Two Serpents Rise

29

Caleb left Seven Leaf Lake soon after dawn, with an escort of two Wardens. He told Four that the King in Red wanted a report on their success, that Mal would stay until reinforcements arrived. This was not, exactly, a lie. Mal could have stopped him, but she didn’t.

They took flight as the first rays of sun glanced off the long flat plane of the lake. Sleep had haunted him all night, ambushing from the darkest corners of his mood. Sharp-fingered devils charged his fitful dreams, demons with his own face devouring the flesh of screaming gods.

He shaded his eyes against the sunrise, leaned back into the gondola, and drowsed.

The Couatl carried him south. Lake gave way to waterfall and smooth-flowing river. Every few miles, stone circles protruded from the forest, their centers thick with shade. Silver glyphs glowed against gray granite. The standing stones bled Seven Leaf Lake south, to slake his city’s thirst. Soon the falls would cease to thunder, and the river shrink to a stream.

One hundred twenty eight million acre-feet of water. After a decade or so, the city’s growth would outpace the lake’s ability to refill itself. The forest would feel the effects long before then.

After three hours they stopped for lunch on a cliff overlooking a deep valley, and ate bread and cheese and drank stale canteen water and agave liquor.

The Wardens napped on the cliff after lunch. Caleb, restless, walked a hundred feet into the woods, found a sturdy birch tree, and struck it with his palms, with his feet and the sides of his hands, scaring away broad-winged birds that roosted in the canopy. He ripped his knuckles’ skin, and left a smear of blood on the white bark. He pushed against the trunk until his shoulders, arms, legs, belly all convulsed and he let out a long, low cry.

A roar answered from the valley, larger, deeper, a sound made by no human throat.

Shaken, he returned to the Wardens, who stood with weapons bared, roused by his cry or the valley’s answer. They packed quickly, and flew south.

By day’s end the Drakspine peaks mellowed into farms and bare hills. Here, amid long dry rows of wheat, the Wardens kept observation posts, small adobe buildings beside barn-sized hutches where Couatl warmed their eggs. Caleb’s escorts spent most of the evening writing reports; afterward, he challenged them and the other attendant Wardens to a quick game. As he played, he did not look the goddess in the eye.

Talking over cards, he listened for news, but heard little more than farmers’ gossip, rumors of Scorpionkind raids on outlying settlements. When he asked about the city, the Wardens glanced at one another and claimed they had heard nothing certain.

They reached Dresediel Lex the next morning. Serpents of smoke tangled in the air above Sansilva. Caleb’s heart leapt, but when they crested the Drakspine he saw the damage was limited to the 700 block. Some shops burned, that was all, a few lives destroyed. Wardens circled above emptied streets.

They landed in the pyramid’s parking lot, strewn with broken bottles, rocks, clapboard signs, all the detritus of a protest turned riot. Two Wardens met them and rushed Caleb across the lot into the pyramid. Glancing over his shoulder he saw Muerte Coffee, empty, its front window webbed with cracks.

His escorts bore him wordlessly across a lobby manned with guards and security demons, into a waiting lift. By the sixtieth floor, he stopped asking questions.

The foyer of the Red King’s office was empty save for dark leather furniture, a grim portrait on one wall, and Anne, Kopil’s secretary, at her desk. She acknowledged Caleb with a curt nod, and turned a stone desktop idol counterclockwise; the double doors behind her, marked with deaths-heads, opened without sound. The Wardens thrust him into the shadow beyond, and the doors slammed shut.

“Caleb.”

The voice was weak, a bare suggestion of wind. For a confused moment he thought it belonged to his father, captive, tortured, and he turned in slow terror of what he might see.

He stood in Kopil’s office, beneath the crystal dome on the pyramid’s peak—the office without entrance or exit. There was no sign of the doors through which he had come.

A hospital bed rested near the altar-desk. The carpet was rolled back, and someone had drawn a mandala around the bed with white and purple and yellow sand. Red sheets clad the mattress, and a red robe wrapped the skeleton who lay upon it.

The shadows that clung to Kopil looked light and insubstantial. His gestures were weak, the sparks of his eyes dull and rust-colored. The Kopil who confronted Caleb in this office months before had been a river in flood, and here he lay at ebb.

Caleb stared. Everything he could say seemed wrong.

The King in Red beckoned Caleb with a twitch of his fingers. He approached.

Bare jaws worked silently until the Deathless King could speak. “What happened?”

“You look different,” he said, and wished he had said something else.

“I am different,” Kopil replied with a low, grating laugh like a snake’s rattle. “I lie reduced, and the water flows. It has been half a century since I last felt weakness. Do they appreciate what I do for them, I wonder.”

“There are people who have sacrificed more,” he said, though he didn’t know why, “and lived less comfortably, with death their only promise of release.”

Kopil did not seem to understand what he had said, or if he understood, did not care. “Is Seven Leaf Lake ours again?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

Caleb did, though he left out many details. He did not mention his scars, or Mal’s acquaintance with Allesandre, or her bloodletting and their fight beneath the lake. Dates, times, names, these he related with precision. Four and her team deserved commendations for their service. Seven Leaf was safe again, and the water flowed.

He spoke of the agony of the gods in the lake, and shuddered when Kopil said, “Good.”

“The riots should stop now,” he said, but the King in Red waved the subject away.

“They were barely worth the name of riot. A tussle with the Wardens. Someone knocked over a few fire barrels, and the coals ignited a line of Sansilva shops. We couldn’t use tainted water on the fire—some Tzimet might survive the heat—so we flew saltwater in from the ocean.”

“The Vale looked quiet when we passed over.”

“Not much trouble there. Wardens arrested a few agitators, prophets proclaiming the Twin Serpents’ return, that sort of thing.”

“Do you think,” Caleb said, but stopped himself.

“What?”

“Do you think they knew we’re drawing the Serpents’ power? Do we have an information leak?”

“One of the men we arrested was a salesman from Centervale with three children and a pending divorce; another, a minor landowner; the third, a junior league ullamal coach. Their wives, husbands, children claim none had any religious history, not even the coach. They dreamed of the Hungry Serpents, and when they woke, they prophesied in tongues of flame.”

“A thousand people must go mad in Dresediel Lex every day.”

“Three thousand. But the visions here were all the same. They saw Aquel and Achal, waking.”

“We only have six weeks to the next eclipse.”

Kopil sighed. “I know. RKC has already volunteered to pay for the fireworks. Fifteen thousand souls for simple merriment. We could buy everyone in the city a cup of decent coffee for that. And yet the revelers must revel.”

“The Serpents are on peoples’ minds as the eclipse nears, is my point. When they go crazy, their madness takes a form to fit their fears. It’s just dream stuff. Nothing serious.”

“Have you ever read Maistre Schatten?”

“Who?”

“Schatten wrote about dreams and myths and the unconscious: Sleeping Giants, The Shadow’s Refuge, The Ends of Time. Did you ever read them?”

“No.”

“I knew the man,” Kopil said. “Old in his fifties, shaken and shattered by a life of delving under the placid surface of his clients’ minds. Do not ignore dreams. They are a line from the past to the future. All nightmares are real.”

“You’re worried.”

“I’m worried,” the King in Red replied. He crooked one finger, and a brown paper envelope floated from his desk to Caleb’s hand. Caleb opened the envelope, and slid Mal’s shark’s-tooth pendant into his palm. The closed-eye glyph and the tracking pattern were cracked and blackened. “Yesterday, the sigils and enchantments on this pendant burned themselves out—around noon, when you struck down Alaxic’s aide.”

Caleb pursed his lips. Allesandre had spouted no True Quechal rhetoric, no promises of the gods’ return. Then again, she had been all but a goddess herself, at the end. And when she usurped Seven Leaf, she had let Tzimet into the water. She would have been a logical poisoner’s agent—she knew Mal was sneaking into Bright Mirror and North Station. As Alaxic’s aide, as Mal’s friend, Allesandre could have set Mal up, pointed her toward a dealer in Quechal artifacts who would give her the tracking amulet. Only the faintest strands of the deal would lead back to Allesandre herself. “Interesting,” he said.

“Are you still in contact with the cliff runner from whom you took this amulet?”

He blinked. “I could try to track her down. I don’t know if she’ll talk to me.” Both statements were true.

“The talisman is dead. Even the tracking signals have ceased. Only broken glyphs remain. My people copied the glyphs, studied the tooth down to its component atoms, and found nothing. This supposed link between your cliff runner and Alaxic’s aide is our only lead. Find the runner. Ask her if she recognizes a woman of Allesandre’s description. You may offer to return the talisman, if she requests it in exchange. Report back to me on your success.”

Caleb slid the tooth into his jacket pocket. “I’ll try.” No need to say more than that.

“Do.” Kopil clicked his teeth together three times, and rested his skull back against the pillow. “Weak, I feel something like fear again.”

“I don’t understand,” Caleb said.

“We’ve built a world in the last six decades, but it has not endured the test of time. We inhabit the gods’ abandoned buildings like spiders in an old house. Madmen flock to worship departed lords and dead ladies, to tear down all we have built. They seem to hate me. Perhaps they’re right to do so.”

“No.”

