Two Serpents Rise

36

Caleb drowned in dreams of fire, death, and lust. He tumbled from the sky, stretched out to ribbons that floated in blissful agony on the air. He was a tower, falling to an unseen foe. Bodies struck stone and broke into disconnected limbs, like bundles of sticks dropped from a height. Skin bubbled from bones, and the bones too burned.

In a cave at the world’s heart, two sleeping serpents writhed with expectant hunger. Their mouths opened. Tongues long as thoroughfares whipped out to taste sulfurous air.

He lay prostrate and paralyzed under a descending knife. As the blade pierced his flesh he recognized the woman who held it.

“Mal,” he gasped, and woke coughing. He sat halfway up and collapsed onto the yielding ocean.

The ocean. Gods, devils, and everything in between. He had slept on the open ocean. He opened his eyes, slowly and with much protest from his tired body.

Midnight-and-milk sky hung overhead. Dawn threatened to the east. He sat up with a groan, and found himself alone and naked on the water. His clothes lay a few feet away, pants and shirt and jacket folded beside sock-stuffed shoes. Mal must have folded them before she left.

He didn’t wonder where she had gone, nor did he blame her for leaving: what would they have said to each other, waking on the Pax? The normal script, the “I had a good time last night”s and the “should I make some coffee”s and the “let’s do this again soon”s, seemed flimsy and insincere. Gods, did he remember a shark? What was real, and what was dream? His memories beggared reality, and ran together like mixed paint.

Bruises lined his ribs, legs, and arms in triple rank, sized and spaced correctly for the points of a shark’s teeth. The shark was real, then. Judging from the scratches on his back, and the half-moon marks of human teeth on his arm and shoulder, so was Mal.

Fumbling with laces, buttons, and buckles, he clothed himself and stood. Gorgeous day for an eclipse: blue skies without a shred of cloud. The first rays of sunrise gleamed off Dresediel Lex. No ships moved on the water. Only a thin column of smoke from the tower on Bay Station marred the morning.

Wait.

The smoke rose from a broken tower. And the island looked no different from any other island, bereft of the Craft that should have sheltered it.

Bay Station sat squarely in front of him, undefended, ordinary. He slipped into a rolling, pitching jog, each step rippling the ocean. He tripped on his own waves, floundered. After a few minutes the pain in his ankle subsided and he could stand again. He limped the last half mile to the island.

Disaster unfolded in the gloaming. The black tower was cleft from pinnacle to foundation. Piles of rubble jutted from sand and grass, fallen masonry amid turned earth and broken trees. Ruined walls laid bare the tower’s inner chambers: office chairs splintered, conference tables overturned, a chalkboard shattered, its diagrams in pieces.

Black-clad guards lay in a semicircle around the beach where Caleb made landfall. Some bled from wounds in chest or arms or legs, some were crushed or tangled horribly around themselves, others burned until their skin was a charred cracked crust. One scarred, burly man had vanished from the waist down. Ropes of his guts coiled on the sand.

Further up the beach, Caleb found what remained of the marksmen: piles of dust nested in the shreds of uniforms. There had been archers and spearmen, bullet-throwers and lightning-callers, in the tower. They must have died when the building fell.

The odor of burnt meat filled his lungs. He should have cried out, torn his hair, thrown up in a nearby bush, but his stomach refused to turn. He staggered toward the tower with a revenant’s uncertain gait.

Caleb found them next, the revenants, the zombie cleaning force marshaled as a last line of defense. In pieces, they still moved. A hand clutched the stub of a wrist. A head tried to roll upright by clenching its jaw.

The tower’s double doors, fifteen feet tall, nearly as broad, and half as thick, were crumpled on the broken lobby floor. Dawn shone sharp through holes in the wall. Caleb picked past rubble and potted ferns and the empty reception desk, to the winding stair that led down to the caverns.

He descended.

Char blackened once-white walls. A spiderweb made from acid had bored into, or out of, the stone. He slid down steps melted to slag. The doors at the foot of the stairs were torn to metal splinters.

A man lay impaled on those splinters. His white coat marked him as a Bay Station Craftsman, a researcher studying the comatose god. The skin of his face had melted away. Eyeballs, somehow intact, stared unblinking from the skull. Metal spikes poked through his chest to dimple his bloodstained jacket.

Caleb would have closed the dead man’s eyes, but there were no eyelids left to close. He stepped over the corpse and into the labyrinth.

There was less damage here, probably because there had been less to destroy. The station used little Craft around the divine body: even unconscious, gods bent structures and systems around them, like taproots growing through cracks in concrete.

He ran down the long hall. Cave-paintings watched him go.

He soon reached the island’s heart. The walkway around the vast pit was empty. Caleb stood alone in the dull amber silence of dying ghostlights.

The silence told him everything he feared, but he walked to the edge of the pit anyway, and forced himself to look.

Qet Sea-Lord floated still upon the water. His eyes stared at the ceiling, open and blind and so large Caleb would have been a mote had he stood upon them. Pain had twisted the god’s features into a grimace; emergency lights painted his teeth orange.

Qet did not breathe. The silver bonds that sustained him were gone, sunk beneath black water. His chest had been sliced open from the continental shelf of his ribs to the mountain range of his collarbone: folds of crystal skin peeled away, ropes of glassy muscle slick with rainbow blood, the rocky breastbone split, ribs pulled back. Tumulose lungs swelled in the god’s open chest cavity.

His heart was gone.

On the cave’s far wall, someone had painted the hundred-foot-tall silhouette of an eagle, wings spread, in blood: the sigil of the Eagle Knights. His father’s sign.

Caleb staggered to the cave wall and threw up, bowed and shivering. The sight of the dead god let him collapse. Arms the size of hills, limp. Vast eyes stared, open, black. You could swim in those eyes, or drown.

He sobbed sour breath.

The pumps did not pump. The pipes were still.

He backed away from his refuse.

The god was dead. Bay Station could no longer strip salt from the ocean. Someone must have noticed. Where were the Wardens? The King in Red should be here. What was going on?

Leaning on the passage wall, he climbed back to the surface.

Rising, he let his mind race. He would be blamed for this somehow. No. Even the King in Red would not leap to that conclusion. The night before, Caleb would have laid his soul that no army could break Bay Station—not Deathless Kings or gods, certainly not a kid with no Craft to his name. Kopil would see that.

Was this Temoc’s doing? Other groups used the sign of the Eagle Knights these days, True Quechal terrorists mostly. Caleb’s father was on the run. An attack so brutal, so destructive, so successful, took time to plan and resources to execute. Temoc might have found a hole in the island’s defenses, though, and passed word to others.

But this wasn’t his style. Liberate Qet, yes. Free him from bondage, deliver him to his few remaining worshippers. Return him to health, and power. Temoc would never kill a god.

Bodies sprawled on the beach amid rubble and surf-tossed debris. Searching the sky, Caleb saw no Wardens flying westward from the city. He heard no wingbeats.

Where was everyone?

Where was Mal?

Safe. She had folded his clothes, a sign of care: she hadn’t left in a hurry. What if she was about to leave when the attack began? She would have gone to fight. Woken him, surely. Unless not: unless she’d seen the attack, and decided to let him sleep.

I don’t want you to die, Caleb. Frozen atop the magisterium stump, eyes burning with starlight. I’ll knock you out and leave you here, warded and sleeping, until this is settled.

She wouldn’t have done it. Couldn’t have left him. And anyway he hadn’t seen her corpse.

Not that there were many corpses left.

No. She was alive. Back in the city, sleeping, safe. If safe had any meaning, now.

At the eastern edge of the ocean path, he held out his hand and called for an opteran. None came.

Some fliers always waited over Bay Station, kept by contract with RKC. If they were gone, something must have so shaken the firm that its routine contracts failed. Even Qet’s death should not have done that much damage.

Or else the god’s murderer had killed the fliers, too.

He walked back to the island, and paced along the coast. Gulls cried and waves spent themselves on sand. In a small artificial bay, he found a pier. A few coracles and a supply barge rocked in the water. Had the attackers been so shortsighted as to leave the boats seaworthy? Then again, why torch them if no survivors remained to sail home?

Caleb had never felt comfortable on the water. The ocean was a terrible thing, domain of creatures greater than man. Brave souls plied its surface, geniuses and madmen driven by the promise of foreign wealth. There were few Quechal fishermen anymore—with Qet gone, the ocean grew restless, and not even the King in Red could tame all the creatures of the deep.

Caleb stepped into a coracle, untied it from the dock, and dipped the oar into the water.

Glyphs on the coracle’s hull glowed silver, and the oar grew heavy in his hand. When he paddled, a swell rose behind the tiny boat to bear it up and forward.

Caleb’s first stroke carried him ten feet from the dock, his second ten feet farther. Paddle by paddle, spray on his face and fear in his heart, he guided his craft into the open harbor and rowed toward the city, leaving island and ruined tower behind.

He rowed east, on the breast of the tide, and tried not to think about Mal.

37

When he neared the docks, he heard nothing. Eclipse or no, by six in the morning the city should have twitched into grudging motion: horses neighing, optera buzzing, airbuses wallowing through the sky. Seventeen million inhabitants of the urban sprawl should be murmuring, cursing, muttering good morning over coffee.

Waves broke against the beach.

Smoke rose from the Skittersill, and Wardens swarmed in the smoke, more than Caleb remembered ever seeing in flight at once. The sky belonged to them. No optera, or airbuses, or commuter drakes flew this morning. Skyspires glimmered silent, and watched.

Caleb quickened his stroke, and soon approached the shore north of the shops and Ferris wheels of Monicola Pier. Revelers littered the beach, unconscious mostly, wrapped in surf and their own hangovers. Couples slept tangled under blankets, arms and legs and ropes of black hair trailing out from under cloth. Kegs of corn beer squatted on the sand beside smoldering barbecue pits.

Not everyone was asleep. A few dark heads peeked up to stare at the smoke rising from Bay Station and the city.

His coracle stuck in wet sand ten feet from shore. No flailing with the oar would drive the vessel nearer to solid ground. Caleb untied his shoes, removed his pants, folded the one around the other, and barefoot, clad in boxers, shirt, and jacket, stepped into the knee-deep water. On one shoulder he held his bundled clothes, and over the other shoulder he carried the oar. A weapon might be useful. Or not.

Wardens turned in the sky. Was Four up there, with her squad?

The water chilled his legs. A jagged shell—he hoped it was a shell—scraped the bottom of his left foot. The few inebriates and revelers awake gaped at him as he walked out of the water. He wondered why they stared, then realized that the scars on his legs were glowing. Why, he didn’t know.

The onlookers kept their distance as Caleb dried his legs on a discarded towel and donned slacks, belt, socks, shoes again. He slung the oar over his shoulder, and waded through sleepers to the road.

“What’s going on?” asked a woman covering herself with a red blanket.

“I have no idea,” he said, and walked past her into the city.

Empty streets greeted him. Down alleys and narrow footpaths he heard cries of pain. Staved-in restaurant windows gaped with jagged glass teeth: their shadowy mouths held broken furniture, shattered plates, plants and statues overturned. He saw a man in a ripped coat stagger down an alley, and called to him, but he recoiled and fled.

Some stores were destroyed, others untouched. No graffiti anywhere, nor any fire he could see, and riots bred flame, especially in the absence of water.

Chaos was not due for hours yet—not until the eclipse, around noon. But chaos seldom stood on ceremony.

None of the people he saw responded to his approach, to his questions. They shrank from him, eyes wide. Nervous clutches of men and women clustered at the intersection of empty roads, but they fell silent when he neared. Clanking steel golems staggered drunkenly down alleys. Golems did not require water as such, but they loved coffee, and without water, coffee was hard to find.

He reached the Monicola Hotel after thirty minutes’ walk: an ornate tower that would not have been out of place on a fancy boulevard in Alt Coulumb. Caleb hadn’t come to see the hotel, but rather the perpetual waterfall that formed its facade.

The water no longer fell. He had not expected it to.

Men, women, children, stood at the plaza’s edge, clad haphazardly in bathrobes, pajamas, suits. They watched the dead waterfall, the silent fountain, and did not speak. “Hey,” Caleb called to a nearby woman. “What’s going on?”

She shook her head. He shrugged, and walked toward the hotel.

Someone ran at him from behind, and he swung around, raising the oar. The woman and two men stopped moving. Their eyes flicked from Caleb to the oar and back. He retreated slowly, holding the oar between them. “Watch it.”

“You’re not safe,” the woman said. “Come away from there.”

“First, tell me what’s going on.”

She reached for him.

He took a step back, and another, toward the gurgling fountain. The fountain, which moments before had been still.

He dove to one side, and the instinct saved his life. Black ice scythed overhead, and water roared in frustration. He turned, scrambled back, fell. A black plume towered above him, lit from within by scintillating starlight. Claws curved like spray. Fanged whitecaps gnashed.

The Tzimet struck again, four ice-pick claws in a blurred swift arc that tore trenches in the pavement where Caleb had lain moments before. He rolled away, feet scrambling on stone. The creature screamed. Barbed claws descended, and he raised his hands in a vain effort to defend himself.

He did not feel the claws enter his body. At first he thought he was dying, that his mind had numbed him to the pain, but he was not numb. Blood sang in his veins.

The Tzimet staggered back, flailing, a beast of shadow and sharp edges. A wet black puddle lay on the ground at Caleb’s feet.

He held the oar between himself and the Tzimet. Its glyphs glowed. Panicked, he had raised the oar to defend himself: a length of wood worked with Craft to move water at high speed. And the Tzimet was, on some level, a pattern imposed on water.

The creature struck again, and Caleb parried with the oar. His second frantic sweep connected. Six of the creature’s arms ripped from its body and dissolved to spray.

The Tzimet recoiled, reared, and roared. Caleb stepped back, holding the oar at ready. A tendril of water tethered the Tzimet to the pool in front of the Monicola Hotel. The creature was bound to the fountain; having lost so much of its bulk, it could not reach him.

The Tzimet’s next attack slashed empty air, raked bare stone. Frustrated, furious, lessened, it slunk back to the pool, and sank into its shelter.

The crowd around the plaza did not meet Caleb’s gaze—except the woman who had tried to stop him.

“Thank you,” Caleb said.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Stay away from the water.”

“All the pipes?”

“Everything that ran. If you open a tap, they’re waiting for you. Like it was a few months back, but everywhere.”

“When did this start?” he asked, though he bet he knew.

“In the night, I think. After the fireworks.”

“Has Red King Consolidated said anything?”

“No.”

Paralyzed. Or worse.

The woman pointed to the oar he held. “Is that a weapon?”

“No,” he said, and laughed bitterly. “I should go. I need to find someone.”

She did not protest as he turned to leave.

After the Monicola Hotel, he noticed Tzimet in the shadows, hiding from light. That explained the broken restaurants, and the untouched bookshops and hardware stores: the first busboy arrives to brew a pot of coffee, and demons spew from the tap.

He walked on, as the city’s stolen water rebelled against it. Serpents of ice wavered over fountains. Jellyfish tendrils spread from sprinklers. Soon he heard his first Warden pass overhead, augmented voice rattling from windows and walls: “Stay away from running water. Do not attempt to shower, or bathe. Drink bottled liquids only.”

Caleb imagined spiders falling from showerheads, and shuddered.

He walked by scared men and women, golems and snakelings and skeletons. He kept to himself. They all did.

Caleb traveled surface streets. He passed grocery and convenience stores with shattered windows and ransacked stock. Refrigerators gaped, empty of water, juices, beer, even bottled chocolate. Fresh bread rested untouched on racks.

Vibrant lawns hid barbed networks of wriggling Tzimet. The sun hung warm in the sky. He was thirsty. So was everyone else.

The oar weighed on his shoulder. Sansilva was several hours’ walk away. No airbuses overhead.

The panic would grow worse over time. The city was quiet still, nursing its festival hangover. Those citizens who were awake had barricaded themselves in their houses, or started looting already. Riots in the Skittersill, though. That would account for the smoke.

More people would wake in the next hour. The Tzimet would feed, and the riots grow.

He called for an opteran, but none descended from the sky.

Of course. The fliers came when they smelled need, and the city was need-drenched this morning. Caleb closed his eyes and focused. Dresediel Lex was falling apart, and only he knew why. He imagined the madness of crowds, children crying for water, clashing fangs. Mal, and Teo. He needed to find her. Find them. He had to reach RKC, and help.

A black buzz grew on the edge of hearing.

Like a fisher-bird the opteran plucked him from the ground and swept aloft. Broken shops and quiet houses cohered into streets, lanes, and blocks. He felt a demonic pull on his soul; the creature’s touch chilled his skin, and color drained away, as if the world were a sun-blanched painting. The opteran was hungry.

They followed Monicola east and inland; shopping centers and row houses gave way to modern buildings, which bowed in turn before the pyramids of Sansilva. People crowded the streets here, ant-sized and boiling in their masses.

Even from such a height, at such a speed, Caleb heard the crowd’s cries—a relief after the unnatural quiet of the morning city. Couatl soared above the mob, but did not strike. The Wardens had not yet declared war.

