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

by Max Gladstone

  The Rectifier drove; Kai and Bescond settled in the rear. Good shocks and rubber tires made the ride eerily smooth. They descended toward the bay; out on the water, the Altus Spire was a pillar of light. Bescond crossed her legs ankle-on-knee, removed her sunglasses, and polished them with her jacket lining. “I’d hoped I wouldn’t find you here.”

  “There’s no law against Muerte Coffee,” Kai said, “though sometimes I think there should be.”

  Bescond did not quite scoff. “It’s more the neighborhood that I object to. Fontaine plays her cards well. Official Friend status covers many sins, but it’s been abused more than I’d care to admit as cover for espionage.”

  “I’m just a priestess,” Kai said.

  “I believe you.” Bescond raised her hands, a calming gesture, though Kai didn’t feel upset. Not yet. Perhaps she should. “I do. But in a city like Agdel Lex, well. The wars to the south have a religious character, and the apocalypse is always a heartbeat away. Unsanctioned priests make people nervous. And, espionage being espionage, individual officers get a lot of leeway in the interpretation of evidence.”

  “I asked Fontaine for investment opportunities. She pointed me here.” Bescond started to interrupt, but Kai decided to roll over the Lieutenant for a change. “I know my sister founded Dreamspinner. I just want to understand the threat I face, staying here. I’d be mad to ignore what happened yesterday.”

  “Madness,” Bescond said, “is not a word taken lightly in Agdel Lex.”

  “Good. I’ve never liked it when people called me crazy.”

  “I don’t think you understand. Here, sanity is a security issue. Deranged perceptions, including conspiracy theories, can breach consensus reality, and let the dead city in. That’s why the Rectification program exists.” She touched her breastbone. “We all doubt, sometimes. We doubt ourselves, our worlds, our truths. It can happen to anyone. Even to people of faith. When we can no longer bear the work, we seek refuge in a clearer mind.”

  “Wrap them in squid to fix them, is that it,” Kai said, then showed Bescond her teeth. “Punish them sane. I’ve been through worse.”

  “You don’t understand.” Bescond smiled, easy and smooth. “The Lords do not punish. They offer bliss.”

  They rode the rest of the way in silence, and stopped before the Arms.

  “This is great,” Kai said. “I keep getting rides home. Certainly helps stretch the old expense account.”

  “You have two options, as I see it,” Bescond replied. “Help our investigation, or stay away.”

  “I’m not here to investigate.” Kai wrenched the door open, and stepped out. “I’m here to invest. Thanks for the lift.”

  She didn’t let herself shiver until she closed her hotel room door, but even that wasn’t so bad, and besides, she had Behemoth to keep her company.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  LEY NEEDED TOOLS. She wrote Zeddig and Raymet and Gal shopping lists in a disguised, sharply slanting hand: lists of texts, lengths of wire, pickled organs of various exotic lizards, moonlight caught in a crystal vial on the seashore. Raymet had most of the books already, but the rest—

  Zeddig glowered at a request for “cold pressed renal gland extract.” “Why do you want all this stuff?”

  “I,” Ley replied, shifting cards on her game of solitaire, “am taking precautions. If all goes well, they’ll be unnecessary.” She moved the seven of spiders onto the eight of cups. “The chance of all going well, I’ll leave to your own capacious imagination.”

  The tools accumulated over a few days. Books colonized Raymet’s coffee table, beakers bubbled over gas burners, boards held insects pinned and painstakingly dissected. For all the clutter, Ley left little mess. Each time Zeddig returned, Raymet’s house was slightly cleaner than she left it. Lost in thought, Ley’s fingertips explored Raymet’s rooms, and order spread from their touch. She paced, drank coffee, and talked to herself. At least, Zeddig thought she was talking to herself.

  One night Zeddig returned with a tiny packet of night hazel, worth more per ounce than gold. “I’ve never heard of this stuff before. Neither had the clerk; she had to ask the old chemist they keep chained to the wall upstairs.” She meant it as a joke.

