Four Roads Cross (9 page)

“Shaped, we say, or carved. And we were not always so few. We were made of Alt Coulumb, not born of it, so the Lady gave us our own tongue. You could speak it too, if you opened your heart to Her.”

“Not likely,” she said, but Aev didn't rise to the bait. “How many of you were there?”

“Two hundred fifty-six, as of the eighth carving. Some fell in the Wars, and after. Some perished in exile. There is a grove in the Geistwood where many stand who gave up hope of seeing home again. They set aside the quickness of their body and sank their roots into living stone. They will not move for a turning of the world.”

“Gods.”

“We who hoped endured, and returned to aid a city that fears us. But now our very existence has placed our charge at risk.”

“Your charge. You mean, us.”

“Yes.”

Cat had grown up hearing stories of Stone Men. You weren't supposed to call them that now, but cradle tales and bedtime stories cut into bone. Unnatural creatures, her grandfather said. Smoke tinted her memories of the man, scarred and weather-cracked and half blind, his voice heavy with faithful decades of cigarette ash. He told her stories of Seril's death, of her children's mad grief, of talons and blood. And today she stood, grown, in a cramped stairwell, before their leader.

Aev was beautiful—not like art was beautiful, which was fine by Cat since she lacked taste for art, but beautiful like a thing made for a purpose. Her talons were sharp, her teeth were long. How many had she killed in the Wars?

“You waited here for me,” Cat said. “Why?”

“You saved us all. When we returned, we almost died at Denovo's hands, at the hands of Justice whom he warped against us. You resisted. You broke the chains that bound your soul, and stopped him. But you have avoided us in the months since.”

“You're intimidating.”

“We scare criminals and fools. We pose you no danger.”

“I—look. I'm a straightforward gal. Tara's the one for all the”—she waved her hand in a vague circle between them. “You know, scheming and plotting. I like things I can see and punch. Kos powers Alt Coulumb, and priests tend his machines. Fine. The Blacksuits work with Justice—and Seril, now—to help people. You guys, I don't know how you fit.”

“Neither do we.”

Cat held a smart reply ready on her tongue, but it slithered down her throat instead to nestle cold and prickly in her chest. “What do you mean?”

“We had a place here once,” she said, “but our home has changed. Now we skulk in shadows, for our presence endangers those our Lady shaped us to protect. We are servants denied service. Even the little we do, it seems, is too much. We were not made to be secret ministers. If we hide forever, what difference remains between us and the frozen ones who wait in the Geistwood grove?”

Cat looked into Aev's eyes and saw herself distorted looking back. “You have any plans for the next few hours?”

The huge head cocked to one side, and the fanged mouth compressed to a thin smile. “I intended to lurk.”

“Want to come for a ride?”

 

12

Alt Coulumb's docks lost none of their savor at night. In the handbook of the Palatine Perfumers' Guild, the recipe goes like this: Mash a global civilization of some four billion human beings and another, say, half handful billion others into a fine paste. Pound that mash against a mile of coastline and let dry in the sun, then steep the resulting extract in fish oil and engine grease. Salt heavily with sweat and spray. Zest the ambition of a thousand tradesmen and -women and small-business owners, from the rug-crouched silver seller to the mustachioed and gaptoothed iconmonger and the clutch of tattooed young women who sold dreamdust at the docks for the Farwright Syndicate. Add three-quarters of this zest raw, then gently blowtorch the remainder to lend that brutal sour edge of hope betrayed, since some ships never come in even for those who wait daily by the docks 'til long past dusk. Round out the odor with a long list of prosaic cargo: saffron, sandalwood, and cinnamon, paper, steel, demon-haunted manufactured goods, long planks of magisterium and sheafs of synthetic dragonscale (inferior in all respects to the real thing, save only for the practical point that the synthetic variety need not be harvested from a dragon), bananas by the crate and oranges by the tube and soybeans by the ton, green bottle after green bottle of wine, and of course the flat nothing-scent of the airtight vessels made from the processed bones of eons-dead monsters in which alchemists stored their toxic earths and strange silvers. Garnish—lightly—with what the Palatine Perfumer's Guild's contributing writers describe, in a rare and generous bout of euphemism, as “effluvia.”