Black heads bobbed below. Upturned faces showed as small tan circles; someone pointed at Caleb and shouted something he could not hear. A few angry protesters threw rocks. The first volley fell back to earth well short of him. The second whipped past his head with the force of a crossbow bolt, and he veered to evade. There were angry Craftsmen down there, or else toughs with rock throwers or black powder guns. Swearing, he shifted course to fly over buildings rather than the street.

When he turned, he saw the Canter’s Shell.

A smooth blue sphere enclosed the pyramid at 667 Sansilva. A bubble, Caleb would have called it, if bubbles could curve out as well as in. Buildings reflected back on buildings on the blue surface, leering over the crowd like distortions in a magician’s mirror.

A Canter’s Shell was a weapon from the God Wars: infinite space compressed to finite dimension. Passing through the shell consumed an eternity of subjective time. Enter the shell, and you emerged as a haze of subatomic particles, if at all. Craftsmen used Canter’s Shells in the Wars to fend off priests and mortal followers while they wrestled with gods.

Caleb had never seen a Canter’s Shell used. It was a lethal defense, overkill against any force less than gods or armies. RKC was more scared than he had thought possible.

Optera darted among the Wardens near the shell; several swarmed one Warden’s mount, only to be batted aside by mighty wings. Protestors taking flight—their attacks angry and erratic.

One dove toward the shell, and through. Caleb winced. Creature and rider stretched out and compressed in the reflection, and were gone.

Caleb turned from the pyramid.

Breath came shallow in his chest. The world retreated down a long, dark tunnel as the opteran drained his soul to the lees. He had to find somewhere safe, somewhere with water. He had to find Mal.

He remembered a golden afternoon months before, when they stood on a balcony and looked over the city toward the ocean.

“You could watch the world end from here,” she had said, “and be happy for it.”

Stupid idea, latest in a string of stupid ideas, but at least he would have a place to sit and think. There might even be water.

Shivering, unsure, he flew south to Andrej’s bar.

38

Mal waited on the balcony. She shone with the risen sun.

She looked up as Caleb neared, and waved as he landed—or collapsed, rather, in a gasping heap on the balcony tiles. The opteran took a final sip of his soul, released him, and retreated to the sky.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said as he struggled to his knees. The universe was a lovely indigo. Demons tangoed between his temples. He groaned, swooned, and fell. She pulled him to his feet. Her touch burned like hot metal.

She tried to help him toward a chair, but he shook his head and pointed into Andrej’s. Someone, presumably Mal, had melted the balcony doors. They stepped over a glass puddle into the empty bar.

With Mal’s aid, he stumbled to a circular silver glyph inlaid in the wall by the card tables. Caleb produced a pin from his pocket, stuck his finger, and smeared a drop of blood on the glyph’s center. Behind the wall, counterweighted machines swung into motion, and the glyph began to glow.

“It won’t work,” Mal said. “The bank’s dead. RKC’s frozen, and everyone else in this city is sitting on their funds. You won’t be able to withdraw anything.”

And so the crisis would spread through the world. In the Skeld Archipelago young fishermen begging Deathless Kings to back their latest venture would receive no aid; a soup seller who heated his soups on morning credit would find none to hand.

Dull milky light seeped into Caleb from the glyph. “Andrej,” he tried, and found his voice steady. “Andrej keeps his own credit, for the tables.” His blood flowed, his heart beat. Color charged the world. His legs straightened and steadied.

“Better?”

“A bit.” He glanced at the glass puddle near the entrance. “Better than the door, at least.”

“I was thirsty. It was in the way.”

“Thirsty.” His head swam. “Gods, do you have water?”

Mal held him up, and together they returned to the balcony, to the breeze and open air.

A blue pitcher stood on a table near the banister. Mal fetched him a glass from the bar with a tine of levitation Craft. Hands shaking, he poured himself a cup of water, wet his finger, flicked three drops to the ground—“water in the desert”—and swallowed the rest so fast he choked and spent an undignified minute coughing into his arm. He poured a second cup, which he sipped like wine.

“You never appreciate things so much as in their absence.”

“Hells. Mal. Do you know what’s happened?”

She sat across the table, black leather bag in her lap. She clutched it as she watched him. “Tell me.”

“Qet.” He had to stop for breath. Saying one word felt like running a mile. He took the rest at a sprint. “He’s dead.”

Mal pressed her lips together into a pale line, and bowed her head.

“There’s no water.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Tzimet loose in the streets. Riots in Skittersill, I think, and near RKC. True Quechal, probably.”

“Or else normal people, scared and angry.”

“The King in Red’s closed himself behind a Canter’s Shell. I don’t know if he’s even still, ah—” He stopped before he said, “alive,” and considered. “Awake.”

“I expect he’s collapsed,” Mal said. “His contracts to provide water bind deep. Every faucet in Dresediel Lex, every toilet flushed or factory trying to fill its boilers, is a claim he can’t ignore. Not to mention the strain of keeping the Serpents asleep. He might as well be dead. The rest of the board, too. The more they were tied to RKC, the weaker they’ll be.”

“It doesn’t work like that. I know those contracts. There’s an escape clause, for emergencies. You don’t want the person most qualified to fix the water to collapse if it breaks.”

She shrugged, which he thought was odd. Then again, the entire situation was mad. How did he expect her to act?

He continued: “But the boss wouldn’t have raised that Canter’s Shell unless something was wrong inside the pyramid, as well as outside. We can’t count on his help.”

She nodded, and waited for him to speak.

“You have to reach Heartstone. We’ll fire up the Serpents, use their power to get the water running, kick out the Tzimet, calm everybody down. Once that’s done, one of the big Craft firms should be able to resurrect Qet, or a part of him at least. RKC will have a rough year, but we should survive, and so should the city.”

Mal watched him through half-lidded eyes. He poured himself more water, drank, licked stray drops from his lips. “What do you say?”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why,” she repeated, “should we save Red King Consolidated?”

The marble tabletop was cool and solid. “Because the city needs water. Because people are dying, and we can help.”

“We will.”

Her voice was flat, as it had been on Seven Leaf Station, when the gods writhed beneath the lake. “Are you okay?”

“Never better.”

Mal was intensity restrained, so still the air seemed to shake. I have a secret, her body screamed.

“If we’re not going to save RKC, what do you think we should do?”

“Caleb.” She closed her eyes, and massaged them with her hand. When she opened them again, they looked soft, and red. “We have to wait.”

“That’s it? That’s your plan? Wait?”

“At first.”

“The riots will get worse.”

“They must. When the eclipse comes, we’ll use the Serpents to grant water to the city. They will rise, and we’ll chase the Tzimet from our land—and the skyspires, too. Craftsmen will flee rather than face the Serpents.” She said it as if reciting the bids in a round of bridge. “We can start fresh.”

He leaned back from the table, and from her. “Mal. What are you saying?”

“If the King in Red recovers, he won’t let Qet’s death go unpunished. He’ll destroy the old religion and everyone who follows it, snap the spines of the last gods and goddesses, break their bones and feast on their marrow. But only if he recovers. If he doesn’t, we have a chance to take a different path.”

“You’re talking as if this is an opportunity.”

“It is. You asked me for an answer, last night. This is it. RKC is dead. Let it rot. Build something new.”

“No.”

“When the cards are dealt, and the players go all-in, what do you do if you hold the winning hand?”

“But you don’t hold the winning hand.”

“We do,” she said.

The world chilled. Caleb forced himself to speak. “Who’s ’we’?”

“Me, and people like me. People who care about fixing our city, our world. You, too, if you’ll join us.”

He licked his lips. To the south, fires spread. “Mal.” He didn’t, couldn’t, say anything more.

“Caleb.” She leaned across the table, laid her hand on his, gripped tightly. Long hours of climbing had left her fingers smooth and hard. He thought her running, a goddess in flight.

“You’re talking about rebellion. Regime change.” He exhaled. “I get it.” Gods writhing in the lake. Qet Sea-Lord dead in a sea of filth. Burning nets fell from the sky to snare her parents, his father, the thousands of the Skittersill Rising. The Rakesblight Center slaughtered twenty thousand pigs every day, turned animals to meat with hooked blades and spinning diamond wheels. “Not today. Please. Not now. Even if you chase the Craftsmen out of town, where would that leave you? In the middle of a desert, without any water. Qet is dead. Without the firms you won’t be able to bring him back to life. Let’s save the city first, then talk.”

“I’ve taken care of that.” She released his hand, placed her leather bag on the table, and undid the brass buckle. Her shoulders slumped, and her hands trembled.

She opened the bag and turned it toward him in the same motion.

He fell.

Falling, forever, into a sky without stars. Silent colossi moved through limitless space, invisible presences whose immensity built the world. He was a speck of dust, a leaf drifting down a cave chimney.

A misshapen planet of meat and rainbow blood hung below him. Severed arteries and limp veins the size of skyspires dripped ichor.

He fell through nothingness toward the heart of a god.

Caleb caught the table’s edge and pulled himself upright. The bag gaped. The heart filled the space within, yet was somehow swallowed by that space, too, a single bright spot in blackness deeper than the deepest cave, longer than the longest tunnel.

“What is this?” he said, though he knew already.

“His heart,” she replied.

“Where did you get it?”

She closed the bag. “I cut it from his chest with a knife of lightning. I would have used obsidian, but I couldn’t lift a blade that large. Lightning is less traditional, but easier to handle. And the effect’s the same.”

“You…”

He trailed off, hoping she would finish for him, but she didn’t.

“You attacked Bay Station. While I was asleep.”

“Yes.”

“I saw what happened there.”

Pain flickered across her features. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what? Sorry for what you did, or sorry I saw it?”

“Both. The attack had to be last night, because of the eclipse today. Bad luck. I tried to get you to turn back. I should have insisted. But. I didn’t want to be alone before it happened.”

“You’re lying. You couldn’t have done all that. You’re not powerful enough. No one is.”

“The Serpents are with me. I am weak, but they are strong.” She opened her hand, and fire blossomed in her palm—not the cold fire of Craft, but a hungry inferno, a burst of heat that blew desert wind in his face. She closed her hand, and it stopped. “Nothing can stand against them.”

“Gods. You’re serious.”

“I am.”

“But drawing power from the Serpents makes them hungrier.”

“Which weakens RKC, and Kopil. Alaxic insisted on that condition. You remember? RKC has to keep the Serpents sleeping. When I attacked Bay Station, everything I threw against them weakened their defenses. The more RKC fights, the more it’s caught.”

“And once Bay Station cut out, RKC tried to draw water from Seven Leaf, but…” He remembered his own work: melding red wires with blue, splicing the Serpents into the system. “Hells.”

“Your people audited Seven Leaf with a magnifying glass and sharp calipers before you bought us; we couldn’t tie Seven Leaf to the Serpents until the deal was done.”

“Oh,” he said. “No.”

“So we broke the station, knowing we could rebuild it later. Allie started the work. You and I finished it. Now, when RKC tries to pump water out of Seven Leaf Lake, it draws power from the Serpents, and the King in Red fades further.”

“The True Quechal didn’t poison Bright Mirror.”

“Of course not. They can barely paint graffiti without misspellings. Their hearts are in the right place, but they’ve had nothing to guide them for eighty years. No sacrifice. No transcendence. They’re small, and petty, and mean.”

“Your entire Concern was a sham.”

She laughed bitterly. “Have you ever tried running a Concern? You need people to do the work. People to manage those people, and to manage those in turn. The Concern is a dumb god and human beings are its cells. After his defeat in the God Wars, Alaxic studied the Craft. He started Heartstone to beat Kopil at his own game. We made contact with the Serpents in their slumber. And when we were ready, Alaxic showed the King in Red what he had found. Kopil raced to acquire us—he couldn’t let Alaxic control the Serpents. Out of two thousand employees, only a handful knew the full plan. Alaxic. Allie. Me. A few engineers, a few Craftsmen. The True Quechal—even if they’re small and petty, they have their uses. When you need someone to take a suicide run into North Station, for example, why not use a premade band of zealots, any one of whom would gladly die at a Goddess’s side?”

“That was you.”

“Once Kopil knew we had the Serpents, we had to convince him he was under attack, which made him more desperate to acquire us, to control them. He wanted insurance. Security.”

“You played me all along.”

“No.” Mal pushed her chair back and rose. Her expression was earnest, desperate. “I didn’t plan for you to see me that night. At first I was scared. I wanted to get rid of you.” Her heels tapped on marble as she rounded the table toward him. He stood and retreated, not fast enough to escape. “But you chased me, through death and pain and fire. You chased me, devoted, suicidal, scared—and I saw you wanted more than me. You wanted to give your life to something. To change the world, only you’d forgotten how.”

“Yes.” The word fell heavy from his lips.

“Well, here we are. Let’s change. Let’s change the world. Together.”

“You sound like my father.”

“Your father wants the gods back on their pedestals. I want us working as one: humans with Craft, gods with divine power, priests with Applied Theology. But we need space to build that society. We need the time and the power to change, and we’ll never have that time or power with Craftsmen crushing us. We need freedom, and I can win that freedom. Not in a decade or three. Today. In one stroke.”

“You want a moderate revolution. You just need to kill a few people first.”

“A few people. Yes. To free a city. To save a planet. Dresediel Lex will be a model for the world.”

“I kind of like it the way it is.”

She reached for his hand but he drew back. They circled the table, and each other.

“This city bothers you as much as me. I’ve seen the way you look at the long streets, the empty-faced men and women. You hold back when you talk, when you think, because you know thinking too deeply will drive you mad. I’ve dragged the madness out into the open. There’s no need to hide anymore.”

He slowed, despite himself, and she caught him in her orbit. She gripped his arm, and through his jacket he felt the feverish warmth of her fingers.

She pressed against him. One hand slid up his arm to cup his chin, curve around the back of his neck, and pull his head to hers, his lips to her lips.

They kissed, atop the pyramid, as the world crumbled.

The kiss was a collision. Hunger shot through them both, and need. They kissed violently, and violently they broke apart, each stumbling from the other.

Caleb looked at her, and imagined years beside her, leaping from rooftop to rooftop above blood-soaked streets as two serpents reared in the sky.

He grabbed the bag off the table, and cradling it in his arms ran from her toward the door.

“Caleb!” she cried behind him, which was all the warning he received before a curtain of flame blocked his path. Glass and metal melted. Recoiling from the bloom of heat he skidded on marble, nearly fell, and ran again, this time toward the banister.

“Caleb, please!” The air thickened to slush and ice, but he opened his scars and the ice thawed. The world inverted, directions twisted, but his scars bore him forward. The marble balcony became an ocean of clashing stone waves and he pressed through. Blind, staggering, he struck the railing, and threw himself over the edge.

He fell ten feet, and stopped, arms jerked nearly out of their sockets. His scars protected him from Mal, but did not guard her bag and the heart it held. Closing his eyes, he saw the silver cords of Mal’s Craft binding the leather. He flailed at those cords, but they rewove themselves faster than he severed them.

The strap warmed in his hand. He gripped it tighter, teeth bared. Heat seared his skin. He held a length of molten metal.

With a cry, he released the bag, and fell again.

After five feet he struck the side of the pyramid, bounced off stone, and slid, accelerating down the incline. Rock tore his pants and jacket. His fingers scraped for handholds, found none. The bag floated back to the balcony and Mal’s waiting hand.

He reached the step of the pyramid and tumbled into emptiness. Out of reflex his eyes closed. Silver-blue cobwebs whipped past his face. Desperate, he clutched at them.

The Craft lines slowed his fall; unlike the cords around North Station, though, these were too thin to support him. They ripped free of the wards that cocooned the pyramid, and those in turn unraveled; an avalanche of Craft followed Caleb down, sparking off pyramid stones.

He shattered the skylight of the pyramid’s next step. Impact rainbowed his world in pain.

He stood, slowly, favoring his left leg. His ribs hurt: bruised, he hoped, not broken. He was alive. He brushed glass splinters from his face and clothes with his jacket sleeve.

Opening his eyes, he found himself in a gray office beside a desk glittering with skylight glass. Thick books filled shelves on the office walls; a three-ring binder lay open on the desk.

Caleb waited for Mal to follow him. She did not.

She would not. He’d made his choice.

But what had he chosen?

When he trusted his legs to carry him, he limped out of the office toward the stairs.

39

Caleb walked, bleeding, down Sansilva Boulevard. He needed a drink. He needed rest. He needed to scream. The first two options were unavailable, and the third would be no help, so he pressed on, limping. Retreating floodwaters of adrenaline revealed new vistas of pain to his battered body.

The distant mob cried rage. A group of ragged young Quechal ran past him down the sidewalk, laden with loot: jade amulets, hammers to drive any nail through any surface, speakers with demonic symphonies trapped inside. A long-haired girl turned cartwheels in the road.

Lighthearted looters, glorying in brief anarchy. No danger.

Tzimet swarmed behind the broken windows of restaurants, jaws clattering. They crawled over a chewed corpse in a busboy’s uniform, who grinned with bloody teeth. Sentient spikes jutted from sewer grates. Demons scuttled down desolate alleys.

