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

by Max Gladstone

  “It seems,” Kai said, suppressing her scramble, “you have me at a disadvantage.”

  “Not really.” Jax, graceful or vicious, let her off the hook. “This isn’t how I planned our conversation to go, for which my thanks. Novelty is pleasure. It’s been a while. Would you mind if I did pitch you?”

  Kai sipped tea, and invited him to start with her free hand.

  “Two things are not happening at once,” Jax said. “There is only one thing happening. The planet is about to die.”

  She set her teacup down.

  “It’s true. The Kavekanese know this as much as anyone. Three record-shattering hurricanes in as many years. Erosion at an all-time high. The God Wars—speaking of knives between the ribs, right? Of course, we could both sing the Craftsman’s justification from memory: modern Craft made our world better than ever before in history. Two hundred years ago, ninety-nine percent of people lived in conditions we would view as abject squalor. They suffered and died without knowing why. Do you want mass famines, blood sacrifice, dead children? Craftsmen love children as a rhetorical device. Think of the kids! ‘Any god or goddess who allows the suffering of a single child is a goddess or god to whom I’ll never bow’ is a typical line.” He might have been listing the menu for a dinner he’d disliked.

  “You don’t approve.”

  “Please.” He waved the question of his approval away. “As if the modern system doesn’t make children suffer. Yet suffering has decreased, on the whole. This is a better world by most metrics than the one into which our great-grandparents were born. I’d be the last man to reject the advances the last two centuries of pain have brought. I have two children, and I love them dearly. And when I almost died giving birth to my second son, I was glad to have modern doctors with anesthetic to hand. So. Despite culture warriors in the Southern Gleb, bleeding hearts in the Two Serpents Group, various academics suggesting we need a more ‘natural’ relationship with the world, untainted by modernity—I’m skeptical.”

  “Huh.” The room twisted and inverted around Kai—not the physical space, but the model of the room, and of Jax, she’d built in her mind.

  Jax seemed to notice, and frowned. “I understand that during initiation Kavekanese priests and priestesses rebuild themselves around their soul, which allows the smooth and complete correction of many . . . bookkeeping errors. Not all of us have such access, and medical Craft has certain path-dependent limitations: physical transformations of any sort are trivial if you don’t mind dying in the process. I happen to enjoy my independence—not to mention my heartbeat. I’m happy to share a moment later, but can we focus on business for now?”

  “Of course,” Kai said. She did not look at Eberhardt Jax in the brief pause as he lifted his briefcase to the table and spun the wheel locks on its latch. That much she could offer, even in this room, even chained and buttressed by their roles of venture-priest and pitchman. The pool let her rewrite herself from the inside out, but she still felt a stab of anxiety meeting mainlanders who knew: do they see me, or are they looking for something inside me that isn’t there at all? Jax must have felt the same. Worse. But they weren’t meeting to discuss that.

  “There are borderline sustainable models of Craftwork,” Jax said, “dependent on starlight and meditation, but despite all the clouds that cover the so-called free cities, we need more power than that methodology allows. We consume necromantic earths and ancient oils. We tax reality to the breaking point, then develop new Craft to tax it further. Vast engines of desire draw ever more value from the physical substrate—which is not, as some envision, a pool to be drained and replenished, but a complex, subtle, interlocking system we attack as if with an ice cream scoop. Soon the system will break. Oceans will burst the walls of the shore. Bond markets will collapse, bankrupting continents, causing a rolling liquidity crisis, tearing souls from the population en masse. The outbreaks we’ve seen so far, in Dresediel Lex and Alt Coulumb, will seem cute compared to what comes. As I said: the world is dying.”

  “I thought pitches were supposed to end on an up note,” Kai said.

  “We’re getting there.” Jax popped open the briefcase and withdrew a single crystal. It lay flat on his palm. When he blew on its surface, light kindled within, and when he raised his hand, the crystal flew like a wind-caught feather to land in the center of the table. The light built, and built, blinding—and then the crystal shattered.

  Kai covered her face by reflex, but no shards pierced her skin. She lowered her arm.

  Microscopic crystal lenses hung in space above the table, catching light, reflecting, refracting. At their core, a line of coherent brilliance speared toward the ceiling—only to be caught, shattered, and bent back down by a tiny mirror. Lines of light built a hovering sculpture in midair. A geometric pillar reared over geometric waves and sunk beneath them, anchored to the sea floor. Kai had seen it before, on the horizon.

