Two Serpents Rise

1

The goddess leaned over the card table and whispered, “Go all in.”

She hovered before Caleb, cloudy and diaphanous, then cold and clear as desert stars. Her body swelled beneath garments of fog: a sea rock where ships dashed to pieces.

Caleb tore his gaze away, but could not ignore her scent, or the susurrus of her breath. He groped for his whiskey, found it, drank.

The cards on the green felt table were night ladies, treacherous and sweet. Two queens rested facedown by his hand, her majesty of cups (blond, voluptuous, pouring blood and water from a chalice), and her majesty of swords (a forbidding Quechal woman with broad face and large eyes, who gripped a severed head by the hair). He did not have to look to know them. They were his old friends, and enemies.

His opponents watched: a round Quechal man whose thick neck strained against his bolo tie, a rot-skinned Craftsman, a woman all in black with a cliff’s face, a towering four-armed creature made from silver thorns. How long had they waited?

A few seconds, he thought, a handful of heartbeats. Don’t let them rush you.

Don’t dawdle, either.

The goddess caressed the inner chambers of his mind. “All in,” she repeated, smiling.

Sorry, he thought, and slid three blue chips into the center of the table.

Life faded from him, and joy, and hope. A part of his soul flowed into the game, into the goddess. He saw the world through her eyes, energy and form flowering only to wilt.

“Raise,” he said.

She mocked him with a smile, and turned to the next player.

Five cards lay faceup before the dealer. Another queen, of staves, greeted the rising sun in sky-clad silhouette—a great lady, greater still when set beside his pair. To her right the king of swords, grim specter, stood knife in hand beside a struggling, crying child bound upon an altar. The other cards struck less dramatic figures, the eight and three of staves, the four of coins.

Three queens formed a strong hand, but any two staves could make a flush, and beat him.

“Call,” said the man in the bolo tie.

“Call,” said the Craftsman with the rotting skin.

“I see your raise,” said the woman, “and raise you two thousand.” She pushed twenty blue chips into the pot. The goddess whirled, a tornado of desire, calling them all to death.

“Fold,” said the creature of thorns.

The goddess turned again to Caleb.

Did the woman in black have a flush, or was she bluffing? A bluff would be brash against three other players with a possible flush on the board, but Caleb’s had been the only bet this round. Would she risk so much on the chance she could drive three players to fold?

Calling her bluff would take his whole reserve. He’d have to give himself to the game, hold nothing back.

The goddess opened her mouth. The black within yawned hungrily. Perfection glinted off the points of her teeth.

You can win the world, she said, if you’re willing to lose your soul.

He looked her in the eye and said, “Fold.”

She laughed, and did not stop until the black-clad woman turned over her cards to reveal a king and a two, unsuited.

Caleb bowed his head in congratulations, and asked the others’ leave to go.

Caleb bought another drink and climbed marble stairs to the pyramid’s roof. Dandies, dilettantes, and high-society corpses clustered near the edge, glorying in the panorama of Dresediel Lex by night: gleaming pyramid-studded city, skyspires adrift like crystal scimitars above, the ceaseless roll of the Pax against the western shore. A ceiling of low clouds confronted the metropolis with its own reflected light.

Caleb was not interested in the view.

A carved black stone altar rose from the center of the roof, large enough to hold a reclining man, or woman, or child. From the iron fence around the altar hung a bronze plaque embossed with a list of dates and victims’ names.

He didn’t read the plaque. He knew too much history already. He leaned against the railing, and watched the old altar. Dew rolled down his whiskey glass and wet his hand.

Teo found him twenty minutes later.

He heard her approach from the stairwell. He recognized her stride.

“It’s been a long time,” she said, “since I’ve seen you leave a game that fast. Not since school, I think.”

“I was bored.”

In modest heels, Teo was Caleb’s height and broader, built of curves and arches. Her lips were full, her eyes dark. Black ringlets framed her round face. She wore white pants with gray pinstripes, a white vest, a ruby shirt, a gray tie, and an expression of concern. Her hand lacked a drink.

She joined him at the rail.

“You weren’t bored.” She turned her back on the altar, and looked east over the city, toward the gleaming villas atop the Drakspine ridge. “I don’t know how you can spend so much time staring at that old rock.”

“I don’t know how you can look away.”

“It’s bad art. Mid-seventh dynasty knockoff, gaudy and over-ornamented. Aquel and Achal on the side look more like caterpillars than snakes. They didn’t even sacrifice people here often. Most of that happened over at our office.” She pointed to the tallest pyramid on the skyline, the immense obsidian edifice at 667 Sansilva. Caleb’s father would have called the building Quechaltan, Heart of the Quechal. These days it had no name. “This place did cows. The occasional goat. People only on an eclipse.”

Caleb glanced over his shoulder. Dresediel Lex sprawled below: fifteen thousand miles of roads gleaming with ghostlight and gas lamps. Between boulevards crouched the houses and shops and apartment buildings, bars and banks, theaters and factories and restaurants, where seventeen million people drank and loved and danced and worked and died.

He looked away. “We have an eclipse every year, a partial or a lunar. For a full solar like the one this autumn, the priests would work through all the prisoners and captives they could find, throw in a few innocents for good measure. Blood and hearts for Aquel and Achal.”

“And you wonder why I don’t look? It’s bad art, and worse history. I don’t know why Andrej”—the bar’s owner—“keeps it around.”

“You wouldn’t have thought that way seventy years ago.”

“I like to think I would have.”

“So would I. But your grandparents, and my father, they weren’t born different from the rest of us, and they still fought tooth and claw to defend their gods back in the Wars.”

“Yeah, and they lost.”

“They lost, our boss won, kicked out priests and pantheon, and now we all pretend three thousand years of bloodshed didn’t happen. We put a fence around history and hang a plaque and assume it’s over. Try to forget.”

“What’s put you in such a good mood?”

“It’s been a long day. Long week. Long year.”

“Why did you fold, at the table?”

“I catch hell from the goddess, and I need to explain myself to you, too?”

“The goddess doesn’t know you like I do. She’s reborn every game. I’ve watched you play for eight years, and I’ve never seen you cave like that.”

“The odds were against me.”

“Screw odds. You had to know the lady in black wasn’t suited.”

He turned from the altar. Southwest winds bore the sea scent of salt and death. “Can’t you go stalk some girl fresh from university or something? Leave me in peace?”

“I’m reformed. I am no longer a dirty old woman.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“Seriously, Caleb. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said, and patted his pockets for a smoke. Of course nothing. He quit years ago. Bad for his health, the doctors said. “The odds were against me. I wanted to get out with my soul intact.”

“You wouldn’t have done that four years ago.”

“A lot changes in four years.” Four years ago, he was a fledgling risk manager at Red King Consolidated, recovering from a university career of cards and higher math. Four years ago, he was dating Leah. Four years ago, Teo still believed she was interested in boys. Four years ago, he’d thought the city had a future.

“Yes.” A tiny copper coin lay at Teo’s feet, a bit of someone’s soul spooled up inside. She kicked the coin, and it tinged across the roof. “Question is, whether the change is for the better.”

“I’m tired, Teo.”

“Of course you’re tired. It’s midnight, and we’re not twenty-two anymore. Now get down there, apologize to that table, and steal their souls.”

He smiled, and shook his head, and collapsed, screaming.

Images burrowed into his brain: blood smeared over concrete, a tangled road into deep mountains, the chemical stench of a poisoned lake. Teeth gleamed in moonlight and tore his flesh.

Caleb woke to find himself splayed on the sandstone floor. Teo bent over him, brow furrowed, one hand cool against his forehead. “Are you okay?”

“Office call. Give me a second.”

She recognized the symptoms. If necromancy was an art, and alchemy a science, then direct memory transfer was surgery with a blunt instrument: painful and unsubtle, dangerous as it was effective. “What does the boss want with you at midnight?”

“I have to go.”

“Hells with her. Until nine tomorrow, the world is someone else’s responsibility.”

He accepted her hand and pulled himself upright. “There’s a problem at Bright Mirror.”

“What kind of problem?”

“The kind with teeth.”

Teo closed her mouth, stepped back, and waited.

When he could trust his feet, he staggered toward the stairs. She caught up with him at the stairwell.

“I’m coming with you.”

“Stay here. Have fun. One of us should.”

“You need someone to look after you. And I wasn’t having fun anyway.”

He was too tired to argue as she followed him down.

2

Moonlight shone off the streak of blood on the concrete path beside Bright Mirror Reservoir.

Caleb watched the blood, and waited.

The first Wardens on site had treated the guard’s death as a homicide. They scoured the scene, dusted for fingerprints, took notes, and asked about motive and opportunity, weapons and enemies—all the wrong questions.

When they found the monsters, they began to ask the right ones. Then they called for help.

Help, in this case, meant Red King Consolidated, and, specifically, Caleb.

Dresediel Lex had been built between desert and sea by settlers who neither expected nor imagined their dry land would one day support seventeen million people. Down the centuries, as the city grew, its gods used blessed rains to fill the gaps between water demand and supply. After the God Wars were won (or lost, depending on who you asked), RKC took over for the fallen pantheon. Some of its employees laid pipe, some built dams, some worked at Bay Station maintaining the torturous Craft that stripped salt from ocean water.

Some, like Caleb, solved problems.

Caleb was the highest-ranking employee on site so far. He had expected senior management to swoop in and take charge of a case like this, with death and property damage and workplace safety at issue, but his superiors seemed intent to leave Bright Mirror to him. At the inevitable inquest, he would be the one called to testify before Deathless Kings and their pitiless ministers.

The RKC brass had given him a wonderful opportunity to fail.

He wanted a drink, but could not afford to take one.

For a frenzied half hour, he’d ordered junior analysts and technicians through the routines of incident response. Isolate the reservoir from the city mains. Pull some Craftsmen out of bed to build a shield over the water. Find a few tons of rowan wood, stat. Check the dam’s wards. Cordon off the access road. No one comes in or out.

Orders given, he stood, silent, by the blood and the water.

Glyphs necklaced Bright Mirror Reservoir in blue light. The dammed river ran glossy black from shore to shore. He smelled cement, space, the broad flatness of still water, and above all that a sharp ammonia stench.

Two hours ago, a security guard named Halhuatl had walked along the reservoir, casting about in the dark with a bull’s-eye lantern. Hearing a splash, he stepped forward. He saw nothing—no night bird, no bat, no swimming coyote or bathing snake. He scanned the water with his lantern. Where the light touched, it left a rippling trail.

That’s strange, Hal must have thought, before he died.

A chill wind blew over the water, producing no waves. Caleb stuck his hands deep into the pockets of his overcoat. Footsteps approached.

“I grabbed this from the icebox in the maintenance shack,” Teo said, behind him. “The foreman will miss his lunch tomorrow.”

He turned from the water and reached for the parcel she held, white wax paper tied with twine. “Thank you.”

She didn’t let go. “Why do you need this?”

“To show you what’s at stake.”

“Funny.” She released the package. He undid the twine with his gloved hands, and opened the paper. A frost-dusted slab of beef lay within, its juice the same color as the blood on the concrete.

He judged the distance to the water, lifted the beef, and threw it overhand.

The meat arced toward the reservoir. Beneath, water bulged and reared—a wriggling, viscous column rippled with reflected stars.

The water opened its mouth. Thousands of long, curved fangs, stiletto-sharp, snapped shut upon the beef, piercing, slicing, grinding as they chewed.

The water serpent hissed, lashed the night air with an icy tongue, and retreated into the reservoir. It left no trace save a sharper edge to the ammonia smell.

“Hells,” Teo said. “Knife and bone and all the hells. You weren’t kidding about teeth.”

“No.”

“What is that thing?”

“Tzimet.” He said the word like a curse.

“I’ve seen demons. That’s no demon.”

“It’s not a demon. But it’s like a demon.”

“Qet’s body and Ilana’s blood.” Teo was not a religious woman—few people were religious any more, since the God Wars—but the old ways had the best curses. “That thing’s living in our water.”

Her voice held two levels of revulsion. Anyone could have heard the first, the common terror. Only someone who knew how seriously Teo took her work with Red King Consolidated would detect her emphasis on the word “our.”

“No.” Caleb knelt and wiped the meat juice off his gloved fingers onto the ground. “It’s not in our water. It is our water.” Stars glared down from the velvet sky. “We’ve isolated Bright Mirror, but we need to check the other reservoirs. Tzimet grow slowly, and they’re clever. They could be hiding until they’re ready to strike. It’s blind luck we caught this one.”

“What do you mean, it is the water?”

“The Craft keeps our reservoirs clean: wards against germs, fish, Scorpionkind larvae, anything that might pollute or corrupt. Charms to curb evaporation. The reservoir’s deep, with dark shadows at the bottom. When the sun and stars shine, a border forms between light and darkness. The Craft presses against that border. If there’s enough pressure, it pokes a tiny hole in the world.” He held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Nothing physical can fit through, only patterns. That’s what these Tzimet are.” He pointed to the reservoir. “Like seed crystals. A bit of living night seeps into the water, and the water becomes part of the night.”

“I’ve never seen a crystal with teeth.” She paused, corrected herself. “Outside of a gallery. But that one didn’t move.” She pointed to the blood. “Who was it?”

“Security guard. Night roster says the guy’s name was Halhuatl. The Wardens thought this was a homicide until the reservoir tried to eat them.”

Gravel growled on the road behind: the golem-carts arrived at last. Caleb turned. Exhaust puffed from joints in the golems’ legs. RKC workers in gray uniform jackets walked from cart to cart, checking the rowan logs piled within. Two junior analysts stood beside the foreman, taking notes. Good. The workers knew their business. They didn’t need his people interfering.

“Horrible way to die,” Teo said.

“Quick,” Caleb answered. “But, yes.”

“Poor bastard.”

“Yeah.”

“Now we know Tzimet are in there, we can keep them from getting out. Right?”

“They can’t get into the water system, but to keep them imprisoned we need better Craftsmen than we’ve been able to get out here so far. Those glowing glyphs hide the reservoir from animals that want a drink. We’ve inverted them to hide the outside world from the Tzimet. They can’t hear us or smell us, but they could kill us no problem if they knew we were here.”

“You sure know how to make a lady feel safe.”

“The Craft division’s woken Markoff, Billsman, and Telec; once they arrive, they’ll build a shield over the water. Feel safe then.”

“No way Telec’s sober enough for work at this time of night. And Markoff will be trying to impress the shorefront girls with his rich-and-sinister routine.”

“Dispatch found them all, and claims they’re up for it. Anyway, the Tzimet aren’t a big deal in the meantime, long as they don’t get into the pipes.”

“Glad to hear it.” She grimaced. “I think I’ll lay off tap water all the same.”

“Don’t let the boss catch you.”

“I said I’d stop drinking it, not selling it. Can this kind of infection happen any time?”

“Technically?” He nodded. “The odds of Tzimet infestation in a given year are a hundred thousand to one against or so. We didn’t expect anything like this for at least another century. Poison, bacterial blooms, Scorpionkind, yes. Not this.”

“So you don’t think it was natural?”

“Might have been. Or someone might have helped nature along. Good odds on the latter.”

“You live in a grim universe.”

“That’s risk management for you. Anything that can go wrong, will—with a set probability given certain assumptions. We tell you how to fix it, and what you should have done to keep it from happening in the first place. At times like these, I become a hindsight professional.” He pointed at the blood. “We ran the numbers when Bright Mirror was built, forty-four years ago, and thought the risks were acceptable. I wonder if the King in Red will break the news to Hal’s family. If he has a family.”

“The boss isn’t a comforting figure.”

“I suppose not.” A line of golem-carts rolled past behind them.

“Can you imagine it? A knock, and you answer the door to see a giant skeleton in red robes? With that flying lizard of his coiled on your lawn, eating your dog?”

“There would be heart attacks.” Caleb couldn’t resist a slim smile. “People dying with the door half open. Every personal injury Craftsman in the city would descend on us like sharks when blood’s in the water.”

Teo clapped him on the shoulder. “Look who’s got his sense of humor back.”

“I might as well laugh. I have another three hours or so of this.” He waved over his shoulder at the carts with their cargo. A bleary brigade of revenants in maintenance jumpsuits lurched by, bearing rowan. They stank of grave-musk. “I won’t leave until three, maybe four.”

“Should I be worried that it takes demons to break you out of your funk?”

“Everyone likes to be needed,” he said. “I might be late to work tomorrow.”

“I’ll tell Tollan and the boys you were out keeping the world safe for tyranny.” She fished her watch out of her pocket, and frowned.

“You late for something?”

“A little.” She closed the watch with a click. “It’s not important.”

“I’m fine. I’ll catch up with you tomorrow.”

“You’re sure? I can stay here if you need me.”

“Fate of the city on the line here. I have my hands full. No room for self-pity. Go meet your girl.”

“How did you know there was a girl?”

“Who else would be waiting for you at two in the morning? Go. Don’t get in trouble on my account.”

“You better not be lying.”

“You’d know if I was.”

She laughed, and retreated into the night.