“Gods perished at my hand half a century ago. Was that for any purpose, beyond satisfying my vanity, my lust for vengeance?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

Caleb pointed to the altar stone. “It’s been sixty years since the last death on that altar.” He saw Mal again, blood black against her dusky skin. “Our city is cruel. It exploits its children. But it does not corral those it fears and hates, does not kill them to appease bogeymen. There’s a lot wrong with this world you’ve made, sir, but that much is right.”

Kopil lay still beneath blood-colored sheets and blood-colored robes.

“I take it your time with Ms. Kekapania did not go well,” said the King in Red, after a time.

“No,” Caleb replied. “It did not.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Thank you.”

“You are right, of course. About the sacrifice, and the value of our creation. But do not underestimate the power of dreams.” The red sparks in his eye sockets blinked out. “I see the Serpents when I sleep, too.”

Caleb said nothing.

“You may leave.”

A Warden flew him home over the Drakspine. Dry heat sucked his blood and spirit. Yet, standing for the first time in days outside his own house, in full sunlight, he could not shake the chill from his bones.

30

Zolin, the finest ullamal player in the world, tore down the narrow court. She dodged defenders, juggling the heavy rubber ball from knee to knee. It struck her flesh with a thick sound. Ten thousand onlookers watched from the stands, and did not breathe.

For two hours Zolin’s squad had lagged behind, but in the last thirty minutes, through a haze of exhaustion, the Dresediel Lex Sea-Lords had closed the gap in score through luck and grim determination. In ordinary games, the audience laughed, cried, shouted obscenities at the stripe-robed, monstrously masked referees; tonight, they waited and hoped for a moment of magic.

Zolin spun clear of the last blocker and struck the ball with the crown of her head. It flew over the opposing team toward the gaping mouth of the serpent statue at the arena’s far end. That serpent was Aquel, the Creeping Hunger; across the field coiled Achal, the Kindled Flame.

For two thousand years, this game had been a cornerstone of Quechal religion. Play mimicked the Hero Sisters’ sacrifice to the Serpents, at the beginning of the world. Modern fans cared little for mythology. Neither did Zolin. But if there was an afterlife, and she met ancient players there, she would play circles around them all.

The ball soared, a blur of black and bone, struck the inside of the serpent’s mouth, and disappeared down its gullet. A bell rang.

Roars of triumph filled the arena. Beer and wine showered like rain onto the sand; torn programs and strips of cloth joined the deluge. Zolin raised her arms and leapt into the air. Sweat flew from her skin. Her teeth gleamed like pearls. She was immortal.

“Dammit,” Caleb said from his seat far up in the stands. With vicious pulls he tore the bookie’s receipt to shreds. Swearing felt good, so he tried again. “Godsdammit.”

“I warned you not to bet against the city,” said Teo as she tallied her winnings. The crowd thinned, making for the exits. Sam, in the aisle, cupped her hands around her mouth and hooted in triumph. “Especially when Zolin’s playing.”

“If she’s sober.”

On the court, each team saluted the other’s serpent-goal. Zolin’s teammates lifted her onto their shoulders and ran a slow circuit around the court. A band struck up a bassy triumphant tune, and Sam thrashed to the music. She waved to Teo, who waved back but did not leave her seat.

“She has a face full of powder off the court, but it’s never hurt her play. This is religion to her.”

Caleb winced, and Teo noticed.

“What is it with you?”

“I just lost a decent chunk of soul. Give me some space.”

“Whenever I mention religion, you get this look like you’re about to stalk off and beat your head against a wall somewhere.”

“I told you what happened with me and Mal.”

“You told me what happened. You haven’t told me what you’re going to do next.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Again Sam waved, and this time Teo smiled, and stood. “Fine.” She slid her receipt into a pocket of her white linen jacket, and joined Sam in the aisle. They danced as the band played, hands on each other’s hips.

Fans filtered out into the dark, hot night. Caleb sat alone in the empty row, save for a small Quechal man, silver-haired and slump-shouldered, who rocked in his seat, muttering a half-remembered prayer.

Sam whispered in Teo’s ear. They drew apart, glanced around at the empty stands, laughed. “You want to grab a drink with us?” Sam asked.

“Sure,” he said.

They extricated themselves from the labyrinth of halls and shops and parking structures that adjoined the stadium, and found a bar with a crudely painted, misspelled sign and a muscular young woman guarding the door. Teo gave the bouncer a wink as they ducked inside, and the woman shifted, unsure whether to smile back. Teo and Sam joked about her confusion as they found a booth. Inside the bar, Caleb drank gin and listened to them argue about art, faith, sports, and alcohol. Sam picked up the tab; her Urban Grotesquerie had sold at auction, and while she was still an artist, she was no longer starving.

After an hour, the bar’s air grew stagnant and they staggered out onto cool streets. Teo hailed a driverless carriage and the horse pulled them across town through traffic toward Andrej’s. As they rolled through the night together, Caleb remembered their last carriage ride, the rush and terror of the evening when the water ran black.

Sam didn’t like Andrej’s. She sat uncomfortable in their corner booth, eying the brokers in the dark elegant suits, who drank expensive cocktails and laughed moneyed laughs. “How can you relax in this place? You think anyone here’s ever seen anything real?”

“What’s real?” Teo asked, swirling her drink.

“Don’t you know?” she replied with a smirk, and touched the side of Teo’s face. A small scar ran next to Sam’s eye, new since the riots. Caleb had not asked how she was wounded. He did not want to hear the answer.

After an hour he excused himself and climbed the spiral staircase to the roof. He looked out over the city to the sea, and to Bay Station barely visible on the horizon. The city gleamed below and above, skyspire lights reflected on the belly of the clouds and on the harbor’s black surface. Salt spray mixed with the bitter quinine taste of his gin and tonic.

“You should go to her,” Teo said when she found him.

“Are you sure you should leave Sam in there alone? She might burn the whole place down.”

“She’ll be fine. And you should apologize to Mal.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You haven’t talked about anything else all night.”

“I haven’t talked about anything all night.”

“Exactly.”

He leaned against the balcony railing, and hung his head over the drop: four stories to the next step of the pyramid, then another four stories, and so on down. Windows glowed from the sandstone blocks: other bars, or people late at work, lost in paper mazes.

“She should apologize to me,” he said, though he knew it wasn’t true. “I didn’t do anything wrong.” That, also, sounded like a lie. The air up here, fresh and cool and open, would not admit falsehood. He drank. “What would I say to her, anyway?”

“Say you’re sorry for being an idiot, to start. Maybe you add: I was under a lot of stress. We’d just saved the city from a mad necromancer, and I have issues with religion, but those don’t give me the right to pass judgment on you. You could plea the fact that your father’s a lunatic, which makes you sensitive about the subject.”

His next sip of gin lingered too long in his mouth, and when he swallowed he shivered as it slithered into him. “Yeah.” Turning from the world he leaned back against the railing and followed Teo’s gaze to the altar in the center of the roof. “Apologize,” he said, testing the idea. “Even if I’m right.”

“Do you want to be right, or do you want to be with her?”

“Can’t it be both?”

“Later, maybe. From her point of view, you’ve insulted her, insulted her dead parents, and left her in the Drakspine Mountains with no one to keep her company but a bunch of the same Wardens who killed her family. This is throw-yourself-at-her-feet-and-beg-forgiveness time.”

“I do sound like a jerk when you put it that way.”

“Yes.”

They watched the stone.

“Hey,” he said at last.

“Yes?”

“You’ve been a real friend to me about this, for the last few months.”

She shrugged, and sipped her single malt.

“I’m glad it’s working out, with you and Sam.”

“Is it? I mean.” She examined the constellations reflected in her whiskey, in the ice. “She’s wonderful. Wild. Too wild for me, I think. She went out in the riots, when you were gone. I couldn’t get her to stay. She said she had to be where the people were fighting.”

“Artists.”

She didn’t reply.

“Do you love her?”

“I think. I don’t know. Shit. Maybe I’m just giving you all this advice because I’m desperate, and I can help you, even if I can’t help myself.”

“To desperation,” he said, and raised his glass. She raised hers as well, toward the altar.

“And to bleeding hearts,” she added, and they drank.

31

An apology was easier to conceive than to compose. He tried writing the words he would say. He tried all the sales tactics—delivering his speech to a mirror, to an empty room, to a picture of her drawn with charcoal and tacked to his wall. Nothing worked.

At the office, instead of processing claims or helping prepare for the eclipse, he began and abandoned countless variations on an apologetic theme. Drafts formed a crumpled mountain in his wastebasket. In the end he settled on a paragraph cribbed from a classic play. “The problems of two people don’t amount to much in this crazy world,” it began. He felt foolish reciting another man’s words, but he couldn’t think of anything better.

Once he abandoned his search for the perfect words, he realized he didn’t know where to deliver the imperfect ones. Mal had never brought him to her home. He could find her office without trouble, but the conversation he wanted to have with her was not fit for a place of business, and dangerous besides. Walls could hear, and Red King Consolidated was not a religion-tolerant workplace as such. Finding her home address from payroll would attract too much attention.