  “It’s rare,” Ley said. “There’s an isle in the Ebon Sea most maps don’t feature, a place people last frequented back when they still called islands isles. Women carved from rock by storm waves tend gardens of night hazel there; they sun themselves on the beach to tempt sailors, who steer their ships into the shoals and die. Their blood feeds the gardens. The women trade cuttings from their crop for memories: memories of touch, mostly, since stone doesn’t feel the world like flesh. Night hazel helps with journeys to the underworld, but the supply’s limited: the isle in question only exists on intercalary days.”

  “Are we going to the underworld?”

  “Don’t be silly.” She snatched the envelope from Zeddig’s fingers, opened the flap, and inhaled. She almost smiled, then. “Nothing like that exists, in the way you mean. Faithful leave deep impressions on their gods and subcreations; cause and effect applies, so obviously the dead linger in some form. But—layered chambers for departed souls? Souls that obviously don’t go anywhere, but reenter the market? Please.”

  “If there’s no underworld, why do you need this stuff?”

  “I need it,” Ley said, “because nobody remembered to tell the underworld it didn’t exist. Thank you.”

  And she returned to her book.

  Zeddig stormed out. Ley of course didn’t notice.

  After their rooftop chase Zeddig had felt something between them. Not love, but—openness. She’d seen Ley scared, exhilarated, happy. Her friend, her onetime lover, let the mask of control slip, and for a moment Zeddig remembered what it felt like for Ley to trust her. But that passed, and now she felt like she had at the bloody end: they were two perfect spheres trapped in mutual orbit, bound, but unable to touch.

  Raymet had more practical issues with Ley’s presence. “I need my space. Did you see what she did to my library?” Raymet’s place was so thick with bookcases Zeddig wasn’t certain which room she meant. “All the papers off the shelves, in neat stacks on the floor, with sticky notes indicating how she’d sorted them. I had a system! And I swear she’s been watering my plants.”

  “Your plants were looking dry,” Zeddig said, diplomatically.

  “Yesterday she saw me reading Cawleigh and interrupted to talk to me about the gender ratios of the people murdered in those books, and dammit, I don’t care if she’s being friendly, I need her out of my house for an afternoon. Just one afternoon to, I don’t know, run around and pee on the furniture.”

  “She’s a wanted woman.”

  “And I want her somewhere else.”

  Zeddig broached the subject with Ley the next morning, when she returned with the moonlight vial. “Disappointing. I expected her to last longer.” Ley poured the contents of one test tube into another, and both sublimed, which the slight adjustment of Ley’s eyebrows suggested had been an unexpected, but desirable, result. It hurt to be able to read her so well. “She’s more tense than I remember. Has she really not made a move on Gal in all this time?”

  Zeddig glanced over her shoulder in case either of them had heard. “That’s not the point.”

  “Fortunately, I anticipated just such an emergency. Let’s take a walk.”

  “With half the city looking for you?”

  She held out one hand, meaning pause, settled the empty test tube carefully in a clamp, and sealed the tube with wax. Then she reached into her inside jacket pocket and produced a mask.

  Zeddig went cold all over. “Ley, what the hells is that?”

  “Zurish ’clave mask, more or less.”

  “You’re a maskorovik?”

  “Hardly. This is counterfeit.”

  “I thought the whole point of those was—”

  “You’re not supposed to be able to counterfeit them. But copy protection is tricky mag
ic, and, as I believe I mentioned, I’ve made a close study of community formation. The maskorovim are a novel approach—really neat, setting aside the organized crime theatrics. The Zurish mask-lords’ system pairs anonymity with authentication, but they haven’t actually settled on a god, so far as anyone can tell. Of course, they still rely on a top-down organizational model, supplemented with occasional kneecap breaking—well, anyway, I’ve avoided replicating the mask’s higher functions, but it should serve for a shopping trip.” She stood, took the mask in both hands, applied it to her face, and swept her hands back over her hair, which brightened from black to red, lengthened, and wove itself into a plait. “How do I look?”

  “I like you the other way.”

  “Sadly, so do the Wreckers.” She shook her head to test the braid’s weight. With a frown, she tugged on the elaborate weave. “Impractical, but it’ll do.” She glanced at her suit, which several days’ wear and laboratory work, along with their rooftop chase and a considerable quantity of blood, had left in a sorry state. “Hold on.” She descended into the depths of Raymet’s apartment—prompting a squawk and cascade of curses from the owner when Ley opened her bedroom door.

