This is the opening of Four Roads Cross as it might have been; I wrote about twenty thousand words in this vein before I realized my characters were far too comfortable with one another, compared to where Three Parts Dead left off. These people were friends, while Three Parts Dead resolved with our heroes at best uneasy allies—they came through for one another in the clinch, but had also stabbed one another in the back, schemed for their own interest, and behaved with profound distrust. To move forward without untangling those relationships felt unfair, and disingenuous. So Four Roads Cross ended up featuring our heroes cleaning up after their seemingly pat victory—and trying, in the bargain, to forge a new identity for Alt Coulumb.
Now that Four Roads Cross is done, though, I might find my way back here. I like the notion of Caleb Altemoc on the run in a city he doesn’t understand for a crime he didn’t commit, and of a Craftwork professional convention, in general.
A week before the conference, an unkindness of ravens wheeled in the sky above Alt Coulumb.
Six days before the conference, thirteen black-suited figures, male and female and skeletally neither, paced thirteen widdershins circles around the Alt Coulumb Interconventional Meeting Center. They were strangers to one another and all but one to the city, which was by design. Their footsteps trailed fire that burned fuel-less on pavement and left a brief starry silver wake. The seventh walker in their line caught rats with her bare hands and wrung their necks, one at and for each point of the mystical compass. They retired to a nearby Muerte Coffee franchise for iced lattes and overpriced sandwiches, no good restaurants being within walking range of the Center—then returned to the Center for their one o’clock with building management and their two pm with stevedore’s local 668. That night they drank in their hotel’s penthouse bar. Gargoyles watched them from rooftops opposite, but did not interfere.
Five days before the conference, the exhibits arrived. A black engine pulled a train of cold iron cars into Terrace Station. Sparks and silver smoke rose from the glyphs etched into the sides of cars and engine both. When the brakes hissed their last and locked home, the engineer stumbled from the darkness and steam of her boilers to the crowded platform and stared at the length of her train, the magnitude of her accomplishment. Any extra pound’s weight on a car is a pound of cargo that won’t be carried, so train cars aren’t often made of cold iron. And all this weight had to be borne over the Gray Mountains and through the Forest of Sighs on coal alone, when usually Alt Coulumb’s god of fire would take over at the slopes and bring the train home.
But this train’s masters wanted as little to do with gods as possible.
The seventh walker met the engineer on the train tracks. She nursed a hangover and a cup of takeout coffee.
“Did you stop?” she asked the engineer, who shook her head and lit a cigarette and the seventh walker’s jealousy. It had been a very long time since she last smoked a cigarette. These northern engineer-priests’ god protected them from cancer and emphysema and heart trouble; it was almost enough to make the seventh walker consider switching teams.
Almost.
“No,” the engineer said, and thought she was telling the truth.
The seventh walker believed her and gave the signal, whereupon the men and women of Stevedore’s Local 668 swarmed toward the black, still-smoking train, donned blindfolds, and entered the cars, surefooted by long practice. From the shadows within they carried ordinary-looking magesterium wood crates, loaded these onto carts, covered the carts with black velvet, and rolled them to a long line of wagons waiting at the train station’s freight entrance. The seventh walker followed, with her coffee, and debated with herself the benefits and costs of unionization, the likelihood of its ever being expanded to thaumaturgical workers, and the question of whether the thirteenth walker had in fact hesitated in the hotel hallway the night before as they had wandered up to bed.
He had very green eyes, she thought.
The black train was not the only one to arrive that morning, nor were the magesterium wood boxes the only ones offloaded, but not all trains of significance are black and blazoned with burning silver glyphs, and not all packages of significance must be born by blindfolded stevedores and covered with warded cloth for shipping. If a prophet had stood on the station platform beside the seventh walker and the engineer—if you believe in prophets, and it’s doubtful that you should, since prophetically-managed investment vehicles out-alpha the more conventional variety so rarely as to fall well within the margin of error for our sampling size—it’s possible such a person might experienced a sudden head-splitting premonition and spewed forth accurate warnings and dating advice alike in rhyming couplets, and that subsequent events might have taken a different path. Then again, maybe not, prophets and their auditors being what they are.
Four days before the conference, the walkers warded the seven convention hotels. The three closest to the Center were booked solid for the event, and so could be circled in the same fashion as the Center itself. The remaining four only promised tracks of rooms, and each floor and chamber of these had to be visited independently and warded—though one death would do for each hotel, which was fortunate, as rats are clever and can suss out danger in their ratty way. The rats of Alt Coulumb lacked their foreign fellows’ generations of experience with Craftsmen and their moonlit knives, but they learned fast.
