The Ruin of Angels--A Novel of the Craft Sequence

by Max Gladstone

  When the vents cycled open, Zeddig led the way—slid out between the enormous blades, spaced just wide enough for an athletic woman to squeeze through if she didn’t breathe too deep, and, squinting against the light, reached back to help Ley and Raymet along. Ley didn’t need help; Raymet’s leg caught in a cable, and she cursed—the sludge rush tailed off to a trickle before she could work her foot clear. She rolled through just as the vents snapped shut. Gal offered Raymet a hand up, and she almost accepted, then pulled back, looked away and stood, slapping dust off her overalls, embarrassed.

  Freight arrival at the Junction was a glorious screaming mess, as union men and women in brown jumpsuits (just like those Raymet had found for the crew) swarmed over colossal freight cars. Enormous winches pulled the train forward car by car, and car by car each slick black lozenge split, petaled open, and vented its insulation into the slough tunnels. Cranes swung into position, unloading containers onto waiting flatbeds. Everyone had a job in that first half hour of arrival, every job required everyone’s full attention, and a few delvers (with client) could sneak through if they walked fast and looked like they meant business. Zeddig, playing foreman, shoved Gal in the shoulder. Raymet approximated a scurry. “Come on, come on.” She almost pushed Ley, but Ley glared back over her shoulder and Zeddig thought better of it.

  Overhead was the only place one could linger while the trains unloaded, so Zeddig led them to the arch houses—massive jawed structures built over the track, from which high-speed pulleys could unload each flatbed from the top while lesser cranes and liftsuits worked from the side. Fifteen stories up the arch house made for a lot of ladder to climb, but you got one hell of a view: the Junction an anthill kicked over, brown jumpsuited ants and their machines carrying cargo containers rather than eggs to market rather than to safety. North of the Junction’s fortress walls, flatbed elevators bore cargo downhill to port, where the Treasure Fleet waited to fill its wrong-angled holds with the bounty of the Gleb.

  This had been a good run, by Waste freight standards: only one car missing, only one container breached. Two million thaums of necromantic earths gone forever—maybe more. Prices were up this week.

  At the end of the climb Zeddig collapsed in the sunlight on the arch house roof. Shadow passed over her: Ley, staring down on the city, taut as drumskin. Zeddig sat up, and looked for Gal—she lay beside the ladder, one hand down, helping Raymet up the last few rungs. Raymet stumbled onto the roof, and slipped—but Gal caught her, and lowered her onto the roof, where she sprawled, breathing fast. Gal sat back on her calves, smooth, sweatless, watching Raymet with an angel’s concern; she touched her side.

  “I’m okay,” Raymet said, eyes still screwed shut. “There’s just too much here out here.”

  The here spread north and downslope to the port and the beachfront resorts, and south past the airport to the shield wall, warded and silvery-black.

  “Would you like water?” Gal asked, as if offering high tea.

  Raymet groped in the vague direction of her legs. Gal unslung the water skin from her shoulder; Raymet took a small sip, then forced herself, not quite upright, but to her knees at least. “Okay,” she said. Gal offered her hand again; this time Raymet let the other woman draw her to her feet.

  “Don’t look at the city,” Gal said. “Focus on the floor. Or on me.”

  Raymet kept her eye on their meshed hands, as Gal led her to Zeddig’s side. “I hope this demonstration’s worth it.”

  Ley must have heard the accusation there, but she shrugged it off. “We could have tried this in the steam tunnels. Or in your house.”

  “You can lead the Wreckers to your own house, if you like.” Raymet glared at Ley. “I don’t mind a field trip. But if we did all this for nothing . . .”

  “Not nothing.” Ley reached into her jumpsuit, and drew her knife. Its blue outlines shone through her hand, as if she held a fire.

  Raymet drew back. Zeddig sat up and watched, wary. Gal didn’t move. One eyebrow twitched up, at most.

  “Ley,” Zeddig said.

  “Do you trust me?”

  Zeddig wished she knew.

