Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(94)
“Okay.” Shale sounded unconvinced.
“This is important.” She fed their optera from her expense account—far from bottomless, but she could afford the ride. Travel by dragonfly felt strange at first. She’d been surprised when Shale accepted one rather than flying under his own power.
“He’s a monster.”
Tara shook her head. “He’s a respectable citizen. This city wouldn’t exist without him.”
“A man can be both citizen and monster. Especially here.”
“In which case he’s a monster and a respectable citizen, whom we’re about to ask for a big favor. Besides, if you try to kill him, you’ll probably just piss him off.”
“We almost broke him in the Wars.”
“Almost only counts with horseshoes and elder gods. He’s grown since you fought. And, honestly, I know you’ve had a rough few decades, but I wish things like don’t attack the immensely powerful necromancer we’ve come to ask for help could go unsaid.”
Streets crazed the irrigated ground like cracks on the scab of an infected wound. Elevated carriageways laced between pyramids—the largest, at 667 Sansilva, eighty stories tall and obsidian sheathed. Black glass grooves cast an illusion of writhing serpents on the pyramid’s steps.
As far as Tara could see, the city bore little damage from the eclipse fiasco a few years back; she’d been at Contracts with her friend Kayla when the news came through, and waited with her in the long line of weeping students at the nightmare telegraph to call her dads. The dreams around Dresediel Lex were so tangled Kayla couldn’t get through for two days, which Tara spent on the couch in Kayla’s dorm, sleeping poorly; she’d told Kayla to wake her if she needed anything, and the girl took her at her word. Kayla’s dads both lived—one broke his leg in the riots and the other spent three days stuck in a collapsed mall—but the waiting, not knowing, hurt.
Rebuilding, the city had turned a quarter mile of Sansilva Boulevard into a memorial walk. Tara decided she would visit if there was time.
For now, they had business at the Grisenbrandt Club.
North of Monicola Pier the beachside shops grew more expensive and elegant until they reached an expense and elegance singularity: the Grisenbrandt, a red-roofed, white-walled palace on the continent’s edge. A ward misted the air above its courtyards and rooftop baths, to keep even the most inquisitive journalist from observing the club’s clientele. The ward might have been opaque, but that wouldn’t have allowed spies and onlookers to envy the rainforest green inside.
Tara and Shale landed on a riverrock path between two lawns that beggared any adjective but “verdant.” The doorman (a Quechal fellow in sunglasses and a funereal suit, whose posture suggested experience as valet, bouncer, and special forces commando) frowned as their optera flew away. People who belonged in the club arrived under their own power. Rentals were for those not rich enough to own.
“Hi,” Tara said with the cheer she always felt when about to ruin a snob’s day, and produced the invitation the porter had delivered to her cabin this morning. “We have an appointment.”
The doorman took the invitation, skepticism evident even through his dark glasses. Tara savored his surprise as he read the document twice, turned it over to check for a watermark, then read it again.
“Of course,” the doorman said joylessly. The doors opened at his gesture. A young woman in a white blouse, an uncomfortable black skirt, and heels that forced her en pointe emerged. “Antonia will guide you.” Antonia’s smile slipped when she read the invitation. “Enjoy your visit.”
And to the nine hells with you too, Tara thought as she led Shale into the club.
They followed Antonia down a pillared arcade between two courtyards shaded with plant life stolen from around the world. Antonia’s absurd heels left bloodred footprints on the white marble tiles. Ripples of color spread from those footprints as they faded, interlacing with the ripples Tara’s and Shale’s footsteps cast.
In a courtyard, a jazz quartet played soft music while clubgoers, skeletal or amorphous or many-limbed, broke their fast at an enormous buffet: glistening piles of fresh-cut exotic fruits and bewitching pastries, an omelet station, an elegant silver bowl of wriggling insects that laughed when eaten. In a salon to the left, a Shining Empire magistrate sipped tea with a Zurish mask-lord in the shade of a broad-leaved Dhisthran tree, all equally far from home.
The part of Tara that would always hail from a farming village on the edge of a desert pondered the expense of the shifting marble, the plants, the wards, the water, the band, the silver, the price of Antonia and the front-door jerkface and their comrades, carried the three to the ten million’s place—then abandoned the exercise. In a way, this kind of wealth was easier to accept than the ease with which Daphne picked up their check at lunch. Even if Tara made partner at Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, she wouldn’t have lived in this world. You earned this power by stealing continents and breaking nations; this was wealth you tore from dying gods.
She frowned at the thought. What kind of radical was Alt Coulumb making her, anyway? Focus on the mission, Tara. Follow Antonia in the absurd heels.
The club doors opened onto a marble stair that led down to a white sand beach. Tara blinked brilliant ghosts from her vision.
The beach was empty save for a man who was not a man anymore.