Caleb walked south, and east. Blood dripped from his cut face onto his torn shirt. Blood seeped from the slice on his right thigh into his shredded pants. Blood was his point of contact with the world.

He found the building without trouble—could have found it blind. He had walked this path many times before, drunk and nearly dead. Caleb walked through the front door; it flowed away from his scars. The lift rattled him up seven floors. He lurched through opened doors and down the bare hall, to apartment C.

He tried to knock, but collapsed instead. His cheek pressed into the pale wood’s grain. A heartbeat rhythm pulsed in his ear.

Halting footsteps from within: slippered feet approached.

“I have little water, less food, and a blast rod pointed at the door.”

“Teo,” he said. “Glad to see you’re … hospitable as ever.”

“Caleb?”

He grunted.

Chains rattled. Locks unlocked. When the door opened he stood straight for three seconds before slumping into her arms. She shouldered the door closed and latched it with one hand.

“Caleb, gods. What happened to you?”

“Gods happened.”

She sat him in the chair beside her coffee table. The cubist war scene taunted them both from her wall.

“You look like you went ten rounds with the bastards.”

“Only one. That was enough.”

“I didn’t take you for such a pushover.” She disappeared into the kitchen, and returned with water. “Drink it slow. There’s not much left. Three quarters of a pitcher, and the ice in the icebox.”

“Water in the desert,” he said wryly, dipped his finger and flicked a drop onto the floor.

“What’s happened?” she asked as he drank.

He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, then sucked the moisture from his skin. “What do you know?”

“I woke up and saw the shell from my bedroom window. I thought it was a joke before I heard Sam scream from the bathroom. She’d turned on the shower, and they were all over her.”

“Is she—”

“I got them off. The tap shut down pretty quick. She was cut, bruised, one bad tear in her shoulder where they dug in.” Teo exhaled. “We went door to door, telling people not to use the water. They understood pretty quick. Nobody here’s forgotten when the demons came from the taps, during the Seven Leaf crisis. Most of the building’s trying to wait the trouble out, for now. Some went to Sansilva to complain. I stayed here, lucky for you.”

“Good idea.” He savored the water. “The city’s dangerous.” Doomed, he almost said. “Where’s Sam?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh. Seven hells.”

“She said we had to do something. I said, yes, hide, and wait. She called me all the things you call someone who says a thing like that at a time like this. Coward, and the rest.” She laughed like a razor scraped over piano wire. “My girl loves a riot. She’ll be in the thick of the mob, next to all the other fools.”

“You’ve been drinking.”

“Screw you. There’s a woman out there killing herself for no reason, in the middle of a city killing itself for no reason.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“So I repeat: what in the hells is going on?”

“The water’s bad.”

“I noticed, thanks. And if that’s all you knew, you’d say so, rather than trying to dodge the question.”

“Qet Sea-Lord is dead.”

She sat down. Her face went blank. “Oh.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t, I mean.” She ran her hand through her hair, gripping strands that slipped between her fingers. “What happened?”

“Mal happened.”

“Mal? Your Mal?”

“Not my Mal. Nobody’s Mal but her own. She’s been behind it from the beginning. Her, Alaxic, her friends and coconspirators.”

“Behind what?”

“Everything. From Bright Mirror to North Station to Seven Leaf, to this. They poisoned Bright Mirror and blew up North Station to speed RKC’s merger with Heartstone. They turned Seven Leaf against us. And this morning, Mal attacked Bay Station, broke in, and killed Qet Sea-Lord.”

“She would have been slaughtered. She’s, what, mid-thirties? No way she could have taken Bay Station on her own. Armies couldn’t do it.”

“She’s using the Serpents somehow. They feed her power.”

“No.”

“She shattered Bay Station, Teo. I’ve never seen anything like it. Killed the guards, broke the tower, ripped Qet’s heart out of his chest.”

“Caleb.” She shifted her chair back from the table, back from him. “How do you know all this?”

Meaning: you’re crazy. Or worse: are you on their side? Is that terror or eagerness I hear in your voice?

He told the tale from the beginning, as far as he knew it, from the Skittersill Rising when Mal’s parents died to Alaxic’s discovery of her, his tutelage, and her decision, on that naked swim in the Fangs, to strangle life rather than be overcome. He outlined her plot.

Teo interrupted when he mentioned Seven Leaf Lake, Mal cutting Allesandre’s throat—“Because she would have talked. If she survived I mean. The King in Red would have pulled the truth from her somehow.” Caleb did not answer. He finished with his fall from Andrej’s pyramid, and turned to her for solace, for comfort.

“What the hells, Caleb?”

This was not the reaction he expected. “What?”

“You came to me with this? Out of all the people in this city? Not to a Warden, or the King in Red, or any of the board members.”

“The pyramid’s locked in a Canter’s Shell, and I have no idea how to reach the board. Ostrakov, Mazetchul, the rest of them, they’re probably as bad off as the King—comatose, or close to it. They’re as tied to the system as he is. Even if some of them are still moving, they’re probably low on power, and in danger—fighting Tzimet, trying to fix the water, save their own skins. I had to hide and catch my breath. Decide what to do next. Maybe that is looking for the board. I don’t know.”

“You could have died on the way over.”

“Or as I wandered through Monicola on foot with Tzimet loose. Or when I tried to steal the heart from Mal. Or when I jumped off the pyramid. My life isn’t the point now.”

Teo stood and paced. She thought best in motion. “How could we have missed this?”

“You never knew her. Nobody did. She was careful. I got closest, and I was in love. Or thought I was.” The past tense hurt.

“What’s her plan?”

“Take over the city, it sounded like. In the short term.”

“We need more detail. She wants to wake the Serpents up. Use them to chase the Craftsmen out, set up a new government, hail the glorious revolution, whatever. But the Serpents wake up on the eclipse. She’ll have ultimate power for, what, half an hour, maybe less, until the Craftsmen move back in.”

“The eclipse wakes the Serpents up, I think. The sacrifice is supposed to send them back to sleep. Maybe they’d normally sleep once the eclipse ended, but Mal’s used a lot of their power. I bet they’re ravenous. Have you ever tried to sleep with an empty stomach and food in the next room?”

“So we feed them.”

“We’d need a sacrifice.”

“So we find a sacrifice.”

“No.”

“I’m only saying, if we can—”

“We are not going to sacrifice anyone. To anything.”

“Even if it would stop Mal? Fix all this?”

“Hells.”

“I’m just saying.”

“No.”

“Okay. Fine.” She cradled her forehead between her hands. “Why did she let you go?”

“She didn’t let me. I jumped, remember? Off a building?” He indicated his wounds and his ripped clothing with an angry wave.

“She grabbed the heart. I’m sure she could have caught you, if she wanted.”

“I don’t know. Maybe she wanted to let me go. Maybe she still has feelings for me.”

“Feelings.” Teo strangled a laugh. “Sorry. This situation is absurd.”

“It’s serious.”

“Absurd and serious. The worst kind of joke.” She tapped her lower lip with a curled finger. “RKC’s out of commission because it has to spend all this soulstuff keeping the Serpents asleep. That’s the problem. If we could get into the Sansilva pyramid, maybe we could break the contract binding RKC and Heartstone.”

“Won’t work. Craft is more than words on a page.”

“But words on a page are important. Without a contract, without a signature, RKC could weasel out of the deal. We might have a chance.”

“A deal’s a deal, though. Can we really just cancel the contract without Heartstone’s consent?”

“Cancel, no. But weaken, sure, enough for someone as strong as the King in Red to ignore it for a while. If Heartstone had Craftsmen and Courts on their side, nothing we do would matter, but I imagine their Craftsmen are all busy right now, and none of the Courts are open.”

“Fair point.”

“But if that’s so, you’re the only one alive who knows what’s going on, and how to stop it. If I were Mal, love you or not, I’d hunt you down and make sure you didn’t tell anyone.”

“Good thing she doesn’t think the way you do.”

“Maybe she hasn’t caught up with you yet.”

There was a knock on the door.

He and Teo exchanged a brief, deep glance. She picked up her blast rod.

There was a second knock, like the beat of a funeral drum.

Is that her, Teo mouthed. He did not answer, but tiptoed to her kitchen and returned bearing a long, sharp chef’s knife.

The third knock, the fourth: thick, solid sounds.

Teo edged down the hall, blast rod leveled at the door. Her hands shook. He followed her. “Sam?”

She received no answer.

“I’m angry, and I’m armed. Tell me who you are or get away from my—”

The latch snapped and the door burst from its frame. Black, sharp-edged shadow boiled through. Teo’s blast rod flared twice. A clawed hand grabbed her wrist and twisted. The wand fell from her limp fingers; the shadow figure spun her around and pinned her against the wall.

Caleb stabbed the shadow, and felt a dull thud as if his knife had struck solid wood. Before he could react, something hit him in the stomach. He sunk to his knees, swallowing air.

The blurred world resolved into outline. Teo’s knife lay on the ground beside Caleb, its blade melted. Their attacker was human-shaped, broad-shouldered and massively muscled, clad in darkness and gleaming light; the air about him thrummed with ancient chants. One huge hand held Teo’s wrist. A forearm thick as a column pressed against her throat. Teo’s free arm clawed at her attacker’s face. Her nails drew sparks as they skidded over the steel-smooth dark.

Caleb recognized him.

“Father,” he said. “Put Teo down, or you’ll have to hit me again.”

Temoc released her and stepped back. Teo coughed, and straightened, cradling her wrist. Anger flushed her face.

Shadows passed from Caleb’s father like flowers closing for the night. His scars dimmed, and the man himself stood in Teo’s hallway: naked from the waist up, dark skin distended with muscles and old wounds.

“Son,” Temoc said. “I need your help.”

Caleb blinked. “What?”

40

“A group of fanatics is about to destroy the city,” Temoc said.

“I know.”

“They intend to use the Twin Serpents as a weapon. The last time Aquel and Achal were used this way, they broke the continent in half. I need you to help me stop them.” He blinked. “Wait. What do you mean, you know?”

“Mal, the woman who’s planning all this, she and I. We’re dating, I guess. I mean, we were.” Temoc’s eyes widened. “I’m not a part of the plan. I left as soon as I found out what was going on. About an hour ago.”

“You did not tell me you were seeing anyone.”

“I didn’t know I had to clear my romantic choices with you.”

“Caleb,” Teo said, massaging her throat, “I’ve never met your father. Please introduce me to this man who just broke into my apartment and tried to strangle me.”

Temoc looked at her. She glared back.

Caleb counted to ten and down. “Teo, this is Temoc, last of the Eagle Knights, high priest to All Gods. Dad, this is Teo. She’s a contract manager at RKC, and my friend.” He laid special emphasis on the last word.

“I apologize for hitting you.” Temoc bowed his head. “I do not relish striking women.”

“Thank you,” Teo said with a cold edge, “for your condescending, sexist apology.”

Temoc clasped his hands behind his back and raised his chin, and waited, like a statue staring into the glorious future.

Teo knelt to reclaim her blast rod. “How can we trust you? You’re a theist, a murderer. You tried to kill the King in Red. You could be part of this whole plot.”

“I could have killed you both if I wished. I have not done so. Nor did I break your wrist when you shot me. These are signs of my good faith.”

Teo bared her teeth. Caleb stepped between them. “Swear you’re not part of this, Dad. Pick a god, and swear.”

“I speak truth, on the bones of Ili of the Bright Sails. Your woman and her comrades have betrayed us all. They have abandoned the keeping of the days and the marking of the hours.”

“Add deicide and murder to those charges.”

Temoc drew a deep, rumbling breath. “Then Qet is dead.”

“Yes. And some people, too.”

“Your woman’s master was a priest once. A good man turned sick. I discovered this planned blasphemy too late, when he tried to kill me, and killed himself. I recovered, broke into his house, found his journals, learned the truth. We must stop his student before others die.”

“Yes,” Caleb said. “But how?”

For a time, Temoc did not reply. He should have been a poker player, not a priest. He was immutable as a mountain. Eons could pass about him, civilizations rise and fall, without Temoc registering the change.

“First,” he said, “I would like you to tell me about this woman. Second, I would like a glass of water.”

Temoc, Priest of All Gods, sipped water from a blue coffee mug emblazoned with the words “World’s Best Daughter” above a picture of a goddess suckling a serpent. Caleb shifted in his seat. His wounds hurt, talking hurt, not talking hurt, sitting at a table across from his father hurt. Teo paced, tapping the tips of her blunt fingers together. She scowled as Caleb repeated the story of his relationship with Mal.

Temoc considered for a long, silent time, head downturned, shoulders sloped over the table like a rocky hillside. Since the Skittersill Rising, Caleb’s father had become a myth, to his son as much as to the rest of the city: a name shouted from newspaper headlines and whispered in dark corners. He was a legend, and a legend could not be a father. Nor could a legend sit in Teo’s white living room, surrounded by sensible Iskari furniture, drinking from a World’s Best Daughter mug.

“The Serpents are the great danger,” Temoc said at last. “If all she had were her Craftswoman’s tricks, we could defeat her. We cannot stop the Serpents while they are hungry. We must feed them with sacrifice—feasting, they will be sated, and sleep. The great altars are all destroyed, or under heavy guard, but lesser altars remain, used before the Fall for simple sacrifices, goats and cows, rarely touched by human blood. Two priests, working together, could purify one of these lesser altars and make sacrifice there. Caleb, you are not a priest, but you bear our marks.” The old man touched the scars on his arms. “You can help me.”

“I won’t sacrifice anyone,” Caleb said.

“Why not? No doubt one of the True Quechal will give his life for the city. Many would count it an honor to be asked. I will find one for us.”

“If your plan involves murder, walk out that door now.”

“You will not let one person die to save an entire city?”

“I won’t kill anyone. Teo and I covered this already.”

Temoc raised an eyebrow. “It is the only way. The Serpents wake when they are called, and will not sleep until their hunger is assuaged.”

Caleb searched the walls of Teo’s apartment, blank white, hung with paintings, but found no help. “There must be another option.”

“There is not.”

“Caleb,” Teo said, carefully. “Maybe you should listen.”

“No.”

“You are not being reasonable,” Temoc said.

“And you’re being disgusting.”

“Disgusting.” He laughed. “You are comfortable when violence is done by others on your behalf—when gods are imprisoned, when men are slain or reduced to slavery, you do not blink. But faced with the need to dirty your own hands, you shudder.”

“That’s not what bothers me.” He pointed to the battle-scape above Teo’s couch. Jewel drops of blood rained from an infernal sky. “People fought a war to keep us from doing this sort of thing. If we sacrifice someone to stop Mal, she’s won.”

“Sophistry. If we sacrifice someone to defeat her, she has lost. This city holds seventeen million people—surely one of them can assuage your wounded conscience in the aftermath.”

“You refuse to even try to think of a better way.”

“Do you not think that if a better way existed, we would have found it somewhere in three thousand years of history?”

“I could say the same about, oh, dentistry. Anasthesia.”

Teo leaned against the back of an empty chair. “Caleb, you’re not helping. Your father knows the Serpents better than we do. If he says this is our only choice, shouldn’t we believe him?”

Caleb’s bruised ribs and burned hand radiated pain.

“The Serpents,” Temoc said, “feed on the souls of our people. The human heart is a focus—the nobler, and more innocent the heart, the better, hence the preference for altar maids and altar men, who are pure in their own bodies. The ritual binds the soul into meat and blood. Death focuses the spirit, heightens its awareness.”

Caleb did not listen.

He stared at the painting of the battle.

Gods fought and died over the pyramid at 667 Sansilva. Temoc and Kopil wrestled in midair, figures wreathed in flame. The flayed body of Qet Sea-Lord sprawled upon a black glass altar stained red with blood.

“Dad,” he said.

“Without that moment of death, without the moment of transcendence, we cannot—”

“Dad.”

Temoc stopped.

“I have an idea.” He pointed to the pyramid at the painting’s center. “This is 667 Sansilva, right?”

“It is Quechaltan. Yes.”

“And this is the altar on top of it. Stained with blood. Three or four drops from every person who’s died there.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen it. The whole block’s red-black.”

“What is your point?”

“Thousands of people were sacrificed on that stone. They’ve left their blood behind—their souls, their deaths. Let’s feed them to the Serpents again. Let’s feed Aquel and Achal so much death they’ll sleep for five hundred years. Let’s feed them the altar.”

Teo straightened. “Would that work?”

“It is mad,” Temoc said, “this thing you suggest.”

“Thousands of sacrifices. There has to be some way we can use that. If the altar itself won’t work, pull the souls out and feed them to the Serpents directly.”

“Impossible.”

“Impossible,” Teo said, “or just difficult? Why don’t we try it and find out?”

Temoc shook his head. “Even if we were to attempt this madness, you would not accompany us.”

“I’m not staying behind.”

“You are not—”

“Don’t talk down to me!” She struck the table with the palm of her hand. Glasses rattled on glass. “My girlfriend’s out there, in danger. I won’t cower here if there’s a chance I can help her.”

“Girlfriend?” Temoc said.

“Do you have a problem with that?”

“No,” he replied. “You would risk your own death to save the city.”

“Of course.”