Meanwhile, in the Center and under direction of those walkers not occupied with warding, Stevedores’ Local 668 deployed the contents of the crates: covered exhibits for the exhibit hall, each to be unpacked in its own time, long rolls of black crystalline wire to be laid throughout the Center, connecting its many rooms, these wires converging in black towers at the hearts of which bubbled glass cylinders containing brains and nervous ganglia from other, more experienced but no more lucky, rats. When connected in accordance with posted instructions, the wires shimmered, and if one were paying attention (rarely wise for an uninitiate dealing in affairs of Craft), one might have heard a scream.
That night in the Stagbourne, an old man—forty, but he thought of himself as old—drew his own sword for the first time in a long, long while, and let the moonlight fall upon its blade.
In the penthouse bar, the walkers feasted again and drank. The day’s work left them haggard and cold and thirsty. Craft draws heat from the bones and fire from the heart, and all that’s lost must be replaced, or else even the most brilliant and well-paid of Craftswomen could find herself reduced to staggering mindlessness, a wreck of former humanity. The seventh walker once more outlasted the others save the thirteenth. They left the bar together, and as they rode the elevator down to their rooms she rambled through a story about the time in the Hidden Schools when she’d climbed the Upside-Down Tower to break into Professor Halcyon’s office in order to reclaim a love letter she accidentally submitted in place of her term paper, due to similar envelopes and a hurried all-nighter’s fuzzing of practical details. The thirteenth asked what happened to the love letter, and she said that after going through all that trouble she realized some things were better said in person, and the thirteenth said he agreed and there was a beat between them in the otherwise empty hall—which the seventh only realized as she was spitting out her toothpaste before bed, whereupon she stared at her own face in the mirror and said, “Shit,” and shook her head and staggered off to sleep.
The third day before the conference, no birds sang. At night the full moon burned with the congress of gods.
The second day before the conference they paced the wards again, and reviewed the bindings on the brains in their vats. Some met with representatives of the local constabulary to explain the nature of a temporary embassy. Others rode the minds of birds and turned in a widening gyre above the city. Human flight was forbidden here, as in other cities where gods still ruled, but all the same recent experience suggested they should ensure the skies were clear.
The first exhibitors filtered in.
Six hooded and cloaked figures descended the gangplank from a ship moored at the docks. No faces showed beneath their cloaks. Each carried a briefcase, though the handles vanished into their capacious sleeves and no hands were visible.
A skeleton in a pinstriped suit stepped out of a shadow on the edge of the Forest of Sighs, and entered a black carriage that waited for him there.
A naked woman emerged dripping from a pool of blood on the forty-second story of a northern skyscraper. Before she emerged, the pool had contained only blood and bone. Her personal assistant averted his eyes; against some savage beauties not even the Craft which recasts all desire in terms of service and price is proof. Her skin was red, and drank the blood that dripped from it to fill itself.
A black marble statue in a gallery opened its eyes and stepped down off its pedestal. It reached for a robe and clothed itself in white terrycloth.
In a crypt so far below the city not even the rumble of a train’s passage overhead could be felt, three cultists raised a glittering ruby from a padded briefcase, and settled into the chest of a seven-meter contraption of gears and flywheels and thorns and sharp steel wire. Flames danced within its fanged maw, and it tested the breadth of its four scalpel-tipped arms.
Within the Center, yellow-garbed Muerte Coffee personnel stocked the twenty coffee stands without which the coming days’ convention might dissolve into a meat grinder riot. The baked goods they could not store so far in advance; outside the city great machines mixed hundreds of eggs and cups of flour and salt and sugar and butter and extruded them into dough, while hungry ovens waited.
Unleashed from their crates, grim structures took shape on the show floor: gray towers and green palaces, broad tables piled with logo-stamped curiosities that granted last year’s wishes and promised next year’s, arcane leaflets enchanted to draw the unwarded eye. Maze-embroidered banners unfurled from bare metal rafters. Seven copies of the same blonde woman, and eight of an equally blonde man, built sprawling labyrinth that only those starved for proper vocabulary might have called a booth, which sported the pyramid-logo of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao; golems ground through the construction of a Varkath Nebuchadnezzar edifice ancient Golden Horde raiders might have confused for a fortress. Which raiders of course, could not have made it through the conference center’s wards. Interns scrambled to nearby hardware stores in search of tape.
At the deepest hour of the night, the walkers stood on a rooftop and tested the protections they had put in place. They directed the full power of their office against the work they had wrought, and their office was considerable. Across the city poets woke up screaming, and sensitives writhed in their sleep. Men bounded in nutshells could not call themselves kings of infinite space, though if that was the title they desired, they probably should not have bounded themselves in nutshells to begin with—or let themselves be bound.
The wards held.