  She did not realize she’d said “Altus” until the name had passed her lips.

  “Means high,” Eberhardt Jax translated, “or deep, in Old Telomeri. For obvious reasons. It’s anchored below the sea floor: we had to drill down far enough to tap the heat of the planet’s heart, and to extend our launch tube. Which required inventing new drilling technology and Craft, which we subsequently sublicensed. I made my first fortunes perfecting the nightmare telegraph system your firm, apologies, priesthood, employs today. But this work will save the world.”

  “You want to leave.” Again, the meeting inverted. “Out into the dark.” Kai could not picture the blackness so much as feel it: depth beyond depth, like the pool of the gods at the heart of Kavekana’ai. Even the ocean had a floor, but not the sky. There was no end: just falling, forever. Myth after myth told of the dangers of heaven. Monsters waited there, watching, hungry, their webs spun between the stars.

  “It’s not so dark as all that. And I don’t want to leave yet—I want leaving to be an option. At first I want us to reach out and drag some stars home. Mine rare minerals and elements from rocks in the sky. Drink power from the sun. We’ve fought our little wars on this little world for so long we’ve used up most of the resources with which we might have saved ourselves. So we need more.”

  “We’ll waste those, too.”

  “I doubt it. As a species, we are neither infinitely arrogant, nor infinitely blind. We are, however, the children of the children of the children and so forth of dumb apes who spent most of their days worried about avoiding tigers. We’ll see the danger eventually. I just want to ensure that, when the danger becomes so obvious even our poor cognitive equipment can grasp it, we still have options. I’ve invested my own capital in Altus; our primary clients, at the moment, are divine, but we’ll expand our services to private Concerns in the future. Our society is largely market-driven, so we will create a market for the technology we need to survive what’s coming.”

  “And you want me to invest.”

  The image hovered between them, slow revolving geometries of the future.

  “No,” Jax said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Your recent interviews have given you a reputation; Fontaine cast a wide net, and fish talk about nets. Most people on your side of the game want a quick payout. You’ve met ten candidates, so far, who could give you the return you want, in a rapid time frame. You’ve turned each one aside, because you’re looking for something more.”

  Kai turned from the glitter. Jax stood, clutching the back of his chair, Altus reflected in his eyes. “So you came to show me something I want, but I can’t have?”

  “I came,” he said, “because in ten years I’ll be the savior of the world, and the world will pay me for the privilege. I’ll have more soulstuff than most major religions. I’m a wealthy man now, but then I’ll be, functionally, a God. And I’ll want an investment manager. Most priests lack the right perspective. I came to encourage you, and ensure you knew the stakes. I came to tell you not to settle. Because I may need your services.”
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br />   “Do I pass the test?”

  Jax snapped his fingers. The crystal tower collapsed to its gleaming seed, and flew back to his open palm. “You’re looking in the right way, Ms. Pohala. Even if you are not looking in the right place.”

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  THE TRAIN JOB STARTED LATE—or early, depending on how you read the clock.

  Izza would have said early. She woke before Isaak most days, in the room they shared in Westridge that, no matter how clean, still stank from the garbage bins in the alley out back. She prayed with her pin and bowl and blood, her words piercing Kai’s dreams as the needle pierced her finger. She kept their conversation short: saw Zeddig tonight with her crew, a Camlaander and a Talbeg woman, and a maskorovik with red hair, about the right height, though the features are wrong. But, of course, that’s what the mask is for.

  Ley’s not a maskorovik, the reply came, sluggish with sleep and grumpy.

  She might have joined. She might be faking it.

  How? The masks can’t be faked.

  You said she was a genius.

  Kai’s exhaustion rolled through the link, and the length of her rolled too, turning against high-thread-count cotton. The Blue Lady bound their minds, faith like a sheet between bare bodies. Can’t you call at a normal hour?

  No, and, after a pause of biting lip, my host and I have religious differences.

  She did not elaborate on the nature of those differences.

