Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(97)

“That’s Dad talking.”

She caught her retort between clenched teeth. Ungrateful— Sister.

“Sorry,” Claire said.

Ellen stopped, surprised. She’d leaned toward Claire as she did to resist the wind, or their dad when he was shouting. “Thank you,” Ellen said. “Hold on.” She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again Claire thought she saw light inside, like when a priest offered blessing. The light passed, though. Maybe it was only a reflection. But Ellen’s smile, too, seemed like a younger girl’s—the smile Claire’d received as payment when she let her five-year-old sister win at tag. “This way.”

Carriages rolled down Summer past the alley’s mouth. Ellen stopped on a dirty stoop, straightened her blouse, and knocked.

No answer came, nor any sound of footsteps.

Overhead, a crow called.

“Nobody’s home,” Claire said. “We shouldn’t wait around.”

Ellen tried the knob. The door creaked open onto a narrow winding stair. “Come on!” And before Claire could react, Ellen ran inside and up, jumping three steps at a time. Her skirt flared as she disappeared around a corner.

Claire caught up with her on the third-floor landing. Ellen had already knocked on the door of apartment 3A, and stood, hands behind her back, face fixed in an expression Claire also knew: nervous, and trying not to show.

Hard rhythmic taps approached behind the door. A cat cried. Claire wanted to leave, but not so much as she wanted to look strong for Ellen.

You think you know a city, she thought. You’ve lived here all your life, and then you follow your sister down a side street you’d never walk alone, and you remember there are people in this town we don’t know, and things that aren’t people but wear their skin, and maybe we’re about to die because you just knocked on some monster’s door.

The footsteps stopped. A cracked voice said, “Who’s there?”

Hells, Claire thought. I’m as crazy as I think she is.

“Ma’am, I’m Ellen Rafferty. We share a friend. She’s helped us both, and now she needs our help back.”

Chains unchained. Locks unlocked. The door cracked.

The woman within—dark skin and white eyes and a narrow white cane with a rubber tip on the end—wore a housecoat and fray-hemmed trousers, and did not look like a monster at all. “Come in,” she said. “Tell me more.”

*

A large and scared and ugly crowd gathered to hear the evening news.

Abelard on tiptoe craned his neck to see over the mounded shoulder of a bald, jean-jacketed man who stank of fish and salt. Past him and a sea of surging heads and shoulders and clapboard signs, the bare stage rose before the Crier’s Guild doors. Fisherfolk and dockhands, secretaries, line cooks, stevedores and factory women, Craftsmen and priests and bartenders off-shift had come hungry to hear what truth there was to the rumors of a Goddess’s return.

The sun declined.

Abelard ached from a day sprinting around the city preaching to preachers. The dawn song had conveyed Ramp’s challenge, and fear of the coming struggle burned through the city. Abelard went where Hildegard sent him, spreading grace to parish priests and local deacons. The Lord, he repeated, is pleased by the Goddess’s return. He asks for our faith as He fights on her behalf.

Even among priests, reactions ranged: acceptance, rage, glory, denial. One man, bent-backed and broken-voiced and old enough to remember Seril leaving for the wars, wept. Abelard held his hand.

Tonight Lord Kos would have many long talks with His chosen shepherds.

But their flocks took the news harder.

So Abelard had come to the Guild for evensong, in case of need.

“We can’t deal with this many.” Sister Evangelist Hildegard pressed beside him in the throng: crimson robed, dark skinned, hair bound in a kerchief. “The Suits rerouted traffic down through Providence, but any trouble and we’ll be crushed.” Bodies filled the square and the blocked street. “Those guys make matters worse.” She pointed up to the rooftops, where a ring of silvered Blacksuits stood.

“Justice can keep the peace.”

“You don’t stop a riot by punching people.”

“If you punch enough of them, maybe.”

“That would just make things worse.”

“Stun nets?”

“Can kill. Let’s hope the Criers give a good show. If they don’t—” She clapped Abelard on the shoulder. “Good thing we have a saint handy.”

The doors of the Crier’s Guild opened, and the crowd hushed.

*

Zurish tribesmen don’t have 120 words for snow. It rains every day in the jungles of Southern Kath, but folk who live there lack the 70 names for water falling from the sky that armchair wits on six continents commonly ascribe to them. Grow up in the Northern Gleb and you’ll see a lot of sand, but it’s all sand in the end.

Gabby Jones knew this. But the myths had roots: live with anything long enough and you’ll learn its grades. Girls from Northern Zur, where the sun takes three months of vacation every year, know the differences between snow that falls like a rock and snow that floats like a feather and snow that burns.

In the same way, performers learn varietals of silence. There’s the cut-rate hush of the obligatory concert on a too-hot summer afternoon, and the sweet tense calm before a loved but rarely seen performer steps onstage. The sad quiet with which a crowd awaits a casualty report sticks and clings. The silence of a barroom when a sweating Crier calls “Extra”—the pause before an enormity’s announced—that silence cuts surer than glass.