Better to meet her on neutral ground, he thought, and returned to the border between Stonewood and the Skittersill. Seeking runners, he found an indigent circle of them sharing a pipe with Balam in a shattered statuary court. The tattooed trainer sported a new scar over his brow, and his right arm hung in a sling. Caleb did not ask what he had done in the riots. Balam took the pipe from a girl to his left, breathed in deep, held smoke in his lungs, and exhaled; as a dragon it rose, circling through ruined statues. Balam’s eyes fixed on a point beyond the sky. “Haven’t learned enough to let her alone.”

“I owe her something. I want to pay her back.”

Balam examined Caleb, passed the pipe, set his free hand on top of his cast. “Maybe you do. Been weeks since she last ran with us. She’s keeping herself to herself. You’ll find her when she wants to be found.”

The runners did not offer Caleb their pipe, and he left alone. No wonder they were suspicious. Their circle was reduced. Many must have died at North Station, or been wounded in the riots.

He set those thoughts aside.

Mal was back in the city—a team of technicians had relieved her at Seven Leaf a week before—but where?

How much did he know about her, really? A few chance encounters. Chemistry. They had saved each other’s lives. They were both wounded. Was that enough to build on?

The public address books were useless: eighty M. Kekapanias to choose from, assuming she was listed at all. With his other options exhausted, he bought a box of pastries at Muerte Coffee and went upstairs to beg Anne, the King in Red’s secretary, for help.

She drank the coffee and ate two bear claws, and when Caleb told her a bowdlerized version of his fight with Mal, she clicked her tongue and smiled. Conversation turned to mystery plays and sports—Anne was an ullamal fanatic—and when Caleb left the Red King’s foyer, he had the address. A calculated risk: if Anne believed his story of a lover’s quarrel, she would protect his privacy. Not that he was lying. This was a quarrel, even if he and Mal were not precisely lovers.

Apology written, address in hand, he should have gone to her at once, but for three days he did not.

He walked at night. Aimless steps wound him to Skittersill. He kept to the light, walked well-traveled streets, and soon reached a patch of red earth between two brick buildings, bare of rubble, weeds, or insects. Twenty years ago, Temoc’s temple stood on this barren plot.

Caleb remembered waiting in the pews, aged seven or eight, knees drawn to his chin, as Temoc stretched out his arms and chanted the story of the Hero Twins to solemn men with faces made from wood and stone. He made mock sacrifice, brought his knife down handle-first on the chest of a prostrate disciple. Half-formed godlings crawled from the altar and licked the living sacrifice’s skin for drops of unshed blood.

The Wardens burned Temoc’s temple after the Skittersill Rising. They draped it in a silver net with lines as fine as dream, and the net burned down through brick and metal, plaster and rock and concrete. In thirty minutes the temple fell. The silver net sunk into the earth, leaving a crosshatched scar on bare red dust. Nothing grew there to this day.

Caleb threw a pebble into the empty lot. Green light flashed where the pebble landed. When Caleb’s vision cleared, a fine white dust lay against the red.

Mal lived in a skyspire on the west side. Caleb took the airbus over, transferring three times. Most of the people who lived in Mal’s spire, in any spire for that matter, flew on their own rather than take the bus.

Leather-winged drakes roosted in an iron aerie beneath the skyspire. Their wings twitched as the airbus approached, and they followed the passenger gondola with hungry yellow eyes. Caleb was the only one to dismount at the stop. He staggered along the catwalk, hands clasped to guardrails, not looking down. The drakes watched him.

The catwalk ended at the skyspire’s crystal wall, without any sign of a door or entrance. He waited outside at first. The sun set over the Pax and the roosting lizards roared their dusk roars. Night fell, and he felt ridiculous standing on the doorstep with flowers tucked under his arm.

Reluctantly, he pressed against the crystal wall with his scars, and bent its Craft to let him pass. A familiar tingle washed over him, and he entered the arctic chill of Mal’s spire.

Craftsmen and Craftswomen preferred the cold. Dancing elementals of air and ice cooled their buildings to the edge of sanity. Shivering in his thin jacket, Caleb climbed three flights of stairs. Mal’s room was one of four on the spire’s third floor. A mailbox on the wall bore her name engraved on a silver plate.

He knocked on the door, but received no answer. Waited, knocked again—still nothing. He set his ear against the door, but heard no movement. Working late, most likely. She was a busy woman.

Fine, he thought, and turned to go. He forced himself to stop. The next bus wouldn’t come for another hour. If he left and returned, he’d arrive at midnight; his apology would not go over well if he had to wake Mal to deliver it. Better return the next night—but what if the same thing happened? And the night after that?

A bead of sweat trickled down the back of his neck. His hands shook for reasons unconnected to the cold. He touched the doorknob, turned, found it locked. A deadbolt, no Craft for him to pry apart or bend. Of course. In a flying tower full of wizards, who would trust an enchanted lock?

He paced, and counted slowly to a hundred. She did not appear. He cursed, and she did not answer that summons, either.

Caleb sat beside her door, and laid the flowers on the carpet. He drew a deck of cards from his pocket and dealt a hand of solitaire.

The denizens of Mal’s tower all worked late, or else came and went without recourse to the hall. Minutes ticked by to hours. Caleb played every variant of solitaire he knew, four times, then won and lost three fortunes to himself at poker. No human presence relieved his isolation. Every quarter hour, regular as clockwork, an elemental eddy whisked by, trailing frost, and he clutched his jacket tight across his chest.

Midway through his fourth fortune, he heard a sound like a champagne flute crushed to sand: an inhuman approximation of the clearing of a throat. He paused, hands hovering above the cards, and looked up. Two demons—he thought there were two, invisible save as impressions in the air, glass scythes and scissor mouths, spiked fangs of crystal and eyes upon eyes—stared down at him.

He started to gather his cards, but they seized him before he could finish.

Either the demons could not talk, or they chose not to. They twisted Caleb’s arms behind his back and thrust his head down. He staggered through white-walled halls, until they arrived at a dark, small room with a table and two chairs. The demons threw him inside, and closed the door.

He sat under a punishing spotlight, and wondered if the Wardens would come, if there was any law against lingering outside a woman’s door and waiting for her to return.

Probably.

He would have played more solitaire, but half his cards remained on the floor outside Mal’s apartment, with the flowers. Instead he practiced palming the cards that remained, sleeving them, sliding them into and out of his pockets. He did not cheat, but even an honest player should know how. When sleights of hand grew dull, he placed his feet up on the table and tipped his hat down over his eyes.

He woke to the click of an opening latch.

He blinked, blinded by light. Exploding galaxies faded into a dim mess of purple and red.

Demons stood in the door.

He did not struggle when they took his arms in their scissor-grip and marched him out.

“Where to now, gentlemen?”

No answer. He hadn’t expected one.

When they did not steer him down the stairs toward the exit, he started to worry. Not handing him over to the Wardens, then—unless the Wardens used a different landing structure than the spire’s residents. But he had seen no such structure from the air. If they didn’t plan to hand him over or let him go, why move him from the cell?

Unless they had other uses for him. What powers ruled in a skyspire? The city’s law, or the law of the Craft, or no law at all? And what if the demon guards had not in fact reported his capture, and were only waiting until the rest of the spire would be too fast asleep to hear his screams?

Demons, he recalled, kept peculiar diets.

As they marched him up a winding stair, he searched for opportunities of escape. None suggested themselves.

When they turned onto the third floor, he began to look more intently. They brought him to Mal’s door, opened it, and thrust him in.

He stumbled, and caught his balance on a hardwood floor.

Shadow soaked the small bare room. Moonlight filtered through the large rear windows, illuminating gray carpet, a leather chair, a small coffee table, and a machine designed for either torture or home exercise.

The city burned below.

Something moved to Caleb’s right, and he turned, expecting to see Mal.

Instead, he saw snakes: a wall of them, writhing.

He swore, jumped back, and after a panting, panicked moment, he recognized Urban Grotesquerie. Sam’s piece. Sold at auction. “Seven hells.”

Demon laughs sounded like spider legs skittering across a steel floor.

“Give us a few minutes.” He recognized Mal’s voice, from the corner beside the exercise machine. He turned to her as the demons withdrew and closed the door behind them.

He pointed at the snakes. “I know the woman who made this. Girlfriend of a friend of mine. I’ll tell her you put it on display.”

Mal moved between him and the city, and pointed to the ceiling. Recessed ghostlights glowed, and details filled in the room. Closed doors led off the main chamber. A photograph, framed, hung on the wall opposite Grotesquerie: a girl, a man, and a woman, in front of an adobe house of the kind that had been common in the Skittersill twenty years before. “You’re lucky I saw the cards,” she said. “And the flowers.”

“I thought they’d have cleaned up after they grabbed me.”

“Demons don’t clean. Another hour, and the maid would have come by, and who knows how long you’d have been stuck there.”

She looked much as he remembered her: hard and elegant. She wore a dark suit and a pencil skirt.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wear a skirt.”

“Formal dinner. Dress to impress.”

“Looks nice.”

“I thought about leaving you in that cell, for the Wardens. I thought about throwing you off the top of this spire. Tell me why I shouldn’t.”

He opened his mouth, but no words emerged. His rehearsed, stolen speech would not fit through his throat.

Mal started to turn away.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She waited.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Still, she said nothing.

