Two Serpents Rise

EPILOGUE

Caleb woke in a cold hospital room, under cotton sheets and an unfamiliar ceiling.

The world was flat monochrome. Bandages swaddled the right side of his body. A bell and a parchment envelope rested on the bedside table. He ignored the bell, and reached for the envelope. Pain called to him from the bottom of a deep narcotic well.

The envelope bore his name in an italic hand. It held a folded note and a shark’s tooth pendant.

The note read:

If you wake, you will be recovered enough for the healing to begin. Ring the bell.

The rest of your clothing burned. The tooth remained. Perhaps it will remind you.

No signature except a death’s head drawn in crimson ink. Of what the tooth was meant to remind him, the note did not say.

He rang the bell.

Three weeks later, Caleb stood at the end of Monicola Pier, looking west. He wore a black suit and a white shirt, and walked with crutches.

The merry-go-round wheeled. Children played ullamal by the seashore. A pall hung over the city, the nurses had said. A palpable fear. He couldn’t feel it.

He couldn’t feel much.

Soul fatigue, they called his condition in Kathic; among themselves the doctors used a longer Telomiri name. When the soul’s been too often emptied and expanded, it recovers slowly. He was near dead when they found him, empty of soulstuff, apperception broken. He didn’t know what that meant, and no one had given him a decent answer. Not quite asleep, not quite dead. A little of both. Soulstuff from his savings had revived him, and he woke with vague memories of fire, of Mal, of a battle within the Serpents. Perhaps a part of him survived inside them, inside the world, slumbering and waiting to wake again. This was his afterlife—this, or else the flame.

Behind him the city’s masses scrambled in the shadow of broken buildings. Cranes rose. Construction crews shouted from scaffolding. Airbuses slid by silent overhead.

He removed the shark’s tooth from around his neck, and held it out over the water.

Mal was gone. The Wardens found no trace of her body. Of course not. The Serpents’ heat had burned her to vapor.

The tooth pointed down into green-black ocean. Waves rippled his reflection, and the burn scar on his cheek seemed to disappear. He stared off the end of the pier toward the horizon, but saw no light there, not even sunset.

Bay Station crouched still at the harbor’s mouth. He could almost hear the beating of Qet Sea-Lord’s restored heart.

“Good-bye, Mal” he said.

The amulet twitched in his hand, and spun, pointing inland, south and west.

He dropped it into the ocean, and left.

Two days later, Caleb visited Andrej’s in the afternoon. The bar had long since recovered. The stone railing and the doors Mal melted were easily replaced. Less so the white and black marble tiles, which the heat of her flame had fused and swirled to mottled gray.

The band played, and he tried not to think about the last time he had visited Andrej’s around sunset.

He walked with the aid of crutches to a table by the mended bannister. From Four he’d learned the story of his survival—she’d swooped in on Couatl-back to catch him, but broke his bones in the rescue. His plaster cast scraped the floor. He leaned his crutches against the railing, and lowered himself into a chair.

The sun declined toward ocean. Rooftops and skyspires reflected and refracted tawny light. Tendrils trailed from the spires to the city: pulleys, block and tackle, raising steel girders and glass plates to repair crews in the buildings’ upper floors. Craning his neck over the rail, Caleb could see road workers repaving Sansilva Boulevard.

A waitress came by, and he ordered a whiskey and water, and savored it, lost in thought.

Teo arrived a little before five, and sat beside him with her drink.

“Hey.”

He sipped whiskey, felt it burn in his throat, and turned to her with a weary smile. “Hey. You got my letter.”

“I was waiting for it.”

“And you came.”

“Of course I did. You look.” He wondered what she would say next. Wan? Bruised? Shrunken? “Better than you did in the hospital. How are you feeling?”

“Used up.” He tapped his cast, propped on a chair. Then he touched his ribs, and his gloved right hand, and the side of his temple. “Hollowed out. The soul doesn’t fit the flesh.”

“You should have saved more. Your account with RKC barely held enough to keep you alive. Couldn’t you have kept some of that soulstuff back?”