  So, on the morning of the job, when Isaak woke her in the gross undigested hours before dawn, she groaned, and rolled on the bed he’d abandoned to her on the first night. He claimed not to mind the floor, though there was hardly enough floor in the tiny, barely legal efficiency for Isaak to stretch his bulk: the bed, a couch, a kitchen counter, gas burner, stack of books in one corner, that was the space. Across the street, a family of four shared a room slightly larger. Isaak took up most of the floor lying down. “Izza. The runner just came. It’s time.”

  She rolled up on the bed, slid her feet into sandals, laced them, grabbed her shirt from the wall hook. “Thought we’d have warning,” she said, garbled and sleep-furred, but Isaak understood.

  “The less warning the less chance someone turns us in.” He turned his back as she dressed, as if either of them had ever had the luxury of nakedness taboos. She hooked her shirt closed, swung her arms through easy circles to loosen the bands of muscle across her back, tied her braids back with a thick cord, raised her hood, and turned.

  He knelt beside a shallow dish of water, in the center of which floated his thin blue stone.

  “Pray with me?”

  And this was why she’d woken early each day, for all the hangovers and headaches and exhaustion after days of trailing Isaak on his city rounds. Once a kid who’d pledged himself to no gods at all, who’d fled those motherfuckers across sand that cut like knives, who’d lived horrors he never described to her, just like she never described hers to him, he’d become too devout for her comfort. And devout, somehow, in the service of the Blue Lady, whose only response to Izza’s angry wordless inquiries on the subject had been a poker player’s smile. Stories spread, yes, and yes the Lady would grow, as Izza preached Her and taught Her and passed Her along, but this was farther, and faster, than she’d thought possible.

  Isaak seemed so content when he prayed. He loved the words, loved his version of the ritual—floating the stone! A perfect symbol of the miracle of theft, of unearned salvation. The stone disk, a nerdy, Kai-ish part of her explained in schoolteachers’ drone, had a kind of metonymic significance: the stone was Kavekana, the Lady’s birthplace, a rock in the water with a hole bored through. Whatever Isaak’s theology, he loved the Lady with the simple faith of a man who spent most of his days beating people up for money. And she still hadn’t told him.

  When he looked at her, she saw the puppy in the attack dog’s face. They’d been kids together, or whatever you were when you were eight and bleeding, smeared with filth in a rail depot in some fucking Camlaander Peace Station where Knights gathered in quest of something that wasn’t Empire but sure as all hells wasn’t Peace, in a place you barely knew to call the Northern Gleb in the middle of something newspapers were careful not to call a war, clutching a person your age who seemed nearly as fucked as you. That wasn’t being a kid, not the way the mainlander birthday cards meant, and after you’d been that you could never be a kid again really, not a birthday card kid. But you were something else, and whatever that was, she and Isaak were that together, after they survived the journey to Agdel Lex. They kept each other company in this broken city, before she left and he stayed. Now, together, they wound time back past the kneecaps he’d learned to break and the lives she’d learned to save and steal.

  He wanted to share this Goddess with her, who’d given his life a shred of meaning, this Goddess who happened to be Izza’s. But if he learned she was the Prophet he sought, well, so much for happy memories of not-childhood. The kids on Kavekana never looked at her the same since she took up the mantle. She didn’t want to lose this last look, too.

  “I thought we were in a hurry,” Izza said. “We can pray together later, maybe?”

  “You said the same thing yesterday.”

  “I meant it yesterday. But we have to go, don’t we? Half an hour?”

  “I’ll just be a moment.” He bowed his head. “Shelter me, guide my steps, help me help myself.” Her words. They weren’t great, and she’d given thought to writing others, but for Isaak, they served. The blue stone burned. Izza felt, as much as saw, the Lady pass into him. The sheet of Her pressed against Izza’s own mind, only rather than Kai on the other side, she felt Something much larger—the Being she’d sheltered in its infancy, grown great. Give him what he wants, She said. Show him who you really are. What would be the harm?

  Izza kept Her quiet.

  He plucked the stone from the water, threaded it around his neck, then grabbed a hooded jacket. “Let’s go.”