“I didn’t think. It’s hard to live in your parents’ shadow. Believe me, I know. I don’t want you to forget them. Even if I disagree with them. Even if I disagree with you.”

“What do you want?”

“You,” he said at last. “If you’ll have me.”

She turned away. “You don’t have the first idea of the trouble you make for yourself, wanting me. Go. I’ll persuade the building not to press charges.”

“No,” he said with more conviction than he felt. He walked to her, placed his hand on her arm. Her skin was tawny and soft. She did not pull away. Traffic surged through the streets and skies beneath them. “Without you, there’s no race. I’m just running, in the dark, alone. And so are you. Burdened, with no one to share the burden.”

“This won’t work.”

“I’ll take that risk, if you will.”

“I’ll destroy you.”

“Possible.”

“I destroy everything I touch.”

“I don’t care.”

“I wish I could believe that.”

“Do.”

Leaning in to her felt like leaning toward a cactus—every second swelling with the promise of pain. Her lips were round, and close, and still the pain did not come.

He kissed her, and did not die. He was so shocked by this that he pulled back, but she followed him, and kissed him in turn.

A minute passed, an eternity. A scythe-claw rapped on the door, and Caleb heard a muffled voice like the death of something beautiful. Mal replied in the same language, and stepped back. He shivered from her absence.

“I need you to leave,” she said. “I have documents to review, and work tomorrow.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

“But—”

“Sorry.”

He tasted her lips on his lips. “See you next month, I guess?”

“We don’t have that long.” She hugged herself, looked down at the city, looked back. “I’ll wait for you in the foyer at RKC, tomorrow night, at five.”

“You’ll wait for me?”

“For you,” she said, “and no one else. Now go, or else the demons will eat your soul and I’ll have to take a husk to dinner.” She snapped her fingers, and the door opened.

He almost left without kissing her again.

Almost.

32

The next day Caleb worked like a man possessed. He tore through stacks of memos, processed claims and ran figures, outlined complex deals and hedges against failure. Her fire would devour him if he let it, so he buried his mind in news and risk reports.

The nightmares had not stopped after Seven Leaf. Madmen crowded hospitals, crying the Twin Serpents’ names. An itinerant philosopher in Stonewood immolated himself in a public square at noon, ranting about Aquel and Achal. When others rushed to douse him, he fought back with burning flesh, melting skin, crisping meat. A mother in the Vale nearly threw her two young children out of a second-story window, before her husband stopped her. She claimed to doctors and reporters that she had seen snakes of flame coiled inside her babies.

Somewhere, Temoc was laughing. Caleb felt sure of it.

Incidents of madness clustered near Heartstone installations. Caleb wrote a memo, a call to discontinue the Two Serpents project, with the frankness of a man certain he would be ignored. The Serpents had come to the city’s aid in its hour of need. If their use entailed risk, well enough—they required more study before they were used again. The first investigations into the Craft had transformed kingdoms to deserts. This was no different.

At four forty-five he closed his books, capped his pens, cleaned his quill, sharpened his chisel, and walked to the lift. As he descended, he ran through an inventory of doom.

The doors rolled back, and he saw her across the hall, ablaze in a white linen dress. Arms crossed, one eyebrow raised, Mal looked inviting as the emptiness beyond a cliff’s edge.

He didn’t run to her, but he walked quickly. She kissed him on the lips.

“You’re wearing a dress.”

“I do that sometimes,” she said. “Come on. Let’s get something to eat.”

“Something to eat” turned out to be dinner at an Iskari restaurant named Esprit, on the lowest level of a skyspire overlooking the ocean, the kind of place a wealthy couple in a mystery play might eat. At first the eremite decor, the silver place settings and expensive porcelain and sunset view crushed Caleb into insignificance. Then he looked across the table at her.

They discussed ephemera: the color of the sky, the sharp bright bubbles of the champagne, the transgressive thrill of spending so much on a single meal.

“We don’t have much time, when you think about it,” Mal said. “I want to appreciate as much as I can before it’s gone.”

“Morbid,” Caleb replied. “But I won’t argue.”

As tuxedoed waiters served course after airy, delicate course, Caleb and Mal spoke of wine, of ullamal (Mal was not a fan, and Caleb found himself defending the conduct of players he would have condemned to Teo), of childhood games, and art. A string quartet behind a curtain played a gavotte he didn’t recognize. At first Caleb thought it strange that no one danced, but the entire evening was its own kind of dance, with subtle steps and pleasant turns. He blundered through, cheerful as a child at a waltz, and laughed when Mal recounted the story of their first meeting back to him.

“You had the most serious expression I’ve ever seen on a human face. I would have laughed, but I thought that might make matters worse.”

“You did laugh, if I remember right.” He sipped a dessert cordial, and felt it go down slow. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the Tzimet in the lake, and the Serpents.”

Her smile faltered. “What do you mean?”

“I spent all day doing damage control. When we draw power from the Serpents, their, I don’t know, their hunger bleeds out into the city. A woman almost killed her kids, a guy burned himself. More people going mad all the time. We’re responsible.”

“What choice did we have?”

“I don’t know. But I can’t stop thinking about Hal, the guard who died at Bright Mirror. We took reasonable precautions against Tzimet. No one can blame us for what went wrong—but maybe they should. We could run a perfect operation: a Concern that hurt no one, every risk sorted and managed, each contingency accounted for. It would cost hundreds of millions of souls even to come close. Too much. So he died.” The ocean rolled green and gray as slate below them.

She wore a string of tiny pearls at her throat. The pearls smiled even when she did not. “There are always risks. The world isn’t safe.”

“Why not feed the Serpents? If they weren’t so hungry, they wouldn’t drive people mad.”

“We can’t feed them without killing people.”

“You can’t give them soulstuff because…”

“Because the Craft is built on exchange. We give, and receive something in return. That’s the reason we can’t just magic ourselves food or water: use Craft to force a field to grow, and you’ll wear the earth to desert in a year. If we funneled souls into the Serpents, their power would flow back into us, and they’d get hungrier. All we can do is keep them sleeping, and that’s only if we’re careful.” She toasted him with cordial. “Here’s to being careful.”

“Here’s to that.” He drank. “Why not leave the Serpents alone? Let them sleep.”

“And one day they would wake, whether we called for them or not. Our grandparents feared Aquel and Achal. I think we should use them, not cower from them.”

Caleb didn’t know what to think. Sunset burned in her eyes.

“Maybe you’re right.”

They saw more of each other, though Caleb hesitated to call their meetings dates. Yes, they kissed, but they did not melt into romance. Mal studied the world around her, broke it into pieces. On their walks together, every mystery play or advertisement or empty storefront signified something about life or Craft, religion or politics or poetry. Being around her was a rush of genius and expectation. They danced, and talked, and danced again.

Their meetings were a welcome respite from the business of the coming eclipse: insurance bargains to be signed and sealed with demonic agencies, water rights secured, Warden patrols doubled in case of accident or unrest. He swam every day through end-time prophecies, waiting for night and Mal to save him.

He kept the shark’s-tooth talisman in his pocket, but every time he thought to mention it, he remembered Allie’s death, and their fight under Seven Leaf Lake, and decided to wait.

Mal returned to the cliff runners as a goddess in white leather, offering no explanation for her absence. Caleb did not run with her, but waited beside Balam, and watched.

She soared on currents of air, leapt and turned, rolled and ran. She was a monkey, a flame, a flash, an angel, a demon in flight. Caught between sky and earth, she was most herself. When she touched down, she stood lightly, as if one wrong step might break the ground beneath her feet.

A week before the eclipse, on Monicola Pier beside the rolling Pax, he showed her the tooth.

It hung from her fingers, caught by sunset, swaying.

“Kopil says it burned when Allie died.”

“And you think it means she wasn’t mad. That she betrayed me. Betrayed us. Poisoned Bright Mirror Reservoir, and all the rest.”

“It seems likely. Doesn’t it?”

“You have one explanation for the facts,” she said. “Perhaps she was working against you all along. Or she was only recruited after she saw the gods at Bright Mirror and decided she could not be a part of your world. Your adversary would have bound her to his purpose with subtle cords and bargains. When we turned her power against her, some might have flowed back through those bonds, and destroyed this tooth.”

“I don’t buy it. She must have been a radical from way back.”

She smiled sadly. “Why?”

“She was only at Seven Leaf for a few weeks. People don’t change so fast.”

“Maybe you don’t know people as well as you think. You didn’t handle Seven Leaf Lake well. Neither did I. What would we have become if we remained?”

“What we do there is ugly, sure, but it didn’t make me want to set demons loose on the city.”

“I doubt that was her goal.” She lowered the tooth.

“What do you mean?”

“I think Allie didn’t want to cause harm. I think she wanted to recover something she’d lost. Seven Leaf confronted her with that loss, and she responded in the only way she knew.” When he looked at her uncomprehending, she tried again. “She saw spirits in pain, and wanted to stop their pain. That was the seed. Everything else—the power, the madness, the betrayal—followed.”

“Their pain is horrible. But we need that water. She must have known that.”

“Does our need justify our methods?”

He remembered the torment beneath the lake, and did not answer.