After they drank to the successful fulfillment of their commission, and to the coming rest of their lives, and to the moon and the stars and Stevedores’ Local 668, not to mention to one another, their waitress, the local gods, windows that could open, to drinking itself and to them that drank—after all that, in a lull in the conversation, the seventh steeled herself and invited the thirteenth up to her room.
Their relationship, she thought as she took off his jacket, was no longer professional. So, she thought as he took off hers, and unbuttoned her slacks, they were free to make it as personal as they cared. And besides, she thought when he stood naked but for an odd smile before her, everyone deserved a little fun sometime.
She was right.
They had fun.
She slept deeply after.
While she slept, someone turned her on her back and inserted a black metal syringe into her arm, drew three vials of blood and left her sleeping.
Dawn dawned, as dawn does.
The thirteen returned to their lives. They left pieces of themselves behind, some on purpose and others on accident.
That night, in her one-bedroom apartment, Tara Abernathy set aside the notes for her next day’s meeting, and paced. She should have gone straight to sleep, but she made the mistake of deciding to catch up on her mail. There were too many bills—including one envelope from the Hidden Schools, which contained a politely worded notice about an overdue payment amounting to a sequence of zeroes which unfortunately had a one at the front.
She tossed the notice on her desk, and poured herself a glass of Camlaander whiskey, which made her more drunk than she should have been. She kicked back in her chair, feet up on the desk that occupied most of her so-called living room, and threw darts until she hit the wall more than she hit the board.
She slept, and dreamed of unfortunate ones and holes and rats and debt and of her next day’s meeting, and not—at all—of a silver woman shining in the sky of her soul.
And as she slept, the conference woke.
[I’m deleting Chapter One, which is a bit of plot setup I might reuse later, and isn’t relevant to the following bit, which I quite like.]
Two
The third chapter of Caldous Grindlebranch’s Sharpen your Knife, Hang out Your Shingle, Third Edition begins with the following exhortation:
The most common mistake made by practitioners of the Craft is to believe that sheer sorcerous expertise will lead to a successful practice. While failures of core competency are in the long run fatal, many first-rate Craftsmen are undone not by sorcery, but by lapses of everyday business etiquette which any shopkeep or restauranteur would recognize—lack of prompt followup to correspondence, for example, or sheer common tardiness. Flawed Craft may kill you, but flawed business practices cost you clients.
Tara was late for her meeting, and so was half the Craftwork world to judge from the crowd.
She’d expected the traffic, but underestimated the degree to which conventioneers would overflow onto the sidewalk: skeletons in flowing robes, golems of all shapes and sizes, Snakelings on ambulatory frames, leather-masked men and pale women whose longs stringy hair fell over faces that staring into would drive one mad—interspersed with suits of every variation on charcoal grey. The Interconventional Meeting Center loomed above them all like a God Wars dragon boat, only with none of the charm or pleasantly obvious purpose.
She elbowed toward the front of the line until she ran into the back of a spider-golem occupying the entire sidewalk at once, and a decent section of the oncoming lane of traffic. Its claws skittered left and right impatiently, tearing deep gouges in pavement. She ducked underneath, cursing once again the local prohibition against flight. Stupid gods and their stupid interdictions.
We can hear you, you know, said a voice in the back of her head that she was trying very hard to ignore.
Her watch ticked eight thirty-seven, and she was already sweating. For all its steadfast brutal northern winters, Alt Coulumb in late summer was a stewpot: much of the northern city was marsh-fill, four rivers had been paved over in its construction, and it showed.
I would rather, she explicitly did not pray, you kept your divine opinions to yourself.
Would you like help? said Seril, Lady of Moon and Stone, consort—just his luck—of Kos Everburning, returned queen of Alt Coulumb’s night skies.
I can take care of this by myself, she thought—thought, again, dammit—thank you very much.
If you say so.
She grimaced, counted to ten in Abyssal, and wondered if Caldous Grindlebranch’s appendices contained any advice on how to avoid strangling one’s clients. Seril was a goddess, at least, and stood a good chance of getting better.
Eight forty, and no movement yet. The spider-golem stamped its feet, tearing more holes in the sidewalk in the process. Judging from the lamppost to its right, the golem had advanced perhaps three inches, though that might be Tara’s own wishful thinking.
Tara stepped out of line into the street, and jogged past the lane of stopped carriages, stomping horses, and swearing drivers, grateful—though not to any particular goddess who might or might not have been riding in the back of her head, thank you very much—she’d decided on flats this morning. The exhibitor entrance at the far end of the hall sported no line whatsoever, which would have been useful were Tara technically an exhibitor. Unfortunately she was not here under the auspices of the Church of Kos today, and Seril had no show floor presence. She walked fast toward the doors, approached the guard with a question on her lips, and died.
Somewhat.