If any of us live that long. I have the contract, but I can’t get to Alt Coulumb in time.

Tara, the Goddess said, and touched her cheek from the inside.

You could take me by the moon roads.

The moon is one everywhere.

When there’s a moon.

When it rises, we’ll bring you through.

There’s three hours’ time difference between the west coast and Alt Coulumb. Ramp will attack at moonrise on your end. Can you last that long?

A pause ensued, of wind in high places. I think so.

Then Tara truly began to pray.

*   *   *

The crowd in Market Square had grown.

Jones assembled tables, Jones unrolled carpets, Jones heated water for tea, Jones ran to a corner chemist’s for medicine, but most of all Jones took notes. She moved among the faithful and spoke with those willing to speak. An Aokane Holdings desk clerk had come because her daughter told her about the gathering. Two men who kept shop in Hot Town visited around noon to crowd-watch and stayed to tend fires and distribute food. A woman in a wheelchair, wearing Iskari medals and a service jacket and old enough—just—to be a God Wars vet, rolled herself into the market, to the front of the crowd by the Crier’s Dais.

No one watched the sky.

Jones had seen all this before, back in Dresediel Lex, as the gods woke in the Skittersill Rising. She’d walked among the crowd before the riots started; later, she watched from afar as the fire fell. She wanted to run. She stayed.

“These people aren’t safe,” she told Ellen, when she caught the girl carrying a jug of water to people huddled on blankets at the crowd’s rear. “Do you see what’s up there?”

“Of course,” she said.

“They could kill us all without breaking a sweat.”

Water sloshed over the jug’s lip and wet Ellen’s hand. Her arms were thin, but they did not shake from the work. She looked very young to Jones. “She needs everything we can give.”

“I’m here to report,” she said. “To write your story and sing it later.”

“You’ve met Her children.”

“The gargoyles.” She remembered Aev’s rumbling voice, the certainty with which she spoke before her Goddess’s wrecked throne. “Yes.”

“You talked with them—and with Her. You’ve heard Her voice, written songs to praise Her, and worked miracles in Her aid. You’re part of us. It’s okay to be afraid.”

The girl’s face was very pale.

Jones remembered the smell of burning flesh and singed hair in a square much larger than this one, a long time ago. She looked away.

“I have to go,” Ellen said, and lifted the jug.

63

63

The sun set over Alt Coulumb.