  In the dark, running north through Agdel Lex, under balconies where old women slept quilt-wrapped in the midnight cool, through this shrunken dream of the place she’d known a long time gone, they might have been not-quite-kids again. He ran, but she outpaced him, vaulting over trash cans and park benches and drowsing drunks. They used back roads, Isaak correcting her path—“they closed that way,” or “the watchtower burned down”—crossing boulevards only when they had to, and then slowly, hands in pockets, heads down, adopting the shuffling tired gait of drunks or late shift workers who didn’t much like the homes toward which they stumbled—until they reached the warehouse by the stinking pier. The side door stood open as promised, and they sidled down the unlit hall behind. The Lady added a shine to Izza’s eyes, and the dark bloomed with form. Isaak only stumbled once, and they emerged into a stockroom packed with shipping containers, silent and enormous as standing stones.

  Two containers near the warehouse’s main gate stood open, crews crouched within, grumbling, rubbing their hands. Ivan, Vogel’s three-hundred-pound maskorovik errand boy, counted the passengers in each. How he managed to count that high without taking off his shoes, Izza did not know. “You,” he said, pointing to Isaak, “in there, and you,” to Izza, “there.”

  “We’re together,” Isaak said.

  “Does it look like I care?”

  Isaak folded down his hood. The maskorovik was almost Isaak’s height, and broader, but Isaak’s eyes were not human anymore. The scales down his neck bristled like a cat’s hair. To Izza, in the half light, they looked very sharp. Isaak did a thing like smiling that wasn’t. He had many teeth. He made a sound like a purr, deep in his throat: content with coming violence.

  “Fine,” Ivan said, faking boredom. “Anything else I can do for you? Glass of orange juice? Hand job?”

  “Which one’s Zeddig’s?” Izza asked, long as he was offering.

  “You don’t want to go with her.”

  “She seems more dependable.”

  “Your funeral, kid.�
� Ivan hooked a thumb toward the lead container. His gaze hadn’t left Isaak’s teeth. “Go on. Some of us got more work to do tonight than sitting in a godsdamn box.”

  He closed them in before he left, and snapped a padlock shut outside. The container smelled of salt and earth and unwashed flesh, stale tobacco and staler weed. Bodies moved against one another. Someone grumbled. Someone else swore. Someone, later, snored.

  Thanks to the Lady, Izza could see, despite the absence of light—the gathered thieves’ souls spun in tight self-feeding spirals, Craftwork tools hung at their belts, and small gods drifted between them. But the rest was darkness, and the still air within the container walls. Her heart raced. She sweat. She had not been inside a box like this for years. The memory squeezed her mind.

  Light eased the dark. Isaak sat across from her, cross-legged. The stone on his chest shed a pale calm glow to blunt the panic.

  “It’s not hard to pray,” he said. “And it helps me. I won’t ask again, if you don’t want me to.”

  He wouldn’t, was the killer. He’d stopper this new thing he loved inside, and never mention it again, rather than annoy her.

  “Okay.” She palmed her needle. “I’ll try anything once.”

  “The Lady,” he said, as quiet has he could make his voice, “is the sharpest and fastest of the many gods. She’s quick-step and hiding, She slides and evades. And always, behind, comes Smiling Jack with his bag that inside’s all teeth.”

  She listened, and prayed, Don’t get any ideas.

  The vast silence beyond wondered what Izza might mean by such an outrageous accusation.

  As Isaak taught Izza her own story, Izza stuck her thumb on the pin, and prayed: It’s time.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  KAI SOUGHT TARA ABERNATHY in nightmares. She’d grown accustomed to the practice since her first chaotic attempts, and knew how to follow the terror down. These days different fears claimed her—she seldom dreamed the cocoon dream, chained to a bed and guarded, cared for, kept from all that might shatter or break. She dreamed, instead, of puppets: she knelt naked onstage before an invisible audience, and worked a marionette kneeling also naked and also, of course, onstage, working a smaller marionette, and so on down, and each marionette looked like her, same haircut, same scars. Only of course the marionette wires were not tied to the puppets’ limbs, but hooked through, piercing skin she thought at first was fake, but the puppets bled when she moved them. She tried to let the puppets go, but their guide wires hooked through her fingers and palm. And she tried to rise and flee, only to feel, in her wrists and arms and legs, the bite of still greater wires tying her to something bigger, higher, and as she turned up to look, she saw the other marionettes turn too, seeking her, and through her seeking something too enormous to comprehend, a Her so much larger than Kai that when she tried to understand it the wires that held her up and made her strong all broke.