“The Serpents needed a whole person, a real sacrifice to give the rest of the soulstuff shape.”

“That was you. The whole person, sacrificed.”

“Yes.”

“So who am I talking with now?”

“Still me. At least, that’s my opinion. Same body, same brain, a transfusion of my own stored soul to replace what I lost. Philosophers might argue. I don’t know.”

Teo drank away that line of inquiry. “If you were all they needed, why not go in alone? Why take power from the King in Red?”

“Aquel and Achal were hungry. One soul might not have satisfied them. We needed to feed the Serpents enough to keep them asleep for centuries. A mass sacrifice, concentrated in one person.”

She looked him in the eyes, and he sensed the question forming: did you expect to die? She did not ask it, which spared him the need to answer.

With a grimace, he pointed to crutches and cast. “Now I’m stuck healing the old-fashioned way. At least I’m drawing sick pay.”

She waited for him to say more. When he didn’t, she filled the silence. “Sam’s fine, by the way. Burned her arm, twisted her knee in the earthquakes, but she’s recovered faster than you.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“She’s lucky. Artists.” She pronounced the word like an expletive. “She deserved worse, running off like she did.”

“Don’t say that.”

A crane lowered a steel girder onto the pyramid opposite. Welding sparks cascaded down the structure’s side. “Any word of Mal? Or Temoc?” She hesitated before saying his name.

He drank, and thought about the amulet. “Temoc hasn’t shown himself since the eclipse, to me or anyone. But he won’t stay gone forever.”

“Good,” Teo said. “When he returns, someone will make him pay.”

“Good luck. My father is debt resistant.”

Sparks fell like stars.

“It’s boring without you. I go to Muerte on my own. A banker tried to hit on me the other day. I told her I already had a girlfriend. Tollan keeps asking when you’ll come back.”

He checked his watch, and returned it to his jacket pocket. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

“You’re quitting.”

“Yes.”

“What will you do?”

He lifted his leg from the chair. “Hold on. I don’t want to have to do this twice.”

“Twice? Who else do you expect?”

“Me,” Kopil said from behind her.

Teo jumped to her feet. The King in Red looked the same as ever: forbidding, crimson, skeletal.

“Good afternoon, sir,” Caleb said, and touched his cast again. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t stand.”

Kopil crooked a finger. A nearby chair shuddered to life and walked over to him with groans of tortured steel. He sat. Teo shifted from foot to foot, then sat herself. Caleb focused on his drink.

“I have come for your answer,” said the King in Red.

“Am I missing something?” Teo asked.

“After he woke, I offered Mister Altemoc a promotion to senior risk manager at Red King Consolidated. He has demonstrated his worth in a crisis.”

“That,” Teo said, “is an understatement.”

“I don’t think so,” Caleb replied, and raised one hand against objections. “I stumbled into Mal’s plot. I barely survived, and I stopped her by luck.”

“You were effective. RKC values effectiveness.”

“I know.” Caleb sipped his whiskey. “That’s why I hope you’ll agree to be my first sponsor.”

Kopil blinked. “What?”

Teo leaned against the table, face grave, and listened.

“The God Wars aren’t over,” Caleb said.

“I know several gods who would disagree,” Kopil said, “were they alive to do so.”

“The God Wars never ended on this continent, because nobody signed a peace. The Iskari have a peace, and the Shining Empire, but here we’ve kept up the war in silence. Craftsmen score victory after victory, but gods are patient. Ideas don’t die easily. True believers pass faith, and anger, to new generations.”

Kopil scraped a finger bone across the table surface. Iron rusted and stone blackened at his touch. “And each time they rise up, we will defeat them. We will fight until the sun burns to a cinder, and then we will fight among the stars.”

