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

by Max Gladstone

  He tried to open his mouth despite the tape, but he felt the skin peel and break, and lips took forever to regrow.

  There, in his bedroom, on his Skeld rug, heedless of the fact that she should be dead, stood Zeddig. Beside her stood a woman whose face he didn’t know—but he recognized the body. Interesting.

  If he had a heart these days, it would have beat faster.

  “You sold us out.” Zeddig loomed over him. There was a lot of power in those shoulders, and his limbs weren’t well attached these days.

  He tried to say some combination of, that was just business, and, I have no idea what you’re talking about, without speaking. The message came out muffled.

  “I have proof,” she said. “A lot of people would like to know you sold their friends to the Wreckers. But I’m willing to cut a deal. I need twenty souls, free and clear, liquid, untraceable.”

  He kept still, thinking of outs and ins, and of the silent alarm across the room. If he could slip these cords without their noticing.

  “I’m not giving you a choice,” Zeddig said. “We have a deal, or I see how many pounds of flesh I can cut off before your guards break the locks on that door. You’re a paranoid man. It might take them a while to get through.”

  Before he realized he had decided, he was already glancing left, to the closet.

  The other woman crossed over, disabled the hidden catch that should have triggered the gas trap, parted the wall of clothes and leather gear, and found the safe. “It’s locked.”

  “Combination?”

  He mumbled something through the tape.

  “If I take this off, and you scream, you’re done.”

  He nodded. The tape coming off hurt worse than expected, and the sudden chill against his teeth told him she’d torn some of his lip off with it. “Gods” came out a bit lispy. “Diamond-sapphire-opal-quartz.”

  Pause. Zeddig glanced down at the tape, and the piece of lip stuck to it, disgusted.

  “It’s not working,” the woman at the closet said.

  “You hit the wrong opal.”

  The lock clicked, and gold light seeped into the room, gentle and slow as dawn.

  “Are we good?” Zeddig asked.

  “We are good.” And the woman began shoveling joss, his beautiful golden joss, into a ratty backpack. “We are so good.”

  “This isn’t done,” Zeddig said. “If anything happens to me or mine, you’re going down. For added security—” She folded the tape around the piece of his lip. “I’ll keep this. It’ll be nice to have a stick I can use to hit you, for a change.”

  “Pleasure doing business with you,” he lisped, not meaning it.

  “You’re a loser, Vogel, and a bottom-feeder, and if we had time I’d give you a taste of what you’ve given me. But for now, you’re not worth the effort.”

  He was about to come up with a witty comeback—he even opened his mouth—but before he could get the words out, there was more tape, and the lights died, and he lay alone and bound in bed.

  At least this way, he thought, he would get a good night’s sleep.

  That was when the pain started.

  Chapter Sixty-three

  FONTAINE LEFT HER OFFICE late and stoned, red-eyed, swollen with a thousand half-had dreams. She staggered from the elevator, leaned against a small lacquer table on which a vase of artificial flowers rested, and waited for the room to steady, breathing the silk scent of a fake rose. The security guard waved good night. Fontaine had never learned her name—they blurred together, offices blending officeholders to one being diffracted through time, a Guard Who Watches All, male and female united in a single frame of care. Or else Fontaine once knew the guard’s name, and forgot. Or never bothered.

  Never mind. Scrape away hair sweat-plastered against scalp. Stumble through automatic doors into night. Stare up and see few stars. Smell dust and feel cool wind and the city’s heat, grudgingly surrendered to a dark that harbored fewer stars than it should. A cab rolled up. She got in.

  Kai sat, cross-legged, in the seat opposite.

  “Hi,” Fontaine said, lazily, and laughed at her own joke, because “Hi” sounded like, well.

  “I wanted to talk,” Kai said, “in private.” She rapped the carriage window, and the horse started walking. The cab jostled, but Kai’s gaze kept steady. Fontaine met those black eyes with her own. They were still as the center of the universe. They were, in fact, the center of a universe, unspooling always and forever, that universe’s edges filigreed with other universes, smaller and smaller—places so minuscule no monstrosity could enter, territories so tiny light’s touch would obliterate them, thus forever safe from the all-seeing tyrant eye. Fontaine raised her hand and watched it spin in the universe’s revolutions around Kai’s pupils. Her fingers shook.