Temoc turned to Caleb. “But you will not permit me one sacrifice.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

He did not answer.

“Perhaps you think no one else would volunteer themselves?”

“I think,” Caleb said, “there’s a small chance we might survive.”

“There is.”

“So, death isn’t certain.”

“Nothing is ever certain.” Temoc cracked his knuckles, and his neck. “It may be possible to do what you say—the altar atop Quechaltan, 667 Sansilva, whatever name you give the building, is old, and well-seasoned with death. There are ways, rituals, to extract spirits bound to a place. But I cannot guarantee this method will succeed. Do you understand?”

Caleb blinked. “You’re serious? You think this might work?”

“If we fail, there will be no time to try again. The city will be destroyed. The danger will be great.”

“Never mind the danger,” Caleb said, though he minded it plenty.

“Can we even get to the altar, though?” Teo asked. “There’s a Canter’s Shell in the way. The grounds are crawling with security demons. The altar’s in Kopil’s private office, and gods alone know what kind of wards he has.”

Temoc glanced out the window. “Canter’s Shell. That is what you call the Curtain of Endless Span?”

“I think so.” Her hands described a sphere in the air. “Translucent blue ball, lots of reflections. Looks wrong in space. Walk through it and you turn to dust.”

“It poses no obstacle.”

“Since when is turning to dust not an obstacle?”

“The gods will shroud us.”

“I thought a shell was supposed to keep gods’ servants out.”

“There are servants,” said Temoc, “and then there are servants. A priest ridden by a god is immortal in most senses of the word.”

“I’m not a priest. I’m not even related to one.”

“A god may ride you nonetheless.”

“I don’t like that image.”

“It is the only way through the shell. The feeling is of ecstasy, not violation.”

“That depends on how you feel about gods.”

Temoc shrugged.

“Well,” she said, “if we can get past the demons, I can take us up, as far as the thirty-second story. I have clearance to reach my office, even during a lockdown.”

“If I bring us through the curtain, and you grant us access to the building, can we then reach the altar?”

Silence.

“Teo can take us to the conference room on the twenty-ninth floor.” Caleb spoke slowly, uncertain what he was about to say until the words left his mouth. “I think there’s a back door, a sort of tunnel, into Kopil’s apartment. He brought me there during the Seven Leaf thing—he was on his way to meet an aide in his office. So there’s probably another path from his apartment to the top of the pyramid.”

Temoc bowed his head, and raised it again. Some religious sign, Caleb thought at first, before he realized his father was nodding.

“We can do this.” Caleb heard the wonder in his own voice. He had almost believed Temoc, almost given in.

“We can.” Teo smoothed the front of her shirt. She walked to the coat rack beside the door, and donned a short-brimmed hat and a leather jacket. “Let’s go. We’ll figure out the rest on the way.”

41

Mal stood at the edge of the world. Smoke and flame and cries of riot rose from Dresediel Lex. New life swelled within the urban shell, ready to break the ground, burst upward, fly.

She tried not to think of Caleb. He didn’t understand, yet. He would, she hoped. He was a good man, and almost wise, even if this city had warped him into a mess of indecision.

She could remedy that, given time.

The wind shifted. She looked up from the streets, from the riots, and smiled.

The skyspires were moving. They retreated from Sansilva and downtown, floating east toward the Drakspine and Fisherman’s Vale. Reflections of rising smoke slid over their crystal walls.

The Deathless Kings that ruled those spires had caught her scent. Blind prophets trapped in silver cages, card-laying soothsayers and elder augurs, saw her face emerge from the dim confusion of probable futures, framed by fire, laughing. They saw death come to Sansilva, and decided they should leave.

That was the problem with the Craft. A Craftswoman’s power derived from deals with great Concerns, with devils and demons from beyond the stars, with the secret powers of the world. These pitiless masters did not permit their servants the easy relief of death. A Craftswoman grew great in power, age, and wisdom, but she was bound to the systems that gave her strength: averse to risk, hesitant in action, a cog in a machine beyond her ken. A slave.

Mal was no one’s slave.

But watching the spires leave, she felt their loss. Until this moment, she could have stopped. Turned herself in. Claimed Alaxic had controlled her somehow, or the Serpents had. She could have returned to her job, her apartment, her life, her moonlit runs. To love.

But the spires knew the future, and they were leaving. She had made her choice, even if she didn’t know it yet.

She took her silver watch out of her pocket. The watch had five hands, and six concentric dials marked with letters, glyphs, numbers. A black hand swung from one letter to the next, and spelled out a message from Heartstone’s head cantors.

Serpents restless. Please advise.

No sense answering. They would understand soon enough.

The moon climbed as a silver sickle toward the sun.

She poured more water, drank, and set the empty glass on the table. Bending, she shouldered the bag that held Qet Sea-Lord’s heart. Power radiated through the leather, rhythmic as rolling waves.

She walked toward the balcony’s edge. The railing exploded, and stone splinters rained onto the city.

Mal stepped out into empty air. Fire quickened within her, and in the black spaces of her soul, she was no longer alone.

Caleb, Temoc, and Teo walked down Sansilva Boulevard, past upturned carriages and carts. Tzimet quivered and recoiled when Temoc turned his gaze upon them. They feared the Eagle Knights of old. Unfortunately, the Tzimet were not the only obstacle between the trio and their destination.

Caleb heard the mob first—bellowing terror, voices cracked with thirst. Then he saw it. Heads and bodies pressed together, rippling and roiling like the sea at storm, overflowing the boulevard to spread out down side streets. The Cantor’s Shell curved above them all, bluer than the parched sky, taller than the tallest pyramids. Its reflection captured world and crowd.

Approaching from the ground, Caleb found the protesters both more and less intimidating than they’d seemed from the sky: less, because the black mass of hair and clothes and noise resolved into individual men and women, and more, because those men and women were near enough to hurt him.

Teo stopped on the sidewalk. “Can we go around?”

“No,” Caleb said. “I flew by here earlier. The crowd surrounds the pyramid.”

Temoc removed a pouch from his belt. Coils and claws pressed against the leather from the inside. “The Gods’ power will cow the masses.”

Caleb thought he heard the pouch growl. He shook his head. “You’ll attract the Wardens. They’re almost as scared as the mob, only they’re armed. Give them something to shoot at, and they’ll shoot.”

“We will fight them, and they will fall.”

“If the Wardens open fire, they’ll hit the crowd, too, and we’ll be trampled in the panic—unless you plan to burn through all these people. We’re here to avoid killing, right?”

Temoc did not reply, but he returned the pouch to his belt.

“Okay,” Teo said. “Optera?”

“The bugs are unclean. Their existence offends Gods and man.”

“Don’t the ends justify the means?”

“A sacrifice demands purity of intent and form. If we use the bugs, we will have neither.”

“You just suggested we fight our way to the pyramid.”

“Battle is holy. Craft-twisted beasts are not.”

“You can’t be serious.”

No response.

“Caleb?”

“Crowd’s thick. Dangerous to force our way through. Unless.” He groped in his jacket pockets until he felt something smooth and fiercely pointed, which he drew out into the light. The shark’s-tooth pendant lay dull in his palm, its surface broken and burned. “I took this off Mal months ago. It helped her sneak into Bay Station, and Seven Leaf. Hid her from anyone without a priest’s scars, including Wardens.”

Temoc took the pendant from Caleb, turned it, lifted it to the sun. “Broken.”

“I know, but the glyphwork is old Quechal style. Can you see what’s wrong?”

“The bonds between the two symbols, here, the seeing and the not, were burned away. Overtaxed.”

“Can you fix it?”

“I would require a week of fasting, preparation, meditation, to repair this link. In four days I could make a new talisman on the same model.”

“We don’t have a week. Or four days.”

“Or four minutes,” Teo said. “I don’t like the looks the crowd’s throwing our way.”

“A glyph-combination like this consists of two pieces: the seeing-not and the not-seeing.” Temoc drew a line from each end of the negation glyph to each corner of the stylized eye. “The first link directs attention from the wearer. The second suggests to others that the area where we walk is occupied. Without the one, we will be seen. Without the other, we will be crushed by those ignorant of our presence. These links are severed now, but I can re-forge them in my mind, using the amulet as a focus.”

“Great.”

“But I cannot do so and extend this protection to all three of us at the same time.”

“So much for that idea.” Teo tipped her hat brim down over her eyes. “Do we fight our way through?”

“Dad,” Caleb said. “You can’t hold the links alone. Could we do it together?”

Temoc looked from the amulet, to Caleb, and nodded.

They advanced, and the crowd parted before them.

Caleb’s left hand, and Temoc’s right, wound through the amulet’s leather lace. Caleb’s right hand clasped Temoc’s left wrist, and Temoc’s left clasped Caleb’s right. Teo walked in the circle of their arms.

Seeing not, Caleb repeated to himself. Look anywhere but here. A closed eye shone in his mind, surrounded by billowing clouds. No, not closed—stitched shut.

“You must empty this space in their minds,” Temoc had said. “We become a moment of distraction, a daydream. I will fill the gap that remains.”

Look elsewhere. Keep your head down. Nothing new about that. Kopil had been right, months ago. Caleb did not want the world to notice him. Everyone the world noticed, it burned.

Poker worked this way. Bet aggressively, and others will respond in kind. Play as if you have nothing to loose, and you will lose everything. Play quiet, play calm, and win.

Men and women stepped aside for them, and closed after they passed. In the heart of the crowd, someone struck up a chant, and a few hundred others joined: “Hear us! Hear us!”

The shark’s tooth glowed blue. Caleb gripped a line of ice, of fire. His scars cracked and burned, casting shadows into the crowd, and onto Teo.

Don’t look. Don’t see.

They closed half the distance to the Canter’s Shell, and half that distance again.

Hide. Live a good life, safe. Guard against disaster. Wrap yourself in cotton.

Mal’s voice in his ears, flying north to Seven Leaf Lake.

We cushion ourselves against death. We live in ignorance.

The closed eye in his mind pulled against its stitching.

Twenty feet.

Ten.

The crowd thinned as they neared the shell. Only the strongest protesters had reached this point: thick men and determined women, daring to approach eternity. On the other side of the blue shell lay piles of ash that had once been human.

In the crowd near the shell’s edge Caleb saw a yellow smiling face tattooed onto the back of a shaved scalp. He looked again, and saw Balam, the old cliff runner scowling and shouting at the pyramid. “Cowards hide! Cowards run!” Of course. Where else would Balam be as the city fell apart? Sam was here somewhere, too, or else rioting in Skittersill. He did not mention this to Teo. She knew already. She had to know.

They passed within feet of Balam; his drill sergeant voice boomed in their ears. Caleb shivered as the man raged at him, and through him, unseeing. He did not break stride. “Cowards!” Fair enough.

Temoc stopped beside the dome, and released Caleb’s wrist. Caleb did not let go of Temoc’s arm. His father took a leather ribbon from his belt and draped it around Teo’s shoulders like a stole. The leather stank of herbal unguents.

“Dad,” Caleb whispered, as Temoc produced a second ribbon. “What is that?”

“God-bearer,” Temoc replied, and reached for him. Caleb pulled back.

Gods lived beyond the mortal world, beside, above, below, permeating it with their presence. Yet deities had anchors: statues, idols, prayers, and god-bearers, relic holders made from cured human skin.

He tried to find a better way to phrase the question, but settled for: “Who was it?”

“One of the lesser corn gods.”

“I wasn’t talking about the god.”

“Caleb, put it on. We don’t have time to argue.”

Seeing. Not. Seeing.

“Cowards!”

“Caleb,” Teo said. “Do it.”

Stitches strained, burst. The shark’s tooth burned blue.

“He died centuries ago. A sacrifice. This is the only way to pass through that shell. You must carry a god within you.”

“You could have told me before.”

“I hoped to avoid this conversation.”

“Excellent job you’ve done.”

“I have set this city and all our souls at risk out of respect for your reluctance to shed blood,” Temoc said. “Do not balk at a millennia-old death.”

“My reluctance?”

“Caleb,” Teo whispered. “Can we have this conversation when we’re on the other side?”

“Put it on.”

“Fine,” Caleb said, and grabbed the stole.

Temoc stiffened. Teo swore.

Caleb froze with his hand on the leather. He had let go of Temoc’s wrist.

The amulet’s glow guttered and died.

Silence fell over the crowd. A hundred thousand eyes fixed at once on Caleb, Teo, and Temoc. Caleb’s half of the link had failed, but Temoc’s had not—and so the crowd looked upon them, and saw something greater. An immense impossible presence filled the space where they stood.

Couatl screamed overhead, and their wings beat closer. Green light flickered about the serpents’ claws: weapons of Craft, building, burning.

Caleb grabbed Temoc’s wrist, but panic gripped his mind, and he could not blur them to insignificance again.

The burly men and broad women nearby had stopped shouting. Balam curled his massive hands into fists. He saw, they all saw, a target for their rage. He took a step toward them, and another.

The Wardens dove to attack. The green light in their Couatls’ claws sharpened to barbed spears.

Caleb grabbed the god-bearer, wrapped it around his neck, and dove into the blue. Teo and Temoc followed.

42

Imagine a cerulean field that stretches to the farthest star. Plummet through that field. Close your eyes. Forget them. Forget the body that falls, and leave only the sense of falling.

He could not see Teo, or Temoc. Were they near? What did that term mean? Between any two points stretched infinity. Could one infinity be larger than another?

He fell, but he was not alone. Another mind woke within his, powerful and still. Caleb gibbered at empty time, endless space. The stranger did not.

Let me in, the stranger whispered.

At first Caleb shrank from the voice, fleeing across forever. The stranger did not need to pursue. All space and time were equal before it.

You will fall, screaming, through ten thousand ages until your mind breaks and body crumbles, and nothing will endure but a scream. Listen and you can hear them, cries that outlast the throats that gave them voice.

Listen, and let me in.

Caleb heard: high-pitched and low, screams of women and men and children, unending.

He opened his mind.

Sensation pierced him, charring synapses, wiring his body to an engine of pain. He remembered he had lungs, for they spasmed in agony; his flesh shriveled and his mind burst and he was—

Was golden sunlight on the tip of a blade descending, a knife’s edge drawn over flesh, a spurt of blood and a relieved sigh from upturned faces. Red droplets fell in rain, as a dragon vomited up the sun. The people wept and prayed and interned his corpse in soil to decay and be reborn in wriggling worm and fruitful seed, in the first brave green spear that pressed through the hard earth and swelled into corn.

He was gathered, he was burned, he was beaten and pounded into thin flat bread. Teeth tore him and he became flesh once more, breathing, sighing, loving in a million bodies until the dragon swallowed the sky, the raven stole the sun, and he lay again upon the altar. He writhed in drugged futile struggle against his chains; in his eyes he gathered the world, concentrated its wasted pieces into a perfect image of the universe—and in his death that world grew again from corn.

Death and rebirth became him, a cycle of time stretching back past Dresediel Lex to the Quechal homeland sunk below the sea, and further still, to men and women weeping over a grave in a trackless wilderness, bedraggled creatures with bedraggled gods, haunted by ghosts of language and ceremony.

Time was a ring, the cosmos a cycle. Space itself was curved, the Craftsmen claimed.

Spinning in emptiness, he gave his blood to the world, and the world cracked open to receive him.

Caleb struck the gravel hard and skidded. Rocks tore his shirt and the skin of his back. The impact jarred, the gravel stung, but the pressure and pain were gloriously real. He laughed in relief. The shark’s-tooth pendant fell beside him. He slid it into his pocket, patted the pocket, and stood, turning back toward the Canter’s Shell.

Teo fell into him out of the blue.

She was limp, and heavy, and made no sound. He staggered beneath her weight.

He set her back on her heels. She trembled, eyes closed, and did not move. Her chest rose and fell. Quechal symbols glowed from the god-bearer draped across her shoulders. Her lips moved, and she whispered in High Quechal: praise the mother who bears the twins, praise the father risen in the corn, praise the twins who die and rise again, on and on.

“Teo,” he said. She did not respond. He touched her cheek.

Her eyes flew open, and they burned. No trace remained of her pupils and iris. To stare into her was to stare into the sun. She chanted, louder. “Praise the mother and the father. Praise the mother who bears the twins. Praise the father risen in corn.”

He tore the god-bearer from her neck, but she did not wake. The leather coiled on the ground, and twitched as if alive.

Temoc stepped out of the Canter’s Shell, and approached Caleb. Walking over gravel, he made no sound. He regarded Teo as if appraising her for purchase. “She was not ready to host a god. Without scars, without training, the experience can overwhelm.”

“Wasn’t ready? You knew this wasn’t safe for her. You knew, and let her come anyway.”

“She insisted on accompanying us, though she knew the dangers. She claimed she could open the pyramid. She may still serve that purpose.”

Caleb looked back at Teo, and closed his eyes. A twitching ruby spider spirit hunched in her heart, preening with each repeated syllable of her prayer. A small god, feeding.

Caleb opened his scars. The spider in Teo’s body twitched as if it could smell him.

He bent to her ear and whispered in High Quechal: “I cast you out.”