The maintenance crew poured ten tons of rowan logs into the reservoir. Revenants did most of the hands-on work, since they smelled less appetizing to the Tzimet. Soon, a smooth layer of wood covered the water. Caleb thanked the foreman as his people slunk back to their beds.

The rowan would block all light from stars and moon and sun. The wood’s virtue poisoned Tzimet, and deprived of the light that cast their shadows, the creatures would wither and die.

Overhead, Wardens circled on their Couatl mounts. Heavy feathered wings beat fear through the sky, and Caleb felt serpents’ eyes upon him.

By sunrise, every executive in Red King Consolidated would be knocking on Caleb’s door, demanding to know how Bright Mirror was corrupted. Craftsmen could bend lightning to their will, cross oceans without aid, break gods in single combat, but they remained human enough to hunt scapegoats in a crisis. Sixty years after Dresediel Lex cast off the gods’ yolk, its masters still demanded blood.

So Caleb searched for a cause. Bright Mirror had been built with safeguards upon safeguards. If a mistake was made, what mistake, and who made it? Or was there some force at work more sinister than accident? The True Quechal, or another group of god-worshipper terrorists? Rival Concerns, hoping to unseat Red King Consolidated as the city’s water source? Demons? (Unlikely—the demon lords made a hefty profit from their trade with Dresediel Lex, and had no reason to hurt the city.)

Who would suffer for Halhuatl’s death?

Rowan logs bobbed on the still reservoir. Caleb’s footsteps were the only breaches in the night’s silent shell. City lights glowed over the dam’s edge, as if the world beyond was burning.

He walked the shoreline, searching for a sacrifice.

3

By the time Caleb reached the far side of the reservoir, he was so exhausted he almost didn’t see the woman.

He had not found his cause. All the equipment and wards seemed to work. No barbed wire was severed, no holes cut into the fence. No drums of poison stood empty beside decaying chemical sheds. He spied no pitons or carved handholds on the cliffs above the water.

When he closed his eyes and examined Bright Mirror as a Craftsman would, he saw an enormous web spun in three dimensions by a drunken spider. He could make no sense of that weave, let alone tell if it was broken.

He opened his eyes again. The dam’s edge cut the world in half, water and rowan below and sky above. To his right stood a dormitory shack, windows dark, inhabitants lost in sleep and demon dreams. Caleb was alone.

He blinked.

Not alone.

A woman leaned against the shack, arms crossed, one knee bent, her heel resting on the wall.

She did not seem to have noticed him. He engraved her on his memory: slender, and tense as a bent blade. Short black flames of hair blazed from her head. Thin lips, with sharp edges. She wore calf-length pants the color of sand and rock, a white sleeveless shirt, and dark gray close-toed sandals with leather straps that wrapped around her ankles and calves. She looked as if she had no business anywhere near Bright Mirror Reservoir.

She rubbed her bare arms, and shivered from the cold.

Either the woman had not seen him, or didn’t think he could see her. If the former, she’d see him soon enough; if the latter, no sense demonstrating she was wrong. He surveyed grounds, sky, water, and shed, as if she did not exist. Step by nonchalant step, he drew closer. She glanced at him, and smiled a self-satisfied smile. She did not greet him, nor did she speak, which settled the matter to Caleb’s satisfaction. She thought she was invisible. Fair enough.

When he came within range, he sprang.

He pinned her arms to the wall. She did not curse or struggle, only stared at him with wide startled eyes of a brighter black than he’d known eyes could be.

He was lucky, he realized, that she didn’t try to fight him. Her arms felt strong, and his groin was exposed to her knee.

“Who,” she asked, “are you?”

“That’s my line.”

“You don’t look like a Warden. Is this your hobby, jumping unarmed women in the middle of the night?”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m taking the air,” she said with a smile. “Waiting for a nice man to accost me. Only way to get a date in this town.”

“Give me a straight answer.”

“I fell from the sky.” She was beautiful, he thought, as weapons were beautiful. No. Focus.

“I work for RKC. This reservoir has been poisoned. The water’s infested with Tzimet. One of our workers is dead. I’m not here to joke.”

Her smile broke. “I’m sorry.”

“Who are you?”

“You first.”

“I’m Caleb Altemoc,” he said before it occurred to him not to answer.

“You can call me Mal,” she said. “I’m a cliff runner.” Caleb’s eyebrows rose. The rules of cliff running were as simple as the rules of murder: runners chose a starting rooftop and a destination, and met at moonrise to race, following any path they chose so long as their feet never touched ground. “I train in these mountains at night. I’ve come every evening for a couple months, but usually no one’s awake. Between the Wardens, the zombies, and the carts, I had to stop and watch.”

“Months. Why haven’t we caught you before now?”

Her eyes flicked down. A shark’s tooth pendant hung from a cord around her neck. The tooth was etched with the Quechal glyph for “eye,” capped by a double arc that signified denial or falsehood. Eye and arc both glowed with soft green light. A strong ward against detection. Expensive, but cliff running was a sport for idiots, madmen, and people who could afford good doctors.

“Why should I believe you?”

“If I’d poisoned this water, would I wait around for someone to discover me?”

“That’s for the Wardens to decide.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Trespassing is wrong. And they’ll want to talk to you even if you’re innocent. If you’ve been here every night for the past few months, you might have seen something that could help us.”

“I won’t go with the Wardens.” She pushed against his grip, to test him. He did not release her, and shifted to the side to bring his groin out of range. “You know how they feel about cliff runners. Ask me what you want, but keep them out of it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” she said, and hit him in the face with her forehead.

Caleb stumbled, and caught himself against brick. Blind, he turned, following her footfalls. His vision cleared in time to see her leap out over the reservoir. He cried a warning she did not seem to hear.

Claws of black water burst up to pierce and catch and rend. She fell between them all, landed on a thick rowan log, and sprang from it to the next. Talons sliced through the air behind her. Mal fled toward the dam, trailing a wake of hungry mouths.

Caleb had no time to call after her. Four thorn-tipped columns rose from the water, arched above him, and descended. He dodged right, hit the ground hard, lurched to his feet and sprinted along the water’s edge. The Tzimet could not see him, but they knew humans: where one was, others would be also.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mal run and leap, now an arc, now a vector.

He did not wonder at her, because he had no time. He ran with fear-born speed.

Iron stairs led down to catwalks crisscrossing the dam’s face. Caleb reached the stairs seconds ahead of the Tzimet, clattered down the first flight, and crouched low on the landing. The dam plummeted three hundred feet beneath him to a broad valley of orange groves. Miles away, Dresediel Lex burned like an offering to angry, absent gods. He pushed all thoughts of height and falling from his mind. The iron landing, the dam, these were his world.

Wards at the dam’s crest stopped floods during the winter rains. They should hold the Tzimet.

Emphasis on “should.”

He swore. Mal (if that was her real name) was his best lead, and she’d be dead soon, if she wasn’t already. One misstep, a log rolling wrong underfoot, and she would fall into a demon’s mouth.

He waited for her screams.

A scream did come—but a scream of frustration, not pain, and issued from no human throat.

Mal dove off the dam into empty space.

Once, twice, she somersaulted, falling ten feet, fifteen. Caleb’s stomach sank. She fell, or flew, without sound.

Twenty feet down, she snapped to a midair stop and dangled, nose inches from the dam’s pebbled concrete face. A harness girded her hips, and a long thin cord ran from that harness to the crest of the dam.

Blue light flared above as Tzimet strained against the wards. Iron groaned and tore. A claw raked over the dam’s edge. Lightning crackled at its tip.

Mal pushed off the concrete and began to sway like a pendulum, reaching for the nearest catwalk—one level down from Caleb. He ran to the stairs. Another talon pressed through the dam wards, scraping, seeking.

At the apex of Mal’s next swing, he strained for her. She clasped a calloused hand around his wrist, pulled herself to him, wrapped a leg around the catwalk’s railing, and unhooked her tether.

“Thanks,” she said. Sparks showered upon them. Fire and Craft-light lanced in her eyes.

“You’re insane.”

“So I’ve heard,” she said, and smiled, and let go of his arm.

He grabbed for her, too slowly. She fell—ten feet back and down, to roll and land on a lower catwalk, stand, run, and leap again. She accelerated, jumping from ledge to ledge until she reached the two-hundred-yard ladder to the valley floor.

Caleb climbed over the railing to follow her, but the chasm clenched his stomach. His legs quaked. He retreated from the edge.

Above, demons clawed at the emptiness that bound them.

The Wardens would catch her in the valley, he told himself, knowing they would not. She was already gone.

4

An hour and a half later, a driverless carriage deposited Caleb on the corner of Sansilva Boulevard and Bloodletter’s Street, beside a jewelry shop and a closed coffee house. He hurt. Adrenaline’s tide receded to reveal pits of exhaustion, pain, and shock. He’d told the Wardens he was fine, he’d make it home on his own, thanks for the concern, but these were lies. He was a good liar.

Broad streets stretched vacant on all sides. The carriage rattled off down the empty road. Night wind brushed his hair, tried and failed to wrap him in a comforting embrace.

He remembered lightning-lit eyes, and a tan body falling.

He’d given the carriage the wrong address, and stumbled a block and a half to his destination, a ten-story metal pyramid built by an Iskari architect mimicking Quechal designs. Over the door, a plaque bore the building’s name in an art deco perversion of High Quechal script: the House of Seven Stars.

He exhaled. It was this, or home.

“You’ve come up in the world,” said a voice behind him, deep as the foundations of the earth.

Caleb closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and counted in his head to ten and back in Low Quechal, High Quechal, and common Kathic. By the time he finished (four, three, two, one), the flare of anger dulled to a familiar, smoldering rage. His nails bit into his palms. Perfect ending to a perfect day.

“Hi, Dad,” he said.

“Either that, or you’ve abandoned that rat-trap house in the Vale to live off your friends until they kick you out.”

“It’s a long way home. I’ve been working.”

“You shouldn’t work so late.”

“Yeah,” Caleb said. “I shouldn’t. I wouldn’t have to, either, if you’d stop trying to kill people.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Caleb turned around.

Temoc towered in the darkness beyond the streetlamps. He was a man built on a different scale from other men: torso like an inverted pyramid, arms as thick as his legs, a neck that sloped out to meld with his shoulders. His skin was a black cutout illuminated by glowing silver scars. The same shadows that clouded his body obscured his features, but Caleb would have known him anywhere: last of the Eagle Knights, High Priest of the Sun, Chosen of the Old Gods. Scourge of the Craftsmen and right-thinking folk of Dresediel Lex. Fugitive. Terrorist. Father.

“You’re telling me you don’t know anything about Bright Mirror.”

“I know the place,” Temoc said. “What has happened there?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Dad.”

“I play at nothing.”

“Tzimet got into the reservoir. We’re lucky they killed a security guard before the water cycled into the mains this morning. Otherwise we’d have thousands out already, crawling in people’s mouths, spearing them from the inside.”

Temoc frowned. “Do you think I would do that? Consort with demons, endanger the city?”

“Maybe not. But your people might.”

“We stand up for our religious rights. We resist oppression. We do not murder innocents.”

“Bullshit.”

Temoc lowered his head. “I do not like your tone.”

“What about when you ambushed the King in Red five months back?”

“Your … boss … broke Qet Sea-Lord on His own altar. He impaled Gods on a tree of lightning, and laughed as They twitched in pain. He deserves seventeen-fold vengeance. I am the last priest of the old ways. If I do not avenge, who will?”

“You attacked him in broad daylight, with thunder and shadow and incendiary grenades. People died. He survived. You knew he would. No one who can kill gods would go down that easily. All you did was hurt the innocent.”

“No one who works for Red King Consolidated is wholly innocent.”

“I work for RKC, Dad.”

An airbus passed overhead. Light from its windows cast the pavement in alternating strips of brilliance and shade. The light revealed Temoc’s face in slivers: jutting cliff of jaw, heavy brow, dark, deep eyes, Caleb’s own broad nose. A dusting of white at his temples, and the firm lines chiseled into cheeks and forehead, were his only signs of age. No man in Dresediel Lex could say how old Temoc was, not even his son—he had been a hale young knight when the gods fell, which made him eighty at least. He nurtured the surviving gods, and they kept him young, and strong. He was all they had left—and for twenty years, they had been his only companions.

Caleb looked away. His eyes burned, and his mouth felt dry. He massaged his forehead. “Look, I’m sorry. It’s been a long night. I’m not at my, I mean, neither of us is at his best. You say you don’t have anything to do with the Bright Mirror thing?”

“Yes.”

“If you’re lying, we’ll find out.”

“I do not lie.”

Tell that to Mom, he could have said, but didn’t. “Why are you here?”

Caleb’s father might have been a statue for how little he moved—a bas relief in one of the temples where he had prayed before the God Wars, where he prayed and cut his arms and legs and dreamed that one day he would tear a man’s heart from his chest and feed it to the Serpents. “I worry about you,” he said. “You have been staying out late. Not sleeping enough. Gambling.”

Caleb stared at Temoc. He wanted to laugh, or to cry, but neither impulse won out, so he did nothing.

“You should take better care of yourself.”

“Thanks, Dad,” he said.

“I worry about you.”

Yes, Caleb thought. You worry about me in those last raw hours before nightfall, before you try to tear down everything we who work in this city build during the day. You worry about me, because there’s no more priesthood, and what are kids to do these days when there are no more reliable careers involving knives, altars, and bleeding victims? “That makes two of us,” he said, and: “Look, I have to go. I have work in four hours. Can we talk about this later?”

No response.

He turned back to his father, to apologize or to curse, but Temoc was gone. Wind blew down Bloodletter’s Street from the ocean and sent a small flock of discarded newspapers flapping into the night: gray beasts old the moment they were made.

“I hate it when he does that,” Caleb said to nobody in particular, and limped across the street to the House of Seven Stars.

Teo had an apartment on the seventh floor, a corner room she’d bought with her own soulstuff. The day she signed the contract she’d drunk a half-gallon of gin with Caleb in celebration. “Mine. Not my father’s, not my mother’s, not my family’s. My soul, my house.” When he observed that she was technically part of her family, she’d thrown a napkin at him and called him a bastard.

“You know what I mean. My cousins are all tied to the purse strings. Not one of them has even the poorest excuse for a career. They live in those damn beach houses up the coast, or circle the globe on Pop’s ticket, three weeks doing coke off the naked back of an eighteen-year-old boy in one of those nameless ports south of the Shining Empire, a month ogling sentient ice sculptures in Koschei’s kingdom. Lunch in Iskar, dinner in Camlaan, a romp in the Pleasure Quarters of Alt Coulumb, and none of it earned. This place, this is mine.” She put a fierce edge on that word.

“And what’s yours,” Caleb replied, drink-slurred, “is mine.”

“I’ll hang the most absurd pictures on the wall, and keep a shelf of single malts, and polish the counters so they reflect themselves a hundred million times. Never will there be a single book out of place or a single picture crooked.”

She was drunk, too.

“Can I visit?”

“You may call on me for the occasional bacchanal and revel.” She glared down her nose at him like an empress from her throne. “In exchange, if I am out of town on business, you must feed Compton,” meaning her cat, a treacherous calico.

“Sure,” he said, and took the key she offered.

He leaned against the lift wall and watched the floor numbers tick up to seven. Phantoms filled his skull: Temoc, father, rebel, murderer, saint. The goddess whispered in his ear. Blood. Stars reflected in dark water. They all faded into vacant, expansive night, the night after the death of the world.

The night of his mind shone black. Mal curved before him like a blade.

The lift’s bell called Caleb back from the ocean of her eyes to a white-carpeted hallway hung with dull oil paintings. Vases of silk flowers stood on teak tables heavy with ornamental bronze. He shuffled down the hall, and searched his jacket pockets for Teo’s key.

His thoughts were chaos and blood and fire as he slid the key into the lock. Chaos, blood, and fire; flood, poison, riot, ruin. Mal didn’t seem the poisoning type, but what was the poisoning type? Why linger at Bright Mirror if she wasn’t involved? She should have snuck away the moment she saw Wardens. Perhaps she trusted her shark’s tooth to keep her safe. Flimsy defense, since Caleb could see her. Then again, the Wardens lacked Caleb’s scars.

He needed a bed, or a comfortable couch. He’d catch hell from Teo in the morning for stumbling in unannounced, but her apartment was closer to the office than his, and he had stashed clothes in her closet—clubbing clothes, yes, but he could salvage an outfit from them for work.

He pushed the key home, turned the knob.

Light stung his eyes, and for a confused moment he thought, good, Teo’s still awake. He stepped into the living room.

Thirty seconds and a shriek later he staggered, eyes closed, out into the hallway. The door slammed behind him. His cheeks burned. From within, he heard two women’s voices raised in argument. He waited, eyes still shut, until Teo’s words assumed the weight of finality, and the other woman retreated toward the bedroom, cursing.

The latch turned and the door opened.

“You can look now,” Teo said.