  Ley returned minutes later, unsinged by the invective, bearing a few armfuls of fabric. She shucked her jacket, and began to unbutton her shirt. Zeddig about-faced, fast. “Warning next time, maybe?”

  “There’s nothing here you haven’t seen before.”

  She stared at a stain on the wallpaper roughly the shape of Southern Kath. “That’s not the point.”

  “What is, then? I don’t care, and you have an excellent memory—there’s no sense standing there looking ridiculous and faking interest in Raymet’s failed attempts at home maintenance. No one’s harmed.”

  “Maybe that’s what bothers me,” Zeddig said, before she realized what she was saying. “Nobody’s harmed. Whatever we were is so far gone you think there’s no harm in my seeing you naked.”

  “Harm,” Ley said, softly, “was never the operative word between us.”

  “What was?”

  “Love was in the running, I thought.”

  “Not utility?”

  “I learned from you,” Ley said. “I don’t deny that. That’s one of the things love is. I learned from you, and you learned from me. Don’t try to paint me with the seductress - who - stole - my - secrets brush. It’s beneath you.”

  Zeddig scraped the stain with her fingernail, and the wallpaper around it came off. “You learned from me. And you left.”

  “We made other mistakes in between, if you’ll remember. If you really want to rehash our every old half-dressed bedroom argument, you might as well turn around and remove your pants to complete the picture.”

  “I showed you my city, and you . . . You used it.”

  “I made art. Yes. That’s what I do.”

  “And you’re still doing it. That knife—”

  “Agdel Lex is a special place,” she said. “I understand your sentimental attachment, but if I stumbled upon some cache of perfectly preserved High Telomeri porn in a cave during a sordid kidnapping episode, I guarantee that once my tears were dried et cetera, you’d ask me to show you the cache.”

  “You’re comparing a hypothetical with my real life. With my city.” She tried to press the torn wallpaper back, but it curled up. “You made a sculpture out of me, and sold it.”

  “That’s fair,” Ley said, after a silence. “And we fought, and I left. I tried to help, and I fucked up, and you hated me for it. And you’re still angry.”

  “You could have stayed. Listened. Apologized.”

  “I didn’t say you were wrong to be angry. I wish things had gone a different way. They didn’t. But we can work together now.”

  “That settles that, then,” Zeddig said, sour. “Fine. Good talk.”

  “I’m happy to drop the issue, or talk more. But either way, there’s no sense in your staring at the wall.”

  “I’m not going to look.”

  “I’ve changed.”

  Zeddig turned.

  The dress was very blue, and full of light and air. It showed off her shoulders, which did not need the help. Zeddig watched the thumbprint shadow at the V of Ley’s collarbone, and tried not to feel . . . anything, really. The heels were high, and changed the architecture of her legs. She looked brilliant, and deeply wrong. This wasn’t her.

  That was the point.

  “The leggings don’t fit with the dress and heels,” Zeddig said, once she got her breath back.

  “I haven’t shaved in a week, and I’m not about to do so now just because Raymet has a hangup about having sex while I’m in the house. I’ll cover with attitude.” She smiled.

  “You look like you want to cut someone.”

  “That’s the idea.” She extended her hand. “Let’s.”

  Zeddig took the hint, and took her arm.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  KAI SUFFERED THREE DAYS of meetings before her next excursion.

  The meetings went as well as could be expected. Entirely too many things were happening at once: increasing volatility in the Kathic housing market, demand for quality experiences (whatever those were), unequal access to equity resulting from a high barrier to entry on derivatives trade, shifting tastes in wine, shrinking arable land and water supply due to the demands high-energy Craftwork placed on soil, concerns about dwindling supplies of everything from alchemical silver and necromantic earths to coal and iron. “Is anything not falling apart?” she asked Fontaine after a grim meeting about water futures.

  “And you wonder why I spend so much time high,” Fontaine said.

  “I had no idea the water table in Dresediel Lex was so low.”