“We were born together,” she said, “men and gods: our first cave wall scratches let them into the world. We miss them. Allie missed them, I think. I sympathize with her.”

“You miss our gods?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“They’re soaked in blood.”

“So am I. So are you. So’s this city. You seem to think it’s different if we kill for gods or for water; either way the victim dies at the end.”

“Why not find another pantheon? Iskar still has gods, and they get along fine. Orgies and existentialism, the occasional burnt aurochs, once in a while a tentacle or two. Seems better.”

“Iskar’s gods aren’t ours, though.”

“Oh, I see, we need to preserve our heritage. Will you burn the pale skins out of Stonewood next?” Barges shifted on the water, pulled by broad-backed sea turtles forty feet across: firework ships moving into position for the eclipse. Their burning arrows would frighten hungry stars away from the wounded sun.

She laughed. “Our economy would collapse. Every tie to the rest of the world would be cut. We must be cosmopolitan, without sacrificing our identity. Walk our own path.”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing now?”

“How many of the Craftsmen and Craftswomen in this city are Quechal, do you think? Twenty percent? Thirty, at most?”

“Something like that.”

“In a city that’s eighty percent Quechal.”

“I don’t see your point.”

“We’re occupied. We don’t talk about it that way, but we are.”

“We’re not occupied. We’re a world city. There’s a difference.”

“Are you sure?”

A cold breeze off the ocean shivered her, and he placed an arm around her shoulder. From the sidewalk an observer might have thought them man and wife, or lovers. Caleb didn’t know what they were. No words seemed to fit. Children ran down the beach, volleying a ball back and forth. “You loved your parents. You value the things they valued. But our gods killed people. They’re gone, and I don’t miss them.”

Mal stopped shivering, but she did not remove his arm. “You don’t get to choose your parents. Why should your gods be any different?”

“What do you suggest? We should bring back the altar and the knife? People will fight you if that’s what you want, and I’ll lead them. We can’t do those things anymore.”

“Of course not,” she said. “That’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean, then?”

“Think about your father. You don’t live the way he lives.”

“No. I have a roof over my head, and I don’t have three quarters of the city out to kill me.”

Waves lapped the thick pylons of the pier. Caleb watched the barges and thought about sharks moving underwater.

“But you have something of him in you, anyway.”

“Scars.”

“Those, yes. But that’s not what I meant. You have his determination. You know a few things in your marrow, and you will never compromise on them. You took parts of your father into yourself and reinvented them. Your mother’s in there, too: contemplative, independent, solitary, strong. You made yourself out of what they gave you.”

“What does this have to do with sacrifice?”

“We used to know that everything ends, and it is better to give one’s death than accept it. The first corn sprang from a dead man’s body. Qet’s blood makes the rain. Beasts give themselves to the hunter; kings give themselves to their people. Sacrifice was the center of our world. We defended that world from Iskari invaders four hundred years ago, but then the Craftsmen came, and here we are.”

“Here we are: better fed, better protected, more justly policed than ever in history.”

“I don’t think the Wardens are just.”

“I know.”

“We’re better fed, I’ll grant, but so what? Cows on a farm are fed. As for ’protected,’ Dresediel Lex only ever fell to one adversary: the one who rules us now. My problem isn’t that we no longer sacrifice, it’s that we’re no longer conscious of the sacrifices we make. That’s what gods are for.”

“What do you suggest?”

“We should bring them back, on our terms. We form a society with sacrifice, but without death.”

“Sacrificing what? Shreds of cotton, clods of earth? A bit of wine, stale bread? Gods are hungry, thirsty creatures.”

“I don’t know what they would accept. But we need them.”

“People don’t miss the gods.”

“They do. You do.”

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

“You’ve been chasing me for months. Half the things you’ve done should have killed you.”

He laid his hand over the back of hers, on the railing. A ridge of scar tissue ran below her knuckles.

She looked at him through the black sway of her hair. “You didn’t know me. You saw something in me you thought was worth your blood.” His expression must have changed, because she frowned, and shook her head. “You saw something you could chase, something for which you could bleed. You wanted to sacrifice yourself, and you’ve never been given the chance. I know the feeling. Desperate for duty. For purpose. Direction. It’s why I saved you, when North Station fell.” She handed the tooth back to him. “I’m sorry I can’t say more. Allie was a friend, and I think I understand her—but I can’t help you with this.”

He took the tooth from her, and slipped it back into his jacket. His grip on her hand was so tight that his forearm trembled. Mal raised an eyebrow. He released her hand, and chose his next words carefully. “We do sacrifice. We pay bits of soul every time we use a faucet.”

“It’s not the same. Those are payments, not sacraments. What, really, do we sacrifice to live the way we live?”

Children sprinted along the waterline. Rising tidewater dulled their footprints, filled them with eddies and sand. By the fourth wave, the footprints vanished as if they had never been.

The last child paused every few strides to lift a shell from the beach and throw it into the Pax. She mouthed a prayer with each throw, an offering to Qet Sea-Lord in payment for her passage along the shore. Caleb’s mother had taught him the words to that prayer, when he was young. After the Skittersill Rising she never mentioned it again.

Caleb followed the arc of a thrown shell, imagined it drawn out past the barges and their harnessed sea monsters, through the deep toward Bay Station.

“I know what we sacrifice,” he said. “But I don’t have the words to tell you.”

“What, then?”

“I can show you, if you’ll let me. Do you have plans for the night before the eclipse?”

Calculating eyes watched him. “I do. What do you have in mind?”

“Come with me to Bay Station.”

“I can’t.”

“It won’t take all night. We’ll be ashore in plenty of time for fireworks.”

Her weight shifted from left leg to right. One hand slid down her dress to rest against her thigh.

“Where should I meet you?” she asked.

“There.” He pointed to the little girl, still throwing seashells. A battered lifeguard chair stood beside her, covered in peeling paint and weathered Quechal glyphs.

“Ominous.”

“We’ll be safe.”

“Fine,” she said. “It’s a date.”

She cupped his chin in one hand, guided him to her, and kissed him. Her mouth was cooler than the twilight. Her kiss danced like a spark down his neck and through his limbs. It quickened in his scars. He wrapped an arm around her waist, and pulled her closer. The vibration inside him built to shiver them both apart.

She slipped from him, and walked away.

Teo had once claimed that human history began with a storm: the interval between lightning and thunder, between the flash and the rumble felt in the body’s core, was primitive man’s first experience of time—the awakening of consciousness, the birth of the gods.

As Mal receded down the pier—quick strides, long for her body—Caleb believed Teo’s theory. Godhood began with watching her leave, and feeling her still present.

When she reached the road, she hailed a driverless carriage and disappeared into the evening traffic up the Pax Coast Carriageway toward the hills. Caleb bought a churro from a street vendor whose cart bore the brand of a winking skull, and walked down to the beach. He lifted a shell from the tidal sand, and poured out the water within. He tested the shell’s weight, and threw it into the advancing tide.

33

Dresediel Lex bled for the coming eclipse. Red banners draped skyspires. Streamers of crimson paper, ribbon, and rope hung from lampposts, and every storefront sported red splatters of decals and paint. Fake blood dripped down walls. Imitation entrails, veins, viscera dangled from fire escapes in the winding back streets of Skittersill. Even the migrants of the Stonewood slums added a splash of red to their tents and battered lean-tos.

Before Liberation, the red decorations had been bought from temples: nothing could match the cardinal dye brewed in holy vats beneath the pyramids, for no one possessed the sheer quantity of blood available to Quechal priests.

Times changed. Simple alchemy mimicked the many colors of blood, and Craftsmen sold their cloth more cheaply than priests.

Teo had tickets to the Eclipse Games, but Sam refused to come—the contest was part of the commercialization of a sacred holiday, she said, though she lacked a trace of Quechal blood. Caleb came instead, and said he was sorry Sam couldn’t make it.

“Yeah,” Teo said, with a tightening of her lips that warned Caleb to drop the subject. “It’s a shame.”

The Sea-Lords played Oxulhat, a rare match-up since the desert citadel was part of a different ullamal conference from Dresediel Lex and seldom made the play-offs. The Eclipse Games were an exception: a relic of centuries past, before the Twin Serpents destroyed the horn of land that once joined Northern and Southern Kath, before refugees fled north to transform the village of Dresediel Lex into a metropolis. Oxulhat had been a frontier outpost of the old Quechal empire, and survived its doom. The cities’ teams played at each eclipse, in memory of what was lost.

Oxulhat scored a string of goals at the top of the first quarter. Zolin replied with play brilliant in its ferocity but sloppy in its execution, and earned herself a penalty. Anticipation swelled. Moans of fear and joy accompanied the rubber ball’s impact on skull or limb or girded hip. The players’ cries rose like mountain peaks above gasps, curses, and threats from the audience.

Caleb followed the game with morbid fascination—not the players, but the game itself, the story upon which it was founded: the balls, the Hero Sisters’ hearts, the players, gods or demons or both. Thousands of feet below the city, Heartstone’s engineers and Craftsmen chanted to bind the Serpents in sleep, no hearts or deaths required. Yet still the people of Dresediel Lex gathered in this stadium and watched their players strive to save the world.

