Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(95)

Antonia extended her hand. Tara thanked her and descended.

The King in Red lay in swim trunks on a lounge chair, his pale anklebones crossed atop bamboo slats. The red gold crown set into his skull glinted dull and bloody in the sun.

White sand pillowed Tara’s footsteps. Waves rushed and rolled. Bodies thronged the beach a hundred meters to her left and right: college kids tossed Frisbees, musician circles played guitars and drums and fiddles, surfers charged the breakers. Children kicked ullamal and cackled as they fell. Tara did not hear them. Their voices died on the crystal air.

The King in Red kept still as she approached. She gave his chair wide berth, rounding to the side. His ribs jutted from the chair like tree trunks a fire had stripped of bark and left to die.

One skeletal hand held a round glass three-quarters full (or one-quarter empty) of a weapons-grade pink cocktail shaded by four paper umbrellas and sporting a spear of tiny melon cubes interspaced with jadeite giraffes. Ice shifted in the glass.

He wore sunglasses, which made no sense. Golden tabs affixed the glasses to the holes where his ears would have been.

She stood, hands clasped behind her, watching and waiting. There were greater powers than the King in Red. It was just hard to think of any at this precise moment.

He raised the glass to where his lips once were, and drank. She watched the liquid disappear.

“Your Majesty,” she began, to be on the safe side.

“I know who you are, Ms. Abernathy. I know why you’ve come.”

His voice was almost human. The difference mattered.

“That will save time, Your Majesty.”

“Drop the Majesty. I have enough. I told Elayne I’d see you, and I have. You can go now.”

“I want to present my argument.”

“It’s good to want things.” He drank again, and again the fluid disappeared—reduced to chaos, all useful properties stripped to feed the Craftwork that kept the King in Red whatever he was. “Alive” was the wrong word. “I want to hear from an old friend once in a while for some reason other than business. You want me to hand you a fortune for no reason. Your stone companion wants to murder me, though he’s displaying admirable self-control.”

“Would you like me to stop?” Shale asked. Jewel facets glinted beneath his imitation human eyes.

“Try me.” The skeleton sounded bored. “Get this over with. I’ve killed so many of you before, in very many ways.” His voice went singsong for that last bit, then lost all humor. “I tore your goddess open and ripped her heart and lungs from the ruin of her chest. Break yourself on me, if you like. You’re not the hundredth or even the thousandth to try. And when I’m done with you, I’ll go back to my drink.”

He took another sip. Translucent giraffes danced with sun.

“Shale!”

There was no Craft in Tara’s cry, but Shale stopped anyway, halfway to the King in Red. He’d begun to change. His skin was veined with gray and hatched with gleaming gaps, his back a wreckage of wings. The human seeming reasserted itself; the jaw cracked to fit shrinking teeth together. He knelt, gasping, on the sand. His shirt hung tattered from his shoulders. Scars crossed his back where the wounds had been.

The King in Red sat up and turned to face them both, elbows on knee bones, ridged spine rising between his shoulder blades. Cocktail sweat darkened his fingers. Of their own accord, the sunglasses slipped down to reveal the dead-star sparks in his eye sockets. “Interesting. It listens to you.”

“He,” Tara said, “is an envoy of my client, Seril Undying of Alt Coulumb. Who is still alive.”

“As I learned yesterday.”

“News travels fast.”

“Fast as fear.”

“Ramp approached you.”

He shrugged. “I own a good deal of Kosite debt in my own name. Red King Consolidated holds more. She’s approached everyone with a substantial stake. Some of us have better things to do at the moment than fight a war, even a limited one.” He waved toward the waves. “As you see. So you needn’t worry about me participating in her coup.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Why did you listen to her?” he asked Shale. The gargoyle had recovered, mostly. Sweat slipped down curves of muscle. “Here I am. You’ve hated me for decades. I killed your lady, or close to it, and I liked it. I’ll even give you first crack. No shields, or wards, or tricks.”

Shale stood. Tara prepared to bind him, in case her voice would not suffice this time. Given how hurt he’d seemed in that momentary shift, her restraint might break him. He wasn’t in shape for a fight.

He might still try.

“Tara asked me not to fight you.”

“And you listened,” the skeleton said.

“Yes.”

Crimson sparks turned on her. “You’ve inspired a divine monster’s loyalty. Nice trick. It earns you my time.” He glanced at the sky. “In five minutes the sun will turn the waves to gold and mark a path straight out over the bay to my favorite island. The air and sea are perfect, and the world sings. You’ll be gone by then, one way or another. Speak quickly.”

“When you killed Seril in the God Wars, you stole Alt Coulumb’s skies from her.”

“They were spoils of war.”

“Alt Coulumb’s liturgy holds that Kos owns Alt Coulumb’s skies in the event of Seril’s death.”