She’d wrapped herself in a plush white bathrobe, hair a tangled mass on her forehead. Compton wound sinuously between her bare feet, and licked sweat from her ankles. Over Teo’s left shoulder, Caleb saw a blonde wearing white cotton briefs and nothing else stagger into the apartment’s one bedroom and slam the door. “She seems nice,” he said, lamely. Teo didn’t respond. He tried again: “Sorry. I’ll go.”

She assessed him with a glance: clothes in disarray, hair standing up, tie crooked and loose. “What happened?”

“The Bright Mirror thing went south. There was a girl there, and she woke the Tzimet up. I have to be in the office early, but I need sleep. Hoped I could use your couch.” I didn’t realize you were using it, he thought but didn’t say. “Sorry. Dumb idea.” He didn’t want to go home. “I hope I didn’t screw up anything for you.”

She sighed. “You didn’t screw anything up. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. Sam’s emotional. An artist. She’ll be fine in the morning. The couch is yours, if you want it.”

“I shouldn’t.”

“I can’t let you stumble back out into the night looking like a half-strangled puppy. I’ll tell her you’re one of my idiot cousins or something. Don’t make me regret it.”

“Too late,” he said, but she had already turned her back on him.

Lights off, he lay on Teo’s couch in the dark, staring up at the terrifying cubist landscapes that adorned her living room. A panorama of the Battle of Dresediel Lex hung over the couch, burning pyramids and torn sky, spears of flame and ice, bodies impaled on moonlight sickles, warring gods and Craftsmen rendered in vivid scrolls of paint. One corner of the painting showed Temoc locked in single combat with the King in Red, before he fell.

Caleb’s eyes drifted shut. Tzimet towered above him, reaching toward the cold stars. Compton dug claws into his leg. He rolled onto his side. Leather creaked.

He drifted to sleep, drowning in a black sea.

5

Dreams of knives and blood on stone woke Caleb to the hard harsh morning, to the light beyond Teo’s windows and to the crick in his neck. He pulled himself off the white leather couch like a man pulling himself out of hell, and staggered for her bathroom, rubbing one hand over the scars that webbed his torso.

A long shower later, he dripped across Teo’s living-room carpet to the hall closet. His nightclub suit would do, a sharp pressed gray with a white shirt, so long as he left the vermilion vest and spats and cravat behind. Yesterday’s shoes were scuffed, but serviceable. He’d have them polished on the way, and find a toothbrush, too.

From Teo’s spare pantry he scrounged a bowl of polenta, and two eggs, which he scrambled. On the table as he sat down to eat, he found a note written in her sharp hand.

I’d say help yourself to breakfast, but I know you already have.

See you at work. The door will lock behind you.

Sam’s pissed, by the way. No surprise. I’ll work my way back into her good graces, but you owe me coffee, at least.

The signature was an uppercase T in pen strokes so deep they dimpled the thick parchment.

The wall clock read 9:47 A.M. Caleb ate a hurried breakfast under the baleful stares of bloodthirsty paintings, washed his plate and the frying pan, and left in a rush, realizing only after Teo’s door clicked shut behind him that he had left his hat on her coffee table.

Dresediel Lex crushed him in a cacophonous embrace. Carts and carriages and wagons clogged the street outside Teo’s building. Drivers shouted at pedestrians, horses, and other drivers as if they could break gridlock by inventive language and the threat of violence. Couatl, buzzing optera, airbuses and simple balloons tangled in the flat blue sky.

Heat ruled the city, dry dominant heat like a god’s gaze or the breath of a forge. All bowed before the heat; buildings prostrated themselves, and people slouched nearly naked beneath the beating sun. By this hour Craftsmen, bankers, brokers, and all others who dressed for work were safely ensconced in air-conditioned offices. Actors and students and night-shift workers walked the streets in shorts, light shirts, miniskirts, tunics, sleeveless ponchos. Caleb caught himself following the long bare legs of three young women down the sidewalk, and closed his eyes. A sharp smile surfaced from the confusion of his memory: the woman, Mal.

He bought a newspaper from a corner stand for two thaums—cheap enough, but his head ached from spending even a little soulstuff. Hangover, had to be. He’d won a good chunk of soul the night before, shouldn’t need to visit the bank for a week or so. The newspaper held no news about Bright Mirror Reservoir, a good sign. The King in Red did not control the press directly, but news of a crisis like Bright Mirror had to be managed.

Caleb walked two blocks to the airbus station and caught the next dirigible downtown. The bus moved west and north, threading around and beneath skyspires toward the 700 block of Sansilva, where eighty-story pyramids rose to worship the sun.

No real worship had taken place there since Liberation, of course. Still, the pyramids impressed.

The air lost its haze, and the sky retreated from the earth. Craftsmen and Craftswomen drew power from starlight and moonlight, though they could also drink from the sun, or from candles, fires, living beings. Smoke and exhaust from the city’s wagons, factories, and cooking stoves would not disturb simple, day-to-day Craft, but the Concerns of the 700 block brooked no interference with their dark and delicate work. They burned their sky clean.

In the depths of winter, when rain washed sweat from the city’s brow and flash-flood rivers coursed down alleys, the sun still beat down on the 700 block. At night, sorcerous clouds covered the poorer districts, Skittersill and Stonewood, Monicola and Central and Fisherman’s Vale, reflecting light back to earth so that, in dark Sansilva, even the faintest stars would hang exposed to hungry Craftsmen.

Caleb got off the bus a half-block from RKC’s headquarters, the obsidian pyramid at 667 Sansilva. True Quechal protesters stood outside, chanting and waving clapboard signs: NO DEMONS IN OUR WATER. THE GODS DEFEND. NO WATER WITHOUT BLOOD. Half wore modern clothes, slacks and shirts and skirts, and half garments even Caleb’s father would have thought clownishly traditional: white dresses hemmed in silver cord for the women, and cotton kilts for the men, their bare and unscarred torsos covered with Quechal glyphs in red paint. Four black-uniformed Wardens watched the crowd, arms crossed. Sunlight glinted off their badges, and off the silver planes of their faces.

As Caleb approached, a soapbox preacher pointed to him with one gnarled finger and cried, “Flee this place! Traitors walk here, traitors to blood, traitors to Gods and their own kind!”

Caleb ignored the man and edged around the crowd. No sense wondering how the True Quechal had learned about Bright Mirror. Their noses were better than vultures’ for smelling rotten meat.

“If you will not flee,” the old man called, “then join us. It is not too late. Stand against the blood-betrayers, the worse-than-dead! Take up the cause!”

“Get lost,” Caleb shouted in High Quechal as he walked past.

The old man’s face twisted in confusion. He probably didn’t know High Quechal, beyond a handful of half-remembered words from some underground religious service. Few spoke the priests’ tongue these days. Caleb only knew it because his father had taught him.

He walked through the protest. Behind, the chants and slogans swelled again to crescendo.

Caleb stepped off the lift at the pyramid’s twenty-third floor, into the silence of men and women working.

He wound through cubicles toward the Director’s corner suite. Tollan would want to see him before he drowned in the sea of paperwork no doubt already covering his desk. Much as it pained Caleb’s boss to admit, some truths could not be conveyed in the blanks of official forms.

He saw her office door, and slowed.

Tollan’s door was a pane of frosted glass—a source of comfort to the whole department, because from her general position in the office they could tell her mood. If she was at her desk, the world was at peace; if pacing, at war; if tending her peace lily, best hide and wait for the axe to fall.

Caleb could not see Tollan, or her desk, or her peace lily. A black blade had cut her office from the universe. Terrible things moved in that blackness, and few of them were human.

The door crept open.

Caleb ducked into the nearest cubicle, startling its blocky, middle-aged occupant from his work.

“Sorry, Mick.”

“Caleb? Where have you been? The boss is looking for you.”

“I’ll talk to Tollan when she’s done with—”

“Not the boss,” Mikatec whispered. “The boss.”

Caleb knelt behind the cubicle wall. Mick had papered his workspace with pictures of his younger, sleeker self, playing ullamal, holding athletic trophies, screaming triumph. Caleb crouched beside his coworker’s memories, and listened.

Quills scratched paper. Chair wheels squeaked. Fingers drummed on a desk. An actuary the next row over coughed.

From the darkness beyond Tollan’s door came a voice like the end of the world: “I hope our trust in you is not misplaced.”

Color faded from the pictures of Mick’s glory. Ghostlights overhead flickered and died. Someone—a new hire, had to be—cursed, and someone else shushed her. The noise of pens and chairs and drumming fingers stopped. The risk management department grew still.

Tollan’s door swung shut.

Three distinct, sharp taps trespassed on the hush, then three more, then the thud of a bronze-shod staff on stone. The noises repeated. A heavy robe swept over the stone floor.

Caleb held his breath.

The King in Red moved among the cubicles, wreathed in power. The taps were his triple footsteps: the bones of his heel, the ball of his foot, the twiglike toes striking in sequence. “As you were,” he said. No one stirred. Sixty years ago, the King in Red had shattered the sky over Dresediel Lex, and impaled gods on thorns of starlight. The last of his flesh had melted away decades past, leaving smooth bone and a constant grin.

He was a good boss. But who could forget what he had been, and what remained?

The footsteps receded, and light seeped back into the world. An elevator bell rang. When the doors rolled shut, Caleb exhaled, and heard others do the same. A thin layer of sweat slicked his brow.

He patted Mick on the shoulder, loosened his collar, and walked to Tollan’s office.

Tollan paced behind her desk, cradling a glass of mescal. She took a sip, and shook herself. Her long black hair was up in a tightly coiled braid, which left her face severe and thin.

“Where have you been?” she asked when he closed the door.

“Sleeping.”

“Sleeping.” She laughed without humor, and looked down as if surprised to find herself holding a drink. “Once in a while I convince myself I’m used to him, I can handle him. Then I see him angry.” She squeezed the glass as if to crush it, reconsidered, and set it on her desk.

There was no need for her to say whom she meant.

Caleb waited. At last, he said: “I was at Bright Mirror until half-past four. If I arrived earlier, I would have been too tired to help you or anybody.”

Tollan kept pacing. He had expected her to shout at him. Her silence was worse.

“Bright Mirror is under control,” he continued. “Nobody was hurt. The Tzimet are contained. They’ll die slowly, but they will die. We can keep the water flowing. He shouldn’t blame this on you.”

“That’s your professional opinion?” Her shoes ground against the floor when she turned.

“Isn’t it yours?”

“We took every precaution,” she said in a tone contemptuous of precautions.

“We use high-energy Craft in those waters. Something was bound to slip through sooner or later.”

“You don’t believe that any more than I do. Or any more than he does.” She jabbed a thumb toward the ceiling, and the King in Red’s penthouse office sixty floors up. “Someone screwed us.”

“It’s possible.”

“Possible.” She spat the word. “The worst part is, the boss isn’t angry for what we’ve done, or didn’t do. He’s angry because this puts the Heartstone deal in jeopardy.”

Heartstone was a dowsing company, water development, energy. “What does that have to do with Bright Mirror? We’re buying Heartstone straight out.”

“Only if Alaxic, their mad old chief exec, decides to sell. Bright Mirror has him worried. The King in Red says, that Alaxic says, that he won’t go through with the deal unless someone convinces him this wasn’t our fault. Face-to-face.”

Caleb shrugged. “So someone should do that.”

“The boss wants you.”

“Me? I’m no good at that sort of thing. Send Teo. She’s Miss Contract Management. They gave her a parking space and everything.”

“The boss doesn’t want to send you because you’re a good negotiator. He wants to send you because of who your father is.”

Caleb didn’t say anything. Many replies leapt to mind, none of them polite.

“Old man Alaxic used to be a priest. He studied the Craft after the God Wars, started his own Concern, but to him, the King in Red is still the guy who killed his gods.” Tollan’s eyes were fierce, and narrow as her mouth. “Will you do this? Go to Heartstone, and explain what happened?”

“I will,” Caleb said. “But I’d rather the King in Red use me because he thinks I’m good at my job than because of who my father was. Is.”

“Tell him that yourself, the next time you see him. And if you’re still alive after, tell me how it goes.” She flipped through her day planner. “I’ll work with Heartstone to set up an appointment. What will you say to Alaxic?”

“That we’ve contained the problem. Either there was a freak malfunction, or the reservoir was poisoned. We’ll monitor the system, step up security, and keep him in the loop about whatever we find.”

Tollan frowned. “It’s not enough.”

“It’s the truth.”

“I wish we had something more substantial. The Wardens said you saw an intruder, who ran. Any details you can add?”

Black eyes, and a smile like a bared knife. Long, taut muscles, dusky skin. Laughing. Taunting. “I have some leads to follow up, that’s all.”

“Nothing concrete? Nothing we can give Alaxic, or the King in Red?”

He saw Mal spinning through space, as demons’ claws clutched after her.

“No.”

6

“No?” Teo’s shout echoed through Muerte Coffee. The listless girl behind the register snapped shut the novel she’d been browsing, and scanned the tables in panic.

“Quiet,” Caleb hissed. The coffee shop was almost empty, but small. Anyone might be listening—the man in the pinstriped suit pretending not to read a tabloid’s swimsuit issue, the woman walking a pen through her fingers, the girl at the register. Only the garish yellow skeletons that adorned the walls seemed to be watching him, but you never knew.

“Are you out of your mind?”

“The Wardens already know there was a runner. It’s not as if I’m hiding that.”

“But you didn’t tell them the runner was a woman. Or that you spoke with her. Or that you know her name.”

“Part of her name. I don’t even know which part. She could have been lying.”

“That’s not your call.”

He shrugged. “I kept the information to myself because I thought Tollan should be the first to know—the crime hurt RKC more than the city.”

“But you didn’t tell Tollan, either.”

“No.”

“Concealing something like this from her, from the Wardens, from the King in Red—one of them will kill you. Or they won’t. They’ll make you beg for death, and hold it back.”

“I know I’m playing a dangerous game.”

“You can’t imagine how dangerous.”

“What do you think will happen to this woman if I tell them about her? Some Wardens will hunt her down, lock her in a cell, and tear her mind to shreds.”

“Isn’t that the point? She’s a poisoner.”

“I don’t think so.”

“That’s a huge comfort, you having so much experience with this sort of thing.”

“She moved like a cliff runner. She was telling the truth about that.”

Teo dumped two spoons of sugar in her coffee and stirred. “So she’s a suicidal thrill-seeker who can evade our security. Sounds like an upstanding citizen.”

“Upstanding, maybe not. But I don’t think she’s a terrorist.”

Teo rolled her eyes. “You think she’s cute.”

“I think she stumbled into the middle of something way too big for her. I empathize.”

“And you think she’s cute.”

The bell over Muerte’s door rang six times to herald the arrival of a small pack of bankers, broad-shouldered men whose over-muscled arms strained against their jacket sleeves. Their hair spiked up from their skulls, and all their vowels converged to a dull schwa. As the bankers ordered triple espressos, Caleb changed the subject: “Tell me about Sam.”

Teo frowned, but knew better than to talk sensitive business in a crowded room. “It’s a new thing.” She stirred her coffee again, though the sugar was already dissolved. “She’s impulsive, smart, impractical. My type.”

“Actor?”

“Painter.”

“That’s a change.”

“Not all blondes are actors,” Teo said.

“Most of them are, around here.”

“The theaters think blondes are hot. I don’t make the public taste, even if I happen to agree with it.”

“Always with the foreign devils. Whatever happened to finding a nice Quechal girl and settling down?”

“You sound like my grandmother: ’Teotihual, if you must be an altar maid, at least stay within the pale of your own kind!’”

Caleb stifled a laugh. “She still says ’altar maid’ for women who like other women?”

“What do you expect from the older generation? Sensitivity training?”

“Pretty offensive, though.”

“Toothless. No one comes hunting for sacrifices these days.”

“Not too clear what ’pale’ means, either, sounds like.”

“Give her a break. Low Quechal’s her first language; she only speaks Kathic with me and my brothers because our Quechal’s so bad.”

The bell over the door rang again, and a wave of hot air ushered the bankers out. Through the window, Caleb watched them saunter into the pyramid next door. The air above the street shivered. He thought about thirst.

“You won’t tell Tollan about this girl,” Teo said after the door swung shut.

“Mal.”

“About Mal.”

“Correct.”

“What will you do, then?”

“I told you about her.”

“I mean what will you do next.”

He sipped his coffee. Teo’s eyes narrowed.

“You told me because you’re about to do something stupid, but you don’t know how stupid. You trust me to stop you from going too far.”

The coffee tasted like black, dense earth, and burned his throat on the way down.

“I’m not your conscience, Caleb.”

“I’m not asking you to be. I just want to talk things through. And I want someone to know what I’m up to, in case it all goes wrong.”

“You have a plan.”

“I do.”

“Tell me.”

“I want to find her. That’s the only way to know I’m right. Find her and learn who she is, what she saw.”

“No.”

“It’s not that bad an idea.”

“It’s not even possible, that’s how bad an idea it is. You’ve seen her once, and you might know part of her first name. Do you have any idea how many people live in the greater DL metro area?”

“Seventeen million, give or take a few hundred thou.”

