Four Roads Cross (27 page)

Then, a silver streak—

*   *   *

Cat saw Shale tumbling, held aloft by two sets of demon wings. She heard his cry through the Suit; without the Suit she would have only felt it in her bones.
We need to help him,
she said.

“You can't fight them and carry me,” Raz said.

I'll set you down—

“Throw me.”

Are you crazy?

Shale's roar weakened as they drained him.

“Do it.”

She gathered him in her arms, let the Suit judge trajectory, and threw. He was a missile of cloth and muscle and teeth.

He landed on a demon's back, and as she closed the gap she saw him wrap his legs around its abdomen, grab its bulbous head and pull, back and up. A proboscis sprang free of Shale's back, spun around, split into snapping jaws, but too late. Raz snapped the head free of the body.

And fell, as the demon disintegrated beneath him.

Godsdammit she didn't have
time—
the fall, the Suit offered, would take thirty seconds—she tore two legs off Shale's remaining demon. Claws caught at her but Shale'd regained enough strength to help. She speared the demon through the heart with its own leg. Its carapace cracked, and twenty seconds, she planted her legs on Shale's body and dove down from him, fifteen, ten, flare—

She caught Raz thirty feet from the pavement, turned his plummet to a sideways swoop, then soared.

He was, she noticed, still grinning.

They met Shale in the air. Silver light leaked from cracks in his skin. He pressed one hand to his side, and more light trickled through his fingers.

Can you fly?

“I must.”

He pointed to the tower in the Ash atop which Cat had seen the second moon.

It was setting now, and glass bugs buzzed around it.

*   *   *

Panic of order time breaks the.

Tara, in some sequence:

—hutched under skittering claws as a spear mouth jabbed at her face—

—threw herself to rough stone and raised her hands and a shield of Craft—

—turned from the goddess's throne to see crystal rainbows and claws approaching and—

—saw gargoyles tense and throne light flicker, Seril lose coherence as Jones dropped to one knee—

To the nine hells with order anyway. Fight.

She stabbed through her shield into demon-skin. The crystal reflected her knife, but the demon recoiled anyway, allowing Tara space to rise, cloaked in shadow.

Demons swarmed Seril's children. Gar went down beneath the weight of two; he clutched one to his chest, shattering it, but the other stabbed him with its mouth and drank. Aev fought three at once, battered a fourth with her wings. Their chorus had broken into roars and rage. Tara closed her eyes, saw their Craft.

She shuddered.

Demons (Professor Halcyon had said, pacing before class with pointer tapping against her palm) hail from continuity neighboring our own, and as a result when brought into our realm possess whatever properties they have been assigned by negotiation. Unbound, they're undefined—conscious singularities that warp the world until the pressure of paradox grows too great and they collapse, destroying territory they've tainted in the process. And that, class, is why we triple-check our summoning contracts.

The contract at these demons' core was dreadfully simple. A few provisions listed the steps by which they might be slain: basic stuff, pressure tolerances, resistances, immunities. They could absorb others' soulstuff. And they were bound to obey the holder of an indenture canceled by … Tara herself.

Oh, gods.

Somehow these demons were tied to the indentures Seril voided. If She fell, they'd be free—to go home, or to wreck the city, or worse.

In Tara's voyage on foot through the Badlands, she'd crossed miles of desert that bore unbound demons' taint: geometries that shifted to her desires as she passed, showed her palaces with tooth-lined doors. Hummingbirds hung frozen in the air, not yet dead. They would pass an age of the world in their dying.

That would happen here, if the demons ate Seril.

She called down starlight. The demon she had stabbed scuttled toward her again. She redefined the atmosphere around it. Individual particles of air were tiny, but considered as a class rather than as individuals, as a blanket shrouding the planet, air weighed a great deal. (This trick wouldn't work against normal matter, which understood its own rules too well, but demonstuff was a stranger here.) The demon spasmed as it sawed the edges of her—admittedly specious—argument. Given time it would recover. So she stepped forward dancerlike and drove her knife through the top of its head.