The spider twitched. Teo spoke, and he heard another voice, like brushing cobwebs, paired with hers: “By whose authority?”

“My own.” His words were ragged with rage. “Leave her, or I will break your legs. I will blunt your fangs and blind all your eyes and you will die.”

The spider wavered, as if about to fight, then faded into darkness.

Teo stopped her prayers. Her eyes closed.

Caleb waited.

When she opened her eyes again, they were dark, and human.

“Hi,” she said.

He hugged her, and she embraced him weakly in return. “I appreciate the sentiment,” she said, “but I don’t swing that way.”

“You’re back.”

“Did I leave?” She stepped forward, swayed, and almost fell. He grabbed her by the arm, and she recovered her balance.

She shot her cuffs and straightened the shoulders of her jacket. Her hat had rolled to the ground, and she knelt to retrieve it. “I’ve never felt anything like that. The King in Red has been inside my soul once or twice, but … I lived a thousand years. I could hear time.”

“If you lived a century ago, you would have been prepared for the experience,” Temoc said. “Gods are not so common today as once they were.”

“Fine by me,” she replied.

Mal stood on air like a bride on an empty dance floor, waiting for the groom to emerge and the band to play.

Most days, downtown airspace was a muddy mess of airbuses and optera, Warden mounts and skyspires and flying machines. Every few hours a dragon passed overhead, beating three-hundred-meter wings on its journey to the Shining Empire. Dresediel Lex had an anthill for a sky.

Today, though, the sun shone at the apex of a bare blue vault, cut with smoke. Optera retreated to their nests. Skyspires fled. No private citizen would fly today, and the Wardens were busy.

She closed her eyes and saw Dresediel Lex as a sprawling web of power and Craft, the human stain wiped away to reveal the bent lightning at the city’s root. But this too was a mask, a deception—a way she had been taught to see.

She touched glyphs at her wrist and temples, and looked down, through basements, pipes, sewers, tunnels, caves, to the beating, blinding red heart of the planet, where two serpents quaked with unpleasant dreams.

Her pocket buzzed: a warning from the Craftsmen back at Heartstone. The Serpents’ hunger outstrips our power to contain them.

She opened her hands and waited for the eclipse.

Caleb, Teo, and Temoc approached the pyramid. No one challenged them. Teo glanced about, wary of security demons, but they were not attacked.

They left the parking lot and walked down a paved path flanked by topiary. Unconscious revenants sprawled in the loam between sculpted trees, sheers and clippers fallen in the shadow of shrubbery globes and pentagrams. When Mal attacked, the undead workers would have been near the night shift’s end.

He touched Teo’s hand. “Hey.” His voice sounded small.

“Hey,” she answered. Their footsteps were the only sound in the garden, beneath the Canter’s Shell.

“Are you all right?”

“All right?” She laughed. “No. What do you think?”

“I’m sorry. I was an idiot back there, in the crowd.”

“Usually you only hurt yourself. I don’t like being part of your collateral damage.”

“Hells.”

“Relax. I was kidding.”

“I deserve it,” he said. “This is my fault. All of it. If I hadn’t got mad at Temoc, I wouldn’t have let go of his arm. We wouldn’t even be here if I’d put the pieces together about Mal. If I’d pressed her about that pendant, about Allesandre. I think she was trying to tell me, but I didn’t listen. I spend my life evaluating angles, but as soon as my feelings get involved, it all goes to hell.”

“Don’t think like that. Blaming yourself for everything.”

“Why not?”

“Because Mal’s crazy. And your father, he’s helping us, but he’s crazy, too. We all are. You can’t hold yourself responsible for people’s actions. Even if Mal made you a bit stupid, you aren’t the one who came up with her plan. You aren’t the one who set her on this road. She’s her own woman, and she did this for her own reasons. It wasn’t your fault.”

He put a hand on her shoulder. “Sam will be okay.”

She didn’t answer.

They reached the wide, flat front steps of the pyramid. Caleb’s gaze swung to Temoc, and kept swinging. “Where’s my dad?”

“I thought he was behind us.”

The grass rustled in a light breeze, but there was no breeze.

Bushes to their right crashed and parted. Temoc stumbled out, wearing a gardening zombie’s jumpsuit. The revenant had been shorter, and larger around the waist, than Caleb’s father. Cuffs of trousers and shirt rode up on his calves and his thick wrists.

Temoc lurched as he walked, and held one of his arms akimbo. Light twisted in his grip, and trailed on the ground behind him. Caleb blinked, and the rainbow confusion resolved into many-jointed limbs, a barbed tail, and a chitinous body. A triangular head with serrated mandibles lolled at a broken angle from the neck clutched in the crook of Temoc’s arm.

Temoc let the demon fall. It struck earth, twitched once, and blurred to match the grass.

“I thought,” he said, “a uniform might let the building recognize me as one of its own. It seems your lawn is well defended.” He joined them at the steps, and ushered Teo toward the revolving door.

She climbed the steps, extended her hand, and touched the door. Glass glowed red beneath her fingers. She pulled her hand back. Nothing happened. She did not die.

She touched the door again, and this time it recognized her. She pressed, and it moved.

“Follow me,” she said, and stepped into shadow.

43

Crystal lamps hung lifeless above RKC’s dark lobby. No sun shone through the doors. Faint ghostlights set into floor and baseboard runners were the only source of illumination; they traced a branching red labyrinth that connected elevators and stairwell to the entrance. Bas-reliefs glowered from the walls—gods in agony, the King in Red triumphant, hearts torn from chests and altars split to shards.

Demons wandered through the foyer, their footsteps like glass on stone. They took many forms: a looming silent shade whose five arms ended in scalpel forests, a spider with legs six feet long. A bus-sized centipede tasted the air with tremulous antennae.

Caleb’s lungs and stomach tried to squeeze into his throat. Teo cursed in High Quechal.

The demons did not attack, or seem to notice them. Nor did they intrude on the labyrinth. A giant spider crossed one crimson path, but it lifted each leg well clear of the red lines and did not step between them.

Simple enough. Stay on the path, and remain safe. Stray, and be devoured. Strange to have a security system that posed no danger to any intruder with eyes.

Caleb stepped forward, but Temoc gripped his arm like a vise. “Don’t.”

“What?”

“There are demons here.”

“I can see that.”

“They haven’t attacked yet. We don’t know what might set them off.”

“It looks like we’ll be fine if we stick to the path.”

“What path?”

“That path.” Caleb pointed to the floor, to the red ghostlight lines—the red ghostlight lines, which cast no shadows. Oh. “You can’t see any light on the floor, can you?”

“I see a small red circle around us. You were about to cross the circle’s edge.”

“Ah. What about you, Teo?”

“I see green lines.”

“Damn.”

“Exactly. My lines turn left after five feet.”

Caleb’s red path remained straight for ten feet, then curved sharply to the right. “So there’s a safe path for you, and a safe path for me, and none for Temoc.”

“Makes sense. It can tell that we’re supposed to be here, and he isn’t.”

“RKC has fed upon both of you for years. The beast knows your taste, and hungers for fresh meat.”

“You’re a creepy man,” Teo said.

“This,” Temoc said, indicating the demon-filled room with a wave of his hand, “is your office building.”

Caleb tried not to think about teeth and claws and legs and pincers. “Dad, I don’t suppose you can fight them off?”

“This would not be a battle,” Temoc said. A thing like a crystal mantis scuttled up to the edge of the red circle, and stared at them with mirror eyes. “I would disappear under claw and fang.”

“Can you climb the pyramid from outside?”

“Perhaps. But there will be defenses outside as well.”

“Okay. Then I’ll carry you.”

“You’ll carry me?”

“If the demons can’t cross my path, we have to make it so they can’t attack you without attacking me.”

“Your carrying me will not solve that problem.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

Another silence of legs and claws. “No.”

“So we do it this way. Straight to the lift.”

“Not the lift,” Teo said. “The stairs.”

“You want us to take the stairs up twenty-nine floors?”

“If the lobby looks like this, do you trust the lift?”

“Stairs it is.” He bent his knees and surveyed his skeleton. “Watch my ribs. I think I broke one earlier, or bruised it. Breathing hurts.”

Temoc grunted, grabbed Caleb’s shoulders, and lurched onto his son’s back.

In that first moment, struggling to balance Temoc, Caleb almost stumbled into demon-haunted dark. The world pitched and righted itself, heavier. Temoc was muscle, sinew, and bone, nothing light or soft. Caleb’s first step fell so heavily he feared it would break the marble tiles. Temoc kept his muscles tight, at least, which made him easier to balance.

They crept into the labyrinth.

The first ten steps were the hardest, except for the next ten, and the ten after that. His father’s living weight pressed him into the floor. Demons writhed half-seen about them, enraged by Temoc’s scent, repelled by Caleb. In a paradox of obligations they gathered, champing teeth and flicking long tongues. Teo walked her own path with ease. Caleb felt a pang of envy that broke his focus, weakened his arms, bent his knees. The horrors of the night drew close.

The floor was dark as the inside of Mal’s mouth.

Caleb shook.

“You know,” Temoc said with a conversational air, “there’s a Telomere legend about this.”

“About—” Caleb sucked in breath. His arms burned, and his back trembled. “About what?”

“The Empire of Telomere traced its origins to a city near the mouth of the Ebon Sea. When that city was destroyed, the future founder of the Empire fled his enemies through the burning wreckage, bearing his father on his back. That father, too, carried the gods of their people.”

Two more turns, and ten feet. “Nice story, Dad.” Gods, how much did this man weigh? Did being a priest-king make your bones more dense? Were outlaws’ muscles heavier than those of normal people?

“Take strength from the story. Stories give us direction.”

Turn. His hip twitched, and his hand slipped on Temoc’s left leg. He lost time struggling for a better grip. “This hero’s father—did he weigh as much as you?”

“I do not think so. The man in the story was old, and frail.”

“Encouraging, thanks.” I bet his gods were more helpful, too, Caleb thought, though he didn’t say it. If Temoc started an argument about religion, Caleb might buck him into the demons, and to hell with Dresediel Lex and the Serpents.

He took the last curve with arms and legs of molten rubber. His lungs ached, and his ribs felt as if they might break through his skin. Mal—no, Mal wasn’t there, that was Teo, opening the stairwell door. Blinding light streamed through. The concrete steps beyond were free of demons. He lifted a silent prayer of thanks for office health and safety rules: in an emergency the stairs had to be safe to travel, no matter the security risk.

He staggered the last three steps across the threshold, tripped, and fell to his knees. Temoc pitched to one side and slammed into a wall. Caleb’s burned right hand struck the floor. The world shimmered with pain. He tried to breathe, and choked.

Teo closed the lobby door. The scuttle of demon claws dwindled to a crinkle of torn paper. Caleb sank against the wall, let his lungs fill with air, expelled it all, and let them fill again.

Time passed. How much time, he did not care. When the world settled, Temoc was waiting. Caleb read no sympathy on his face.

“Are you all right?” Teo asked.

“Yeah,” he said, more to reassure himself than her. “I’m fine.”

“Good.” Temoc glanced up the gap at the heart of the turning staircase. “We have nine hundred steps to climb.”

“Hells.”

“The trouble with atheism,” Temoc said, “is that it offers a limited range of curses.”

Caleb ignored him, and started climbing.

Heavy footsteps echoed up and down the stairwell. No doors opened or closed. Caleb, Teo, and Temoc climbed alone.

After the tenth story, they rested, though not for long. Teo’s watch read quarter past eleven. The eclipse was due shortly after noon. Temoc claimed he could draw fossilized souls from the altar in ten minutes. On schedule. Barely.

Caleb swayed. Teo draped his arm over her shoulder. At first he tried to walk on his own, but around the fifteenth floor he trusted her with his weight. She bore it without complaint or comment, and they climbed together. Temoc sprinted each flight of stairs alone, and waited at the landing for them to catch up.

“Not much of a team player, is he,” Teo asked when Caleb’s father was out of earshot.

“He had a team,” Caleb replied. “Most of them died.”

“He could at least act like we’re on the same side.”

“We’re not.”

“Maybe you’re not.” Teo grunted as Caleb’s leg gave out and she took his full weight. “He’s trying to save our lives, which puts him on my side.”

“No. It puts you on his side, for the moment.”

At the twentieth floor they allowed themselves another short rest. Caleb sat on a step and leaned against the cool railing. He had slept in beds less comfortable. Teo crouched beside him. Temoc did not sit. Tensed like a spring, he scanned walls, ceiling, and lower floors for threats.

Temoc broke the silence.

“You know,” he said, “these stairs weren’t a part of the original pyramid design.”

“What was here earlier?” Teo asked.

“An empty shaft descending into the sub-basement.”

Don’t ask what they used it for, Caleb begged Teo with his eyes.

“How would they use something like that?”

“We threw bodies down the shaft,” Temoc said, “after the sacrifice. There was a fire at the bottom, for the corpses.”

Teo looked as if she might reply, but did not. Caleb stood, and turned from Temoc to the steps.

They climbed the rest of the way without speaking.

44

Potted ferns lined the broad dark hallway on the twenty-ninth floor, like soldiers supervising an execution. Faint inhuman laughter hung on the still air.

“If we survive this,” Caleb whispered to Teo, “I am never coming in on a weekend again.”

They reached the conference room’s mahogany doors without incident. Caleb’s skin wanted to crawl away and leave his meat and bones to fend for themselves. Veins popped on Temoc’s thick forearms and the backs of his slab hands; he squared his shoulders and stood strong, but his eyes flicked restless about the passage. Teo waited by the doorframe, lips tight, silent.

Caleb opened the doors, and light flooded the hall.

“Hello,” said a voice like honey poured off a razor.

A many-legged horror filled the doorway: thorns and thin-spun glass, steel and barbs and blue lightning, clustered multifaceted eyes, and a mouth like a child’s, above a maw that brimmed with ichor-wet fangs.

“Hello,” the demon repeated with its child-mouth. Its maw shrieked torn metal.

Temoc punched the demon in the face.

It tumbled backward, arms flung out for balance. One of its eight hands slammed into the conference table; knife-claws gouged long streaks from the wood. The child-mouth wailed.

Temoc did not wait for the creature to recover. He became a silvered shadow and leapt on his adversary. The demon swatted him to the ground with a flailing paw, and followed with a kick. Falling, Temoc grabbed the demon’s knee and barbed ankle and wrenched the joints in opposite directions. Chitin cracked like crystal. Temoc struck the floor, and rolled between scrabbling claws to his feet.

Caleb pulled Teo into the room, and closed the door behind them.

“What are you doing?” she shouted.

“The fight might draw others. You think we can hold off more of those things?”

Caleb’s father danced with the demon. A talon slashed Temoc’s side, and he staggered but did not fall. He had grown large in shadow, scars shining. He wrenched one of the beast’s arms sideways, and tore it from the shoulder. Two mouths screamed, and scythe-claws swung, but Temoc was already moving.

Crystal limbs and teeth clashed. Liquid light dripped from the demon’s wounds, and smoked where it fell. Temoc was a dark blur, leaping from table to floor, taunting his opponent in High Quechal. The demon cursed him in its broken tongue, all pretense of human speech gone.

They circled each other around the table, slow enough at last for Caleb to comprehend the demon’s shape: a round scorpion-jointed back, six clawed legs gripping the floor, one of its eight arms gone and two more limp.

Between cries of pain, the demon laughed like thunder.

“I think it’s enjoying this,” Teo whispered.

Temoc was the first to slow, and the demon pressed him until it slowed in turn and Temoc fought back with maniacal ferocity. The silver scars on his face twisted, and by their light Caleb saw, for the first time in sixteen years, his father smile.

The demon leapt onto the conference table and landed with a heavy, hollow sound. Temoc circled, and it scuttled to face him. It hissed, and he was silent; roared, and he showed no fear.

The beast sprang, a storm of teeth and sharp edges. Temoc dove into and through the claws, and wrapped his arms around its body. Knives scraped the corded muscles of his back; jaws snapped inches from his face. His grip tightened, and cracks appeared in chitin. Temoc stepped under his opponent’s center of gravity, and swiveled his hip to the left.

The demon’s left legs gave way, but Temoc did not let go. As it fell, he twisted its torso back to the right.

The snap of the demon’s spine should have been too soft to hear. Somehow, it overcame all other sound.

Thorned legs went limp, but the upper body fought on. Temoc rolled with the demon on the floor. Soon, they lay still.

Temoc rose. Fading shadows hung from him in tatters. His skin was a mess of welts and bruises. Thin, shallow cuts crisscrossed his back and legs and arms, broken by the protective network of his scars.

He retreated from the demon’s corpse, and slumped against the pitted remains of the conference table.

Caleb ran to his father. Temoc held up one hand, motioning him back, but Caleb ignored him.

“You’re hurt.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Temoc said between breaths. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll worry about you if I want.”

“No time. Others have heard the fight. They will come soon. Find the door.”

Caleb wrapped one arm around his father, counted to three, and lifted him off the table. The old man swayed, but steadied on his feet, and spat blood to the floor. “Find it.”