The teams grappled on the narrow, frieze-lined court. The Sea-Lords wrung points from Oxulhat like water from a sun-dried rag. Teo gripped Caleb’s arm through his jacket, hard enough to break skin. She shouted, she swore, she twisted her black small-brimmed hat in her hands as if to rip it into pieces.

A drift of fog with a familiar face hovered above the court, ragged and almost invisible. The goddess of games alone survived to consecrate the contest. All the other gods were gone.

Victory arrived at last, and with it hunger. Teo, who had spent the last quarter standing on her chair screaming at the players, dragged Caleb to a downtown bar where they met Sam, already drunk. For the festivities she’d twisted her golden hair into a bun and painted her face red and blue. Together they roamed the broken streets, staggering from trouble to trouble until they arrived at a battered nightclub packed with Sam’s artist friends. A swinging band welcomed one and all to the dance floor.

Caleb, drunk, danced with two women whose names he promptly forgot, then settled at the bar with a gin and tonic and watched Teo and Sam dance closer, closer as horns cried golden in the smoke. Teo led, and Sam spun a series of turns so sharp her flowing skirt wrapped tight around the muscles of her legs. The heat of their proximity burned the air around them white. Caleb watched until Teo kissed her, hard and full. He took his drink to a game being dealt at a corner table, bought in and played loose, not caring how much he lost. The goddess fled him, and he pursued; embraced him, and he tumbled through space wrapped in a net of jewels.

He woke the next morning swollen with the stolen souls of other men, a dull ache where his head should have been. Rolling to his feet he found himself in a dark hotel room, blackout curtains pulled. He left the curtains alone, not wanting to see what time it was, knowing he had risen early. His body never let him sleep off a hangover. He identified the hotel by its faded harlequin wallpaper: he was three blocks south of Teo’s apartment.

Confronting the wreckage of his face in the bathroom mirror, he decided against going to work. He sent a rat to Tollan, apologizing and claiming one of his many unused vacation days. Little point visiting the office at any rate. No business would be discussed. Half the staff was on vacation. RKC could mind itself.

In the shower, he thought of Mal.

He remembered Temoc’s stories of the old days, of priests bleeding themselves to the edge of death before a full eclipse. Their howls must have echoed through the pyramid, down to the pens where sacrifices trembled in their chains. The Red King’s lover had been one of those wretches. Caleb remembered his smile in the sepia picture.

Screw it. Had he been sober, he would have lain awake all night tormented by ratiocination and self-doubt, like one of those Iskari novelists who could unpack world history from the taste of a cookie. He had plenty of time to recover from his hangover before sunset.

Clean, he slid one finger down the showerhead glyphs. Angular symbols ripped pieces from his over-full soul, and the stream of hot water ceased. Wrapped in steam and thought, he stepped from the stall, groped for a towel, and prepared his mind against the day.

34

Caleb waited on the beach at the turning of the tide. Families and couples crowded the sand; toddlers built pyramids and older children played catch or tag, or ullamal with buckets for goals. Wave by wave the water advanced, bearing ropes of seaweed and sticks, trash and dead fish: the ocean threw the city’s refuse back to shore. Edged against sunset on the bay, barges waited to unleash the fireworks that slept within their hulls.

People gathered at the shore and in the city’s parks and fields, watching a night sky their myths said festered with bogeymen and many-armed devils. Tonight, DL’s citizens faced those demons, armed with ritual, comradeship, and explosives. They drank, danced, cheered. On the beach, a wandering chorus sang the Death Hymn:

Dreaming, dying, counting time

We wait upon the days sublime

Living edge of dooméd earth

We wait for joy of bloody birth.

They skipped the second verse, which named the Twin Serpents, and the fourth, which described the sacrifice: the flick of blade that parted skin, the strike that broke the breastbone. Rather than chanting god-names for the chorus, they sang nonsense syllables, la ne she la te la ta. Caleb realized he was mouthing the original words, and stopped.

“Couldn’t you have picked a less crowded place to meet?”

Mal’s voice at his side. He whirled on her, and almost lost his balance. “You startled me.”

“At least one of us is discrete.” She was dressed sensibly: gray slacks, flats, a loose white high-necked blouse belted at the waist, a leather bag slung over her shoulder. Sunset caught her skin in burnished bronze. “Shall we go?”

A black sliver detached from the sky, plummeted, and stopped above Caleb’s outstretched hand, hovering on long dragonfly wings. The opteran’s proboscis brushed his skin, tasting his soul.

She called another flier to her. Multifaceted eyes glinted sunset red. Caleb guided his own insect to his shoulders. Its legs wrapped beneath his arms, around his stomach, about his thighs. He fell forward, gave himself to gravity and the surge of lifting wings. Mal followed.

He flew up and out, over the gunmetal gray Pax, high enough that neither spray nor leaping sharks nor the springy tendrils of gallowglasses underwater could catch him.

From above, he saw the ocean’s wounds: four stripes of water six feet broad and half a mile long, transparent from the sea’s surface to its floor. No fish moved in those channels, nor any other living thing. The God Wars had been fought over the oceans of Dresediel Lex, as well as the land and air. Even the sea bore scars. Ships sailed around the clear water, which rusted metal, warped wood, and rotted flesh.

The city retreated at their backs. Skyspires fell toward the horizon, spears to skewer the world. Left and right the Pax opened beyond the harbor’s shelter. Miles to the south, hidden from Dresediel Lex by a spur of rocks, the port of Longsands bristled with triple-masted sailing vessels and the superstructure towers of Craft-sped container ships. Few sailors would join in the evening’s revel. Shipmasters from the Shining Empire and Koschei’s kingdom knew better than to let their crews make landfall on Dresediel Lex during an eclipse. True Quechal gangs would roam the Skittersill tonight, in search of victims with the wrong color of skin or hair.

Bay Station swelled like a pustule on the horizon. Walls of Craft surrounded and protected the atoll and its tower. He drifted through them like a ship through sharp coral and jutting rocks. Dark shapes long as boats and sinuous as serpents circled under the water.

Caleb guided his opteran down toward the ocean.

Mal followed, but when he stopped five feet over the water’s surface, she balked, and shouted: “What are you doing?”

“Don’t worry. We’re safe.”

“Do you know what lives in this harbor?”

“Deaths-head coral, sharks, and gallowglasses. Maybe a star kraken, though I doubt one could get past the wards.”

“A gallowglass could grab you from there.”

“Barely.”

“One sting and you’d claw off your skin to stop the pain.”

He reached back to his neck, and brushed the opteran’s proboscis away. His dull sucking depression ceased, the creature’s arms unclenched, and he fell, arms pinwheeling, to the ocean.

He had made this trip many times, but experience did not dull the monkey panic of falling toward a sea full of teeth and poison. A strangled cry escaped his throat. Gray water struck him in the face and body. Pressure and pain illuminated his ribs, his right hip and cheek, shoulder and thigh. He inhaled through the pain, groaned, and lifted himself off the water.

The Pax gave beneath his hands like a firm bed covered in silk. Testing one leg, then the other, he worked his way to a crouch and stood. Ocean stretched behind him to the city, ahead to Bay Station and beyond. A wave nearly pitched him off balance, but he recovered. “Come on down,” he called up to Mal. “The water’s fine.”

“I remember a story,” she replied, “about two brothers who tricked a Tzimet king into killing himself, by pretending to cut off their heads and daring him to do the same.”

“Trust me.”

“That’s what they said in the story.” But she closed her eyes, released her opteran and fell, twisting through the air like a cat. She landed lightly, and rolled with the waves to her feet.

Standing, stable, Mal pressed her toe into the water and watched the ripples when she lifted her foot. Eyes closed, she repeated the experiment.

“Wild,” she said. “I can’t see anything keeping us afloat, with my eyes open or closed.”

“A club back east figured it out,” he replied. “One of those weird sensory deprivation tricks, for clients who happened to be Craftsmen, or Craftswomen.”

“What kind of club would want to blind its clients?”

“It has a particular clientele.” He bit his lip, wondering how to explain without going into detail. “The place calls itself Xiltanda,” which was one of the High Quechal names for hell.

“Ah.” She walked toward him unsteadily, shifting her weight to remain upright. “Why isn’t this in mass production? I’ve never heard of anything that could make Craft invisible to Craftswomen.”

“No sense mass producing a system that’s not cost effective. Soul for soul, this is the most wasteful piece of Craft in RKC. Lord Kopil likes it, though. Who am I to argue?”

“And so you walk on the water.”

“Not quite.” She pitched forward and he caught her outstretched hand. “If you’re not the right sort of person, you fall through into the ocean.”

“Disturbing.”

He didn’t disagree.

She turned west. An island lay two miles out, and from that island rose a matte black tower, like an arrow drawn to pierce the sky. A shadow crossed her face. “Bay Station,” she said, resigned. “I think I know what you plan to show me. I’d rather not see it.”

“I thought the same thing, the first time someone took me here.”

She drew back. A cool wind blew salt spray against his face.

“You need to see this,” he said.

“They’ll show me when it’s time.”

“I want to be the one who shares it with you.”

“Let’s go back to the shore. Watch fireworks. Have a nice evening.”

“Yes,” he said. “Let’s. But first I want to show you what I mean about sacrifice.”

