Four Roads Cross by Max Gladstone

keep still and let her find the man she sought.
    She peered beneath the physical world. All this metal was quite simple on the level of Craftwork: tricks to convert energy from one form or vector to another. To her gaze the machines pulsed in heartbeat time, and there, in a nook ten feet off the ground, nestled between a wall and a steam tank, was a man’s spinning soul.
    â€œThere you are.”
    â€œCan anyone hide from you?” His voice echoed.
    â€œNot like that,” she said. A ladder led up to his nook, concealed behind a bundle of thin pipes. The rungs were warm. “Kos could hide you if you asked; He couldn’t do the same for me, because of my glyphs.”
    â€œNo hide-and-go-seek for necromancers.”
    â€œOh, we play. We hide in bargains and loopholes and fine print.” Tara crested the ladder and pulled herself into the niche between tank and wall. Abelard sat within, legs curled against his chest, arms crossed on his knees. Beneath him lay a thin pallet, and across from him a small altar. Tara tested the floor for dust, and sat. “You sleep here?”
    â€œSometimes,” he said. “How do you sleep?”
    â€œWell,” she replied. “On my back.”
    â€œI mean, you see things with your eyes closed.”
    â€œSo do you. Light filters through the lids, creates patterns, that warm pink edge to darkness. You can’t turn off your skin, can’t close your ears, but you sleep fine.”
    â€œNot these days,” he said.
    â€œWhy did you leave the meeting?”
    â€œDid I miss much?”
    Here in the half-lit dark, she felt like she could say anything. “Same story as ever. Don’t like the news? Question the bearer.”
    â€œI’m sorry.”
    â€œIt could be worse. Sometimes clients play dumb—they go to you for expertise, then argue with your conclusions. Back in Edgemont I hung out my shingle and dealt small-time magic, before Ms. K found me. You know what phrase I learned to hate more than any other? How bad can it be? ” She leaned her head against the cool rock. Hair bunched and coiled against her skull. “You should have stayed. You could have helped them understand.”
    â€œCardinal Bede knows more about bond markets than anyone else in the church; Cardinal Nestor’s a wise Technician. I’m … me.”
    â€œYou kept your God alive when everyone gave him up for dead. You kept faith when there was no chance your faith would be rewarded. Those old men don’t know what that was like. What you did. What you almost lost.”
    â€œI died, Tara. Let’s not put too fine a point on it.”
    â€œI was getting to that,” she said. “Let me build up a rhythm.”
    He tapped cigarette ash onto the tray atop his little altar. “The Council of Cardinals wanted to canonize me. There was a whisper campaign around the solstice.”
    â€œSaint Abelard. You’d fit right in with the gaunt-faced fossils in the murals.”
    â€œThe Cardinals are afraid—they think I’ll undermine them by going directly to God. And I fear them, too. Cardinal Gustave was a pillar of strength, and he betrayed us all. Do you think he could have done that without help?”
    The metal heart throbbed around them.
    â€œIf it’s any consolation,” she said, “conspiracies don’t tend to be the massive webs you’d imagine from mystery plays and adventure novels. More often you have a few people willing to do bad things to get results, and a few more who look the other way while everything stays quiet. That’s what happened to me back at the Hidden Schools. Professor Denovo had been binding wills, stealing minds, for years. But he was famous, and his lab produced groundbreaking results, so people looked away. They didn’t ask. They didn’t even whisper. And when my friend Daphne and I started to work with him, we were so excited we didn’t realize