“Fine.” Caleb stepped back, and examined the room. There was, of course, no door in the wall through which Kopil had led him on the night of the Seven Leaf crisis. No door, and nothing that could hide a door: no bookcase, no trophy stand, no glyphs Caleb could see. The room was blank and featureless, its walls an even grey.

He closed his eyes, but saw no trace of Craft. “I walked through this wall.”

Teo prodded the blank stone with her hands, and struck it with a broken chair leg. The wall did not sound hollow. “Nothing’s hidden here. You’re sure this is the right place? I can think of twenty rooms in the pyramid that look just like this.”

“Of course it’s the right place.”

“I’m not calling you a liar. Relax.” She paced around the demon’s corpse, over puddles of sizzling blood. “It must be here. Otherwise why set a demon to guard this room? To defend the table?”

“More demons are coming,” Temoc said. “Up the stairs.”

“They can use the stairs,” Caleb said, then checked himself. “Of course they can use the stairs. Do you see any controls anywhere?”

“Only the usual ones, for the lights. You say you walked through this wall? In this conference room?”

“Yes.” In the hall outside, he heard a sound like the world’s largest centipede crossing a tile floor.

“The door will hold them,” Temoc said. “But not for long.”

Could Kopil have opened a gate between two points in space, and closed it, just to disorient Caleb and save himself an elevator ride?

No. Kopil was a miser. He didn’t like to fly—too wasteful. He barely left the RKC pyramid. He wouldn’t go tearing holes in the world for his own amusement. Any passage he built for himself would be reusable.

“We should leave,” Temoc said. “There must be other ways to the altar.”

Something much larger than a dog scraped at the conference room door.

Caleb’s mind caught the end of a thread. “Teo, what did you just ask me?”

“I asked you if you were sure this was the right room. If that was the right wall.”

“I don’t think it is. I don’t think there was a wall there to walk through.”

“What?”

The scraping grew louder and insistent. Wood splintered beneath hooked claws and bladed fingers.

“You said this looked like any other room in the pyramid, but it doesn’t. Even my little office has carvings and decorations all over the place. These walls are blank stone.”

“So they redecorated.”

“They did more than that. When I was here, I never saw any walls. And no one but Mal entered or left by the door.”

Temoc’s eyebrows rose.

“Teo,” Caleb said. “Turn off the lights,”

“What?”

“The overheads. Turn them off. There should be one light on the center of the table, that’s all. One light so bright you can’t see the walls.”

“Caleb—”

“Do it. Please.”

A heavy weight struck the doors, which shuddered but held firm. A demon’s cry scoured the air.

Teo ran to a bank of dials on the wall, and turned them at random until the lights dimmed.

“More!”

Lights flickered, flared, cut out. Caleb could still see the wall. “Make the center light stronger.”

Her fingers flew. Twice more demons struck the doors. Wood splintered near the latch. “Here!” Teo spun the second-smallest dial clockwise. The table’s spotlight brightened to surgical brilliance. The world twisted.

The walls vanished.

The doors broke open. Beyond, ranks of eyes burned with ruby fire.

“Teo!”

She leapt over the dead demon’s claw, sprinted toward him, and grabbed his hand as he grabbed Temoc’s. Together, they ran into the dark. The fiends followed after.

45

The demons pursued on many legs—distortions in darkness, closing at an insectine gallop.

Caleb, Teo, and Temoc fled through shadows beneath the universe. They should long since have reached the King in Red’s apartment, but the farther they ran, the closer night drew around them.

The path was closed, apparently, on the far end. Caleb tried to remember what Kopil had done to open the way on the night the water ran black, but his memories blurred together.

The conference room’s walls existed as long as he could see them. Maybe the other door could not open while he knew it wasn’t there.

The demons’ footsteps grew louder.

“Close your eyes,” Caleb shouted.

“What?” Teo snapped back.

“Close them. Close them, or we’re stuck here.”

Their grips on his hands tightened.

Caleb closed his eyes.

Space was a net of flame; universes hung like water droplets at its intersections. The net spun and warped. Worlds merged, broke, reformed in fractal patterns.

Caleb let go of his father’s hand, reached out, and touched a smooth brass doorknob. He turned the knob, the latch gave, and he tumbled onto a red carpet.

Temoc and Teo staggered into the room after him. Demon footfalls pursued from the darkness beyond the door.

Caleb slammed the closet shut. He waited for a few heartbeats, then opened it again. Suits, robes, shirts, ties and expensive shoes had replaced the void.

“So this is where the monster sleeps,” Temoc said.

The room looked as Caleb had last seen it: round bed unmade, books stacked beside the armchair, piles of paperwork teetering on end tables.

“This doesn’t look like a monster’s room,” Teo said once she found her breath. “Doesn’t look like his, either. I don’t know what I would have pictured. Something cleaner.”

“He’s a busy man,” Caleb said. “Skeleton. Thing.” He wiped sweat from his eyes. “You want him to spend his days cleaning?”

“Or get maid service. A team of zombies could scour this place in five minutes.”

Temoc pursed his lips, and turned away.

“What?”

“You would rather exploit another’s body than dirty your own hands with work,” Temoc said. “I find that interesting.” He wandered away into the kitchen.

“Caleb,” Teo said, when Temoc was out of sight.

“Hm?”

She had flushed red, and her brows drew low over glaring eyes. “Your father.”

“Trust me, I know.”

“He’s a jerk.”

“And a murderer. And he just saved our lives, which, I know, doesn’t excuse the rest of it.” He leaned against the door, fighting exhaustion.

“Are you okay?”

Kopil’s empty unmade bed looked more comfortable than any he had seen in years. He wanted to lie there and vanish. “I’m tired. And I keep thinking about Mal.”

Teo sank into the red armchair. Neither of them spoke. She wove her fingers together, unwove them. “If she comes, and tries to stop us, what will you do?”

“I … I’ll fight her,” he said. “And I’ll die. She’s stronger than you can imagine. She’ll kill me.”

“What if she doesn’t, though? What if you win?”

He looked away.

She walked to him. In her eyes he saw himself reflected, a cutout shade, barely human.

In the kitchen, wood splintered, china broke, cutlery clattered on stone. Temoc appeared at the threshold, dignified and calm. “I have found the entrance to his office.”

The moon rose, and rising lost its light. Black sphere in a dusky sky, it stalked the sun.

Mal sat cross-legged above the city. Her mind moved with the serpents, turning in uneasy slumber. They whispered to her in High Quechal and tongues older still, brutal cries from the birth pangs of the world. Their dreams surrounded her like gallowglass tendrils, and they burned.

Where was Caleb? Somewhere safe, she hoped, and doubted. He was not the type to hide.

At Andrej’s on the day of the Heartstone acquisition, the day Kopil betrayed himself with a kiss, she had danced with Caleb on an empty floor. They danced without touching: she wrapped him in Craft and he grabbed her by those same ties. They were dancing now. How he thought to stop her, she could not imagine, but he would try.

She hoped she was wrong—hoped he would hide and wait, and she could find him later, when the battle was won, and explain herself, and all would be well.

And she hoped she was right. She hoped he was marshaling forces against her even now.

She felt the familiar lightning thrill of touching knifepoint to skin, before the small sharp movement of the wrist that let blood flow free.

Craft threaded through the Serpents’ diamond brains, through their pulsing hearts of molten rock. By itself, each of Heartstone’s systems served a purpose: channeling the Serpents’ hunger, dulling the edge of their sleeping minds, drawing them to the surface of the lava to be tamed.

Together, those strands wove the reins of the world.

With a small sharp movement of her wrist, she called the Serpents to her.

The stairs from Kopil’s kitchen were long, straight, and rough-hewn, so narrow Temoc had to climb them sideways.

“That apartment,” he said as they rose, “was once a vestry room. Priests prepared there for the ceremony. Divining stones were cast, chants sung, days named. They shed their own blood and prepared to shed the blood of others.”

“And that,” Teo said, “is why you broke the King in Red’s cabinets?”

“There used to be beautiful murals on those walls, depicting the triumph of the Twins, the sacrifice of Ili. Gone now. Replaced by porcelain and cutlery.”

The gray sliver at the top of the stair grew, and through it Caleb saw the curve of Kopil’s office dome.

They emerged through a thin opening that vanished behind them. The office had changed little since his first visit: carpet, plants, low bookshelves and chairs, and of course the altar-desk. The hospital bed was gone.

Kopil lay sprawled atop the desk, a mug of spilled coffee by his hand. His skull rested on a thick sheaf of papers.

Caleb ran to him, Teo close behind.

The King in Red did not move as they approached. Caleb knelt and lifted the skeleton’s hand. Somehow his bones clung together, as if bound by invisible rubber strings. Hand and arm were lighter than he expected, and clattered as he set them down.

“He’s gone,” Teo said, wondering.

“Can’t be. He’d have taken most of the pyramid with him. Deathless Kings go out in flames.” He rolled up the red robe’s sleeve. Glyphs glowed blue and silver against bone. “He’s alive, or whatever they call it. Unalive. Must be sleeping.”

“More like comatose.” Teo slid the papers out from under the King in Red’s head. His skull struck glass with a dull, dark sound. She fanned the pages, and froze. “Caleb. This is the Heartstone contract.”

“What? The original? The one that’s seventy thousand pages long and carved into stones from here to Alt Coulumb and back?”

“This is the signature page. The keystone. See, here. That’s his signature, and Alaxic’s, and the witnesses’. If this is destroyed, the contract starts to unravel.”

The King in Red must have woken early that morning, if he ever slept. Sipping his coffee, he felt Qet Sea-Lord die, felt the Serpents suck the marrow from his bones.

“He knew what was happening. And he tried to stop it.” Caleb laid Kopil on the floor beside the altar, arms crossed over his chest.

“This changes nothing,” Temoc said. He circled around the altar toward them. “We have no time. We must begin.”

“It changes everything. If we break this contract, the King in Red might wake up. RKC could break free of Heartstone. The board—”

“Their heathen Craft will be useless against the Serpents, as would your master’s if he wakes. Besides, he would see me, and try to kill me. We have no common cause.”

“You do now.” Caleb took the signature page from Teo, and held it up so his father could read the scrawled ink. “If he wakes up, he’ll see that you’re not part of Mal’s plot, that you’ve risked your life to stop her. You have a chance to make peace with him—to keep him from blaming this madness on every religious Quechal in the city.”

“What I have done today will change nothing in his eyes. We are old enemies, he and I.”

The picture in the silver frame stood on the desk, two men smiling, their eyes sepia-black. Caleb remembered Kopil’s voice: everyone thinks they’re on their own side, until the time comes to declare war.

“He might not like you, but he’ll fight beside you.” Caleb searched the desk, and found a letter opener, three pens, a coffee mug long since dry. Nothing that looked like it could dissolve contracts. “Teo, do you know how to break one of these things?”

“There’s usually a mess of protective Craft, but it looks like Kopil got rid of that already. Rip it. If that doesn’t work, try fire. Here, let me…”

“No,” Temoc said.

Teo’s shoes scraped against the floor, and Caleb looked up to see if she had tripped.

Temoc stood behind her, squeezing her throat in the crook of his elbow. Her eyes screamed. She clawed at his father’s arms, his hands, his face. Her mouth gaped for air. Her hat fell to the floor. She jerked her head back, but Temoc tightened his grip.

Her eyes rolled white, and drifted closed. Her body hung limp in his father’s arms.

Caleb leapt at Temoc.

His father turned faster than Caleb’s eye could follow. One fist swept around in a blurred half circle.

Darkness consumed the world.

46

Temoc looked down on his fallen son, and shook his head. He was a brave boy, to bear his father on his back, to grow to halting manhood with only a mother’s hand to guide him.

He was weak, but he lived in a time of weakness. The God Wars flayed the world and hung it on a cross. The strong fell and the craven thrived. No wonder Caleb’s generation retreated into despair and compromise. No wonder the children of the Wars drank and fornicated, gambled and danced and wondered, after long days smeared drunkenly into night, why their lives seemed meaningless.

An obsidian knife hung from Temoc’s belt. In seventy years he had used the blade twice. Ten years old, at his initiation into the priesthood, he carved the gods’ signs into his chest with hands blood-slick from the wounds his teachers gave him. The second time was the night the barricades rose in Skittersill; he knelt over his son and cut the same symbols into his flesh.

Temoc had never wondered about his purpose. His purpose was the point of that knife.

He lowered his son to the floor beside Teo, and turned to the King in Red. Kopil’s round skull glistened. Six decades before, peals of laughter had rung from that grinning mouth as he scattered the Quechal priesthood and broke their gods. He had impaled Temoc on a thorn of ice, and left him writhing to die.

Temoc set his foot on the skull and pressed down. The bone did not yield.

He stomped. Bone bounced against the floor, but did not chip or shatter. He roared and leapt on the skull with both feet, but it rang like iron and he stumbled back. The shadows of Kopil’s face mocked him.

Above, the moon broke the circle of the sun. Time enough for vengeance—later. He had a world to save.

Temoc lifted his son’s friend, the girl who had never known a man’s touch, the altar maid, the offering who confessed her willingness to die. He placed her on the altar.

He bowed his head, and drew his knife, and began to sing.

Mal and the moon opened their mouths and breathed in fire. The moon swelled and darkened as it consumed the sun’s body. Mal too devoured flame and was transformed.

Shadows fell upon the earth. She worked her Craft through the slumbering course of the Serpents’ minds. From deep dreams they whispered to her. They knew her name. The eclipse came, and the stars called them to battle.

“Come,” she whispered, taking hold of the Serpents’ reins. “This is your moment. Rise, and be my weapons.”

The earth trembled. Buildings shivered, pyramids shook. Another tremor came, stronger than the first.

Wake, she willed. The sun dies. Stars circle like starving vultures, and sup on the light that bleeds from its husk. As it dims they shine.

Come forth.

A stillness passed over the surface of the earth. Mal’s eyes snapped open.

Beneath the world’s shell, the Serpents stirred, and stretched, and woke.

Balam laughed at the first earthquake. Other protesters screamed, farther back in the crowd on Sansilva Boulevard before the Canter’s Shell: newcomers to the city’s struggles. The masters and Wardens of Dresediel Lex used their power to cow resistance. They shook the ground and burned the sky to spread fear, but they rarely killed. Hardened protesters trembled only at Couatl claws and lightning. Or they feared nothing, for Craftwork weapons moved faster than human eyes could follow or human ears detect, and to fear those was to live in fear.

Balam did not fear. Decades of cliff running and riots had burned the emotion from him.

And if this was no plan of the Wardens’, and the ground was trembling of its own accord, well, then, Dresediel Lex was a city on the ocean’s edge, and sometimes the earth shook beneath its weight. The crowd surged against him, acres of sweaty skin, stinking of meat and leather and rage.

“Is that the best you can do?” he shouted at the sky, at the pyramid sheltered behind its shield.

When the second earthquake came, he did not laugh.

Bedrock and packed earth did not stay the Serpents. Slithering upward they carved tunnels that caved in as they passed. The land rolled. Glass broke in skyscraper windows. Towers swayed and bowed their heads. Only the pyramids stood strong: they were built to outlast the world.

Sansilva bisected Dresediel Lex from east to west. Foreign visitors often wondered why the ancient Quechal had built so broad a road through the center of their city. Little freight passed through Sansilva, and few commuters—the priests had lived on their temple grounds.

They wondered on a false premise. The road had not been built for human use.

The second quake began like the first, shaking pitching ground, men and women crying out in alarm and pain, but rather than receding it built. Balam and his comrades stumbled against one another. They thrashed and pitched like froth, and this too was normal—but over their cries Balam heard another note, a high creaking cascade, everywhere at once, scraping against the pate of his skull.

In the surge and thrust of angry limbs, at first he could not find the sound’s source. When the screams began, he saw: broken glass rained from skyscrapers and pyramids all around. Shattered panes fell from shaking towers. Transparent knife blades tumbled, sparked by the dying sun. Striking, they severed flesh. Screams cut short before others took their place. Bodies pressed against Balam from all sides: ten thousand people simultaneously forced themselves toward the center of Sansilva Boulevard, away from the glass and blood.

This was not Wardens’ work. They would not break the buildings they were sworn to defend. Real estate was sacred to them. Above, their Couatl wheeled, wings beating rapid, roaring with jaws unhinged by panic.

Couatl feared nothing—not fire, not death, not the shifting earth. No mere earthquake would make them cry. But if not Wardens, and not an earthquake, what was happening?

The groans and cries changed tempo and tenor, rising, gaping, higher. Hot wind blew across Balam’s face, and the crowd convulsed again, pressing him not toward the center of the road this time but forward, toward the lethal blue border of the Canter’s Shell.

He turned, straining against the tide, and saw fire.

Asphalt glowed like broken coals. Mal flailed in flame, in hunger. She strained against the weight of stony sleep. Air melted to plasma. Below, demonstrators fled, screaming.

In the old days, the rooftops had boiled with spectators, risking their sanity to see.

The fleeing protesters thought the quakes, the flames, were the Craftsmen’s vengeance.

They would understand soon.

The world held mysteries more worthy of their fear than human Craft.