  She reached for her purse, but it was gone. Where? She patted around the seat, on the floor, searched her jacket pockets, underfoot, the seat cushions, gods, had she left it in the office, impossible—stolen? How could she have missed that theft, as easy to pickpocket her arm. “Purse,” she said, then looked back to Kai, who, she realized, held it. “I need it.”

  “I need answers. And I need you sober enough to offer them.”

  “Sobriety,” she said, “is overrated,” and she lunged for the purse. Several moments in time unstitched from one another, and when entropy and consciousness commenced to fucking once again she lay on the bench seat Kai had recently evacuated, and Kai sat on the chair from which she had lunged, and her head hurt like some Quechal hell, and her hand stung as if she’d punched something solid. The carriage greened, and rocked, only it wasn’t rocking really but spinning end over end, like she was strapped to the rim of an enormous wheel, which she was, she supposed, if you thought of gravity as an invisible strap. The spinning did not. Would not. Stop. “Help,” she said.

  Kai moved, this time in ways and at speeds Fontaine found almost comprehensible. The priestess kicked open the carriage door, lowered Fontaine into the footwell, and made sure she got as much of the vomit on the road as possible under the circumstances. When Fontaine tried to close her mouth, her teeth grit together, and she threw up again. The driver, at least, did not slow.

  The lights of Agdel Lex seared her. She did not fall, because Kai held her jacket in one fist, and she did not fall, because Kai’s other fist held her hair. Nonsense nonsense nonsense, was the churn of the carriage wheels against shock absorbers and Iskari cobblestones painted with Fontaine’s dinner.

  Fontaine wriggled, wormlike, back into the carriage footwell, and pulled the door shut behind her. Click was a nice sound for a latch to make. The wheeling sensation did not stop—odd how the trick of nerves could make you feel stretched out even curled into a ball on a dirty floor—sickness had that magic too, to transform a surface from which you’d recoil in disgust, sober, to a surface you could cuddle—she pillowed her cheek against her hand, and watching her reflection in Kai’s shoe.

  The woman tried to pull her upright. She slumped.

  There wasn’t much room in the footwell. When Kai joined her down there, they lay almost face to face. Fontaine knew what her breath smelled like; she tried to breathe through her nose. Her heart kept a running rabbit’s pace. She listened. Kai spoke.

  “No one else at your bank spends quite so much time quite so high. I’ve wandered the halls during business hours, and I pay attention. You can’t have kept this up for long. You would have died. Your companion, your Lord—it feeds off your blood. You share the high, both minds at once. It’s not human, and it’s smaller than you—so it reels, shuts down, while you stay conscious, or close to it. Just blink once, if I’m right.”

  She blinked. Once. She wanted to say so much. Her Lord rested against her chest, His arms stilled, His mind reeling from the feed. Reflexively, He pushed antitoxins into her vein. She felt their weight on her bloodstream, tasted them bitter as angostura when she exhaled.

  Kai sagged. Fontaine studied the skin between the follicles of her thick,
black hair.

  “You brought me here,” she said. “I’ve wanted to approach the local artist’s community for six, seven months, and your invitation came at just the right time. My sister approached you, didn’t she? Explained the danger. Asked you for a loan. Maybe even asked you to set up a meeting with Jax. And you couldn’t, because the squids didn’t let you. They closed things down.”

  She blinked. Once.

  “The Iskari Defense Ministry used your bank for their ends. You’re a patriot. You believe in the system: free enterprise, development, the whole fairy tale. You’re not naive. But you learned those stories deep down, before you learned to question stories. I knew a woman like you once.” Kai sounded so sad. Fontaine wanted to touch her, and before she realized it, she was. “You went to your supervisor, and she said, it happens. The IDM uses us to hide their dirty work. We play along. You did. You turned Ley down. But she was desperate. And maybe you’d heard my name—maybe you’d browsed past my letter a few dozen times, thinking, someday. Why not now? So you took your drugs, and sent me a nightmare, and let Ley know I’d come. It would have worked, if I had listened.”