The handbook includes a sidebar note indicating that, like most such purely descriptive recipes, the journeyman should regard this as a test of his own nasal and artistic fortitude, as well as his extraction skills. Sales, if any, will be small.

Cat gnawed the last meat from a skewer as she climbed the gangplank from the docks to the
Kel's Bounty.
“Law on deck!” the bos'n called, and she sketched a salute to the array of not-quite-savory characters that turned to her. By day the
Bounty
was a ship like any other, mortal-crewed with sailors from throughout the known world, with a slight bias to Archipelagese. The night crew hailed from a wider range of ports of call.

Raz appeared at the upper deck's rail. “What kept you?”

“Meetings,” she said.

He leapt over the rail, somersaulted, and landed light-footed on the boards. His eyes were true red in the moonlight, not the burned scab color they seemed in daytime shadows. “Anything important?”

“Probably,” she said, “but it'll keep. Glad to see you aren't on fire anymore.”

He wiggled his fingers. Thin scars crisscrossed his palm, tracks left by sunlight. The regrown skin was even darker than the rest of him. “There's a reason I tan. Course now I'll have to even out, or I'll get blotchy.”

“Some leech you are. Isn't your guys' thing more a sort of deathly pallor? I knew girls on the club circuit who went through my salary in white pancake makeup every month.”

“Dumb. Scenesters imitating form over function. Shoreland suckers in the Old World, the ones with castles, drew lines from skin to status—if you were pale, it meant you could afford people to do things for you in the day. The paler you are, the faster you burn, so if you're really pale it shows you're not scared of the peasants-with-pitchforks routine. Which is all well and good until you forget to adjust your clocks for daylight savings time, some traveler you wanted to put the moves on pulls off the window blinds at dawn, and you go up like dryer lint.”

“Daylight what?”

“It's an Old World thing. Are you ready to sail?”

Her pocket watch was ticking. “Yes. Everyone's aboard?”

“Hold's packed with your creepy friends.”

“Again with the creepy.” She waved at the crew scuttling, skittering, and lurching around the
Kel's Bounty
deck. “What do you call these?”

“Sailors,” he said, and turned from her and raised his hand. “Cast off!”

In the rigging, a woman with the legs and abdomen of a spider shouted, “Aye!”

They made good time out of port—the
Bounty
's wind walker filled their sail with a steady breeze, and Raz took the helm. “Promise to cover for me with the pilots' guild. I don't want to end up on their bad side.”

“As far as the port authority is concerned, none of this is happening.”

“They don't like to be reminded some of us have been sailing this harbor since before they were born.” He spun the wheel, called for depth, adjusted again. Sighted on something she couldn't see with his spyglass, collapsed it, let it dangle from his neck.

The ship swayed, and Cat almost fell, but caught herself with a lunge for the rail. “You have the edge of experience?”

“This spyglass of mine's older than most pilots on the river.” He touched the symbols stamped into the bronze. “A relic of my vital days. Locals sail the harbor more often. If there's a new wreck I don't know about, if the sandbanks have shifted, if you put in port chains or kraken mines, we're in trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“Can you swim?”

“In my own body, yes. If I put the Suit on, I sink.”

“I'll try not to wreck us, then.”

“You weren't doing that already?”

Fangs glinted in the moonlight as he grinned.

Despite Cat's misgivings about the skeleton crew, they seemed at least as competent as the mortal variety. Raz's sailors were not linked like the Blacksuits were through Justice, but they'd worked together long enough to even out the difference. A hand of bone tossed a coil of rope to the chitinous claw of a mantis-thing, who scrambled up the mast so lightly its needle-tipped feet left no tracks on the wood. The spider-woman called depth, a skeleton whose bones were half-replaced with metal checked the charts, and a raven cawed from the crow's nest.