Tar bulged, rippled, burst. A forked fiery tongue spouted from the molten flow, and retreated into a blunt mouth a hundred yards across. Two eyes of white flame flared from an immense arrow-shaped face. Aquel bared fangs the size of trees. A thousand years of sacrifices stared out from the diamonds that lined her gullet, Quechal faces trapped in agony. She roared a volcano roar.

Her sister too broke free, and they rose together, sinewy, strong, hungry. They cried doom.

The city shook. Elders trembled as nightmares wormed from the rotten timbers of their memory. Madmen shouted prayers in High Quechal, though they did not understand the words spilling from their lips. In hospital coma wards, patients silent for years opened their mouths to speak:

“Blessed Be They.”

In the Skittersill a burning building collapsed around a three-year-old girl and left her unharmed. A Warden’s mount plummeted from the sky, dead; the Warden’s partner swooped to save him from a bloody landing.

From Fisherman’s Vale to Monicola, from the Pax Coast Highway to Stonewood, Tzimet exploded into steam. In the fountain of the Monicola Hotel, the beast of water and black ice shattered. Insect-sized demons popped like blisters. They fled the approach of greater monsters.

In Balam’s childhood when his grandmother lay drunk on corn beer on cool dry winter afternoons she had told him tales of old gods and heroes. Beyond these he knew no sacred signs, no holy chants beyond those repeated before an ullamal game. But he recognized the cobra-hooded coils above Sansilva, the house-sized scales slick as water if water burned, taller than the pyramids, tall enough to eat the sun, or kindle it aflame again with the darting forked lava spouts of their tongues. Shining in every color and none, cored white as alabaster: Aquel and Achal, greater than goddesses, fiercer than demons, the world’s first children.

He almost froze in awe and wonder, and if he had, he would have been lost. The crowd saw, and whatever they understood, whether they recognized the Serpents or thought them Craft-born terrors or demons run loose, they knew to flee. Desperate they stumbled away from the Serpents: down alleys and into swaying buildings, despite the rain of glass. But most ran along the path of least resistance, down Sansilva Boulevard, and their tide carried Balam toward the Canter’s Shell and forever.

Balam pushed against the crowd, with muscles built down decades of cliff running and decades more of teaching runners. A stone statue stood fifty feet upstream, some robed Iskari goddess, a break in the human tide. Fifty feet might as well be miles. He thrust himself into spaces between people, he struck men in the stomachs, he tore free from clawing fingers, and pressed toward the statue.

Heat passed over him, raised rivers of sweat on his arms: the heat of the Serpents’ gaze, or else their distant breath.

His legs ached. A flailing elbow caught him above the eye and tore his skin. Blood ran down his face. He growled, and fought harder, in and down, gripping cobblestones with his feet, desperate not to lose the slim scrape of traction that bound him to the earth and kept him safe from pounding feet and pulsing legs.

Men and women died around him. They fled the Serpents like ants flee the beam of a magnifying glass. Those too slow were crushed, or burned.

The air stank of panic and sour sweat.

Ten feet left. An eternity. He could not cross the distance. He could count his wounds, and weaknesses: a finger broken when a woman he was fighting past shifted left instead of right. Blood in his eyes. A back twisted by too much running, by a youth spent sprinting over rooftops. Forty years of fat.

Damn the crowd. Damn the Wardens for circling above the damage. He might not make it, but for one more moment he would fly.

Six feet. He released his hold on the ground, but rather than let the tide carry him forward he grabbed the shoulders of the men pressed against him and pulled himself up, onto them, over their bodies, through the forest of arms and heads, a cliff runner’s last leap—

Too short. He landed a foot shy of the open space around the fountain; his weight pressed bodies beneath him to the ground, but others surged over him, over them, dragging him back. He roared in frustration, reaching toward that stone Iskari goddess to strangle her promises of victory.

A hand closed around his: a steel grip, slender but implacable, a rock against the tide.

He pulled with strength that could tear stone, and the hand pulled back, and in a tumble he lay panting in the statue’s shadow beside his savior, a woman, not even Quechal: blond hair in tangled braids, a scar on her temple. Her eyes were wide with terror, and she sucked in breath like a horse after a sprint. So did he. He swore, and cursed, and spit.

“Thank you.”

She nodded.

“Balam,” he said, and tapped his chest. He could not raise his hand to offer it to her.

“Sam,” she said. Around them, the world continued to end.

Mal tossed, spun, caught inside the Serpents.

“Stop,” she said, in High Quechal and then in Low: “Stop.”

The Serpents swayed, brighter than the dying sun. She hovered level with round crystal eyes a hundred feet tall. Heat scored her skin. Sweat ran down her face—altar sweat, the sweat of the bound woman who sees the knife. The Serpents’ scales pinged and hissed and cracked as the air tried and failed to cool them.

They waited for her.

A smile crept across Mal’s face.

The Serpents twitched, and her smile faltered.

The smell of sacrifice rose from the pyramid at 667 Sansilva. The serpents smelled it, and so did she.

Temoc. No other priest remained to make an offering. Alaxic had killed the others, one at a time down the decades, with poison, blade, and Craft. Temoc should have been the last. Somehow, he must have escaped, and reached the altar with a victim.

No matter. She would burn him from his place of power.

She flew down Sansilva toward pyramid, sacrifice, and victory. The Serpents slithered after her.

Sea was the word for world, rocking, rolling, turning. Sea, and Caleb floated upon it beneath a woman who laughed knives and kissed with steel. His pain floated up toward a sun like a burning ring in the heavens: a hollowed sun, a hallowed sun.

Caleb followed the pain up, toward the light.

He blinked at the gray arch of the crystal dome. His skull throbbed. So did his hand, his ribs, and the rest of his body.

Incense coiled in the air.

“Qet Sea-Lord, Exchilti Sun-Shaper, Seven Stone, receiver of offerings. The Twins gave of themselves when the sun their father died. Yes, they gave of themselves—suckled the Serpents on their blood and heart-flesh. In innocence they suckled them, and we give innocence in their memory.”

The words were High Quechal, spoken in the vocative of address to the divine, with a priest’s conjugations and declensions. The voice belonged to Temoc.

He remembered: the blow to his head, Temoc’s arm around Teo’s neck, the rage and fear in her eyes as she went limp.

His vision cleared.

Temoc bent over the altar, his back to Caleb. Shadow flowed silken over his skin, wreathed his body from head to foot in a darkness like priestly robes.

Mounds of copal incense burned at the altar’s head and foot. In one large hand Temoc held a hook-bladed obsidian knife.

Blood dripped from the knife’s tip, and from the gargoyle mouth in the altar’s side.

Caleb’s world chilled, and drained of color.

“Let me go!”

Teo. Still alive. Gods. Temoc was bleeding her before the sacrifice.

“Each age is called to give of itself,” Temoc chanted. “We fortunates are called to give our hearts.”

Caleb rose. His father rocked with priestly fervor. Teo lay spread-eagled on the altar, hands and feet locked in obsidian cuffs. She pulled against her bonds, and shouted obscenities. Blood ran from her left wrist down grooves in the glass, and dripped from the altar’s mouth into a coffee cup.

He searched for a weapon, but saw none. The King in Red was more partial to deep magic from before the dawn of time than to up-swords-and-sally-forth. Nothing useful in the office clutter, either. Books, few large enough to do damage. Chairs too heavy to lift or swing. Temoc had pushed the detritus of Kopil’s desk onto the floor to make room for Teo: papers, a coffee mug, the picture of Kopil and his dead lover.

The picture, in the heavy silver frame. Caleb hefted it, testing its weight and the sharpness of its corners.

Teo’s stream of invective paused for breath. Her head lolled to one side, and she saw Caleb. Her eyes widened.

Caleb swung the picture frame with both hands into the side of his father’s head.

“We have to go,” Sam said.

Balam shook himself back into the world. “Go where?”

“Anywhere. That pyramid over there, on the left. Those things are coming.” She peeked over the lip of the fountain, and ducked again. “This way.”

“The Serpents.”

“What the hells else do you think I might be talking about?”

“We’ll die. We can’t fight through the crowd like this.”

“They’re headed for RKC. We’re in the way. We move or melt.”

“We move and die.”

“I’m going.”

He shook his head. “Wait.”

“No.”

“Wait!” He put all his anger and his trainer’s authority into the shout. She paused halfway to her feet. “When they’re nearer, the crowd will thin out. Then we go. And hope.”

She sunk back onto her calves. The air around them swelled with heat.

Temoc staggered; Caleb struck again, harder, and the priest sank to his knees.

He jumped over his fallen father onto the altar.

“Caleb.” Teo was hoarse with shouting; Temoc had cut her shirt open, and drawn a charcoal cross at the base of her sternum to guide the knife. Wet streaks ran from the corners of her eyes. Blood pulsed from two precise cuts in her left wrist.

“I’m sorry.” He tore at the manacle on her left hand. “Gods, I’m sorry.” Scars flared on his arm. Obsidian pulled and snapped like taffy. He reached for her right.

An arm strong as an iron post circled his waist and flung him to the ground. He hit, skidded, and staggered to his feet.

Blood streamed from a deep cut on Temoc’s scalp, over his ear and down his neck; rivulets ran to his chin. “Caleb,” he said, kneeling to retrieve his knife. “Do not stand in my way.”

“Why are you doing this? We had a plan!”

“Your plan will not work.”

“You didn’t even try!”

“I do not need to try. Aquel and Achal hunger for life. There is only one way to feed them. This is better, surer, than I thought possible. An altar maid’s heart offered by a high priest atop Quechaltan, as of old.”

He had loosened Teo’s right manacle enough for her to pull both hands free. Blood gouted from her wrist. She clasped her palm over the vein, and tugged against the bonds on her feet, but they did not give.

“What would you have done if Teo didn’t come? Kill me?”

“Even had we barred her way, she would not have remained behind. She is well-suited for a sacrifice. Noble intentions, and noble blood, too, if I do not mistake her features. Unsullied by man. Strong of spirit, strong of heart. She must have sensed my plan, known her fate.”

Teo slumped to one side. Her arm and head hung over the altar’s edge, and her outstretched fingers brushed the floor.

Caleb rushed toward the altar, and once more Temoc threw him. Falling, Caleb dug his fingers into his father’s shadow, and it tore. Cold strength rushed into him. He spun in midair, and landed on his feet. Darkness clung to him like a halo, and his scars glowed from within.

A bright light rose to the south.

“See,” Temoc said. “The Serpents wake. They smell their meal. Our time is short. I will save this city, with you or in spite of you. I will take her heart.”

“I’ll stop you.”

Caleb ran forward; Temoc swung the dagger’s pommel around to where his son’s temple had been a moment before.

Caleb ducked, grabbed Temoc’s leg, and pulled up. Temoc sank his weight against Caleb’s pull, and did not fall. He kneed Caleb in the ribs, scattering shadows and knocking him to the floor.

The world swam as Caleb stood. He tried to raise his fists, but could not move his right arm.

“I don’t want you to lose,” Temoc said sadly. “You put up a good fight, for an untrained boy. You have shown courage. I’m proud of you.”

“Thanks.” Caleb panted. He heard something tear.

“But I can’t let you win. I hope you understand.”

“I wasn’t…” Exhale, inhale. Take the moment slow. “I wasn’t trying to win.” The dome darkened. He smelled ozone and the pits of hell. “I just had to distract you long enough for Teo to rip up the Heartstone contract.”

Temoc blinked. A cold gust of wind blew over them. Somewhere, heavy velvet curtains swayed.

Teo sat upright on the altar, holding a torn, bloodstained piece of parchment—one half in her right hand, the other half in her teeth. Sparks trailed from sundried silver glyphs. Her shirt hung from her shoulders. Blood leaked through the fingers she’d clasped over her vein. She spat out the piece of parchment, and it drifted to the floor, landing signature side up.

Incense flames guttered and died, and with them light and life.

The dark of deep space devoured all. There was no pyramid, no dome, only emptiness, and at its core, immense, astride the husks of dying stars, the King in Red. His eyes flared like the birth of the world.

He smiled.

“Temoc,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

47

As Mal advanced, the sky turned against her.

Wardens swarmed her on Couatl-back, black serpentine streaks striking with arcs of lightning, with silver spears and nets of green thread. Wingbeats and thunder thickened the air. A golden lasso caught Aquel’s neck; the Serpent hissed in frustration.

Of course the Wardens had come. Lapdogs of the King in Red and his brothers, murderers, servants who did not ask why they served, who let themselves be shaped into weapons against their own people. The Wardens had burned her parents in the Rising, had unleashed fire on screaming crowds. They had missed Mal in their cull, and now they realized their mistake.

She smiled, and her teeth were pointed as the Serpents’ fangs. Let them come.

Aquel pulsed sun-brilliant and threw a wave of plasma against the Warden who had caught her. The golden line snapped, and the Warden who threw it fell in smoking pieces to the ground.

Mal laughed, but in her joy an emerald net snagged her limbs, her mind. The world collapsed to a projection inside a nutshell where she hung suspended, bounded empress of space. She lived and died in the net, lived and died again, infant with every indrawn breath, growing, swelling to maturity with the filling of lungs, dwindling as she exhaled to a fragile age, arms and legs thin as mast-cord, skin taut and dry, dying to inhale and be born again.

No. She was more than this. She was rage, dying, and born again she was vengeance. The Wardens would not bind her.

Fire burst from Mal, and she was free. Spears of flame lanced in all directions, burning holes through pyramids, reducing Wardens to ash. She felt each death. She was Dresediel Lex. She was Quechal. They were her children, though twisted and deformed. She wept and moved on.

More Wardens rose against her. She broke the wings of their mounts and they fell. Some swooped low above the crowd, catching refugees and winging them to safety; these she did not strike down. Their kindness pleased her.

She approached the Canter’s Shell, and pointed toward it. Thin ropes of flame snaked from Aquel and Achal, surrounded the blue bourn and pressed in. The shell’s logic, its Craft, its mechanisms strained against the Serpents’ power, the weight of history and wrath older than gods.

At first she thought the shell might hold.

Then it began to crack.

Caleb closed his eyes to the billowing dark, and saw. The King in Red wore midnight like a halo. Temoc’s skin bled light. Around them, between them, space twisted and gave birth to fever dreams, knives and hooks, grasping claws, chains and webs of iron, barbed tentacles and hideous geometries.

“You will not stop me,” Temoc said. “The Gods lived before you, and when you die they will endure.”

“I died eighty years ago.” Kopil’s voice held no trace of humor. “Your gods and I have that much in common.”

A blade swung out of darkness toward Temoc’s throat, but blunted and burst to steam.

Wings spread from Temoc’s back. The hooks and chains glowed with his faith. White light spiraled through space between them.

“Interesting.” The King in Red cocked his head to one side. “You are not dead.”

“This pyramid was ours for a thousand years.” Chains wrapped Kopil’s robes. “You have perverted it, but it still answers to me.” Spears swung down to pierce the Craftsman, claws to tear and teeth to rend.

The King in Red snapped his fingers.

Spears and claws and teeth stopped. Time’s depths hummed.

Kopil stepped forward, feet tapping triple time on glass. Fire burned in his eye sockets. The hum deepened in volume and pitch.

Sweat shone alabaster on Temoc’s brow.

“This pyramid was yours,” Kopil said. “Now it’s mine.”

White spirals flickered, flared, and burned red in the night.

Darkness opened three thousand eyes. A fanged mouth gaped beneath their feet. The mouth had always been there, gnawing the world’s marrow, unseen. They were standing on its teeth.

Caleb’s eyes snapped open, and he fell, blind, shivering.

A cry of frustration split the shadows, and a cold corpse-wind rushed past his face.

Light returned, and the dome was empty save for Caleb, the King in Red, and Teo collapsed on the altar.

Caleb ran to her. Her chest rose and fell, rapid, shallow. Eyes darted behind closed lids. He tore off his jacket, pressed it against the cut in her arm. Blood everywhere. Blood on the altar, blood on the ground where she had reached for the contract.

If he hadn’t cut her free, the cuff would have kept pressure on the vein. If he hadn’t cut her free, she would have died at his father’s hand.

“Caleb.”

The King in Red’s voice.

He whirled. “Fix her.”

Red stars stared from a blank skull. “I can’t.”

“You can. She saved you. Do something.”

“She’s too weak. She has lost much blood. If I touch her with Craft, it will drain her.”

“Then heal me.”

“What?”

“Try to fix me. Do to me what you’d do to her.”

“You are not injured.”

“No time to explain. Do it.”

Shadows flowed from the King in Red, and plunged through Caleb’s skin. His heart slowed, his hands froze. Kopil’s Craft worked within him. His cuts and bruises and broken bones ached for healing, but he denied them. Pressure built, until his scars felt ready to burst from flesh.

He lifted his jacket from Teo’s arm, and touched her wound.

His light flowed into her, and her pain into him. Her wounds closed, faded, and vanished. Her breath deepened, her eyes fluttered, and she woke.

“Hi,” he said, and sagged against the stone.

“Hi,” she replied. “We have to stop seeing each other like this.”

Oven heat pressed Balam down. The road around him hovered silver as a mirage. The Serpents were so close now, rearing less than a stadium’s length behind the statue. Their coils slagged asphalt and concrete.