  Ley gripped one of the blade’s three edges between thumb and forefinger, bit her lower lip—Zeddig’s breath caught like it always had when she made that face, not quite worried, groping around the edges of a problem or an orgasm—and peeled the knife apart. She did the same with each of the blade’s three edges, until she held the knife by the handle alone—and then she let the handle go. The rings and rays that had been the handle extended and realigned, forming a shape Zeddig lacked the math to call its proper name, an ever-branching spiderweb—each ray spread small sharp twigs and leaves, only each leaf’s edge was somehow the whole spiderweb itself, spinning spinning spinning further down to the center, where a wet red sphere glistened. The web hovered between them, growing, until its furthest substrands bloomed about a meter out from the blood.

  It was beautiful. Terrible. Terrifying. Sexy. Scary. No single word in Talbeg, Kathic, or Iskari did it justice. “What is that?” She reached for the thing, and where her hand approached, the blue lines burned gold.

  “Art,” Ley said.

  “What does it do?”

  “Pull you in,” she said. “Touch it. Just—don’t, really don’t, stroke the lines, or press against them. They’re very . . . thin? Sharp?”

  Zeddig did. Raymet, brow furrowed, followed suit. Gal pinched one of the web-leaves. Ley took hold of an inner ring.

  Gold spread from their fingers through the web. The design did not move, or else it had never stopped moving—spreading, turning, wheels within wheels spun against one another to spread even more filigree of wheels within wheels within wheels, and she—

  slipped

  —and was smaller than she should have been, her heart racing against the iron bars of her ribs, every muscle tight, crushed on all sides by the enormity of the horizon—

  —and was still, and large, and calm, and, wondering, heard her own voice say, “keep still”—

  —and was—something—she slid through, unable to find purchase, furious—

  —and returned, gasping, unsteady, to her self.

  “What?” was the first word she found, and the second.

  Ley, across from her, adjusted the innermost ring of the web. “Sorry, overdid it—there. You can let go now.”

  She did. And she shivered.

  The dead city spread below them.

  They stood on a suggestion, a ghost of solid air, the memory of a warehouse that never existed here. Below them lay Alikand, torn, shattered, frozen, bleeding light. Gods screamed in the sky. Armies wrestled freezing armies in the streets. Bloody clouds spiraled overhead, drawing ever inward like a cyclone toward the Wound, toward the library she could barely stand to behold, where, in a frozen instant of time, Maestre Gerhardt stood dying. There were cracks in the clouds, and many-faceted eyes stared through.

  This was her great-grandmother’s city, in ruins. No one living had seen it whole, not even Aman, though Aman learned her art from those who had. Alikand, the wonder of the world, who sheltered infant Craftsmen and was broken in return. That blackened crater where a skeleton in an enormous metal suit had thrust her fist through an angel’s chest to tear free its crystal heart, that was Kisbey Market, where chefs in training cooked for the poor, and the university laid feasts on cross-quarter days. The seven-winged mansion there on the western ridge, that should be the Ko family estate, the libraries licked with frozen flames. These icy ruins were museums. Those, schools. That, a hospital.

  She wept.

  She had seen all this before, but always with a mission: some volume or artifact to rescue, some death to record. This was a crime confronting did not expunge.

  She wept, but her tears did not freeze.

  Zeddig shivered in her jumpsuit. Her fingers numbed against the gold web. But she should not be merely cold—she should be dying. Yet her breath barely steamed.

  “What is this?”
<
br />   Ley wasn’t even looking at the city. She grinned, as unforced an expression as Zeddig had ever seen on her face. “When you delve, you reject one city, and embrace another—binding yourself by its rules. Stands to reason you could create a different community, a different city, with different rules. That’s where art comes in: an audience is a community based around the art. Once I learned delving, thanks to you, I could build a work to bring viewers into a community that interacted with the dead city, without entering it. Identity slippage is a side effect—sorry. It’s not perfect, but here we are. You get me into Altus, and I’ll give you the blade.”

  Fierce amber wheels turned in Ley’s eyes.

  “Stop it,” Zeddig said.

  “Seen enough?”

  Zeddig’s throat was too tight, and she couldn’t breathe, and a red layer overlay the city. Her city. The city that should have been hers. Below, in a train station that didn’t exist, a woman screamed. “Stop it, damn you.”