The creature exploded to steaming dust.

She stumbled into the space where it had been, weak from conjuring. Not enough starlight here for proper magic, and the moon was spoken for.

The roof boiled with battle. Demons fed from gargoyles and grew stronger. Seril's children fought, bleeding but fierce. The struggle's score was bass and treble with no midrange—torn stone and broken glass. Blood ran down Tara's cheek. She did not know when she had been cut.

In the center of the roof Seril spun, dim and demon torn.

The demons attacked Her children. Seril sustained the gargoyles as they fought, and She fought on their behalf: moonlight trapped one demon-bug in silvery crystal, and time slowed for another. But there were so many, and as the gargoyles fell, the demons drank, and Seril weakened. This was how you fought a goddess: tore her between obligations until She spent herself in Her people's service. You built unwinnable scenarios and forced her into zero-sum games.

The gargoyles fell.

Tara wasn't kitted for war, lacked glyphs and weapons. But the demons were focusing on Seril and Her children. They'd ignored Jones for the most part, even as she attacked them with a collapsible club she'd produced from within her coat. If they ignored Tara, too, there were bindings she could work, procedures for demon outbreak. If she could talk fast enough.

She raised her hands and began to chant.

A sharp weight struck her. She spun in glass and blood and torn shadow, ripped herself free. She bled.

Demons flanked her.

Of course. They didn't care about Jones. But Tara, may all gods burn and bleed, was a priestess now.

She bared her teeth and made her blade long to fight.

*   *   *

By the time Cat and Raz and Shale reached the broken tower in the Ash, the moon was almost dead. Demonic waves washed the tower top. Claws of drowning gargoyles rose from the glass, tearing wings, breaking arms, but the demons were stronger than before.

They took strength from the goddess as they ate her.

Tara fought shadow-clad. Aev's great arms seemed sluggish. Seril's light showed dim through demonglass.

Cat felt her pain through Justice.

“We can't help,” Raz said. “Not against that many.”

The other Blacksuits said: we're coming, but we won't be there in time.

The Goddess said:
I need you.

Shale dove, trailing silver from his wounds and wind from his wings. He disappeared into the flood and froth.

We can't help,
she said.
But we can fight. I'll set you down. Bring the other Blacksuits—

“No,” he said. “We go together.”

They flew into the sea of knives.

*   *   *

Abelard watched Seril lose her war.

It was a small war as such things went, but even the smallest wars were vicious. Demons broke. Gargoyles fought, impaled. Tara slashed, cut and slowed but lightning-wreathed. Cat and Raz joined battle, tearing demons off Aev's back so she could help her brothers and sisters—and the Blacksuits neared—but they would be too late. Seril was falling apart.

He felt the wheel of her thoughts twist on its axle.

God burned, watching.

—Why don't you help? Abelard asked.

You asked me not to.

—They'll die.

You were right. Are right. If I help them, it will hurt us all. (Each word formed from a hundred voices molded by a potter's hand from the turning clay of the city's minds.) If I help, I risk my people, who do not know Her as I do, and do not love Her as I do.

—We can teach them.

Can we? Can they learn to love her in time?

Abelard did not know. Yes, he prayed.

You feared, before, that I did not trust you. Here we are. You asked me to let Her stand alone. Ask me again, and I will.

—You don't play fair.

I don't play at all, He replied. None of Us do. Ink has been spilled on the subject. Did you fear I mistrusted you, or did you fear what my trust in you would mean? I offer you a choice. No tricks. I will save them, or not, as you ask.

Abelard's soul strained beneath those words, which were more than words, as if he were trapped between the bolt and hole of an enormous lock.

Bede had asked him to talk Kos out of doing exactly this. The Evangelist was not a bad man. He knew much Abelard did not, and his faith was deep. But so was Abelard's.

And his friends, and His, were in danger.

—Help them, he prayed.

There came a sound so enormous Abelard mistook it for thunder.

Later, thinking back, he would realize how much it resembled knuckles cracking.

*   *   *

Tara was not, probably, about to die—appearances (demon beset and bleeding, one arm limp at her side, suit mostly shredded) to the contrary.

