughter) you think because looking at us you can say that one draws a salary, this one bears us from place to place, that your limited comprehension gives you any measure of safety or control.

Far ahead, lightning flashed green between towered clouds.

“I’d like to stay out here for a while,” Tara said. “If it’s all right with you. I won’t talk. I just want to watch.”

The great eye closed.

Soon the hum returned.





46

“I hate this place,” Shale said as they fought through the plaster labyrinth of Dresediel Lex Metropolitan Airport alongside three thousand other people and their luggage. Most of the crowd were business travelers, but a fraction trailed bellhops and brass luggage carts driven by rat brains—and, like pebbles in an hourglass, that fraction was more than enough to stem traffic’s flow. “Why would anyone live here?”

“The weather’s nice.”

“They have to import water”—with audible scorn—“from outside the city. How good can the weather be?”

“It doesn’t rain, for one thing.” She danced sideways to avoid tripping over the rolling suitcase of a scale-skinned Craftsman who’d turned an unexpected left. “Except once or twice a year. Then it floods.”

“Every fall like clockwork the whole country catches fire. The earth shakes!”

Recovering her footing, Tara almost bowled over two women arguing in a language she didn’t know. “What do you expect? They have enormous lava serpents underground.”