“And how many of them have names that contain the syllable ’Mal’?”

“Mal’s probably short for Malina.”

“Don’t think I’ve heard that one before.”

“It’s a kind of cactus flower. Very traditional name. Your grandmother would love her.”

“So you have a name, possibly fake. What else?”

“She’s a cliff runner. She’s good, and rich enough to afford some High Quechal glyphwork. That narrows the range. Other runners should be able to lead me to her.”

“That’s assuming she told you the truth, about her name or about being a runner.” She frowned. “You’re interested in this girl.”

“Woman.”

“You’re interested in this woman.”

He might have lied, if there had been any chance of fooling Teo. “I’m interested. I’m interested, and I don’t want to sic the Wardens on her. I’ve seen what they do to people when they want answers. She was afraid last night.”

“Why would she be frightened if she wasn’t guilty?”

“I won’t dignify that with a response.” He stared out the window into the heat. “I don’t want someone else to burn for something my father or his cronies did. And she will burn, if the Wardens get their hands on her. They’ll crack her skull, pull the memories out, sew her back together again. Meanwhile, my father escapes unscathed, like always.”

“He told you he didn’t have anything to do with this one. Why would he lie?”

“Why tell the truth?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” he admitted. “You remember university?”

“What do you think I’ve forgotten?”

“You remember when you told me you’d decided to break up with Ivan, that you’d met a girl. That you needed to do this, that it was a part of you. I asked you why you’d come to me. You said you had to know you were telling the truth to yourself, and the only way to know that was to tell it to someone you trusted to know when you were lying.”

She tilted her head to one side. “Do you think this is the same thing?”

“As coming out?” He put up his hands between them. “No. Of course not. Shit. Sorry.”

“Apology noted.”

“But this could kill me. I’m not being figurative. The Wardens will want my head for lying to them. I’m maybe obstructing justice, aiding and abetting who knows what. It’s not like I’m above suspicion, either. Tollan has been good to me, but I doubt she ever forgets who my father is. So I want to know—am I telling the truth? Is this something I need to do? Or am I about to commit suicide because I want to get in this woman’s pants?”

“I said I wouldn’t be your conscience.”

Caleb drained the last of his coffee, and stood. The shop felt too small. Skeletons mocked him from the walls, waving their arms in an obscene dance. Fire built inside him, fed by words he didn’t remember how to speak. Teo bit her lower lip, teeth showing white against her dark skin. Weighing scales shifted in her eyes.

“Do it,” she said at last, as if passing sentence. “Find her. But if you don’t manage it in two weeks, I’ll go to Tollan myself. She will kill you for keeping this from her, and I’ll never work in this city again because I waited to tell her. I’ll have to throw myself on the tender mercies of my family, and be cursed to wear nice dresses and glad-hand Craftswomen at parties, or else join my cousins in the hedonism tango. I’ll hire a Craftsman to raise you from the dead once Tollan’s done with you, just so I can kill you again. I’ll do that whenever I get bored. And life with my family is so. Very. Boring.” She emphasized each word with a tap of her forefinger on the table.

“You’re serious.”

“I am serious.”

“Why let me look for her at all? Why not go to Tollan right now, or force me to?”

“Because four years ago you would have gone all in with two queens in hand and a third showing, rather than let yourself be bluffed out of the pot. Because you used to have fire, and you’ve got scared. You’re becoming a risk manager in truth as well as title, and it’s hard to watch. This is a stupid idea, but I won’t stand in your way. In fact, I’ll lay you a soul and a half that you won’t be able to find her and learn what she knows before my two week deadline’s up.”

“Three thousand thaums.” Two months’ payment on his house. Buy-in for one hell of a high-stakes game. “Odds?”

“I’ll give you two-to-one against. I don’t want to bankrupt you.”

“You sure you can cover it? I don’t want to send you running back to Mama when I come to collect. I know how uncomfortable your family makes you.”

“You should talk.”

“You’re on.”

They shook. The yellow skeletons grinned.

He grinned back at them.

7

The next day’s dawn clawed at Caleb’s eyes. He tugged his hat brim low, and climbed the gravel path that wound up the sandy hill toward Heartstone’s headquarters. The driverless carriage that had brought him rolled away into heat and haze.

Caleb felt about sunrise the way he felt about RKC’s accounting department: necessary, and best kept at a distance. But Alaxic, Heartstone’s chief executive, was a busy man, and when he set the meeting early, Caleb hadn’t argued—he needed this talk to end well. If Alaxic took pressure off the King in Red, the King should relax his grip on Tollan and the Wardens, leaving Caleb free to search for Mal. If not, Caleb’s chances for finding her dwindled to nothing. Especially if the Wardens decided to peek inside his head for any details about the runner he might have missed.

Dry dwarf pines rustled beside the path. Caleb turned to look, and a slender blade settled against the swell of his throat. He froze. Sharp points and edges pressed into his back. A needle breathed over his right eyelid. He heard the silence of something large standing still, and near.

“State your name and business,” said a voice like chalk on slate.

“Caleb Altemoc.” He swallowed. His throat pressed against the security demon’s claw. “I’m from RKC, here to see Alaxic.” Slowly, he reached into his pocket, and slid his badge out of his wallet. “I have an appointment.”

The claw did not slide across Caleb’s throat, nor did the spines of the demon’s chest impale him. This was probably a good sign.

Caleb waited.

The Tzimet in Bright Mirror Reservoir were to proper demons what a monkey was to a man: similar in shape, sometimes even stronger, but pale imitations with regard to intellect and cruelty.

Minutes passed. He waited on the hillside, millimeters from death.

Footsteps. He tried to turn his head, but the thorns at his cheek prevented him.

A woman entered his field of vision: skin a shade darker than Teo’s, face round, red-tinged hair pulled back in a bun. She wore a khaki suit with a knee-length skirt, and carried a clipboard. She glanced from his face to the clipboard, and held out her hand. “You must be Caleb. I’m Allesandre Olim. Mister Alaxic is eager to meet you.”

Claws, blades, and thorns released him. One moment, a sneeze would have driven ten spikes through Caleb’s skull; the next, he stood free on the path. Caleb accepted Allesandre’s hand and shook it. Her grip was firm, and she did not smile.

“Apologies for the security. Our work here is delicate, and dangerous. This way, please.”

“You have effective guards,” Caleb said, and would have turned to look behind him. Allesandre shook her head, and he stopped. “The demon’s still there, isn’t it?”

“Will you follow me?” she said, and left the path.

Caleb followed. The hillside where they walked looked rocky and uneven, tangled with sagebrush and weeds, but he felt a smooth stone walkway under his feet.

Allesandre led him to a circle of standing stones. With a wave of her clipboard she slid a five-hundred-pound altar aside, revealing a rough-hewn tunnel into the earth, and rock steps descending.

They climbed down the steps for a long time.

At first the tunnel felt warm as desert noon, then warm as a baker’s oven. Dim red light illuminated wall carvings of the Hero Sisters, eagle-headed gods, and of course serpents: the ancient Quechal who dug this passage had etched a double bar of stylized scales under each graven figure.

“This,” Caleb said, “is a strange place to work.” The Quechal carvings reminded him of childhood, of nights listening to his father chant holy tales of blood and murder. He remembered some of these designs from the walls of his father’s temple in the Skittersill, before it burned. “You don’t see carvings like these anymore.”

“The bas reliefs are authentic,” Allesandre said. “Five hundred years old, give or take a century.”

Caleb lifted his hand from the wall. “Trying to save on real estate?”

“Hardly,” she replied. “Sites like this are vital to our work.”

When he first heard the voices, he took them for wind through fissures in the rock. Deeper, deeper he followed Allesandre, and the whisper rush resolved to words in an obscure form of High Quechal, a jumble of nouns, adjectives, and verbs from which he caught snatches of meaning: Serpent. Flame. Lost. Burn. Make. Mold. Crush.

Stinging sweat ran down his cheeks, the line of his jaw. His shadow and Allesandre’s, melded, stretched long and thin behind them, a road into the darkness from which they had come.

The passage opened onto a broad, black stone ledge on the lip of a vast cavern. Light from the depths cast the world crimson. Stalactites hung jagged overhead, twined round by metal pipes. Chant braided with the rhythm of machines.

Men and women crowded the ledge. They wore loose white linen, and tool belts girded their waists. They worked at stone altars and plinths, adjusting bee-carved dials, pulling levers shaped like snake’s heads. Burning motes danced in the air before their faces. The technicians chanted as they worked, heads bobbing to keep time.

The words and carvings were High Quechal, but this place lacked the trappings of ceremony: no priest, no priestess with bone flute, no Mat-Keeper with blade upraised. Modern, angular Craftsman’s glyphs glowed from every surface.

An ancient man in a black suit stood by the railing at the platform’s edge. Hands behind his back, he stared down into the cavern. Scraps of thin white hair clung to his scalp. His body stooped, as if it could no longer bear his strength.

The white-robed crowd parted for Allesandre. Caleb followed in her wake. She stopped behind the old man, and said: “Sir, I’ve brought Caleb Altemoc, from RKC. Caleb, this is Mister Alaxic.”

Caleb swallowed, for reasons that had nothing to do with the heat.

“Altemoc,” said the old man, chewing the syllables of the name. His voice was high and spare. “Not Temoc’s boy by any chance?” There was no question which Temoc he meant.

“Yes, sir. My father and I aren’t close.”

“Hard to be close with a wanted felon.”

“I don’t approve of his life choices, and he doesn’t approve of mine. We have an equitable arrangement.”

Alaxic did not turn. “Strange that the most stalwart of the True Quechal would give his son a foreign name.”

“When I was born, he thought there was a chance for peace. He and my mother chose my name as a sign of that peace.”

“You were born before the Skittersill Rising.”

“Yes,” Caleb said.

“Dirty business.” Though Alaxic’s hands remained clasped behind his back, his fingers worked and twitched as if playing an invisible instrument. “Men standing to defend their rights. Killed by Wardens who should have protected them.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“And the other?”

“I’d be less generous.”

“Humor me. Speak freely.”

“I’d say the rioters were fanatics who wanted to sacrifice their neighbors to bloody-minded gods.”

“You don’t share your father’s faith.”

“I don’t respect murderers, as a rule. However they try to justify themselves.”

“Ah.” Alaxic turned from the ledge. He was not wrinkled, but worn, skin stretched thin and drum-tight. One eye stared white and sightless from his face, and a puckered, twisting scar bent the right side of his mouth into a smile. His remaining eye glittered, cold, black, and sharp. “A modernist.”

“I suppose.” Stop this conversation, he told himself. Don’t let yourself get dragged in. “I don’t imagine you asked me here to talk politics.”

“Politics and security,” Alaxic said, “are two sides of the same parchment.” He raised his hands, and tried to spread them. His fingers crooked in like claws, and quivered. “Dark writing on one side may be read from the other. Once, we sacrificed men and women on Quechaltan to beg rain from the gods. We do the same today, only we spread the one death out over millions. We no longer empathize with the victim, lie with him on the slab. We forget, and believe forgetfulness is humane. We fool ourselves. Your organization is founded on that foolishness.”

Don’t chase the bait. “Sir. The Bright Mirror infestation is an isolated incident. We’re studying what went wrong, so we can guard against it.”

Alaxic shook his head. “You don’t understand why you’ve been called here. You think your purpose is to soothe me to sleep. To convince me to sell my life’s work to your master.”

The engines of Caleb’s caution thrilled to motion. He felt as if a careful player had just glanced at his cards, then raised. “Why am I here?”

“Yesterday, Red King Consolidated sent me more documents about Bright Mirror Reservoir than I could read in a thousand years. But papers can lie. I want someone to stand with me face-to-face, and tell me I can trust your master.”

The air pressed close, heavy with chant and heat. “What do you mean?”

Alaxic beckoned him to the railing. “Look down, son of Temoc.”

Caleb almost refused on principle, but principle had no place on company time. He stepped to the platform’s edge, leaned out, and looked down.

Liquid fire filled the pit, rolling, burning, boiling, red and yellow, orange and white and blue. A tremor traveled from one side of the fire to the other, like a twitch on a horse’s flank.

Following that tremor, Caleb saw the eye.

What he had mistaken for an island in the molten rock was in fact an enormous eye ringed by scales of lava—an eye bubble-lidded like a snake’s, if a snake were large enough to swallow worlds.

A serpent lay coiled beneath them, a serpent larger than the cave, larger than the pyramids of Sansilva. Its immensity shattered all concepts of size. Uncoiled and rearing to strike, this creature would cast a long shadow over Dresediel Lex.

Sweat chilled on the back of Caleb’s neck.

That serpent had a sister. Caleb knew their names.

“That’s Achal,” Alaxic said. “Aquel’s in the depths now. They turn and move in their slumber, as we do. They’re bigger than we are, though.”

“Guard and shield us from the fire,” Caleb whispered in High Quechal. The words came unbidden to his lips.

“Well.” Alaxic smiled. “I see you have some religious sentiment after all.”

“That.” He tried again to speak. “Do you have any idea what that is?”

“We know exactly what she is. Better than anyone in history.” Alaxic stared down into the pit. “At the beginning of time, the earth trembled and split, and many men and gods died. The twin daughters of the Sun descended into the depths, seeking the cause of the tremors, and found two massive serpents, larger than mountains, older than the earth. Once, they had slithered between the stars.

“Demons danced around the serpents, inciting them to tremble, to riot. The sun’s first daughter tore her heart from her chest, and threw it into the first serpent’s mouth; the serpent gained her wisdom, and her name—Aquel. The demons tried to prevent the sun’s second daughter from doing the same, but she threw her heart over them into the second serpent’s mouth, and the serpent gained her wisdom, and her name—Achal. Aquel and Achal took pity on gods and men, and chased the demons from their fiery domain into the cold of space. They slept, then, but sleeping they forget. When the sun dies, the demons return, and the Serpents wake, and we give hearts and souls to remind them we are their children.”

“Not anymore, we don’t.”

“As you say.”

“And I wasn’t talking about myths.”

“Neither was I,” Alaxic said.

“We fed those things on our flesh for three thousand years. They’re not gods. They’re animals, if that. Congealed power. We used them as weapons once, and broke this continent in half. Destroyed a dozen cities. Millions died.”

“Millions died because, in the darkness of our ignorance, we dared try to control the Serpents. We have learned, in the centuries since the Cataclysm. For thousands of years the Serpents fed on us. Now it’s our turn to feed on them.”

Technicians chanting. Quechal carvings marked with Craft. Steam pipes in the heat. “You’re drawing their power.”

“The hungrier the Sisters grow, the hotter they burn. We use their soulstuff to power our Craft, and they burn more fiercely. We harness that heat to drive thaumaturgical engines. At this moment, we can only pull a few hundred thousand thaums a day before they start to toss in their sleep. Their dreams are the seeds of earthquakes.”

“The King in Red isn’t buying you because of your waterworks,” Caleb said. “He wants the Serpents.”

“RKC needs our water, but the lakes and rivers we have harnessed will not sustain Dresediel Lex for long. Your master believes he can use the Serpents’ heat to purify the ocean, like your system at Bay Station. Pull saltwater into these caverns, let it evaporate, collect and cool the steam. The prospect of nearly unlimited power also intrigues him, of course.”

“Gods.”

“No.” Alaxic smiled, slightly. “But close. And your master wants them. I do not care for him. When he conquered our city, I strove against him in the air, and fought him on the earth. I learned his dark arts after the War, hoping to cast him down with his own power. But I am tired now, and I refuse to let the Craft carry me on to skeletal immortality. Do you understand?”

Caleb did not understand, but he could not think of anything to say.

“Craftsmen hedge risks, gird themselves against worst-case scenarios. But the worst case here far outstrips any hedge you can secure. If your master mismanages Aquel and Achal, there will be no second chance, no insurance, no recovery. If the Sisters wake, the city will burn. If the King in Red wants my Concern, he must guarantee that RKC will preserve the Sisters’ slumber before all other priorities, even his own life. I want a contract written and signed in blood, or the deal is off.”

“We can’t give you a blanket guarantee.”

“You can. And you will. Your master needs my Concern more than I need to sell.”

Caleb remembered Tollan pacing her office, and the black anger of the King in Red. He looked over the platform’s edge, and envisioned the Serpents towering above Dresediel Lex with diamond fangs bared.

“I don’t have the authority to agree to those terms.”

“Pass them along. Or do not, and let the deal fall through. I leave this in your hands: do you trust your master to put our people’s safety before his own?”

The sleeping serpent twitched. A groan of tormented rock rose from world’s root.

“I do,” Caleb said after the echoes died.

Alaxic nodded, once. Caleb could not tell if he was satisfied. “Allesandre will show you out.”

8

When Caleb delivered the message to Tollan, she cursed for three straight minutes. Contract revisions so late in a deal were expensive, and precarious. For two days, a trio of senior Craftsmen corralled Caleb in his office, asking question after repetitive question about his conversation with Alaxic. They forced him to complete forms in triplicate, in cuneiform, in blood.