She owed the Hidden Schools ten souls of tuition, which made it just the low end of worthwhile to keep her—
alive
might be a stretch, but at least roughly
compos mortis.
There were, of course, consequences to being bound to unlife by a single obligation. It distorted the psyche, discarded bits of consciousness irrelevant to the bond. Craftsmen who kept their bodies into old age had stolen—or borrowed—enough from the universe that the universe wanted a return on its investment. Reinforce those obligations with extensive personal leveraging, premortem prep, and the creation of phylacteric trusts, and an individual could endure the flesh-bone transition mentally intact, depending of course on one's philosophy of consciousness.

Die in overwhelming debt to a single provider, though, and less freedom remained to you. A Tara resurrected to repay her student loans would not remain interested in Alt Coulumb. There were stories of dead indebted Craftswomen processing contracts in beehive crypts beneath the Badlands, reviewing foundational wards in sleepless monotony. She'd never heard anyone confirm these rumors. Nor had anyone denied them.

So, while these demons might not exactly kill her, her likely fate was not pleasant.

Her senses filled the rooftop, spread through the shadows her Craft cast. She fought through pain. Cat flailed beneath a pile of demons. Raz ran to help her, ignoring the pieces of himself he left behind on claws. Tara caught a demon in an ontological twist—watched it trip and thrash to reassert its own existence, though the twist refused to accept the testimony of a nonexistent being. Before she could kill it, another tackled her from behind. Claws pierced her shadow guard, down and in, and she roared with the pain and so did Seril—

Then, on the rooftop, there was light.

More than light.

Fire.

She smiled as the demons burned.

 

35

“You might want to watch this,” Daphne said, and passed the binoculars.

Ms. Ramp raised them, squinted, adjusted focus, and scanned the horizon until she found the tower. “Well, that's one way to resolve our—”

Daphne was looking at her boss, not the tower, so she only saw the firelight upon the woman's face. By the time she turned, the fire had faded to cinders upon stone.

Ramp lowered the glasses and blinked. “Godsdamn.” She screwed her eyes shut, and tears leaked from their corners. “Never mind.” She waved at the balloon's burner. The flame there shriveled, and they sank. “Shame.”

Above, the moon shone brighter than before.

“I really do like this city,” Ramp said. “Good theater. Better Old World restaurants than you'll find anywhere else in the New. And there's a special feeling to the light. I don't know if you've ever sat in a sidewalk cafe on a spring morning with a view of the sanctum—nice cup of coffee after full meal, nothing to do but sip and digest. Then the sun hits the sanctum's peak, around nine or ten depending on the date and which cafe you choose—and there are only really four anyone should choose in this city. The tower reflects a pure spark of sunlight in the center of the sky, the union of a star that existed millions of years before the gods, and a city only humans would be mad enough to build. Hold that cooling coffee in your mouth, black and thick, and watch the reflection. It looks like it will last forever.” She sighed. Daphne had never heard her sigh before. “It doesn't. But we always hope, don't we? Still, the place will recover once we're done with it. And the theater might not even suffer. Actors are good as roaches for survival. You know, during the Camlaan Blitz, they performed a musical about the life of Ursus in the subway tunnels?”

“I didn't know,” Daphne said.

“Good reviews. Shame I missed it. But, you know, a city doesn't bomb itself.”

*   *   *

Matt waited in the hospital. Corbin Rafferty slept curled around himself, covers crinkled by his body. Matt felt uncomfortable watching him. He hadn't often seen another man sleep. Rafferty's position reminded him of Claire's on the couch.

The hospital room had two chairs. Claire sat in one, Matt in the other. The light was off. Matt didn't think he had slept, but there was no way to mark time here, with the curtains drawn. He read a few magazine stories about places that did not exist as far as he was concerned, about people whose problems might as well have been made up. He went to the bathroom. Wandering the halls, he found a pot of weak tea and cups made of a pale foamlike substance that sat badly against his skin and tasted like aerated bone. He returned.