“You do everything for you, Corbin. Let it go.”
Corbin Rafferty’s eyes went wide as an angry horse’s, and showed as much white, and he grew very still. Folk at the crowd’s edge turned away.
Rafferty’s shoulders slumped.
Sandy relaxed, too. But the girls did not, and neither did Matt, because he’d seen Corbin Rafferty drunk, had seen him fight, and knew his tell: that moment of slack before he moved snake-quick with a bottle or a nearby chair. Or with that cane, which he swung up and around, toward Sandy—
But the cane never fell, because Matt ran forward and grabbed Rafferty’s arm. Rafferty twisted fast and vicious, pulled free, and struck Matt in the side of the head. He stumbled back, ears ringing and wetness on his temple and his cheek. Matt smelled Corbin’s whiskey, saw his white teeth flash as the cane came down; he put his hand in its way, but the cane knocked down his arm, then struck the side of his head. Matt barreled forward. His shoulder took Rafferty in the stomach but the man squirmed like a hooked eel and Matt couldn’t hold him. The audience roared and Sandy joined the fray and somewhere a large beast or a small man snarled, and Ellen’s prayer rolled on like a river, or else that was the blood throbbing in his, Matt’s, ears.
There came a crash and a splintering sound, followed by a hush.
Even the Crier’s pencil stopped scratching.
Matt forced himself to his feet.
The top half of Rafferty’s stick lay broken on the ground. The man himself had drawn back, hunched around his center, clutching the remnants of the cane. Sandy wasn’t bleeding. The girls were safe.
A Stone Man confronted Corbin Rafferty.
He did not resemble the monsters of Matt’s imagination or his father’s stories. The Stone Man was thinner than Matt expected, carved with lean muscle like a runner or dancer. His face was narrow and short muzzled with a bird’s quizzical expression, and his wings were slender and long. Maybe their kind came in as many shapes as people.
“Shale!” Ellen sounded happy for the first time in the years Matt had known her.
Rafferty recoiled. One crooked accusing finger stabbed toward the statue. “There! You see. They sneak around our city, taking what’s ours!”
The gargoyle’s—Shale’s—expression didn’t change like a normal person’s. It shifted, like windblown sand. “We take nothing,” he said. “We help.”
“We don’t need your help.”
“If someone asks,” the gargoyle said, gentle as a footfall in an empty church, “should I refuse?”
Rafferty spun from the gargoyle, to Matt, to Sandy, to Ellen. Whatever he sought from them he didn’t find, because he revolved on Shale again, still holding the broken cane.
Then he ran toward the gargoyle and stabbed his chest with the splintered end of his stick. Matt tensed, waiting for claws to wet with blood.
The gargoyle took Rafferty by the shoulders.
The moon came out.
Before, the moon had been a slender curve. No longer. An orb hung overhead, and there was a face within it Matt recognized from a distant past that never was, and since it never was, never passed. Shadows failed. Silver flame quickened within paving stones.
Alt Coulumb lived. There was a Lady in it, and She knew them.
Matt was not a religious man—he sacrificed on time and paid little heed to the rest—but this, he thought, must be how the faithful felt: seen all at once in timeless light.
There was no source to this light, but Corbin Rafferty stood at its center, transfixed, reflected on himself in that moonlit time.
The moon closed.
Corbin’s knees buckled and he fell.
Clocks started again, and hearts. Blood wept from the wound on Matt’s face.
Matt thought the gargoyle was as shocked as anyone, and awed, though he covered it fast. “Blacksuits are coming,” he said to them all but mostly to Ellen. “This is their place. I must go.”
He left in a wave of wings. Sandy limped to Matt and touched the skin around his wound; her fingers stung. The girls watched, quiet, still, as Corbin Rafferty wept.
The gargoyle was right. Soon the Blacksuits came.
And the Crier wrote the whole thing down.
17
Tara collapsed on her walk home.
She’d been turning the Seril problem over in her mind—gods and goddesses, faith and credit, debt and repayment and Abelard’s despair and the gargoyles atop their ruined tower. Swirled round with sharp-toothed dilemmas, she marched past the shadow people who drifted down the sidewalk toward home or gym or bar. A beggar held out a cup and she tossed him a coin with a few thaums of soul inside. Might as well be kind while she could afford it. Soon none of them might have the luxury of generosity.