He emerged from those days in a wandering fog. He drank to soothe himself to sleep, but talons of black ice haunted his dreams. Visions slunk out of darkness into day. Once, he looked up from his paperwork and thought he saw Mal walking past his office door.

On the wager’s third day, Caleb left the office before eight for the first time since Bright Mirror. Rather than hopping an airbus home over the mountains, he ate a quick dinner at an expensive Sansilva bistro and headed downtown to the glowing neon strips of the Skittersill.

As he traveled east from the pyramids, streets narrowed and buildings hunched low to the earth. Lamplight flickered in the mouths of painted demons in shop windows. A pair of eyes sculpted from glowing transparent tubes glared down from an optician’s billboard. Sour smoke wafted from an open club door. A blind man played Quechal airs badly on a three-string fiddle. Far above, Wardens circled. Their mounts’ wingbeats thudded in Caleb’s breast.

Drunks crowded the sidewalk. An airbus landed on a nearby platform and unleashed a deluge of students: sharp young men with slick hair, eager women in halter tops and short leather skirts, their smiles all printed by machine.

Dresediel Lex had been one of the first cities liberated in the God Wars, but not all the city’s rulers perished with their gods. Priests poured out their blood on battlefields, true, but some noble Quechal families laid down arms. They were neither rewarded nor punished for their surrender. They sunk into the earth—and into the Skittersill, where they thrived, feeding off the city’s sin.

Teo’s family came from that stock. These days they owned manufacturing and shipping Concerns, but her grandfather had been a slumlord, and worse. And when his children went straight, others took their place.

Caleb came here to play cards, when he wanted easy money and didn’t mind extra risk. A careless winner in the Skittersill was as likely to leave his table dead as wealthy.

Tonight, he had a purpose. Mal claimed to be a cliff runner, and her skills bore out her boast. Running was a select hobby. Even in a city the size of Dresediel Lex, most runners would know one another. So he had to find a runner.

Caleb knew little about the cliff-running community, but runners were addicted to risk. That addiction should carry into other arenas.

His usual tables were too rich for players who jumped off rooftops in their spare time. Cliff runners needed every thaum they could scrounge to buy charms of speed, strength, and balance from booze-tinged back alley Craftsmen—and to buy doctors when those charms failed. A cliff runner who gambled would look for cheap, vigorous action.

He tried six bars before he found the right game: four angry children in spiked leathers, and a woman with a long white scar running from the crown of her skull down past her ear. The skin around the scar looked slick from recent regrowth. She played with contempt for her companions; she did not smile, or laugh, or even speak. She wanted to be anywhere but here.

She wasn’t the only one. The goddess above their table listed from player to player, a staggering, tired jade.

Caleb bought in. The players suspected him at first—he handled the cards well—but he drank more than they did, and played with careful abandon. His soulstuff flowed freely, and the others relaxed. Over an hour he dared his companions into riskier play, and the goddess quickened in the table’s center. She touched each player with a chill like cold water on skin; she demanded worship, and they knelt.

Flames quickened in the scarred woman’s eyes.

Caleb lost several small hands, doubled up through a member of the leather brigade, and rose at game’s end slightly richer than when he sat down. When he thanked them all and made his way to the bar, the scarred woman joined him. She bought his drink, and waved off his protests. “I’m Shannon,” she said.

Caleb introduced himself. “You play well for a newcomer.” He raised his whiskey to the light, and watched the room through its amber lens.

“What’s to say I’m new?” She knocked back her shot, and ordered another.

“You’re comfortable with risk in general but you’re not used to poker. You took a ten and a seven to the flop, but you scared off three hands better than yours.”

“A woman has to get her thrills somehow,” she replied with a crooked smile.

“Where did you get yours before you started to play cards?”

“Cliff running.” She leaned back against the bar. “I was a good runner. Skill matters to a point and after that it’s how much you’re willing to bleed. Three months back, I bled too much.” She swung her hand through a plummeting arc, and turned her head to show him the scar.

“Looks bad.”

“It was bad,” she said. “I was out for almost a month, and when I woke my balance was twisted. I train when I can. During the week I come here, and hope the game will keep me from growing scared.”

“Doesn’t it bore you, after what you’ve done?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes, it surprises me.” She shivered as she downed her second shot. “What do you want with a washed-up runner?”

“Pardon?”

“This isn’t my game, but it is yours. I can tell. Even this dive has two tables that play for higher stakes. When I ran, I never went to a course that wouldn’t challenge me. You joined our table for a reason, and I don’t think it had anything to do with those kids.”

“You’re not a humble person.”

“Humility is a vice of which I have never been accused.”

“I’m looking for a runner,” he admitted, “named Mal. Malina, maybe. Quechal woman, short hair, about my height. I hoped you could help me.”

Shannon sucked air through her teeth. “Crazy Mal.”

“That sounds like her.”

“She’s good. You won’t know what to do with her when you find her.”

“I’ll worry about that when I do.”

She laughed, a blunt sound heavy with alcohol. “I can’t help you much. Mal keeps apart from the rest of us, and I’ve been away too long to know where she runs now. The courses change.” She finished the drink. “Walk me home,” she said, and limped through the crowd toward the door.

He escorted her down long straight streets below signs ghostlit in colors no god ever made. They turned off the Corsair Parkway onto a lane of small clapboard houses nestled against the foot of the Drakspine. Craftsmen’s palaces gleamed on the mountain peaks, and clouds and skyspires shone with the city’s light. Shannon’s house was dark. As they reached the stoop he heard within the sound of laughter and muffled conversation.

“Roommates,” she said. She laid a hand on his arm. Her eyes reflected the city like still pools. “Do you want to come inside?”

“Yes.” He didn’t move.

She sank onto the stoop, and looked up at him. “But.”

“I’m on a quest, I think,” he said, not having realized this before. “Or something like one.”

“Those went out of fashion a long time ago.”

“Maybe. Maybe that’s the problem. I’m sorry.”

She bent her legs, crossed her arms over her knees, and let out a long-held breath. “It’s better this way. I’m drunk.”

“You’re strong,” he said. “You’ll be running again soon.”

She smiled.

“Where can I find her, and when?”

“She used to run on Sixthday, in the border between Skittersill and Stonewood. You’ll find a trace of her there, if anywhere. Look for the fire. Balam can help you—he’s a fat man, with a smiling face.” Shannon tapped the back of her head. “Here. He trains runners. He’ll know more than I do.”

She uncurled back against the steps, and waited below him, considering. A carriage passed on a side street. The jangle of tack and harness faded, and so did the laughter inside the house.

“Go, then” she said at last. “If you won’t stay.”

He thanked her, and left her there, and wondered at himself the whole way home.

9

Dresediel Lex had worse neighborhoods than the Skittersill. Some places were too dangerous for the dangerous, and one of these was Stonewood.

Before the Craftsmen came, the petrified forest to the city’s southeast stood barren, uninhabited and uninviting. After Liberation, refugees flooded in, hoping for new lives, jobs, family, free of gods. Some found what they sought, and others—drunk, mad, or simply poor—pitched their tents in Stonewood, and banded together in loose clans for protection against the giant spiders that spun steel webs between dead and ancient trees.

The people of Stonewood were less organized than the Skittersill mob, but jealous of their territory. Every few years, some enterprising hoods ventured south from Skittersill to stake a claim among the poor and lost. Their bodies were never found. The bodies of men and women from Stonewood who crept north to work or beg or whore appeared often indeed.

Ten acres of shattered buildings and blighted land separated the two districts, and preserved them from constant bloodshed. During Liberation, a god had died there, draining life from soil and air in his desperate bid for survival. After sixty years, living beings still walked uneasy on those streets. Beggars who slept on the broken roads did not wake, or woke transformed by nightmare visions. No one visited the borderland, save cliff runners who came to drink and dance in the ruins.

Caleb waited for Sixthday, when, Shannon said, Mal came to run. He suspected she was a high-pressure professional of some sort, Craftswoman maybe. Cliff running was her passion and escape, hence the late-night trips into the mountains, the precautions against being seen.

At dusk he donned denim pants and caught a driverless carriage through the Skittersill. When the cab refused to take him farther south, he paid the horse and walked.

The Skittersill ended in a jagged row of abandoned buildings, and the border began: rubble, ruined stone, rusted steel, the skeletons of shops, temples, towers broken by the dying god.

Two blocks in, he saw firelight rise from the roofless wreckage of a warehouse. Caleb approached the ruin, and ignored the shadows that detached from rock and fallen wall to follow him.

He met no sentries, only men and women lying drunk near fallen statues, smoking weed as they reclined against the foreheads of dead kings. Marks covered every surface, painted warnings and boasts in arcane calligraphy. Runners flitted between broken towers above, or scaled walls, spiders racing spiders.

One wall of the warehouse lay collapsed, felled by time or a flailing divine limb. Cliff runners gathered inside, corded with muscle, covered with scars and tattooed on arm and chest and neck.

A collection of pillars to the rear of the warehouse had once supported a lofted office, long since gone. Runners tested themselves there, jumping between pillars. Some landed and leapt again with ease, and others fell into packed dirt. A thick middle-aged man in a leather jacket shouted encouragement and abuse to them from below. A yellow tattooed face grinned on the back of his shaved head. This had to be Balam. Older by at least a decade than any of the other runners Caleb had seen: a survivor, fortysomething and ancient in a young man’s endeavor, his peers long since retired or dead.

Caleb approached, waited for a lull in Balam’s tirade, and said, “Excuse me.”

The man turned to him with thin-lipped surprise and contempt. Caleb had dressed to blend in, but jeans and leather jacket left him several pints of ink and a handful of piercings away from looking like he belonged. He’d debated dressing to show his scars, and decided against it; the scars would earn him respect, but also the wrong sort of attention. Who knew where the Wardens had informants? So he endured scorn, and pressed on: “Shannon said you could help me find Mal.”

“Maybe I could.” Balam spoke slowly, as if his words were tough meat he had to chew for flavor. “But why would I?”

A semicircle of runners gathered. Their leathers and spikes were uniforms of a sort, Caleb thought, sure as ancient Quechal paints and piercings.

“Mal challenged me to find her. I’ve traced her here.” He sounded more confident than he felt.

Balam’s stomach protruded from his jacket, a swell of muscle beneath a thin layer of flesh. His skin glowed roundly in the firelight. “You can’t catch her.” He looked Caleb over, examining the thin arms under his jacket, the slender legs inside his trousers. “Might kill you even to try.”

“She challenged me.”

The trainer rested his thick fingers on the mound of his belly. “Mal runs like there’s something after her with teeth and something ahead brighter than gold. If you go against her, you will fall, and you will shatter. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Caleb said. I just want to talk with her, a small part of him railed. He ignored it.

“You like the ground too much. Run from it, and it’ll break you.” Balam turned back to the pillars. The runners there, who had paused to watch the conversation, sprang once more to motion. The audience on the ground remained, because Caleb remained. Balam ignored them. His fingers tapped his stomach like a drum. He smelled of leather, and smoke, and animal sweat.

“I’ll find Mal.” Don’t blink, Caleb told himself, any more than normal. Count your heartbeats. This is no different from bluffing any player at any table in the world. “Or I’ll tear the city apart looking for her.” Or the Wardens would.

“Best get started.”

Caleb had almost decided to leave when he noticed the runners beside him staring into the southern sky. Beyond the pillars rose the warehouse wall, and on top of the wall a woman stood silhouetted against the gray night. Caleb recognized her, even before wind fanned the flames behind him and threw flickering red light on her face. She was a blaze of sunset wrapped in skin: hands on hips, elbows out, head back. She wore tan trousers, thin-soled boots, a sleeveless shirt and brown gloves, all worn, all torn.

Caleb recognized her, and ran. There were no ladders, no stairs leading up the wall, but a few pillars rose nearby. From those he could leap and reach the wall, grip the edge, pull himself up. She could escape before he reached her, but if she wanted to escape why show herself at all?

Long use had worn handholds into the nearest pillar. He climbed. She watched him. The other runners paused.

He reached the top of his pillar. Monkey-fear seized his gut as he sought the next: five feet away. Five feet, easy, he told himself, you used to jump from rock to rock in your back yard all the time, five feet apart give or take. Nothing to worry about, only tense and go.

He landed before he realized he had jumped, and the shock shot through his body, every cell screaming: never do this again. He might have listened, but his balance was too far forward. Stopping wasn’t an option.

He leapt to the next pillar. Fear pounded through his veins instead of blood. Three more pillars, two, one, and then only the gap between pillar and wall. He was moving too fast to stop, and airborne above broken stone.

He struck the wall chest-first. The world inverted, and he coughed up dust and dry rock and coppery blood. He didn’t fall.

His arms splayed out atop the ruined wall, and the rest of his body dangled over the drop. Legs flailed for a foothold in pitted brickwork. His fingers slipped and found no purchase.

He tried to pull himself up, but his left arm was a solid bar of pain, an exploding universe contained in the shoulder joint. Broken? No, that would hurt more. Dislocated, maybe. Damn.

Footsteps on brick. Brown thin-soled boots stepped between his arms, and she knelt. He saw the curve of her calf, and remembered her jumping, twisting, falling from Bright Mirror Dam into night. The closed-eye pendant dangled around her neck, but it did not glow. She cocked her head to one side like a bird either curious or about to strike. Her eyes were wide, her eyebrows raised.

“If it isn’t the policeman,” she said.

“I’m no Warden. I’m not trying to arrest you.”

“Then why are you here? You’ve gone through a lot of trouble to find me.”

“I need to talk to you. For your own safety.”

“You do know how to make a girl feel safe,” she said, and: “A week from tonight, on top of the Rakesblight Center, at ten. Come. Race. If you catch me, then we’ll talk.”

“I’ll catch you.”

“Let’s see.” She touched the back of his right hand with her fingertip, cool and smooth and hard-polished from gripping rock. He closed his eyes, consciousness slipping; when he opened them again, she was gone.

He fell, right arm wheeling and left jutting at an odd angle from the socket: an angel with one wing broken. He struck something heavy and round and human, and thick arms set him gently on the broken ground. Caleb looked up into Balam’s blunt face. Other cliff runners peered down, astonished and confused. They crowded him with warmth.

“You still want to catch her?” Balam asked as Caleb struggled against his body’s weight to rise.

“Yes.”

The trainer didn’t reply.

Caleb closed his eyes, and thought about Mal, and about this strange massive man, old in middle age, and about Shannon and her scar. Who was Mal, to have this hobby?

He levered himself into a sitting position, and the pain from his arm almost made him vomit.

“You love the ground too much,” Balam said. “Or it loves you.”

“Where’s the nearest hospital?”

All told, once he escaped the god-shattered wasteland, once he staggered into a hospital waiting room, once the doctor looked down over the gold rims of her glasses and reached through his skin to set his shoulder from the inside, once he woke from the swoon of pain and soul-loss, he judged the evening a success.

Seven days. More than enough time to heal, and prepare.

When Teo met him in the hospital, she looked so worried he almost didn’t tell her the story.

“I suppose you’ll call the whole thing off now,” she said as he tested his mended shoulder’s strength. “Hand her over to the authorities.”

“I can’t quit now.” He reached for his pants. “I’ve almost won our bet.”

10

Two days later, wounds healed and mind unsettled, he stalked Teo’s office.

“What do I have to do,” she said, looking up from a pile of paperwork, “to get you out of here so I can focus?”

“Thanks for your support. I’m in trouble.”

“What happened to the cocky attitude? I’ve almost won, all that stuff?”

“I have almost won.”

“But you’re pacing.”

“I’m so close. It’s this last little part that’s the problem.”

“The part where you have to beat a runner at her own race.”

“That’s the one.”

“You know what you should do. Tell Tollan, fall on your sword and”—she waved the quill tip of her pen at the door—“walk away.”

“Would you give up, if our situations were reversed?”

“Of course.”

“I think she’s innocent.”

“You’re infatuated.”

“I’m not. I want to help her.”

“Because she’s pretty.”

“Because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “And pretty is not even the right word. She burns. She’s a verb.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“You fall for people all the time.”

“Fall is certainly the operative word in this case.” Teo returned her pen to its copper stand with an exasperated click of quill on metal. “I’ve never dated a key suspect in an ongoing investigation. As far as I recall, and feel free to correct me, I’ve never come back from a date with anything worse than a hangover. How many bones did you break last week?”

“That’s beside the point,” he said, though it wasn’t. He studied one of the paintings on her office wall: a canvas awash with orange and brown and splashes of blue. A city rose, or fell, from the angry brushstrokes—a city suspended between two hells. “Would you rather I fold?”

She crossed her arms and reclined in her chair. Leather creaked to cradle her. “That isn’t fair.”

“I’m not blaming you. You’re right. I never would have let that hand pass four years ago. I got scared, got tight. I’m afraid of losing my job, my house, the shreds of soulstuff I’ve squirreled together. But this woman doesn’t deserve to be handed over to the Wardens just because she doesn’t listen when the world tells her where she can and can’t go.”

“She’s dangerous.”

“She’s amazing,” he agreed.

“I don’t think you get my point.”