  The web snapped shut, the world inverted, and they stood above Gavreaux Junction and the Authority tower rose obscene to the north and east where the Library had once been, and Ley reached for her, that kicked-puppy expression on her face, what did I do wrong. Zeddig pulled back. Ice crystals melted on her skin. Below, winches worked and the kicked ant farm writhed and foul almost-living gunk gushed through pipes, and scavenger lice lurked and waited to eat. The sun burned—not her sun, no, the sun some Iskari motherfuckers thought should shine here, because this was the Gleb, wasn’t it, this was a desert, that’s where these people lived—curses caught in her throat and Ley needed answers and Zeddig had none to give.

  “Zeddig—”

  She’d turned away, so she didn’t see whether Gal or Raymet stopped Ley from saying more. But it was Raymet who told the big lie. “It’s okay.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  KAI CREPT INTO THE stained glass warehouse.

  She did not fear discovery. She had an appointment. The address Fontaine gave her led to a dangerously hip foreigner enclave west of Sauga’s, the kind of place where twenty-year-old guidebooks would have cautioned visitors against walking alone at night, but which had since embraced a coffee shop– and performance space–based economy. From outside, the warehouse looked abandoned by the west waterfront’s enhippening, windows broken, sign defaced with graffiti, an investment property whose investors had not yet cashed in. But when she passed through the empty front office—a wolf spider scuttled across the secretary’s desk—and stared into the bare open space beyond, she did not announce herself. She entered softly, because she did not want to disturb the colors.

  High dirty windows begrudged sunlight entrance to a warehouse bare of shelves and forklifts and hand carts. The chamber should have been dim, but wasn’t. Mirrors and prisms, some mounted, others pendant from thin steel cables that crisscrossed the vastness, broke and bent the light to majesties.

  Some of the stained glass was new. Kai had only seen the stuff antique, in Iskari or Telomeri churches, dragons and star kraken and mountain-sized spiders formed pane by monochrome pane. Fresh, it dazzled. Shards hung, some meters on a side, others no larger than Kai’s smallest fingernail, recasting the light in stark panels of overlapping color. Curved mirrors reflected the world back weird, warping those colors into a riot, a cataclysm, a liberation of form, or a transformation of form into something . . . else.

  Kai had felt this way before.

  There was a pool in the center of the sacred mountain of Kavekana’ai, and in that pool gods lived, and dreamed, and built the world. Form slipped there, and changed. Ideas mattered more than matter.

  At the chamber’s heart, broken colors overlapped in a circle of blinding white. As Kai approached, the vastness rippled, transforming with each footstep. Recognizable forms emerged: half-glimpsed beasts that, when she turned face to them, were not there at all.

  She neared the circle of light. Warmth pressed against her face like a lover’s hand. She reached for it—

  “I wouldn’t,” said a voice of crushed glass. “If I were you.”

  She pulled her hand back, and whirled, searching the colors and shadows for a face. The rainbow reflected her skewed, foreshortened, pared, immense.

  She did not see the demon until it landed in front of her.

  It glittered in the light: mantis-like but with a spider’s legs, sharp mandibles, all planes and edges of black glass save for multifaceted red eyes. It reared, and cocked its head to the side like a confused dog. With one great sickle-claw it stroked the underside of its mandible. “You wanted to enter the circle,” it said. “Would you please tell me why?”

  “Ah.” All her words had scurried off to hide under some sofa of her mind. “It’s not, that is . . .” Nothing terrible, just a demon, you’ve seen them before, this guy’s not even particularly large as they go, just three meters or so at the shoulder. She looked for binding marks, and found none. “What would have happened if I did?”

  The demon scraped a chunk of cement off the floor as easily as Kai might have scooped a handful of sand, and threw it into the light. The cement stuck in midair, vibrated—no, not vibrated, vibranted instead, every shadow and curve and peculiarity visible in stark relief—then exploded and imploded at once. Kai flinched, felt a wash of heat, and when she turned back there was nothing left in the circle, not even ash.