  “And that’s a comparatively rich, thaumaturgically strong area. You want depressing figures, look at Northwest Dhisthra sometime. They don’t have a Deathless King, or a convenient rain god. Hells, you don’t have to go that far afield—my family were small-time holy folks for a village out beyond what’s now the Wastes, before the God Wars started. The Wastes suck up water and simple soulstuff for miles beyond the blast zone—even now, you can barely herd out there, let alone grow crops. So my great - great - grand - so - ons marched around the Wastes to the safe zone, and we’ve been here ever since.”

  “I knew the equity part, and the theological derivatives, but hearing them in this context—a lot of Craftspeople are getting richer than gods, the market has become so complicated nobody understands more than a shade of it, and people optimize local outcomes without concern for global consequences. We’re walking a razor’s edge without even considering actual bad actors—and there’s no shortage of those, either.”

  “Yup,” Fontaine said. “I mean, you wanted to hear about the big stuff.”

  “I did. I just didn't expect it all to be so big, or so connected.”

  “You know what’s the problem?”

  Kai cracked a smile. “The world,” she said, quoting one of their more hapless presenters, “is becoming increasingly global?”

  “The world,” Fontaine intoned, “is becoming increasingly global.”

  All of which was—“fun” wasn’t the right word exactly, more: instructive. But she was also killing time, buying her freedom with midnights and meetings and cups of coffee. The first day, five hooded Rectifiers followed her from rooftops, waited outside her hotel in the morning. The second day, the five reduced to three. The third day, the two reduced to one. On the fourth day, she half-decided, half-hoped she’d lulled them into a false sense of security.

  She’d taken the trolley to work three days in a row, even though her strained expense account would have covered a cab. (She’d received a nightmare telegraph from Kavekana the night before, Twilling’s carefully worded message boiling down to “What the fuck are you doing, come home at once.” She ignored it.) In her morning commute upslope she studied the thousand villages knit together to make Agdel Lex: R’ok lived in the Iron Band; east of the Iron Band ran the Iskari Concess
ion, east of that the port, and south of all those, upslope, the Wings, Talbeg neighborhoods whose property values rose as you climbed the cliffs, with windows that were carefully aimed to offer views of everything in the city except the Authority tower.

  The Wings and the Iron Band held the best restaurants and nightlife, so at 7 P.M. on a Fifthday night, the evening commute downslope was a packed, sweaty, jovial riot, drunks calling to other, presumably acquainted, drunks over the heads of those few wage earners not yet drunk themselves. (Not all drank, of course. Certainly some wanted to go home and see their families. They just didn’t talk so much, or so loud.)

  Even half-squid cop monsters would have trouble tracking Kai through that booze-slicked mess.

  She pulled all the tricks she ever read about in spy novels, changing trolleys at the last second, or seeming to, only to dive back onto the trolley she just left; she hailed a cab and paid it to drive to a random address while she stepped out its opposite door. She folded her jacket into her purse. She’d worn a white flower in her hair, and planted that flower in the hair of a woman about her height and build on a bar street in the Wings, as that woman cheered a bare-knuckle boxing match. The further Kai fled, the more natural she felt. She encountered fewer broad Iskari boulevards, and fewer signs. A bicycle rickshaw offered her a lift; when she gave the peddler Zeddig’s address, he said, “I know a shortcut.”

  Shortcut didn’t do his path justice. Kai had studied the city’s layout in her hotel, nudging Behemoth aside when he settled on the map, and their route was impossible. The driver should have had to cross two tank-broad Iskari boulevards to reach the Hala district, but somehow he stitched together a route that crossed neither Mandate nor Regency. They wove down narrow streets past wicker tables where old women played cards. Crossed laundry lines flew underwear prayer flags. The rickshaw driver’s calves surged and bulged. Kai watched planes of muscle swell, round, and stretch smooth: alchemy at work in that body, in the curve of his shoulders and his rigid arms. Kai knew big men, strong men, back home, but this was a different kind of strength, and she felt guilty for using it, yoking him. And yet, the transformations that strength worked on distance! Buildings closed out the sky overhead, and perhaps they entered a tunnel—but they emerged before the terror of confinement seized her.