“I don’t think I care.”

Teo leaned forward. Caleb steeled himself against whatever she was about to say.

A bell rang, interrupting them both. She grimaced and pressed a button on her desk. A tiny door opened in the baseboard behind her wastebasket. Two hesitant red eyes peered out from the shadows.

The white rat stepped cautiously into the room, nostrils flaring. Satisfied of its immediate safety, the rat darted up Teo’s desk and sat atop her paperwork. It wore black velvet barding blazoned with a silver spiderweb; a leather scroll case the size of a cigarette hung around its neck. Teo opened the case with a flick of her forefinger, and tapped a parchment scroll into her palm.

The rat accepted a few thaums of her soul in payment for the delivery, sketched a mechanical bow, and darted back through its hidden door, which snapped closed. Teo unrolled the scroll, read the message there, and swore.

“Heartstone?”

“Heartstone,” she confirmed. “This deal will kill me, or else I will kill every single person involved in it.”

“Please don’t. That would include me.”

“I might kill you anyway,” she said. “They want all our customer complaints for the last year, to prove some damn thing or other about our service. As if I didn’t have enough on my mind.”

“I have five days to figure out how to run faster than the best cliff runner in the city.”

“Practice.” Teo grabbed a pen and scrawled a list on a spare palimpsest.

“Their practice almost killed me.”

“Then cheat.”

He raised one finger and opened his mouth. Ten seconds passed, twenty, and no words came out. A sun rose in his mind.

“Teo, you’re a genius,” he said, and left.

Caleb couldn’t beat Mal if he played by her rules. He was neither Craftsman nor athlete. His skills lay at the card table.

But Mal had challenged him to catch her, not to win. If he cheated, she might not talk, but since he couldn’t win by playing fair, he would lose nothing by stretching the rules. Balam would not approve, but Caleb didn’t need his approval.

Cheating at a footrace was difficult. There were no cards he could hide in his sleeve, no tricks of shuffling or sleights-of-hand. Fortunately, Caleb had other alternatives.

He descended winding stairs into RKC’s basement library, a labyrinth of twisting paths built centuries before as a ritual maze for the priests of Aquel and Achal. After the God Wars, the King in Red used the paths and dead-end chambers to store the millions of contracts by which the city maintained itself in the absence of divine grace.

This library held no Iskari romances, no histories of the Atavasin Empire or treatises on gardening or the cultivation of dreamweed. Shelves strained to support ledgers, pacts, scrolls, codices of souls collected and paid. These documents, and the Craft they anchored, were RKC’s meat and blood.

No windows opened onto the library. No candles burned. Ghostlamps offered the only light. Attendants wandered branching paths between high walls lined with forbidden tomes.

After a half hour’s search Caleb found the Sub-Basement of Honorable Confusion and Folly, which held the industrial contracts. From the third oversized shelf in the fourth bookcase he removed a hand-bound sheaf of documents, spine embossed with “Rakesblight” and illuminated in gold leaf. He recognized this book, its prim, stiff binding and the green marble cover paper: he had written most of the reports inside. Rakesblight had been one of his first projects.

He flipped through pages of contracts and graphs and sigils until he reached the glossy pictures at the book’s heart: plans of the Rakesblight Center, with lines of Craft drawn in blue. He sketched a copy of the diagram in a small notebook he carried, and stared at his sketch as if to drink its lines off the page into his mind. He made a small correction, and retrieved a larger book, labeled North Station in heavy letters, from the oversized shelf.

North Station surrounded Rakesblight and its neighboring properties on three sides. The people of Dresediel Lex paid RKC and other Concerns for their lights, water, and food in slivers of soul. In North Station, Craft engines smelted this soulstuff into power free of memory, affection, or moral content. That power in turn set the city’s lamps ablaze and pumped its water down miles of pipe.

Caleb laid the book open on a wooden table that creaked with its weight. North Station’s physical schematics were almost illegible below the blue lines drawn above and around them. Near North Station, the Craft twisted into thick ropes of obligation and interest and torment. Those ropes moved like belts in a machine.

Perfect.

Closing the book, he stood alone in the sub-basement. It was lunchtime, and the architects and students and junior Craftsmen who usually worked here would not return for an hour at least.

The library dripped with Craft. Mystic bindings and filaments clogged the narrow avenues between bookcases. Craft lines tangled and knotted until only scholars could tell a consignment order from a service contract, a statement of work from a record of accounts receivable.

Not so different from the air around North Station.

Caleb pulled his chair into the center of the room, and stepped onto its seat. The legs wobbled, but did not give. He slid a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, unfolded the cloth and held it before him at arm’s length. The fabric hung limp in the dry basement air. He spread the fingers of his free hand beside the handkerchief, but felt nothing. He raised both handkerchief and hand above his head. No change. Carefully, slowly, he searched the air. At last he found the right spot: the handkerchief did not move, but a cool breeze blew against his hand. No. Not a breeze. More like a stream of water, if water were invisible, and not precisely wet.

Caleb traced the invisible flow for a few feet in either direction. He closed his eyes, and at first saw only the black behind his eyelids. A world emerged: the library outlined in lightning and blue flame. His body was a tangle of wires, his hand a skeleton’s hand. A silver line passed through his palm. Light flowed along its length. The scars that spiderwebbed his forearm tingled and awoke. The Craft-line became solid to his touch.

He opened his eyes, framed his mind in an attitude he would not have recognized as prayer, and jumped.

11

The sun died, devoured by the rolling ocean. Dresediel Lex bloomed from its death, like a flower on a grave. Pyramids and skyspires cast light into darkness. The arteries of commerce glowed. In an office atop the obsidian pyramid where he once broke the gods, the King in Red sipped coffee and watched the city his power made possible, the city his radiance illuminated.

The lords of the earth and the bums in rags and tatters hid from that light, under ratty blankets or in the perfumed caves of nightclubs and dance halls. Across town by the shore, five students doffed their clothes and ran naked into cold dark water. Dresediel Lex by night was a brilliant menagerie. The animals trapped inside scraped at the bars of their cages.

Caleb arrived early at the Rakesblight Center, a black square box a thousand feet on each side and four stories tall. Animals were bought here, butchered, and sold—unsuspecting pigs herded a hundred at a time into rooms that smelled nothing at all like death, so well did the center’s Craft scrub away the stench and spiritual taint of slaughter. From those rooms the pigs’ corpses moved to wheels and metal jaws and conveyor belts. By the time their meat reached the sale floor, it had become cold flesh in a small box, nothing left to suggest it once squealed or rooted in muck.

Two years before, the King in Red had bought the place from Illyana Rakesblight, the Deathless Queen who designed the center to replace the fallen Goddess of Plenty. After the purchase, Illyana retired to an island she raised from a distant ocean, and the King in Red assumed her role. Each knife and abattoir became an extension of his power. Caleb’s job had been to review the plant and ensure RKC would profit enough to offset operating costs. The center was a good investment, he decided after weeks of waking up shivering from nightmares of nothing-wrong, of smiling as he was flayed alive by sharp, spinning wire; the King in Red agreed. Caleb earned a promotion from his nightmares, never entered the Rakesblight Center again, and renounced all meat for seven months after the deal cleared.

He skirted the edge of the center’s parking lot. No true night ever fell in Dresediel Lex, but there were shadows enough to hide. Soon he reached the alley between the center and the warehouse next door, which belonged to a demon-summoning Concern. He found a fire escape set into the center’s wall and began to climb.

Cliff runners flitted across the gap between the buildings above, silent as falcons falling, so swift he might have missed them between blinks.

He climbed faster, and tried to calm his heart. Reaching the top of the ladder, he clamored to the roof and stopped, amazed.

The runners waited, arrayed for war.

Some stood and some crouched on the flat black roof, uniform in their lack of similarity. Short hair and long, thick and thin, skin tattooed or clean or pierced, dressed in basic black or strips of multicolored cloth, armored with chain or girded by soft leather. Caleb felt underdressed in his denim pants and cotton shirt.

The runners did not speak to him or to each other. Noise might attract Wardens and other undesirables. They communicated through gesture and glance.

Fifty curious gazes turned to him. He ignored all but one.

Someone had chalked a white line on the roof from north to south. Beyond that line the city rolled over buildings and below skyspires, to the black ocean and the cold sand.

Mal stood on the line, arms crossed, waiting.

As he approached her, the air grew warm. She’d slicked her hair back against her scalp, and bound it with a leather strap.

“I’m glad you made it,” she said.

Rooftop gravel ground beneath his feet as he approached her.

“Why are you chasing me?”

“I’m trying to protect the city.” He took another step. “And you.”

The cliff runners watched.

Ten feet. Five.

“You’re the one who needs protection,” she said.

Three. Two. One. He smelled sweat, sandalwood, and leather. “I’ll take my chances.” He reached for her.

He blinked.

When his eyes opened, Mal was halfway across the roof already and gaining speed. Caleb had no time to drop into a crouch: he fell forward, caught himself with his leg, and pressing off the ground he fell and caught himself again, tumbling more than sprinting after her.

Mal reached the roof’s edge first, and leapt to an outbuilding a story lower than the warehouse. She landed with a roll as Caleb launched himself into the yawning gulf.

12

The world opened beneath Caleb, six stories’ drop onto solid gray asphalt. Emptiness and wind tore at his mind, but he landed on the neighboring roof, and rolled. His knee throbbed. Adrenaline dulled the pain, and he staggered to his feet and ran again.

Mal had already reached the outbuilding’s edge and leapt, this time across a twelve-foot chasm toward a stockhouse that supplied the Rakesblight Center with victims. Caleb gaped in disbelief. The distance was too great. Not even Mal could make such a jump—nor did she.

She struck the wall feet-first, caught the ledge overhead by her fingertips, and pulled herself onto the roof. How had she learned that? If her first try had not been perfect, she would not have survived for a second.

No time to speculate. Caleb jumped, and closed his eyes.

Dresediel Lex was built of stone, glass, and contracts—promises stronger than steel, tying the city together by pledge and payment. Bonds of contract were invisible, unless you looked at the world as Craftsmen learned to look, with eyes closed and mind open.

The black behind Caleb’s eyes came alive with blue-white webs, strands several feet thick, as if woven by pyramid-sized spiders. The contract lines stretched to the horizon. They bound building to building, tied skyspires to the earth, lit streetlamps, pumped water through subterranean pipes, cooled hallways and made the desert city livable. Ahead, these lines converged on the nova palace of North Station.

Falling, Caleb grabbed a silver cord.

Scars all over his body burned as they woke and drew on the cord’s power. He shot forward, dragged by a line of lightning. Cold fangs sank into his arm. His eyes snapped open from the speed, and the visible world resolved blue around him again. The contract cord had carried him almost a hundred feet; he flew over the stockhouse’s rooftop. With a shout of triumph, he released the cord and fell to the gravel, landing with knees bent. The chemical stench of close-kept pigs enveloped him; wards burned off most of the stink, but not all.

Mal sprinted ahead of him, toward North Station. With eyes open, Caleb could no longer see the station’s burning soul, the blaze of contracts—only its colossal physical form, a sprawling complex of cooling towers and thick pipe, lit by ghostlight and gas flame, and surrounded by a barbed wire fence.

Once Mal crossed that fence, alarms would sound, and Wardens would arrive. She’d be caught, and his work to find her, to learn what she knew and keep her free of the Wardens’ hands, would be meaningless.

He could not let that happen.

Bloodstained aprons, sheets, towels fluttered on clotheslines at the far end of the roof. Mal left a wake in sanguine cloth. He followed her, reached the roof’s edge steps behind, jumped.

Lava coursed in his veins and melted his muscles. Every exhalation broke upon a rushing indrawn breath. He gripped the reins of Dresediel Lex and they scorched him with their chill. Already his hand felt frozen. His flight, like everything, had a price. These cords took his soul as they carried him. Soon they would drain him completely and he would fall.

Mal landed on the fence, climbed without apparent concern for the barbed wire—another cliff runner’s trick, maybe, or else enchanted gloves—and dropped to a service shed on the other side. As she landed into North Station, the sky erupted in red light. A banshee shrieked, and others around the station perimeter cried out in answering alarm. Mal paused atop the shed like a locust on a blade of grass, then sprang onto a thick conduit and ran toward a cyclopean cooling tower at the station’s heart.

He landed on the conduit behind her. The noise of his impact caused her to glance back. Her eyes widened; she fled, and he followed. As they ran through the forest of vents and ducts and pipes, he called to her, panting: “We need to talk.”

“You’re persistent.” Her voice was even, conversational.

“It’s a virtue.”

“How are you flying?”

“I made a gamble.”

“I hope you didn’t risk anything valuable.” She ducked under a chest-height conduit; he vaulted over it and struck his shin on a jutting metal bar. His pants tore.

“Only my soul.” He grabbed for her, but she sprinted ahead, reached the coolant tower, and began to climb.

From the pipe she leapt to the lowest rung of an access ladder, climbed that and jumped again, this time to a duct that ivied around the tower. She moved from handhold to handhold easily as a guitar player changing chords.

Groping blind, he found a line of Craft that spiraled up the tower, and gripped it with both hands. Chill fingers clawed at him as he rose. His heart beat to burst the cage of his ribs and rain blood on the city.

More banshee cries shivered through North Station as other cliff runners crossed the fence. Wardens would come soon, Couatl mounts beating terror through the night sky. A Couatl could outpace Caleb in the air, read a newspaper three miles away in the dark, track a rat in its nest or a man in a mob. Even if Mal could evade them, he would not.

Red warning flares cast a hellish pattern on the balloon of an airbus approaching the tower—lower, and nearer to North Station, than an airbus should fly. Irrelevant. The world was an incandescent maze. Chest heaving, brain blood-battered, Caleb approached the lip of the cooling tower.

He let go of the line, and, for a moment, flew.

Momentum thrust him skyward. He tumbled toward stars and skyspires, and at the apex of his flight let out a whoop of triumph that turned to fear as he began to fall.

There was no time to think. The stone tower thrust at him, a sword point with the world’s weight behind it.

Rock struck him hard in the chest, in the legs, and everywhere else. After a few seconds, he realized he was still alive, prone on the lip of the tower, boiling steam to his left and void to his right. Hot air and sulfurous fumes engulfed him. Arms splayed, he embraced the stone.

He was alone.

He sat up, teetered, and nearly fell into seething smoke.

A gloved hand crested the tower, followed by the rest of Mal. Her hair was a black nimbus, her face and arms sweat-slick. Fierce eyes stared at him through smoke.

“Hi,” he said.

“Couldn’t think up a better line”—she gasped for air—“on the way up?”

Caleb couldn’t think of anything to say, and anyway he could not speak for his lungs’ heaving. He edged toward her around the precipice.

“So what happens now,” he said when he drew near.

“Now.” She stood, and fixed him with a broken glass grin. “We see how much farther you’re willing to go.”

He lunged, too late. She dove off the tower’s edge.

The force of her leap carried her clear of ducts and ladders and platforms. She fell, spun, tumbled—and landed, on the balloon of the airbus passing below. Gray silk dimpled around her body.

Sirens wailed. A fresh breeze feathered Caleb’s brow.

He jumped after her.

Sharp wind buffeted him. Falling, he strained with fingers, arms, and tortured shoulders for the contract-cords that guided the airbus. Cold talons tightened around his heart.

He clutched at nothing.

Blue fire tore through his arms and chest.

Caleb halted two feet above the gray balloon. Pain jolted his eyes open. Mal lay beneath him as if on a pillowed mattress.

“You made it,” she said, shocked.

“Couldn’t think of a better line on the way down?”

“You’re an interesting man.”

He was about to say something inane about living in interesting times, when a thousand suns exploded over Dresediel Lex.

His shadow fell across Mal. Light bellowed through his body.

A woman a thousand feet tall, four-armed and six-winged, emerged from North Station like a swimmer from a shallow pool. She opened many mouths and roared.

Flame and figure both vanished in a heartbeat. The city’s million lights went dark. Night closed around Caleb like a warm fist.

The canvas struck him in a rush. Blinking galaxies from his eyes, he scrambled on the slick fabric, found no grip, and started to slide.

The more he fought, the more he slipped. He heard Mal call for him; he reached for her and slid farther. Fingers brushed his grasping outstretched hand and she was gone, and the balloon was gone. He tumbled into the sky. Dresediel Lex wheeled below, above him, and he saw North Station’s towers fallen. Fire clung to broken rock.

He fell for hours, or seconds, until something struck him hard in the chest. Darkness rushed in, writhing with terrible dreams.

13

When Caleb woke, he was staggering through a familiar hell. Ixaqualtil Seven Eagle ruled a realm of darkness where fire shed no light and no stars shone, a vast vacant universe that resounded with the cries of dying and damned, with demonsong, with the crackle of flame and the slither of invisible blades on invisible whetstones. Within that cacophony Ixaqualtil crouched before the Sun’s empty throne, feasting on all who dared approach his master’s perilous seat.

The Sun-God was dead, slain by the King in Red during Liberation, but His servant yet awaited the unwary, two hundred fifty six dagger-teeth bared in a hungry smile.

