Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(99)

Yes, she prayed, like that, but softer on the high end, and if you can do something about the delay— She coaxed the singers with her fingertips, shaped their sound, invoked the basses, and ushered sky-borne echoes back into the blend.

Skein voices spun into song.

(Which should have been impossible. Sound had a finite speed, like light. The words her choir sang on earth ought to take a fraction of a second to reach the sky, and seconds more to return. But gods were outside time. And that thought, in turn, had implications she resolutely ignored for fear of going mad.) She directed her choir, and her gods. Alex in the alto section wept, but her voice kept steady.

They sang truth, and the city listened.





49

The Godmountain had many names. Failfire, some Badlands tribes called it, and told its story. At time’s dawn, a tide of flame burned the green world to ash from sea to sea, burned the ash to bare stone, and would have burned the stone itself had not the Lady of the Plains challenged it. Proud, the fire came, and when it came the Lady wrapped it three times round: first in a cage of her hair, second in a lake of her blood, and third in a mountain of her bone. The fire, more fierce than clever, scorched her hair, and simmered her blood, and blackened her bone—but the hair, scorched, melted to wire, and the blood, simmered, thickened to lava, and the bone, blackened, fused to stone, and the more the fire burned, the worse it trapped itself.

Still, the Lady of the Plains knew one day the fire would burn free. So she wrapped it in a fourth and final maze made from her own mind: mirrors reflecting mirrors within, so the fire could burn and burn but only burn itself. Beneath Failfire, the Lady plays time’s game, deceiving, outracing a pursuing flame. Some holy men and women enter the Godmountain’s caves to chant old chants and eat certain mushrooms and hear her laughter and her cries.

Homesick, Drakspine fisherfolk called the mountain, for soil taken from its slopes pulls always toward the spot from which it came. The fisherfolk made necklaces from its stone in ancient days when their boats roamed the Kathic coast and crossed the ocean Old Worlders call the Pax, to Xivai and the archipelagic West. (Their descendants, who live in Kovak, claim their fathers and mothers even reached the Shining Empire, that those wandering weathered explorers were the Ocean Sages of Imperial legend—but tell that to an anthropologist and they’ll offer you a good deal on mousefeathers or the Camlaander Channel.) But this much is true: Homesick stone does always point toward home, and each piece of the mountain let off its chain will swim oceans and worm across earth until it returns to the face from which it was hewn.

Site A-313, the Kovak Central Mining Concern called it. “Which,” Tara said, turning a page and squinting to read by lantern light, “tells you everything you need to know about the Kovak Central Mining Concern.” Site A-313, rich in copper and rare elements essential for high-energy Craftwork, rail-convenient to Kovak, Regis, and Dresediel Lex, ripe for exploitation. “You need these elements for industrial-scale necromancy, and there aren’t many places in Northern Kath you can get them without pissing locals off, since the mining process leaks.”

“Leaks?”

She compared her travel guide’s map to the flyspeck printing on the sheet the Two Serpents Group offices gave her. “Mining runoff enters the groundwater, people who drink it have higher mortality rates, and one or two sigmas greater than average chance of doing the wandering brain-chomping undead thing after death. No big deal.”

“It sounds like a big deal.” Outside the carriage window, over the tops of trees, the mountain grew. Its vicious black stone peak jutted toward the stars.

“Long as the Concern uses proper containment, there’s no outbreak. Problem is, containment isn’t working.”

“So there’s a zombie horde out there?”

“I mean,” she said, and trailed off.

Shale looked at her from across the carriage.

“Horde is pejorative. So’s zombie, for that matter, if you’re not referring to the Archipelagese religious practice.”

He did not speak then, either.

“Fine. Yes.”

“That explains why we had such a hard time getting a taxi to the camp.”

“Basically.” They’d had to pay the horse double, with a promised tip that would gouge away most of her expense account.

“And you wonder why the God Wars happened.”

“That’s not fair. The containment system should have worked. This is an isolated event—one site with one problem. Without the resources we pull out of the ground here, no one could do large-scale revenant agriculture. Price of food goes up, people starve. Do you want children to starve?”

“It’s just one problem at one site.”

“Yes.”

“So’s a stab wound.”

“I’m not having this conversation with you anymore.”

A high-pitched howl split the night, and others joined it. “Let me guess. Undead wolves?”

“Shambling wildlife,” Tara said, “isn’t the real problem with a leak.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“Yes, fine, undead wolves. But the issue, believe it or not, is weeds.”

“Weeds.”

“The seepage spread south into the water supply for industrial farms in Centervale. Have you ever farmed?”