“We won’t last that long.” Caleb pointed north, past mountains and orange groves, toward Seven Leaf Lake eight hundred miles away. “This city has doubled in size in the last decade, and will double again in the next. The Craft makes Dresediel Lex possible: we provide water, food, and shelter. But use the Craft to farm, and the soil dies. Use the Craft to drill wells, and the land itself sinks. We went hundreds of miles north to steal water from Seven Leaf Lake, and we’ll drain that dry before long. What’s next? War with Regis, Shikaw, or Central Kath? War with Alt Coulumb? Craftsmen against Craftsmen? If you thought the God Wars were bad, just wait. This isn’t just our problem. It’s the world’s problem.”

“Our Craft will improve,” Kopil said.

“It won’t, not the way we hope, not for a long time. The Craft takes as it gives. You can’t heal the land with something like that, any more than you could destroy the Serpents. It only makes the problem worse.”

“You sound like a theist.” In the Deathless King’s voice Caleb heard breaking stone. “Or like your father.”

Caleb’s hands did not shake. He met the King in Red’s gaze, and did not look away. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it. The old ways are gone, but we need peace with the gods. Their powers don’t drain and break the land. They can fulfill their function, and let the world of Craft fulfill its own. A partnership. The pantheons regain power and respectability. The city, the world, gets a new lease on life. People like Mal, like my father, like Alaxic and the True Quechal, lose the authority that fear and oppression gives them.”

Kopil scraped a second trench in the stone.

“I’m not a theist, sir. But think about the Serpents. We sacrificed to them for three thousand years, maybe more, because that was how we always conceived of our relationship. We never tried a different approach. That’s changed now. I changed it. I think I can do more. I can use power, your power, to fix the world, piece by piece.”

“You’re proposing your own Concern.”

“I don’t know what to call it. Something between a Concern and a holy order. We’ll take soulstuff from Concerns like RKC and use it to build bridges with the gods. Maybe we can even use it directly, to heal the soil, repair a water table, stop a war.”

“You’re not a Craftsman. You’ve never built a Concern. You have little experience, and no skill.”

“We’ll find Craftsmen. Specialists. And they’ll come to us. People understand this problem, even if they try to ignore it. When we give them a chance to help, they will. The business side, relationship building, all that—you’re right, it’s not my strength. That’s why I hope Teo will take a leave of absence and help me.” He was gratified to see her eyes widen in surprise, and interest.

“I’d have to think about it,” she said, with a note of wonder—at the concept, he hoped, not her own agreement. She glanced from the King in Red beside her, back to Caleb. “It sounds … fascinating. Worth a try.”

Kopil interlaced his fingers. Bone clicked against bone.

Caleb sat, and the city rebuilt itself behind him. Re-raise. “Sir. I’m not asking for much. Help. Advice. Support. The risks are too high for you to turn me away. We survived this battle, barely, but there’s always another. We can’t just crush every rebel who wants to sacrifice someone on that altar. We need to build a world where nobody needs to sacrifice. A world that will survive longer than the few more decades we can eke out, the way we’re going.”

Kopil bowed his head. “Help. Advice. Support.”

“And power. Give me soulstuff, without precondition. Like before.”

Two points of flame met Caleb’s gaze. “To heal the world.”

“Yes.”

“Where would you start?”

Screams beneath smooth water. “Seven Leaf Lake.”

The band played jazz into twilight. The future unrolled like a strip of parchment, so long it narrowed to a point at the horizon. Kopil inhaled over his teeth, though he had no lungs. “Have you thought of a name?”

“No.”

“Choose one that rolls off the tongue. Red King Consolidated was a mistake—monolithic, impersonal. How about the Twin Serpents Group? Catchy, and there’s a story behind it. People like stories.”

“I’ll think it over.”

Kopil extended his hand. “Do what you claim you can, Caleb Altemoc. If you don’t succeed, you’ll probably die.”

“It won’t come to that, sir,” Caleb said.

Salt breeze from the Pax ruffled his hair. The city surrounded him: music from Andrej’s band, muffled conversation from the bar, cries of construction workers on the pyramid across the way.

He took the King in Red’s hand.

Power struck him, filled him, shone through his scars. The long scroll of history began to write itself.

He did not know what he was doing. But sometimes, when you didn’t know, you had to bluff.

He looked Kopil in the eye and grinned.