  “Why the hells,” she said, only too conscious of the irony, “would you build something like that?”

  “It’s an interesting problem,” the demon said. “What is this thing we call form, and to what extent do we comprehend our own forms? I have a form, surely, as do you, and let us grant that we’re both conscious even though certain philosophers would argue that assertion—fortunately they’re not here. So! Both conscious. But we have imperfect knowledge of our own forms, let alone our own selves—consider the human man, his last self-image formed at the age of twenty-five, surprised by wrinkles on his forehead as he looks in the bathroom mirror. Deathless Kings’ residual physicalities endure long after they’ve become skeletons—and they perform premortem exercises to stem mental fragmentation. You’d be surprised how frequently and how widely mental image and physical form differ.”

  “I really wouldn’t,” Kai said.

  She’d meant that to come off as wry, or at least free of pain or resentment—no sense getting into personal stuff on a professional call—but the demon’s flood of enthusiasm froze, and it bowed its head.

  “I did not mean to cause offense,” it said, “and I apologize if I have. How’s this: I am frequently surprised by the range of difference. Not least because I am not native to your physical frame of reference. Everything works . . . differently where I come from. The distinctions I describe aren’t only physical-mental—as if the two were different.” It laughed a rolling of wind chimes. “Rather, let us include differences in perception and conception. We are not complete in ourselves without others, without a world to complement our self-conception—and were we to become so complete, we could not bear it! The fullness of ourselves would break us. We burn. The point of Figment/Fragment/Filament”—claws spread to encompass the whole warehouse space—“is to reflect, refract the beauty of physical form, the glorious futility of our quest for complete knowledge, mastery, or independence. Yet every time a human visits, without fail you gawk a bit at the pretty lights, then make a beeline for the center, and reach for the circle! As I’m sure you can imagine, immolating the guests would put a dampener on an otherwise successful installation opening. So—why?”

  “Have you considered,” Kai said, “putting a rope around the pretty glowing circle of murder light?”

  The demon turned from her, to the light, and back. Kai hadn’t thought those eyes capable of narrowing, but they grew sharper. She pondered the distance to the exit. The demon had more legs than she did, and she was wearing heels.

  Then the demon doubled over, chittering. One sickle arm slapped the concrete, and left a deep gouge.

  “Are yo
u R’ok?” Kai guessed. Fontaine had said “Rock,” leaving off the epiglottal fricative, which had left Kai expecting—she wasn’t precisely sure, but it wasn’t this. “Ms. Fontaine sent me.”

  “Of course, pleased to meet you. Kai, isn’t it? I’m glad you did not immolate yourself. Would you like tea? This great new place just opened down the street.”

  R’ok locked the door behind him with some sort of extruded ebon glass in place of a key, and led Kai three blocks west past several tea shops that seemed perfectly passable, to a small cart with a long line in front. “Before you ask anything,” R’ok said, “I have to say that I’m very limited in what I can discuss about Dreamspinner.”

  “You’re not with the Concern anymore.”

  “Not for eight months. Your sister recruited me. You shouldn’t act so surprised—there are not terribly many Archipelagese in Agdel Lex, Pohala is not a common surname, and she spoke highly of you.”

  Kai felt something twist in her stomach. “Were you and Ley close?”

  “We never slept together, if that’s what you mean,” R’ok said.

  “Is that even—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  “Quite all right. It is possible, if one is willing to be patient and respect the range and diversity of . . . apparatus. But, no. We collaborated. We were friends, though your sister is a guarded person. We met working on an exhibit; a sculpture of mine came to life and made matters awkward for the exhibitor. The exhibit hall burnt down, and the two of us went out for drinks. She was dating Zeddig at the time, I believe.”

  Kai blinked. “Dating?”

  “Well. Yes. They were together for, it must have been two years? It ended, as such things do. A shame—they were good for one another. Ley showed up on my doorstep drunk after their breakup; she stayed with me in varying degrees of intoxication for a month afterward. She never told me what went wrong between the two of them. Spent her time making small sculptures to crystallize human dreams, then destroying each dream from within. It was a bleak period.”