In Ixaqualtil’s hell one did not move for fear of stumbling into a hidden pit, a black fire, a beast’s waiting mouth, yet Caleb was moving. Walking. Each step poured sharp pain down his side. He tried to stop, but could not. His left arm was wrapped around a woman’s shoulder, her arm around his back. When his feet faltered, she pulled him along.

Caleb saw only suggestions of shape within the velvet dark, but he knew Mal walked beside him.

“You shouldn’t be in hell,” he said.

She started at the sound of his voice. So did he: cracked, hoarse. “You don’t know me well enough to say that. I’m not, though, yet.”

“What happened?” He struggled to place one foot in front of the other. Clouds of noise and flame obscured his mind.

“You fell. I caught you.”

“Caught me how? You were lying”—he remembered—“on top of the airbus.”

“It would have been bad manners to let you fall.” In the distance, he heard the subsonic roars of Couatl. Wardens, hunting. Still alive, then. Probably. No doubt there were Wardens in hell. The Couatl roared again; Mal flinched beside him, and spoke, as if to block them out: “I don’t know why I saved you. If I thought about it, I might not have. I rolled off the balloon, caught the airbus’s rudder, and grabbed you with some Craft.”

“You’re a Craftswoman?”

“A bit of one.”

Caleb remembered a rush of wind, and a winged, sun-bright woman. When he closed his eyes he saw her in negative.

“I remember a woman of light.”

“You faced the blast,” she said. “I saw its reflection, and the darkness after. At first I thought the light had blinded me. Then I realized the power was off.”

He blinked, and saw their hell with clear eyes. Darkness grew texture and depth; hints of black and red and violet adhered to brick, to glass and pitted pavement, pipe and cobblestone and palm tree. They staggered down an avenue walled with stores and small restaurants: Salamanter’s Deli, Cusko & Sons, a Muerte Coffee franchise. Shards of broken shop windows covered sidewalk and street; they should have caught streetlamp light like diamonds on a jeweler’s cloth, but there were no streetlamps. No lights in the shops, either, or the upstairs apartments. Neither stars nor moon relieved the darkness.

Caleb saw by firelight reflected off the belly of the clouds. The city was burning.

“We’re in the Vale,” he said. “My home isn’t far.”

“I know. I found your address in your wallet.”

“I have no secrets from you now.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“You saved my life.”

“It does look that way.”

He tried to laugh, but his ribs hurt. “The other runners, who ran into the station after us…”

“I don’t know.” He thought at first she might say no more, but she continued: “We won’t learn anything tonight.”

“I hope they escaped.” He imagined Balam’s reaction to his students’ death. The ground will break you, he had said.

“So do I.”

Terror passed overhead on beating wings. A roar below human hearing shivered him. The Warden swooped away toward the fire, and Caleb could move again.

“Gods.”

“Watch your language,” she cautioned.

“What else could it be? An explosion that powerful, with blackout and riots just after. Gods,” he repeated, less a curse than an expression of wonder, “and their faithful. They hit North Station. One of the True Quechal must have smuggled a god inside somehow. Or a goddess.”

His foot slipped on a stone. Her grip tightened around his waist, and pain flowered in his ribs. He recovered his balance, and they walked on.

“This is me,” he said when they reached Three Cane Road, and they turned onto it together. Caleb barely noticed the road’s gentle slope on his morning commute, but it was a mountain path tonight.

Fresh black paint disfigured the houses here. Some gang of fervent amateurs had scrawled scenes of scripture and sacrifice on the pale adobe walls: Aquel and Achal devouring the Hero Twins; Qet Sea-Lord giving his body to the deep.

After ten minutes’ agonizing climb they reached Caleb’s squat two-story. A small gang gathered on his lawn, three men and two women bearing paints and brushes and knives. The tallest man had defaced Caleb’s front wall with a crude, violent cartoon of Aquel chasing demons from the earth.

“Hey!”

The painters turned. In darkness Caleb could not see their faces. They might have been his neighbors. Paint glistened like blood on the wall.

“Get the hell away from my house,” Caleb said.

The tall man set down his brush. His shoulders were broad, his steps heavy.

Caleb twisted free of Mal to meet the man’s advance.

“We have a right to be here,” the man said in High Quechal, his vowels round and broad, consonants knife-sharp. He spoke as if each word were a boulder he had to lift and let fall. He’d learned the tongue from books. “The dark is sacred. We glorify the Gods.”

“The gods,” Caleb said, and the tall man recoiled, for Caleb also spoke in High Quechal, swiftly and without accent. “The gods spit on your offering. They don’t notice such small gifts. Count yourself lucky. If you met them face-to-face, your heart would burst and your brains boil.” The painters stood sharp and at bay, like surprised rats. Did they understand him? “Leave my house,” he added in Kathic. “Scuttle back to your holes.” He shook, and hoped they took his tremors for rage rather than exhaustion and injury.

“Who are you?” the tall man asked.

“My name is Caleb Altemoc.” For the first time in years, Caleb put the accent on his father’s name. “Leave me in peace.”

One of the shorter men took a slow step back. The others followed. That first step taken, the second followed faster, and the third faster still. They retreated into the Vale.

Caleb watched until they were no longer people or even rats but insects, ants, disappearing into the deepening dark. Night overcame him and he slumped against the side of his house. Bloody paint smeared across his cheek.

Through the shifting world he saw Mal sheathe a knife.

With her aid, he shuffled along the wall to his front door. He searched his pocket and after a brutal interval found his keys. “In the last blackout some kids, same ones maybe, painted half the houses two blocks over. Paint sinks into the adobe. You have to redo the whole wall to get it off. Public nuisance.”

She watched him fumble with the lock and miss the keyhole twice. “Need help?”

“I’m fine.”

“What if they didn’t run? What if they wanted to fight?”

“They believe in the old gods, or claimed to. Anyone who believed in the old gods, and liked to fight, died a long time ago.”

The latch clicked open, and he stumbled into his living room. Mal followed him, and he closed the door behind her.

Caleb lived alone in the Vale, no girlfriend to impress, no pets save a four-foot iguana he kept to chase the larger spiders away. What did such a life require? In the living room, a couch, two secondhand chairs, an unlit brazier, a shelf full of books on poker and bridge and a few cheap Iskari romances, the kind with dashing swordplay and dark Craft and men who raced to save the world from doom. A low table by the couch bore a five-story house of cards. Caleb was almost glad for the blackout: darkness made the room look like the chaotic abode of a dangerous mind, rather than a chamber cluttered with a young man’s junk.

Mal waited by the door. Caleb searched the table for a match and lit the candles scattered on shelves and tabletop. “Sorry.” With a wave he indicated the mess. “I didn’t expect guests.”

Mal turned a slow circle on the carpet. Fire painted the room orange and black, and her the same. “Why all the candles?”

“I like candles more than ghostlight. They feel authentic. Besides, lights aren’t reliable in this part of the city, especially in summer.”

“Is that so?”

“You must live on the west side,” he said, meaning: you’re richer than I thought. She didn’t respond, not that he expected a response.

“Do your lights die so often that you need to leave candles out?”

“No.” He looked away from her, at the shadow she cast on the wall. “My father comes to visit sometimes. Craft tends to break when he’s around.”

She leaned against the couch. “Your father.” Head lolled back, mouth open, she reminded him of a sacrifice in an old engraving, curled around the blade plunged into her stomach, crying out in pain or rage or ecstasy. She whispered: “Caleb Altemoc,” accenting his father’s name.

“I told you when we met.”

“There are names and then there are names. I didn’t think you meant that Temoc, of all the Temocs in Dresediel Lex.”

“Temoc Godhaven. Temoc Last-Standing, Temoc who strikes as an eagle from the heights. Priest of All Gods. Tormentor of Dresediel Lex. Yes. That Temoc.”

“He really is your father?”

Caleb nodded.

Her eyes were dark as the inside of her mouth. “Why did you chase me?”

“That’s not the question you should ask.”

“What is?”

“Ask why I didn’t tell the Wardens you were at Bright Mirror.”

She blinked. “Why?”

“Because if I told them, they’d have thought you poisoned the reservoir. If I tell them what you did tonight, they’ll accuse you of blowing up North Station.”

“I didn’t.”

“I believe you. But they wouldn’t. If you’d gone with me two weeks ago, they would have asked you questions—that’s all. Now, they’re eager, and desperate. They’ll tie you to a rack, pull your memory out through your eyes and slice it with silver knives until they find the truth.”

“And they’ll learn I’m innocent. What do I have to fear?”

“Pain.”

“Pain doesn’t hurt.”

“This kind does. It changes people. Bright Mirror wasn’t your fault—it was my father’s, or the fault of those who follow him. Dad’s hurt too many men and women, by his own hand and by proxy. I don’t want him to hurt you, too.”

Candlelight soaked her hands in blood. “What do you want from me?”

“Tell me what you saw at Bright Mirror. Give me something to go on, some angle to chase.”

“Nothing. Moonlight on the reservoir. Your guards. The Tzimet.”

“No sign of a poisoner? Nothing incriminating?”

“No.”

“I need more.”

“I have no more to give.”

He walked around the couch toward her. Flames danced in her eyes. The shark’s-tooth pendant hung from her neck. He touched the pendant, lifted it between thumb and forefinger. His hand grazed her chest, and she twitched as if he had shocked her.

“How did you get this?” he asked softly.

“I bought it.”

“Old Quechal workmanship. You didn’t find it at a Craftsman’s boutique.”

“I have sources.”

“In the Skittersill.”

“Yes.”

“You must have paid a small fortune.” He turned the tooth over. Intricate carvings covered its back.

“A lady never tells.”

“I can help you,” he said. “If you give me the pendant.”

“Why?”

“You use it to sneak into places you shouldn’t be. That brought you to Bright Mirror two weeks ago, and to North Station tonight. Someone’s playing you for a patsy. If I take this, maybe I can find out who.”

She didn’t respond. Slowly, he lifted the pendant over her head, and slid it into his pocket.

When he looked up, she was watching him.

“You ran after me,” she said, “even though you might have died, because you wanted to help. And you won the race.”

“I didn’t win. I cheated. I fell.”

The curves and planes of her face were red and yellow and black. “If you hadn’t won, I wouldn’t have caught you.”

Like water she flowed toward him. Her small blunt nose touched his, and her leather slacks pressed against the inside of his thighs. Her dried sweat smelled of salt and sea and flesh. She kissed him. Her lips were cool, the rest of her body warm.

He tossed inside her kiss like a splinter in a flood. Too soon. Too strong. A crashing kiss, a kiss with death at the bottom. He thought of his dark room upstairs, where there were no candles to light their bodies turning on fine cotton sheets. Drowning, he breathed her in, and she filled his lungs instead of air.

Their lips parted, and he saw himself reflected in her eyes.

“Well?” she said after a moment.

“No,” he replied. A knife lifted from his throat. The gates of heaven swung shut.

Her right eyebrow crept up, and her head tilted to the side—puzzled, not disappointed. “Why not? Because I kissed you before you kissed me? Because you don’t want this?”

His mouth was dry. Words formed slowly, heavy with regret. “Because I do. But if we go upstairs now, it will be over tonight. We’ll lie together, and you’ll disappear.”

He lived in her scent. He struggled to master himself, and at last stepped back.

He recognized her expression from countless card tables, from Craftsmen and snakelings and demons and human beings judging their cards and judging him.

“Do you want me to leave?” she asked at last.

“It won’t be safe outside until morning. You can use my bed. I’ll sleep down here, on the couch.” He sidled toward the stairs, but did not take his eyes from her, so he tripped over the coffee table and scattered the house of cards. “I just need to go upstairs and get a few things, first.”

Cresting the stairs he found his bedroom door closed. He stepped inside, and pulled the door shut after him, blocking out the candlelight from below. The bedroom was not dark: a dim blue radiance shone within, the color of the Sansilva sky at night.

“Dad,” he said in High Quechal. “You need to leave.”

14

“You knew I was here.” His father’s voice rumbled like an avalanche. “How?”

“I don’t make card towers, Dad. My hands shake.”

Temoc lay on Caleb’s bed, reading a book on contract bridge. The bed was made, corners tucked in military fashion, though Caleb had left the sheets in disarray that morning. Temoc must have made it before lying down.

Caleb’s father was girded for battle, his skin black as empty space. Jagged patterns of moonlight gleamed from his forehead, his cheeks, his chest and arms and stomach.

“Don’t you ever wear a shirt?” Caleb asked as he approached the bed.

Temoc dog-eared his page in the book, closed it, and sat up. “I was waiting for you.”

“Whatever you have to say, I don’t want to hear it.”

“I can see you’re angry.”

“I’m not angry,” he snapped. His father shrugged. “I’m not. Do you have any idea how many people you killed tonight? I was almost one of them.”

Temoc stood. Shadows melted into his skin. Mazes of silver light dimmed and died, leaving a network of scars across his body and face.

Caleb’s father had fought for sixty years. Stone and lightning and time could not defeat him. His was a losing war, against knowledge and truth and undead hordes, but he refused to die or surrender. Songs were sung of his exploits in the God Wars and down the decades since, bloody violent odes chanted by drunken hoodlums in the Skittersill.

“I didn’t do it,” Temoc said.

“Someone tried to break the city tonight, using a god for a weapon. Who might that have been, do you think? Mom? The Wardens? The godsdamn King in Red?”

“Believe what you will. Speak to me in whatever tone you think yourself entitled to use. I did not cause this blackout. I would swear this to you on the gods, if you believed in them.”

Caleb shook his head.

“I do not lie.”

“Who else could have convinced a god to do something like that?”

“Goddess,” Temoc said, and stopped, and closed his eyes. Caleb waited, and soon his father found words again: “The figure burning in the sky was Ili of the White Sails. She is no more.”

Caleb wanted to put a hand on his father’s shoulder, and throw him out the window. “Fine. Feel sorry for a goddess, not for any of the people killed tonight in the blackout, in the hospitals. In the riots. Every True Quechal dope who throws a beer bottle at a Warden this evening and has his arms broken for the privilege is on your conscience, whether you admit it or not. Either way, find somewhere else to hide. I need this room.”

Glass broke two streets away, shattering the bedroom silence. “I did nothing,” Temoc said. “My people did nothing. The Wardens attacked my hiding place soon after the blackout. I fought my way free, lost my pursuers, came here. Call me murderer, terrorist, call me whatever they’ve taught you to call those of us who keep the faith, but I had no part in tonight’s attack. I am innocent of this attack, and of the death of Ili of the White Sails.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“I’m your father.”

“That’s no answer.”

“I have to go. The Wardens will be here soon.”

Caleb scanned the sky outside his window for Couatl, and listened for the beat of their wings. He saw nothing, and heard only the distant riot.

“We have a few minutes left before they catch my trail.”

Was that patch of darkness a cloud, or a Warden’s mount? “The blackout won’t last.”

“Of course not. One power station was destroyed, a single link in the chains that bind our city. Lights will return within the hour. Breaking your master’s grip would require more than a single explosion.”

“Which of course you know, because you’ve spent seventeen years planning this kind of attack.”

Temoc did not answer.

“You claim you’re innocent of the whole thing?”

“I do.”

“Why did you come here?”

“I wanted to see you.”

Caleb closed the drapes, but did not turn around. “Liar.”

“They’ll be hunting me now, more hungrily than they have for years. I won’t be able to visit as often. They might come for you.”

“I won’t tell them you were here.”

“No. Tell them. They’ll know if you lie, and you’ll be in more trouble than I’ve made for you already.”

“If you say so.”

“Who’s the girl?”

“She’s, you know.” Caleb laughed bitterly. “I never told you there was a girl.”

“I heard the two of you downstairs.”

“She’s … wild.”

“I’m glad to hear it. You need more wildness in your life.”

Staring into the drapes, Caleb thought back seventeen years to the Skittersill Rising. Poor men and women had clutched their charnel gods like beggars wrapping themselves in threadbare cloaks. The protest revolved around Temoc. He was the movement’s sun, its shining center. Ten years old, Caleb had watched his father in awe: the last true priest, the paladin of fallen temples.

Temoc swelled with his people’s need, and his family crumbled around him.

At last, the great man made his choice. Caleb woke to screams and blood. His mother cradled him and cried hot, fierce tears. His father was gone.

“Thanks, Dad,” Caleb said.

A gust of wind answered him.

When Caleb turned, he saw an empty room. His bedroom’s second window stood ajar. Night breeze brushed the curtains.

Temoc could have closed the window behind him, and vanished without leaving any sign. This was his form of courtesy, the nearest he could come to saying good-bye.

Caleb placed the book about contract bridge on his nightstand, and left the page dog-eared. He straightened the comforter, patted the mattress to remove all trace of Temoc, and went downstairs to guide Mal up to bed.

15

Caleb woke to an empty house. The bed upstairs where Mal had slept was carefully made. A bowl and mug rested drying beside the kitchen sink. When he returned to the living room he saw a cream-hued envelope atop the piled books and playing cards on the coffee table. The envelope bore his name in a sharp, angular hand. Within, he found a note:

Caleb—

Thank you for the race. You’re an intriguing man.