Her eyes met his: black mirrors reflecting the passion of the sunset.

“Okay,” she said.

He bowed to her and walked toward the station. Out here, away from the shore, the sea no longer smelled of dead fish. “Have you spent much time on the water?” Caleb asked after a while.

“Some friends and I kayaked through the Fangs once, after graduation.”

“I didn’t know you could kayak in the Fangs.”

“Some of the bays are still tainted by the Cataclysm, so the kraken and sea serpents and the other big monsters stay away. Wards on the kayaks deal with little ones.” A tall wave rolled beneath their feet. “The ocean between the Fangs is warmer than the Pax, shallower. On calm days you can see all the way down to sunken Quechal cities overgrown with coral.” She sighed. “Why do you ask?”

“The path is sensitive to intent. The more I think about the station, the more it strays. If I don’t distract myself, we could walk all the way to Longsands, or into the center of the Pax.”

“Oh.”

“So,” he said. “Tell me about your trip to the Fangs.”

“We splashed around for two weeks; I was almost eaten. That was the end of the vacation, at least for me.”

“Eaten?”

“I was bored with the stars one night, and the ocean looked placid, inviting, rippled soft as molten glass. I took off my clothes, warded myself, and swam out.”

“Gods.”

“It wasn’t a good idea.”

“Wasn’t a good idea,” he said. “There are things in the Fangs that would eat you in one bite, wards or no wards.”

“Most of those don’t swim close to shore. I thought I was safe. The water was cool, the ocean dark. I’ve never felt such wonderful solitude.”

“What happened?”

“A riptide.”

“Oh.”

“I looked back and realized I was farther from our island than I thought, and no matter how I tried to swim back, the current bore me out. Panic took over. I forgot everything I knew and tried to swim against the tide, splashing and pulling and kicking, but it didn’t work. I tried to call for help, but I was too far away.” Her grip on his hand tightened. “It’s strange. You talk about something like that and the moment rushes back.”

“So, what did you do?”

“I was about to die. I remembered that riptides are strongest near the surface, and don’t extend far from side to side. I dove down and tried to swim parallel to the island’s shore, but I was tired. Then the gallowglass struck.”

“Qet and Isil,” he said, not realizing that he had sworn to gods.

“The water around me glowed green, and I was caught in a tangle of burning wires. Even with my wards, some of the poison made it through. For weeks afterward I looked like I had been flogged from head to foot with a barbed whip. I screamed, I’m not ashamed to admit, and the winding wires drew me up to the surface, toward the beast’s mouth. Which was lucky, in a way.”

“I think we have different definitions of lucky.”

“I was tired. If it hadn’t reeled me close to what passed for its brain, I couldn’t have struck it with the Craft. I drank the creature’s life, and used the strength I stole to guide me back to the island. My classmates found me the next morning, lying on the beach, passed out and wound with the stinging tendrils I hadn’t been strong enough to tear away. They launched a flare, and a nearby settlement soon sent help. I spent the rest of the vacation in bed. I don’t go to the ocean much anymore. I like the land. You can see what’s creeping up on you most of the time.”

Sand crunched beneath Caleb’s shoe, and he realized that they stood on the eastern beach of Bay Station, in the black tower’s shadow. As always on this journey, he had missed the moment of transition, when the island ceased to be a distant goal and appeared beneath and before him.

Watchmen waited atop a grassy bank overlooking the beach—burly, armed, the air around them thick with Craft and threat.

“Friends of yours?” Mal asked.

“No,” he said. “I’ll handle this.” Raising his hands, he strode forth to meet them.

35

Caleb and Mal descended into the island, paced by silent guards. The stair was long and winding, and pristine, like everything else in Bay Station. Every light was sun-bright, each corner swept.

“They keep house well,” Mal said.

“Dust can hide things,” Caleb whispered. The wide halls and open spaces made him nervous. “One of my father’s associates once tried to sneak a goddess in here, lodged in the dirt of his boot. She nearly took over the station before the King in Red stopped her.”

“I see.”

Their descent continued. Down side corridors, Caleb glimpsed the other station staff: academic Craftsmen in white laboratory robes, junior initiates arguing about thaumaturgical theory or professional sports, gray-shirted janitors living and undead, mopping floors and polishing windows.

On Caleb’s previous visits Bay Station had resembled the inside of an anthill, but tonight it was almost deserted. Everyone who could request time off for the eclipse had done so. The unlucky remainder would gather tonight in the observation tower to watch the fireworks and miss their families.

The staircase ended in a broad landing and a thick double door of cold iron, so wrought with wards and contracts that Caleb’s eyes refused to rest on its surface. The guards stood on opposite sides of the door, and placed their hands on the featureless white wall. Their wrists twisted at a particular angle, and silver-blue light shone around their fingers.

A glyph in the center of the doors blinked three times, and the world dissolved in darkness. Out of the darkness flashed a brilliant claw that pierced Caleb’s body and soul. The night broke, and the door ground open.

Beyond, white walls gave way to unfinished rock. Crude, primal symbols marked their path through the stone labyrinth.

“How old is this place?” Mal’s voice sounded small in the winding, echoing tunnels.

“There were Quechal colonists here before the city was founded. Since they lived so close to the Pax, they worshipped ocean-gods, predator-gods, rain-gods. Qet Sea-Lord was the center of the pantheon. After the Cataclysm, when so many Quechal moved up here, their heresy became dogma. We built new temples on land, Serpent-temples, sun-temples, but the old sacred caves remained out here.”

A rhythm resounded in his chest: a twinned concussion, two building-sized hammers beating against granite. Rocks shifted on the floor of their rough-hewn path.

“There’s still a god here,” she said.

“Yes.”

“We can go back. You don’t need to show me this.”

“I do. For my sake.”

The rhythm drew nearer. Caleb heard a rush of breaking surf.

The tunnel widened into a cavern. Stalactites hung like rotten teeth from the arching roof. Dark rock glittered wetly in the ghostlight.

The path split to circle an enormous pit. The percussion and the rolling ocean swell emanated from within.

“Is that what I think it is?” Her voice was so soft he could barely hear her.

“Yes.”

She stopped, mouth half open, tense as a scared cat. She closed her eyes and breathed deep, mastering herself. Chin high, she strode past him to the pit’s edge, and looked down.

Caleb waited. He examined the thick pipes that lined the cave walls, the glyphs ancient and modern carved into stone. Too soon, he ran out of objects for his attention, and approached Mal, walking heavily so as not to startle her.

She stood straight, and still. He touched her arm and felt tension beneath the envelope of her skin. Her nostrils flared.

A god lay in the pit. No statue, no graven idol could compare to this imperial thing. Spread-eagled, suspended in dark water, he was the size of a mountain. His massive lips, softly parted, bared teeth as large as carriages. His eyes were sails, his chest broad as a pyramid. Legs and arms thick and long as magisterium trees hung limp in the dark water that lapped at his sides.

Unconscious, his silence was the silence of the sea. His slow indrawn breaths were the rolling tide, the sleeping twitch of his hand a hurricane. Eons past, in deep time, the first Quechal had looked out over the ocean, seen chaos, and given it form, and name, and life.

Qet Sea-Lord was not dead, but not alive, either. His closed eyes did not move like the eyes of a dreaming man. Thick metal pipes protruded from his arms, his chest, his neck, his corded thighs, to join the hive of plumbing below the surface of the water. Silver bands circled his chest. Before each breath, the bands glowed with unearthly light, and after each breath the light faded.

Caleb said the god’s name gently, knowing Mal would hear.

She recoiled from the pit. Her eyes flashed white, and shadow cohered about her skin. Her teeth grew long, pointed like fangs and gleaming. She towered above him. Ghostlights flickered and shattered on the walls; Mal hissed, and lightning cracked between the fingers of her outstretched hand. She swelled like a cloud of smoke above an erupting volcano.

“This is what I wanted to show you, Mal,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

The magnesium flames of her eyes burned into him, but he stepped forward and extended his hand, palm up and open. She glanced from him, to the pit, and back.

In a black blur, she fled up the long hallway. A guard barred her way, but she struck him and he fell. Caleb ran to the guard and knelt beside him, felt his pulse. Still strong. Good. He rose to follow Mal, but another guard blocked his path.

“Get out of my way,” Caleb said.

“Who in all the hells was that?”

“My girlfriend,” he almost said, but stopped himself. “My boss.” That was also true, technically, and confused the guard long enough for Caleb to brush past.

“We’ll head her off at the beach,” the guard called after him.

“No,” he shouted back. She might hurt someone before the guards brought her down. “No. She’s just confused. This is her first time to Bay Station.”

“Oh,” the guard said. “That explains it.”

Caleb began to run.

He found her on the starlit beach. Silver waves lapped the sand, and the calm sea reflected the fat full moon. No halo of Craft clung to her, no ichorous claws tipped her fingers. Lit by the night, she resembled a cave drawing: a life defined in five lines of ink. He could almost ignore the guards surrounding her with weapons raised.

She turned to face him as he approached through the cordon.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he replied. “Shall we go?”

“Yes.” She held out her hand. Her skin was cool to the touch, colder than the night air. She stepped onto the water. The ocean buoyed her up, and he walked beside her away from shore.