Sansilva was not yet empty. Much of the crowd had escaped, but those that remained were frantic and impassable. Knots of men and women clogged the sidewalks and open spaces, tumbling and brawling in their terror. Still, he saw the beginnings of a path through them, a road over broken glass to the safety of a bank pyramid. Uncertain, and shifting, but a path nonetheless. If they waited, another might present itself. Then again, maybe not.

Sam waited in a sprinter’s crouch. She remained, he thought, due more to concern for him than to belief he could actually judge the proper time to leave.

No sense straining her patience. Balam stood, and as one they ran.

Caleb could not stand on his own, but Teo and the King in Red helped him.

“What,” Kopil said, “is going on? Why has Heartstone turned against us? Why is Bay Station broken? Why is the city in tumult?” He produced a pipe from the pocket of his robe and lit it with the tip of his forefinger.

“Is my father—”

“Fled. He used some trick, some hidden means of escape built here when this place was still a temple.” Kopil took a long drag of tobacco and exhaled smoke. “He has spent the last thirty years running and hiding. He is skilled in that regard. Now. No delays. Tell me what has happened.”

“You remember Malina Kekapania?”

“From Heartstone. Your girlfriend.”

“Yes.” Of all the things to remember. “She attacked Bay Station, killed Qet, and she has awoken Aquel and Achal. She wants to chase Craftsmen out of Dresediel Lex. Alaxic planned it from the beginning.”

Kopil took a drag on his pipe and exhaled smoke. The red lights in his eye sockets blinked off, and on again. “I will tear satisfaction from his soul.”

“Too late. He’s dead. I think.”

“In which case I will content myself with his disciple.”

“Who has Aquel and Achal at her back. Can you defeat them?”

Kopil shook his head. “Our plan was to preserve their slumber.”

“You’ve killed gods.”

“You,” he said coldly, “do not understand the Serpents. The more they hunger, the more they burn. Any Craft I use against them will take from them, and increase their hunger. Only sacrifice can assuage them, but I will not give them sacrifice.”

Kopil’s eyes blazed. The dome overhead wavered and grew transparent. Angry orange cracks split the blue curve of the Canter’s Shell above and around the pyramid; to the south and east, along Sansilva Boulevard, rose two distorted columns of light taller than skyspires.

A ring of sun burned around the moon’s shadow. Beneath, the city lay broken. Small human shapes ran for cover.

Kopil drew on his pipe.

Nothing could stop the Serpents except a sacrifice. Caleb could have let Temoc do it: feign unconsciousness until the blade descended.

Teo gripped his hand, and he felt sick.

The cracks in the Canter’s Shell widened, and the surface of the sun leaked through.

“So that’s it?” Teo asked. “She wins?”

“No,” Kopil said. Wind rose atop the pyramid, bearing the dry scent of a thousand years of dead sand. The King in Red reared to his full height. The surface of his skull shone. One hand held a curving knife of lightning, and the other crackled with black flame. “Ms. Kekapania holds the Twin Serpents in thrall. If she dies, they will lack direction, and perhaps they can be contained.”

“She’ll kill you.”

“I died a long time ago. I have the might of RKC at my disposal—my own Craft, that of the Board, and beyond them the millions who live in this city. She has weakened us, but we remain strong.”

“The last time someone used the Serpents as a weapon, they broke this continent in half.”

“In the God Wars, I tore space and time asunder. I made a crack in the world.” The King in Red walked toward the pyramid’s edge. Air rippled as he moved. His power pressed against the skin of reality. “We shall see which of us is the more fearsome.”

Caleb caught Kopil’s sleeve. He did not turn or seem to notice. “If you fight her, no matter who wins, the city will lose. I know you’re angry. But this isn’t the way.”

“Do you have an alternative?”

Sacrifice, Temoc said.

“I do.”

The shell shattered into mathematical shards. Each spinning splinter reflected the broken, burning city. An eclipse chill blew through the cracks, ruffling Caleb’s hair and Teo’s shirt. Kopil’s robes flared like wings.

Balam felt rather than heard the shell break, as if every joint in his body had popped at once. He pressed on, pounding through the pain, eyes blind to all but their path—until Sam, behind him, shouted: “Stop!”

He looked back, looked up, looked everywhere at once, and saw a spinning blue curve, three hundred feet on a side, slice through the pyramid ahead as if hundreds of years of stone and steel had never existed. The blue boiled away in an instant, but falling, it scooped out a ten-story section of pyramid, and the floors above strained, creaked, collapsed in a rain of steel and spark and tortured metal.

Sam grabbed his arm again, and pulled, and following her he fled back toward the fire.

Mal laughed when the Canter’s Shell shattered, and the Serpents laughed with her. She understood Allesandre’s madness now. Sanity was the gap between perception and desire, and that gap had closed. The Serpents’ power belonged to her: millennia of sacrifice congealed into will and flame. What could she imagine that she could not create? What could she hate that she could not destroy?

Atop the pyramid stood a figure in red.

She remembered the taste of Kopil’s teeth, when they exchanged the traitor’s kiss.

How to break him? Slowly or swiftly? A simple rush of plasma, or dismemberment—or should she split his body atom from atom?

As she pondered, a weight struck her from behind.

“Give me souls. All the souls you can spare.”

“In exchange for what?”

“For nothing. I need you to give them freely. No strings attached, no contract, no consideration.”

“The Craft doesn’t work that way. I can’t give you something without taking.”

“Look.” He removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. The scars on his arms glowed. “This is how I helped Teo. I don’t have any Craft of my own, but I can use others’ power, and pay the price myself. The old priests bore the gods’ power with these scars, worked miracles with them. My father still does. Maybe I can do the same: give the Serpents power without taking anything in return.”

“You’ll kill yourself.”

“Maybe.”

“I’m no god.”

“And I’m no priest. But we’re the closest we have.”

Mal spun, searching for her adversary, but the skies seemed empty. Again she heard leathery wingbeats, and claws tore into her back; she responded with a wild jet of fire. A colorless blur crossed the corner of her eye. She spun after it, but saw nothing.

She summoned a whirlwind that swept several hundred pounds of sand from a nearby construction site into the air around her.

A shape flew through the dust: a Couatl, with a woman crouched on its back, medium height, with broad shoulders and thick arms and a Warden’s smooth visage.

Mal recognized her, in the instant before the woman’s cloak adjusted to the dust in the air and she disappeared again.

“Hello, Four.”

The lights in Kopil’s eye sockets dimmed. “So, how is this done? I’ve never had a priest before.”

“Give me your blessing, and your power. I’ll take it from there.”

The King in Red raised one skeletal hand, and placed his palm on Caleb’s forehead. The bones of his fingers shook.

Caleb dissolved in light.

Mal sent waves of lava in all directions, roped the sky with lightning; Four and her Couatl rode the waves, and circled to safety. The Serpents struck, but their fanged mouths closed on air.

Four pressed her assault with spear and talon and arrow, with discus and net of despair. The attacks did not wound Mal, but they broke her focus.

Mal swept the sky above her with fire, and heard the Couatl turn sharply and beat away toward the ocean. Not dead, but wounded at least. She returned her gaze to the pyramid. A fountain of light danced on its summit.

She did not notice the whistle of air overhead, but she did notice when a pair of hands closed around her neck.

Balam and Sam ran around the burning corpse of a fallen Couatl, down the few remaining ribbons of intact road. The broken Canter’s Shell had scored trenches several hundred feet deep into Sansilva and the pyramid parking lot. They searched for a path through the maze. Steel fell around them, and glass and molten wires and chips of stone.

Sam skidded to a halt: the asphalt ahead had buckled up in the shell-shard’s wake. What had seemed a straight road was actually the lip of a deep trench.

Behind them towered the Serpents.

“We can go back,” Balam shouted.

Sam didn’t hear him. She had turned to the pyramid’s peak.

Souls flooded Caleb, a wash of experience and broken memory: a lover’s kiss ringside in the swell of victory, a dockhand’s sweat after a hard night on the pier, the glint of a butcher’s knife in motion, and the shine in a glass of whiskey as a bartender drew off a shot.

Playing poker he had felt other souls collapse into his own, a few at a time. He could not count how many joined him in those few seconds’ rush. Lives swelled him and burst his skin.

The world fluoresced and vibrated. Dresediel Lex was a tapestry of life, debt, ownership, dedication, faith, investment. Multicolored light knotted around the fluttering shadow of Kopil’s spirit. Teo’s shadow was larger, her bonds fewer: to her gallery, to her apartment, to Sam.

To him.

“Caleb,” she said, and he wondered what she saw when she looked at him.

“I’m here.” Beneath his voice he heard other voices: the chorus that now comprised him.

She stepped forward, hugged him fiercely, and said: “Go all in.”

“That’s the plan.”

She let go. “And come back.”

He turned from her, to Kopil, to the Serpents, and stepped off the pyramid’s edge into empty air.

“We have to get out of here.” Balam grabbed for her shoulder, but she shook her head, and pointed to the sky.

“Watch.”

Mal struck Four with diamond-tipped fingers, but the Warden squeezed harder. Her silver mask pressed smooth and slick against Mal’s ear. “Can’t stab you,” Four said through her teeth. “Can’t cut you. But you can still die.”

She twisted Mal’s neck, which did not break. The Serpents’ power coursed through her. She was their vessel, or they were hers; her bones were metal and her nerves flame. But Mal had not yet lost the habit of breathing. When Four squeezed her windpipe, she gasped for air, and found none.

Spots and sparks swam across her vision.

She could burn Four to ash, but doing so she might burn herself. A foolish way to die.

As foolish as being strangled by a person you can’t even see?

Oh.

Yes.

The world contracted to a long thin tunnel. She placed her hand on Four’s arm, and pulled.

The sky bore Caleb’s weight. Scars on his ankles and the soles of his feet woke to grip the air.

He advanced.

Mal pulled, not at Four, but at the Craft that bent light through the air around her. Invisibility required power, and that power came from somewhere. The most likely source was Four herself.

Mal drank deep.

Her vision dwindled to a single gray spot. Too late.

No.

Four’s grip slackened. Her legs loosed. Mal heard her adversary groan.

Air sweet as wine filled her lungs.

She caught the Warden by the arm before she fell.

Four’s jacket smoked in Mal’s grip. Effortlessly, she pulled the Warden up, took her throat in one hand, and bared her teeth. Four struggled, weak. Her flesh burned, seared, smoked. The face beneath her mask was round, with broad eyes—a Quechal face.

Shame.

“Let her go, Mal.”

She looked up, and blinked away a wash of light.

Mal had changed.

Her dusky skin was molten stone, her hair a field of ebon flame. Her eyes were radiant jet. Beside her hovered the leather bag containing Qet Sea-Lord’s heart.

“Let her go.”

She shrugged, and dropped Four.

The Warden tumbled through empty air. Caleb did not move to help her; after a few flailing seconds, her Couatl arrived, grabbed her in its talons, and flew to safety.

He met Mal’s gaze.

“You caught me,” she said at last.

“You look surprised.”

“Surprised, and glad.” The Serpents’ mouths moved in time with hers. He saw faces in the diamonds that lined their throats: Quechal faces, painted, pierced, tattooed, plain, agonized or rapturous or simply watching. “I thought you might be dead.”

“I’m not.”

“I hoped that was true,” she said, and tilted her head to one side. The Serpents echoed her movement. “There’s something different about you. You’ve picked up a halo, and your scars are live.”

“There’s something different about you, too.”

“Yes.” She laughed. “I suppose there is.”

“You don’t have to go through with this.”

“I’m an arrow in flight.”

“Arrows don’t have a choice. People do.”

“What choice?” She smiled, sad, distant. “My choices were made twenty years ago, when my parents died. Or sixty years ago, at Liberation. Or earlier than that. The world’s tossed in bad dreams. Someone has to wake it up.”

“There are other ways.”

“Not for me.” She approached. The Serpents shifted to flank him. Three mouths moved in tandem. Who was the speaker, and who the puppet? “You don’t have to fight me.”

“I do.”

“I’m sorry.” She reached for his face. The heat of her touch seared his cheek, boiled his skin. He should have recoiled, but did not.

He wanted to take her in his arms, to shrivel to ash, to kiss her with melting lips.

“You don’t have a chance. Temoc stopped his sacrifice.”

“I know. I kept him from killing my friend.”

“You’re too sentimental for your own good.” Her eyes were an ocean, luminous. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I don’t want to hurt you, either,” he said, and gave her his soul.

The heart is the spirit’s anchor, Temoc had said. Aquel and Achal hungered not for flesh, but for Quechal souls.

When Caleb bet in a poker game, a piece of him flowed into the game, into the goddess. Each player gave her a part of himself, and at game’s end she divided her favor among them according to their victories and defeats.

What if the goddess outlasted the game? What if she stretched through centuries, beyond any purpose she might once have served?

Living, she would grow hungry.

Perhaps the myth was true. Perhaps the Serpents existed before the Hero Twins found them, great beasts that broke the world with their madness. Perhaps not. Perhaps the Quechal threw two sacrifices into the heart of a volcano, and the sacrifices endured, and received sacrifices in turn. They clutched one another in the heat of their dying, and survived.

Caleb gave his soul to Mal, and through her, to the Serpents—his soul, and the souls he bore, so many that they carried him on a flood. There was no bargain, no quid pro quo. He streamed into Aquel and Achal, and became more.

In their diamond mouths, in their gleaming teeth, in their molten hearts, they received him. All were received. All lived. No, not lived—all endured, sleeping through centuries: every sacrifice, every victim, caught and one with the Serpents.

He felt the stone knife plunge into his chest ten thousand times, and ten thousand times his death cry rose over the chants of the priests, in High and Low Quechal and languages older still. The dying souls rose with their hearts, dreaming last dreams of a mother’s smile, of a coyote’s laugh at nighttime, a mug of chocolate, a victory dance, a lover’s embrace. Dreams fell into the Serpents’ mouths, and the Serpents ate them, and became them. Soul, accreted onto soul, accreted onto soul, down millennia.

When the sun died, the Hero Twins gave their hearts to the Serpents, became one with them, to save the world.

The Quechal were the Serpents.

The Serpents were Quechal.

Caleb was a thousand, a hundred thousand. He was the smile of Kopil’s lover on Sansilva Boulevard beside the pyramid of the Sun.

Somewhere, he heard Mal scream.

You can’t sacrifice other people anymore.

You have to sacrifice yourself.

Serpentine thoughts twined and spun around him, minds linking to minds. Aquel and Achal joined with the souls he had borne. Their hunger ebbed. He opened four immense eyes and stared out on a crystal world.

Mal burned within him, around him.

“Stay with me.”

She spoke through his mind, through all their minds. Voices in forgotten tongues cried out at her touch.

“The murderers, the Craftsmen, the rulers of this world, they tempt you with death, satiety and sleep. They will destroy this planet, and all life with it, unless we stand against them.”

She called to him, and he ached to follow her. He burned for her, with her, through her. His heat radiated from her skin, his lightning arced between her teeth.

Three thousand years of Quechal sacrifice lived in the Serpents. Dead generations woke to burn, to melt and mold and reforge. They were the world’s last defense, its guardians. Death bowed to their fangs.

“Fight,” she said. “Do not give in. Do not sleep. Victory is near. See our triumph.”

The Serpents’ rage flowered as she called, and flowed along channels she prepared. They would not sleep. She was too strong.

But Caleb could use her strength.

Months ago, drawing pictures on his skin in her tent, she had told him: battles of Craft are fought on many fronts. The world is an argument, and there are many ways to win or lose.

He could not fight Mal with her hooks caught in his mind. When she pulled, he would follow.

But he could follow in the manner he chose.

See, he echoed her, a whisper in the Serpents’ minds.

Towering over Dresediel Lex, they saw.

The city lay broken around them.

Glass ran like water down Sansilva Boulevard, and blood melted into steam.

There were old souls within the fire, so ancient they spoke in song and rhyme. They did not recognize Dresediel Lex. To them it was a shadow on a cave wall, an echo, a story, a dream.

But the new souls, the ones Caleb brought, they knew. Sun-baked streets wavering with summer heat. Surf rolling against a cold beach at dawn. Dark corners in well-lit bars where a man could drink in peace. Summer nights when skyspires shone with echoed starlight.

Tollan, surly and pacing with her whiskey at midday. Mick, his desk hung with mementos of faded glory. Shannon, biding time with cards in the Skittersill and dreaming of the day when she could dive again off rooftops. Kopil, who broke gods to avenge his dead love. Teo, laughing and drinking, dancing in aisles and toasting with champagne.

Below, on the broken boulevard, he saw Balam, and Sam, staring up, waiting, scared, and hopeful.

All of these, and more. Millions more.

“Make it new,” Mal said. “Burn it clean.”

The city has never been clean, answered voices old and young. Nor has the world. The people were never clean. But they are worth defending.

Mal pulled at the Serpents’ minds with ropes of Craft, and the Serpents pulled back. Her Craft strained, and snapped.

She flared like a star in the sky, and went out.

The ground gaped beneath him.

Caleb fell.