We will see more of one another.

—M

He showered briefly, keeping his tender left side away from the pounding water. He dressed in loose slacks, and winced when he raised his arms to don a thick cotton shirt. He’d visit a doctor in the afternoon. Clinics would be crowded all morning with every hypochondriac working stiff who bumped his head in the blackout.

For now, he needed a meal and twenty or so cups of coffee.

He shrugged into a tan corduroy jacket, slumped downstairs, opened his front door, and collided with a silver statue wearing a black uniform.

“Caleb Altemoc,” the Warden said in a voice with its serial numbers filed off.

Like all Wardens, the man before Caleb was literally expressionless. A quicksilver pall encased his head and neck. Dark blots on the metal suggested a brow, two eyes, nose, mouth, features that blurred when Caleb tried to focus on them. An enamel badge glinted from the left breast of the Warden’s jacket: an ebon skull with the number “5723” in crimson on its forehead. “What?”

“You are Caleb Altemoc,” the Warden repeated.

Caleb memorized the number. It was the only name he would ever know for this Warden. Upon joining the force, each recruit had a number etched into her bones, scored into her soul. A Warden’s mask could not be worn without a badge, and each badge reported its wearer’s number; a Warden who abused her power could be identified by that number and cast out.

At least, in theory.

“That’s me,” he said.

A scalloped shadow passed over them both. Caleb looked up. A beast half serpent and half bird crouched on his roof, wings flared. The Couatl had a snake’s face, a crest of red and yellow and green feathers, and a vulture’s all-encompassing black eyes. Another Warden sat in a saddle on the creature’s sinewy neck.

A second Couatl, no doubt belonging to the Warden at his door, coiled and preened on Caleb’s front lawn.

“Please come with us,” the Warden said. “We have questions.”

“Are you arresting me?”

Smooth silver darkened where the Warden’s brow should have been. “You’re not in any trouble, sir. You will answer our questions, and be free to go.”

“I have a right to know why I’m being taken,” Caleb said, though he knew, or at least suspected, the answer, “and where,” which he did not know and about which he knew better than to guess.

“I can’t tell you.” Perhaps the Warden did not know, yet. That quicksilver mask was a means of communication as well as a disguise. Orders passed through it, and commands. “Will you come?”

Caleb had little say in the matter: Craft augmented Wardens’ speed and strength, and their mounts were swift and hungry. Even if he could escape, he had nowhere to run.

He closed the door behind him, locked it, and tugged on the lapels of his jacket. “Well. Can we travel by carriage, at least? I hurt my ribs in the blackout last night.”

“You’ll ride with me,” the Warden said. “My mount flies steady.”

Caleb was not reassured, but he followed anyway.

This was not his first interview with the Wardens. They sought him out after Temoc’s attacks—the ambush in the 700 block, the attempted sabotage of Bay Station a few years back, all the rest. So accustomed were the Wardens to debriefing Caleb that they’d questioned him after the zombie revolt two years ago, though Temoc played no part in that.

They only came for him once the action was over. Temoc must have eluded his pursuers.

How long had this Warden waited outside Caleb’s door? How long had his partner’s mount coiled on the roof? Had they seen Mal leave? Did they let her go?

No sense worrying. She could take care of herself. Nothing incriminating about a woman spending the night at a single man’s house. He hoped.

The serpent’s emerald neck was as tall as Caleb’s waist. The Warden mounted his saddle and motioned for Caleb to climb on behind.

As he settled against the warm scales, invisible cords lashed his arms to his sides and his legs to the beast’s back. He relaxed into the spectral bonds. The more he struggled, the tighter they would grow.

“I thought I wasn’t under arrest?”

“Not arrest,” the Warden said. “Protection.”

“Feels similar.”

The Couatl’s muscles surged, and in a thrashing, horrible instant the creature rose into the air. Two massive wingbeats bore them past the housetops. The Warden on Caleb’s roof goaded her own mount to flight, and together they wheeled south, toward the bustling cancer of downtown Dresediel Lex.

When they crested the mountains, Caleb saw the damage from above. Skittersill had born the brunt of the riots. Shattered windows, burnt-out shops, and broken bricks marred the streets—as if giant children had played there, careless of the lives they crushed.

Set beside the Skittersill, the wealthier districts’ scars seemed affectations. Repairman teemed Sansilva, replacing windows in boutiques and jewelry shops. Even the finest looted gems would not be lost for long: Sansilva stores cursed their wares pre-sale. Over the next week the thieves and fences of Dresediel Lex would suffer insanity, depression, catatonia, and violent disfigurement until the stolen merchandise returned to its owners. Grocery stores lost more from riots and looting than did fashion houses: few grocers could afford curses or insurance, and their stock was perishable.

Couatl circled the crater where North Station used to be, keeping watch, a funeral guard over a goddess’s corpse. Couatl had once been sacred birds, before Craftsmen claimed and changed them. Caleb wondered if the Wardens’ mounts remembered their old masters.

The Couatl that bore Caleb turned from the crater and flew west, toward the black pyramid at 667 Sansilva.

Caleb swallowed. Powers lurked inside that pyramid, powers that could turn a man inside out, or trap a woman in agony until the sun burnt to a cinder and the planet fell to dust—powers ancient and implacable. He knew those powers. They paid his salary.

The Couatl descended toward the pyramid’s peak, a black glass slab carved in concentric spirals: ancient Quechal versions of the circles modern Craftsmen used. Here, in ages past, high priests worked miracles. The priests were gone, but their patterns and tools remained.

A crystal dome forty feet across stood in the center of those spirals. The Warden landed them beside the dome. Couatl claws clicked on obsidian.

The beast lowered its head. Caleb’s bonds disappeared, but he did not move.

“Go on,” the Warden said.

Caleb dismounted and almost fell. When the world ceased to pitch and yaw, he walked toward the dome, and through.

Crystal pricked his skin like a million needles. Upside-down the world was, and back to front, inverted in eyes and mind. Gasping, he breathed infinity. Panic seized him, but when he next inhaled, cool air filled his lungs. He coughed, shivered, swore, and stumbled forward onto a glass floor.

The dome was transparent from within. Morning light streamed from the cloudless sky onto a red Iskari carpet. An unoccupied and richly furnished room lay beneath the crystal: two plush leather couches, six unoccupied chairs, three freestanding bookcases packed with arcane tomes, and a tall desk of the same black glass as the pyramid, but stained a faint crimson.

“Hello?” he asked, and received no answer.

Warily, Caleb approached the desk. It was seven feet long, four feet wide, and cluttered with papers, pens, small clockwork toys, thick volumes of Craft, scrolls that murmured in tongues dead or yet to be invented. A sepia painting the size of a playing card rested in a heavy silver frame at one corner of the desk, beside a fist-sized depression in the glass.

Each corner of the desk bore a similar depression, and from them deep channels ran to gargoyle-mouth spouts in the desk’s sides. Quechal priests killed by removing the heart, but they drained blood before each sacrifice: blood loss induced euphoria, and brought victims closer to the divine.

“It would have been a waste to throw the thing out.”

Caleb turned from the altar.

A skeleton in a crimson bathrobe stood behind him. It held a steaming mug of coffee in one hand, and a folded newspaper in the other. A circlet of red gold adorned its skull, and two ruby sparks glittered from the pits where its eyes would have been.

Caleb snapped to attention, hands at his sides, chin up. “Sir.”

Lord Kopil, the King in Red, Deathless King of Dresediel Lex and Chief Executive of Red King Consolidated, did not acknowledge Caleb’s salute. “Obsidian isn’t porous, you know. It’s not physically possible for sacrificial blood to have colored that altar. Your gods—our gods, I suppose I should say, or the Quechal gods—made this possible: their hunger pulled blood into the glass, stained it like coffee stains teeth.”

With a bony index finger he indicated his own pale yellow cuspids.

“They were no gods of mine,” Caleb said.

“Your father’s gods, then,” Kopil allowed. He released his newspaper, which floated across the room to the cluttered desk. “Two drops, three, entered the stone for each sacrifice. Think about the millennia of full moons and midsummer’s days and eclipses that stone represents, thousands of deaths offered to the Hungry Serpents and Qet Sea-Lord and the rest. They have gone before—and none will come after.” The bones of his feet clicked like a crab’s claws against the floor. “You’ve worked for me for three years, six months, and two days, Caleb, yet we’ve only spoken a handful of times. Why do you suppose that is?”

Because you’re the most powerful Craftsman in Dresediel Lex, Caleb thought, and I’m a peon. “We don’t have much in common,” he said at last.

“The professors who recommended you to my service claimed you were intelligent and ambitious. I would like to think those are traits I share.” The skull possessed no lips to smile, nor did his tone convey any trace of humor.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Tollan says you’re talented. Yet you’ve remained content with a mid-level position in risk management.”

“I’ve done well there.” He paused, expecting his boss to interrupt, but the King in Red only sipped his coffee. “It’s exciting work.”

“It’s not.”

“Excuse me?”

“I wouldn’t expect a soldier to call a guard shift at our front desk ’exciting,’ and I don’t expect you to say the same about your current role in risk management. It’s good work, not exciting.”

“I like control: bets I can win, situations I can manage.”

“If you like control so much,” the King in Red asked, “why are your ribs broken?”

Caleb’s mouth went dry. “I fell.”

“Your soul is frailer than it was when you left this building two days ago.” Red sparks shone in the black holes of Kopil’s eyes. “You have used, or borrowed, much power in the last twelve hours. You may have fallen, but you flew first, I think. Nor is this your only recent injury: last week, you drew on the Company’s medical policy to heal a dislocated shoulder, and a hairline fracture of the collarbone.” Shadows shifted on the skeleton’s face. “For three years you’ve worked for me, confident, competent, unassuming, a perfect, invisible employee. On the night of the gravest assault against our company in three years, you suffer severe and mysterious injuries. How did you come by those injuries, I wonder.”

The King in Red’s voice was conversational and cold. Its chill seeped into the air, and stung Caleb’s skin.

“To what end have you bent your intelligence and ambition, Caleb? Not to glorify yourself in my service, I’m sure. Have you plotted with your father to destroy me? To destroy everything I have built?”

Caleb did not blink, did not show his fear. A pit yawned at his back, and the slightest misstep might send him tumbling without Mal to catch him. “No, sir.”

Kopil laughed, a chattering, unsettled sound of bare branches blown by wind. The sun faded and the sky bruised to gray. Silver glyphs glowed about his eye sockets.

An invisible serpent circled Caleb and lifted him from the floor. Scales pressed his arms to his sides. Cold carrion breath hissed against his neck.

“No?” Kopil said. “You were at North Station last night. Tell me why.”

Words skittered from Caleb’s grasping mind. “I was chasing a lead. A woman who snuck into Bright Mirror. A cliff runner.”

“Your report,” the King in Red noted absently, “made no mention of a woman. Only an intruder, of indeterminate gender and appearance.”

“If the Wardens tried to hunt for her, she would have disappeared. The cliff runners look after their own. She was innocent—a catspaw. She needed help, not an arrest party.”

Ruby eyes burned into his soul. “That was not your decision.” The invisible serpent tightened its grip. He gasped at the pain in his ribs.

“She had a pendant. It’s in my pocket. Take it out.”

The shark’s-tooth pendant twitched, wormed free of his pocket, and floated to eye level, revolving in the half light. Kopil regarded it. The closed-eye glyph glowed dull silver on the tooth’s surface.

“She thought the pendant kept her hidden. But that’s not all it does, I think.”

The King in Red snapped his fingers, and Caleb fell silent. No sound trespassed on the darkness.

At last, Kopil spoke. “A charm to track and observe the wearer. Well-hidden by the obfuscating ward. Clever, in a base fashion. Quechal Applied Theology—a modern Craftsman wouldn’t see it unless he knew how to look.”

“Someone found a cliff runner who likes to go where she doesn’t belong, gave her that pendant, and followed her until she led them to a place where they could hurt us. They tricked her into showing them how to sneak in, and sneak out again. They used her to poison Bright Mirror and blow up North Station.”

“The Wardens will find the person who made this, and the truth of your story.” Kopil slid the tooth into the pocket of his robe. “But your situation has not changed. You show me a talisman and claim a woman you will not identify wore it when she broke into our facilities—a fact you hid from Tollan, and from me. I find your testimony less than compelling.”

“I’m telling the truth.”

“We know your father was in your house last night. We traced him there, and lost his trail after.”

The serpent’s coils compressed his broken ribs. He gasped. “Temoc was in my house when I came home last night. He told me he didn’t plan the North Station raid. After that, he left.”

“A strange claim.”

“It’s not a claim. It’s a message.”

Kopil cocked his head to one side. “What do you mean?”

“The Wardens attacked Temoc last night. How did they find his hideout?”

“An anonymous tip.”

“An anonymous tip. Which they needed, because they haven’t been able to find him for twenty years. But they traced him to my house. Do you think he got sloppy while running for his life? He wanted you to talk to me, because I would tell you I think he’s innocent of the attack.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m the last person who would believe his innocence.”

Kopil did not respond.

“People died on that altar,” Caleb said. “My father killed them, and his father, our whole line as far back as memory. Temoc took his first life when he was seven years old. If Craftsmen hadn’t freed Dresediel Lex, I would have done the same. I’d fight him until the sun burned black. So he came to me, and told me he was innocent, knowing I was the least friendly witness he could find.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I don’t know. He seemed sincere.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m no Craftsman, but I’m no terrorist, either.”

“Where do you stand, then?” asked Kopil.

“On my own side.”

“Your side hurts.”

“Yes,” Caleb said when he realized what the King in Red meant. “It does.”

Kopil crossed the red rug and stood before Caleb, six feet tall and slender in his crimson robe. He radiated cold power. His skin had rotted decades past, sinews and muscles crumbled, heart shriveled into dust. He endured. A cold wind blew between them.

“Let’s fix that,” Kopil said. Darkness rolled out from him to drown the world.

Caleb could not flinch or flee. Five arrows struck him in the chest—no, five fingers, and they did not pierce his skin but passed through it as if dipping into a pool of water, water that could feel, and think, and scream. He opened his mouth, and shadow crawled past his lips, over his teeth, wriggled down his throat to nest in his lungs. He could not breathe, but he did not die, and the King in Red began to work.

A second skeletal hand joined the first in Caleb’s chest, hot as hatred and cold as love. If not for the shadow filling his mouth, he would have ground his teeth to powder, bit through his tongue. His broken ribs were two arches of jagged glass. Kopil’s hands moved over that glass, smoothing and joining. Pain rose in a fugue, variations on a theme of agony.

The music stopped. Light returned. Kopil drew his hands from Caleb’s chest. Bits of tissue and spare red drops clung to his skeleton fingers. The mortal refuse smoked, boiled, and burned from the King’s pale bones.

Caleb could move again. He touched his side, and found it whole.

The King in Red shook his hands as if to dry them. “Lift your arm. Do you feel any pain?” Caleb did, and felt none. “Inhale.” Sweet air filled his lungs. His muscles trembled, and laughing he breathed again.

“How do you feel?”

“Like I just ran here all the way from Fisherman’s Vale. Tired in the bones. My stomach’s cold.”

“Eat well tonight. You almost killed yourself yesterday; I took as little power from you as I could for the healing, but you’re weak as if you haven’t eaten in days. Go to a restaurant tonight. Order enough for three men. Drink plenty of fluids.”

A wrenching, horrid screech erupted from the floor behind the King in Red. Black glass warped open to reveal a staircase that spiraled down into the pyramid.

“Go,” the skeleton said. Caleb attempted to walk, staggered, and caught the edge of the altar-desk. He steadied himself, tried another step, and made it halfway to the stairs before Kopil’s voice stopped him.

“I know what it’s like to be on no one’s side but your own.”

The King in Red had lifted the picture in the silver frame.

“Sir?”

Kopil opened his palm as if setting a bird free. The picture slid through the air. Caleb caught it, and looked for the first time at the image: an old-fashioned sepia miniature. Two men embraced at the foot of a black pyramid. They were young and smiling and obviously in love, both dark as magisterium wood, one shorter than Caleb, the other tall for a Quechal man, six feet at least and thin, with narrow sloping shoulders. His eyes were black, and his smile looked familiar.

Thin, Caleb thought, so thin he could almost see the bones of the tall man’s skull.

Kopil stood beside the desk, beside the altar, his finger bones spread on bloodstained glass. His shoulders were narrow and sloping, and his smile had not changed.

“Eighty years,” Caleb guessed.

“More than that.”

“What was his name?”

“Timas.”

“I’m sorry.”

“They took him for the sacrifice to the Hungry Serpents.” Kopil tapped the surface of the altar. “He’s still here. A piece of him, at least. Two or three drops.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“We all think we’re on our own side, until the time comes to declare war.”

Caleb released the picture. It flew back and settled on the desk beside the King in Red.

“Go,” Kopil said, and Caleb descended into the office building that was once a temple.