“Don’t look back,” he whispered. “The guards are hair-trigger tense. They won’t relax until you’re gone.”

“I can’t believe I did that.”

“It happens. Everyone takes their first sight of Qet in a different way. I’ve seen grown men kneel; one Craftsman I know wept.”

“I can’t— I mean, I knew, or a thought I knew. I thought I could handle it. The expectation, and the shock, and everything at once—I can’t believe I let you take me. I’m an idiot.” She spat the last word.

“Don’t talk that way.”

“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do.”

“I should have listened when you asked me to stop, when you asked me not to show you. I’m sorry.” A rising swell shifted his weight sideways, into her. She kept him from toppling. “I’m a bit of a jerk, I guess.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“It was a stupid thing to surprise you with.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Stupid.” The sound of surf faded into rolling ocean silence. Dresediel Lex burgeoned on the horizon, a tumor of light that dulled the stars and blunted the moon. No ships passed them in the dark. Barges stood at anchor beyond the harbor’s mouth. “Think it’s safe to look back yet?”

“Yes.”

She glanced over her shoulder. “The island looks bigger from this distance. Less human.”

“It camouflages itself with Craft. If you could see the real island, you would know where it was, which would make it easier to attack.”

“Elegant system.” She stopped walking. “Can we stop here?”

She sat cross-legged on the water, and he sat beside her. The ocean surrounded them like a meadow.

“I thought it would be like the Serpents,” she said. “But it’s worse.”

“Yes.”

“They’re beasts, however big they are. Terrors. But that’s a God. Not a half-conscious spirit like the ones we bound in Seven Leaf. Qet ruled us, once. Loved us. And we loved him.”

“Yes.”

He traced ripples in the water in front of them.

“He’s not … dead.”

“No. Not exactly.”

“I heard he lived somewhere, in chains.” She sounded strangled and slow, as if every word had to be won from her throat by single combat.

“Those are chains,” he said, “of a sort. Qet fought the King in Red during Liberation. The Sea-Lord was broken on his own altar. But he didn’t die.”

“He didn’t survive, either.”

“Yes. He’s not strong enough to have a mind anymore. Flashes of awareness at most, on high holy festivals. Once in a while, he cries out, or babbles nonsense. But his power remains.”

“And so you use him. In pain.”

“We use what’s left of him. He was the bringer of rains from the ocean, Father of the Green Beside the Desert. We pump saltwater into his heart, and as the water runs through him, he removes the salt. He didn’t have such a physical form, before—like most gods. What you saw was a salt statue grown in his image. Pipes and pumps draw purified water back into the reservoirs of Dresediel Lex. Whenever a tap is opened or a glass raised in this city, Qet is there. Or what’s left of him.”

“Why did you show me this?” Her hands rested in her lap, one inside the other. Her thumbs pressed together, their tips white.

“I wanted,” he began, but he could not complete his sentence. The false serenity of her face terrified him: still as the surface of Seven Leaf Lake before the gods began to scream. “You asked what we sacrifice, to live the way we live. This is our sacrifice.”

“This isn’t a sacrifice,” she snapped. “This is abuse. Exploitation.”

“We drained the water table around Dresediel Lex a hundred years ago, maybe more. We suck lakes, rivers, streams dry like a starving leech. Even Seven Leaf won’t last long. Ten years, twenty at the most, before we have to reach further afield. We’ve studied Qet day and night for five decades and no Craftsman has been able to duplicate his methods. We can take from him, though, and we do, and so we survive.”

“Why don’t you show the people what you’ve done?”

“Think how you reacted when you saw the truth. Can you imagine that magnified through an entire city?”

She did not answer.

He leaned back, unfolded his legs in front of him, and thought for a long while.

“The sacrifice,” he said, slowly. “We come out here, learn the price of our world, and we go back convinced it’s worthwhile, because we don’t have any choice. Whenever I pass a beggar in Skittersill, when I hear about riots in the Deep Vale, when I run afoul of True Quechal punks or when some fool like my father tries to start a revolution, I know that they’re all of them party to Qet’s torture. Spend long enough with that in your mind and you can’t fight for anything anymore. You wander through this city, and wonder if anything you do will make up for the horror that keeps the world turning. To live, you rip your own heart from your chest and hide it in a box somewhere, along with everything you ever learned about justice, compassion, mercy. You throw yourself into games to mark the time. And if you yearn for something different: what would you change? Would you bring back the blood, the dying cries, the sucking chest wounds? The constant war? So we’re caught between two poles of hypocrisy. We sacrifice our right to think of ourselves as good people, our right to think our life is good, our city is just. And so we and our city both survive.”

She rocked beside him, or else the waves rocked her. Her gaze rested in the cup of her hands, like a statue of a monk from the Shining Empire. Their sages claimed that all was nothing, or nothing all. For a moment, he understood.

“It’s funny,” he said. “The first time I saw Qet, I couldn’t handle it either. I didn’t call upon dark magic or anything like that, but I tackled my boss, demanded an explanation. You did the same to me tonight.”

“What’s funny about that?”

“We have a lot in common. We both keep secrets, and maybe we don’t even know we keep them. When we try to share ourselves with other people, we don’t know how to begin.”

“Is that what drew you to me?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“Everything I said just now—about Qet, and sacrifice, and what it does to us—it’s not an answer. It’s an escape. The question remains: how are we supposed to live? The world can’t be a war between the too-certain and the bankrupt, between my father and the King in Red. But what else is there?

“It took me a long time to figure out why I chased you. You’re beautiful, and compelling, but I’ve known beautiful and compelling women before, and none of them caught me like you did. I think, somehow, I decided you had the answer. Maybe you don’t. Maybe no one does.”

She placed a hand on his shoulder, and he fell silent.

She leaned back and lay on her side, body rolling softly with the sea. Her lips opened. Inside them he saw a waiting darkness.

“I don’t know all the answers yet,” she said. “I think I will, though. Someday soon. I’m working on it.”

“I can wait.”

“Dangerous, to trust someone else’s answers more than your own.” Her fingers traced the curve of his collarbone, finding a nest for the heel of her hand. “You might not like what they have to say.”

“I think I will.”

From the ocean behind them came a dull pop as if a cork had been pulled from a giant wine bottle. A needle of sparks knit through the night, apexed, and burst into a brilliant blue sphere.

The second explosion came faster, a red globe within the blue, and the third faster still, a mist of yellow-white stars that twisted and schooled like fish made from light. The fireworks, he thought, were as tall as the Serpents would be if they reared above the city.

“Look,” she said.

“I see them.” Her eyes mirrored the explosions, and the stars behind.

She kissed him, and drew him toward her. He gave himself to the kiss, wrapped an arm around her curving back, and pulled her toward him in return.

The fireworks above Dresediel Lex that night cost thirty million thaums. A grown man earning a decent wage could work for four hundred years and still not earn that much. The Nightflower Collective, owners of the barges and their explosive cargo, conducted similar events every few weeks around the world: always there was a High Prince’s birthday to celebrate in the Shining Empire, some Iskari ritual that demanded dramatic accompaniment. Once, the Empire of Deathless Koschei ordered a solid month of festivities to celebrate the construction of the Dread Lord’s golem son. The Collective ordered its affairs with an army’s precision and an artist’s skill, each flood of light succeeded in rushing crescendo by the next.

Caleb and Mal rolled together on the waves in grand confusion. His hands tangled in her shirt; she ripped a button from his cuff with a sharp pull and it flew through the air to sink. Her pants slid off easily. Explosions overhead battered hearts and lungs as he gripped the curve of her hips, the taut muscles of her legs. When they kissed, the sky erupted in reflection of their minds, and they kissed often, lips finding arms and shoulders, stomach and sides as often as each other’s mouths.

A precisely timed sequence of blasts formed a pyramid in the sky, two serpents rising above with mouths flared. The ocean was smooth against Caleb’s skin, and it warmed beneath him as he scrambled among heaped clothes for the condom he had placed in his pocket before he left his house. She bit his neck, he clutched her, they fell together. The chill of Craft faded from her skin. Reflected flame burned in her eyes, and as they lay with each other, on each other, in each other, the flame built. She was a single purpose crafted into flesh, and as Caleb grappled with her, he forgot terror, forgot fear, forgot himself and became a single purpose too.

A great wave rolled from below, and a shark’s maw enclosed them. The solid sea surface shielded them from the beast’s teeth, but for a moment they were wrapped in the cave of its mouth. Mal let out a laugh that was a scream, her teeth gleaming white, her mouth red, surrounded by many ranks of fangs. Her laugh shook the world.

The shark released them and fled to safer depths. Caleb and Mal remained, set large upon the surface of the water. Mal panted, skin slick and bright as she crouched astride him. They breathed in unison, and clutched each other forever.

Fireworks burst and burned, flared and retreated. The sky broke open time and again only to reclaim its darkness. All was subsumed in flames, which were themselves dancers, singers, beaters of drums, flowering on the infinite to die.

The universe faded back into view, and found Caleb and Mal sleeping on the dark ocean.

Hours passed. She shivered and pulled him closer. A slit of pink tongue wet her lips. She swallowed.

“I’m sorry,” she said, but only the ocean heard.