“The
Dream
is moored,” Raz said once they cleared the harbor, “just leeward of the cape. You can see her lanterns from here.” There were no lights on the
Bounty
's deck—most of the crew could see by moon and stars as if by daylight—so Cat's eyes were well-adjusted to the dark. He pointed to three small bright flickers near the ocean's face, like candle flames or stars. “That's not good,” he said. “Plan was, run silent until we're alongside. We've snuffed the running lights—which, in case you ever try this on your own—”

“Without our civilian contractor?”

“Running without lights is stupid, and dangerous. Never, ever do it unless you can see at least as well at night as you can during the day, and want to sneak up on someone, and are a pirate.”

“What's the problem?”

“They're past the city's no-fly zone. You see that line there, where the water's less shiny?”

“Yes.”

“They'll have scouts in the sky, and any sky watch worth its salt can see in the dark. There goes our element of surprise. We can probably still catch them—but then this goes from a sneak-and-board to high-seas battle against professionals.”

“Isn't that your area of expertise?”

“Part of lasting long enough to develop that expertise,” he said, “has been deploying it as seldom as possible. I have people who can take out their recon if we make it to the open ocean, but we're inside the zone. Your Suits can fly, right?”

In theory. In practice, flight involved more collaboration with the Goddess than anyone on the force had managed so far. “We're not trained for aerial combat. Most officers don't even know how to make the Suit grow wings.”

“No time to try like the present,” he said.

“I have a better idea.”

She did not exactly pray. She wasn't talking to a god—or goddess, for that matter. Just sending a message.

Keep telling yourself that.

Her own thought. Probably. Either way, she ignored it.

Waves lapped the
Bounty
's sides, and the deck rolled gently beneath them. In the distance, wind whistled over sharp rocks.

“I'm waiting,” Raz said.

He looked up as the whistle approached.

Aev fell from heaven in a granite blur and flared her wings to arrest herself one foot above the deck. She landed with a soft tick of talons on wood, but her weight still set the ship rocking.

“Can I help?” she asked.

Raz swore in a language Cat did not recognize, and removed his cap. “I think you can, at that.”

 

13

Matt half-hoped their plan, concocted over drinks at lunch—their scheme, to be honest—would end as so many others did, in a third (or fourth) round of beers and someone's finally remembering they all had shops to open come morning. Public displays of civic fervor were no fit pastimes for small business owners. Leave adventures to kids dumb as they'd once been, a new crop of which the Quarter sprouted every year and ate faster.

But Corbin Rafferty did not calm. The idea stuck in his mind like a fishhook in the lip, and he would not stop wriggling long enough to let others pry it out. He took to the street, and Matt followed.

Determination straightened Corbin's weaving path. He visited taprooms and tea shops whose owners he knew, and regaled them with his plan. He met customers on sidewalks and outside construction sites and playing ball on public courts, and in each venue he proclaimed: I'll bring the Stone Men for you all to see. Come to the market tonight at nine. The message took them as far as Hot Town before Matt noticed the Crier following them, a bow-shouldered man in guild orange. He dropped into a convenience store, waited for the Crier to pass, then stepped out behind him.

“You want something.”

The Crier spun and stumbled and caught himself on cracked pavement. He had to look a long way up to meet Matt's eyes. “Just a story.”

“You have the story already.”

“One witness is nice; twenty would be better. If your friend—or his daughter—calls the Stone Men, and they come, that's news.”

“Maybe they won't show.”

“That's news, too.”

“Come tonight, then,” he said. “Stop following us.”

Matt didn't wait for the Crier's answer—walked past him, instead, to join Rafferty, who was haranguing a demolition guy, regular customer of Matt's, a big round man who bought a dozen eggs every other morning. Every day Matt expected to learn the demo guy's heart had burst. Maybe he didn't eat all the eggs himself.

Rafferty burned out around four in the afternoon beside a bratwurst stand—sat down on a dirty bench and leaned over his knees, head bobbing. Carriage wheels rattled over uneven cobblestones. Matt set a hand on Rafferty's back, but the man didn't react. Matt didn't worry. Rafferty's flare-ups came and went like heavy traffic down a poorly paved street, leaving torn ground and deep holes behind.