Four Roads Cross Read Online Free

them.
    The song rolled on, to tell of gargoyles returned to Alt Coulumb not to raid, as they had many times since their Lady died in the God Wars, but to remain and rebuild the cult of their slain goddess, Seril of the moon, whom Alt Coulumb’s people called traitor, murderer, thief.
    Tara knew better: Seril never died. Her children were not traitors. They were soldiers, killers sometimes in self-defense and extremity, but never murderers or thieves. To the Crier’s credit, she claimed none of these things, but neither did she correct popular misconceptions.
    The city knew.
    How would they respond?
    There was no Craft to read minds without breaking them, no magic to hear another’s thoughts without consent. Consciousness was a strange small structure, fragile as a rabbit’s spine, and it broke if gripped too tightly. But there were more prosaic tricks to reading men and women—and the Hidden Schools that taught Tara to raise the dead and send them shambling to do her bidding, to stop her enemies’ hearts and whisper through their nightmares, to fly and call lightning and steal a likely witness’s face, to summon demons and execute contracts and bill in tenths of an hour, also taught her such prosaic tricks to complement true sorcery.
    The crowd teetered between fear and rage. They whispered: the sound of rain, and of thunder far away.
    â€œBad,” Matthew Adorne said in as soft a voice as he could make his. “Stone Men in the city. You help the priests, don’t you?”
    Tara didn’t remember the last time she heard Matthew Adorne ask a question.
    â€œI do,” Tara said.
    â€œThey should do something.”
    â€œI’ll ask.”
    â€œCould be one of yours,” he said, knowing enough to say “Craftsman” but not wanting, Tara thought, to admit that a woman he knew, a faithful customer, no less, belonged to that suspect class. “Scheming. Bringing dead things back.”
    â€œI don’t think so.”
    â€œThe Blacksuits will get them,” Adorne said. “And Justice, too.”
    â€œMaybe,” she said. “Excuse me, Matt. I have work.”
    So much for breakfast.

 
    4
    One does not need an expensive Hidden Schools degree to know the first step in crisis management: get ahead of the story. If that’s impossible, at least draw even with it. Tara, who had an expensive Hidden Schools degree, hunted Gavriel Jones.
    The Crier’s Guild was more hive than office. Stringers, singers, and reporters buzzed like orange bees from desk to desk, alighting coffee mugs in hand to bother others working, or pollinate them with news.
    â€œLate report by nightmare telegraph, lower trading on Shining Empire indices—”
    â€œYou hear the Suits busted Johnny Goodnight down by the docks, taking in a shipment?”
    â€œNo shit?”
    â€œâ€”Haven’t found a second source for this yet, but Walkers looks set to knock down those PQ slums for her new shopping center—”
    â€œStill missing your bets for the ullamal bracket, Grindel’s about to close the door—”
    â€œâ€”Loan me a cigarette?”
    â€œDo you really want it back?”
    They didn’t let people back here, exactly, but Tara wasn’t people. She forced her papers into the receptionist’s face—I’m Ms. Abernathy, Craftswoman to the Church of Kos Everburning, we’re working on a case and want to check our facts, without pause for breath. Then she held the receptionist’s gaze for the ten seconds needed for the word “Craftswoman” to suggest shambling corpses and disemboweled gods. Not that most gods had bowels.
    Useful mental image, anyway.
    The young man grew paler and directed her to Jones: third desk from the back, on the left, one row in.
    They’d thrown desks like these out of the Hidden Schools in Tara’s first year, chromed edges and fake wood tops that didn’t take the masquerade