Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(92)
“Before the wars, the gods kept the rain coming here. But with the gods dead, what’s left? The city survives only because it steals water from others. These people are an affront to the world.”
“Now you’re being dramatic. The world doesn’t mind.”
“Fires. Earthquakes.”
“Lava serpents, like I said.” Signboard arrows suggested that three different hallways all led to GROUND TRANSPORT. Tara chose right, saw a construction bottleneck, and reversed course. Shale, turning, upended a golem, who sprang to his feet, raised scissorfingers, gnashed fangs, and chattered a clockwork challenge. Shale didn’t speak demonic, but he understood the body language and responded in kind: chin up, shoulders back, pecs tense under his shirt. Tara grabbed Shale’s bones with a slip of Craft meant to animate skeletons and jerked him after her, ignoring his glare as he recovered his footing. “The city’s bigger than what it costs.”
He frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Dresediel Lex is a symbol to the Craftwork world.” The long hall narrowed and grew brutalist, without windows or even ads to relieve the pale plaster. Glass doors opened at the hallway’s end, and past those doors she saw another pair, and after those, sun. “The God Wars lasted a hundred years give or take. Imagine fighting your own people for a century.”
“I don’t have to imagine,” Shale said.
“Fair enough.” Almost outside. Free air melted on the tongue like spun sugar. “Gods owned the earth and hated us, so we built our nations in the sky. By the time the wars crossed from the Old World to the New, both sides were exhausted, desperate, mean. Dresediel Lex was our great victory. Once these gods fell, Liberation cascaded through the continent. For the first time in history, there was a city where the dead walked, and we could fly.”
They swept through, past sign-bearing chauffeurs and waiting family. Two dark men embraced. The second layer of doors rolled back, and they emerged into Dresediel Lex.
Tara felt the city’s hot breath on her skin and its sun on her face.
She was done walking for a while.
She’d visited Dresediel Lex in her caravan days to hock wares in dusty markets and fill warded wagons with goods for sale to the farm towns of the central plains—and she visited again on spring break with friends from the Hidden Schools. So it was not surprise that made her stop.
It may have been awe.
Overhead, the sky was dry and enormous, the color of paintings on Shining Empire pottery. It did not hang or arc or curve. It rose forever.
Crystal towers hung upside down in air above the free city, breaking sunlight to a billion-prismed rainbow. To the west, juniper and manzanita matted the Drakspine hills dusk green, but at street level palm trees and clawfoot azalea grew emerald leaves that boasted of piped water in defiance of all drought.
Pyramid peaks crested above the hills.
The heat was an oven’s, and a magnifying-glass sun beat down. Her skin, long accustomed to weak Alt Coulumb light, felt its use again.
A buzzing came across the sky.
Shale, beside her, recoiled. Of course: he did not know this city, or its odd ways of moving people. Dark forms speared from the high blue to earth, and as they fell became four-foot-long dragonflies with broad wings. They landed upon the men and women outside the airport, gripped them with long legs, touched feathery proboscises to the backs of necks, and bore them skyward.
“What are those?” Shale asked.
Tara grinned. “Our ride.”
As families reunited and drivers swept businesswomen toward carriages, as food carts hawked bottled water and candied nuts, as an old man played a Quechal tune on a three-string fiddle, the newcomer to Dresediel Lex took flight. Their wings laid rainbows on the earth.
“Gods,” Tara said. “I missed this.”
*
Gods, Abelard prayed as the meeting entered its fourth hour. Deliver me.
“And if you require further information on our foreign bond positions, Brother Amortizer Stefan has prepared detailed archives of relevant scripture. Our record-keeping procedures are normalized according to the Interfaith Standards Council 19001, so they should be fully interoperable with your systems. Now, if you’ll turn to page eighteen—”
Deliverance was not forthcoming. The team from Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao turned to page eighteen.
The five Craftsmen and Craftswomen sat interspersed with Cardinals and the clerical team. Abelard had assumed Tara and Ms. Kevarian were typical Craftswomen, but these didn’t match his expectations. At least the partner, Wakefield, seemed right: distant and elegant in white suit and vest, thin lips carved to convey the air of a person who’s just told a joke no one in attendance gets. Aside from Wakefield, the team consisted of one woman—Saqqaf, with a ruby fixed in place of her left eye—and three men whose names Abelard hadn’t yet got straight. Skane was the tall one, no, Cao was the tall one and Skane had the deep belly and the slumped shoulders and the diagonal scars on either cheek, no, that was Hedge, which made Skane the man with the thin mustache. But then Wakefield referred to him as “Mr. Cao,” interrupting Bede’s review of page eighteen. “Mr. Cao is our team’s document management expert. He’ll bridge the field team with the courtroom, which I’ll hold.”
But the tall one—Skane?—almost opened his mouth before the man Wakefield addressed—Cao, evidently—spoke. “I’ll coordinate document intake and review. For this contest, we need deep knowledge, not just thematics. We need instant access to moment-by-moment data. Brother Amortizer Stefan—”