  Kai’s arm, under her suit jacket: skin and muscle, bone and fat. Fontaine’s fingertips explored cords of tension, dug in. Kai’s features tightened. Pain? Pleasure? The woman felt warm.

  “I can’t change that now. But I can still help. I need to speak with Jax.”

  Plans, objections, words. The world’s spinning slowed. Universes no longer birthed universes in her eyes. Some colors did not hurt anymore. She clawed at the purse Kai held. “It’s waking up. If it hears—”

  “I need you to remember this. I need Jax.”

  “Jax,” Fontaine said, “Yes. Right. Good. Now.” She was crying, when did she start crying. “Give me the godsdamn purse before you get us both killed.”

  Kai let go.

  The pills tasted sharp and clear and rough as silk.

  Chapter Sixty-four

  SOLITARY.

  There was an eye in the room.

  There was a lidless eye in the room.

  There was a lidless eye the size of Izza’s head, in the room.

  There was a lidless eye the size of Izza’s head, in the room, and it watched her.

  There was a lidless eye the size of Izza’s head, in the room, and it watched her, and knew.

  There was a lidless eye the size of Izza’s head, in the room, and it watched her, and knew what was best, for her and for her friends, and for the world, because the eye was a bud of a greater mind, which knew truths too deep for any crawling, limping time-tethered mammal to comprehend. Eyes linked to other eyes, arms linked to other arms, throughout a city, throughout a globe.

  There was a lidless eye the size of Izza’s head, in the room, and it watched her, and knew her story to a point: knew the name of the village from which she’d come, knew the names of her parents and the face of her mother, knew the priestess, her teacher, whose throat was slit by raiders, by cultists, to feed their hungry Wastelands jackal-God, and to appease the Deathless Kings they had promised, on pain of greater pain and in exchange for sureties of protection, that they would pacify the narrow flat and fertile region foreigners called the Imbar Valley, at the foot of the mountains foreigners called the Glain, after the Camlaander Knight who’d perished in battle with a local dragon there seven thousand years after the people who settled those slopes gave their rocks and rivers other names—for the slopes of the Glain were rich in ossuate, malevolite, and other necromantic earths.

  There was a lidless eye the size of Izza’s head, in the room, and it watched her, and knew that she fled the slaughter, to the train, to Agdel Lex, terrified—though it could not know what it meant to be “terrified,” such experiences were beyond its ken—and it knew that as she walked the streets of Agdel Lex, a hungry kid, alone, she stole and fought and grew hard from fear, and even after the High Sisters wrapped her tight in their love, even though they granted her every advantage and every joy, she scorned their love, and left.

  There was a lidless eye the size of Izza’s head, in the room, and it watched her, and knew that in her wandering she had grown, and that she was wounded, broken, lost, that she fought because of her wounds, because of that break, because of that loss, and the eye knew it could help: the High Sisters offered all children their own Lord, a companion, a piece of the Being from whom the Eye took life, and if she accepted its love she would never lack again—might hunger, but not for meaning, might suffer, but not from loneliness, might stray, but not for ignorance of what paths there were in the world to walk, and all she need do to receive this blessing was extend her hand and open her heart, because the heart is a strange fortress, with portals and locks invulnerable to any assault but weak to an opening will within.

  There was a lidless eye the size of Izza’s head, in the room, and it watched her, and knew so much, wadded her round with the weight of its knowledge, and her every twitch, every word, every scream (for there was weight, and pain, in being the subject of such regard) added to its knowledge, as it learned the hidden paths of Izza, and how she could be encouraged to stretch out her hand, and open her heart.

  There was a lidless eye the size of Izza’s head, in the room, and it watched her, and knew her, and listened, and added to its model new certainties—it learned her stories, her tales of shore and surf, and of Smiling Jack, thin and tall, who lurked in dark alleys and caught kids in his bag full of knives facing in, and of the Lady Who Made Herself a Hummingbird and swift as swift unstitched the bottom of Jack’s sack, so when he caught the kids and tossed them in they cut themselves on the knives, and screamed, but fell right out the other side and ran, until at last Jack asked himself why his sack would not catch, and climbed in himself, and the Lady Who Made Herself a Hummingbird, swift as swift, stitched the hole in the bottom of the sack to the sack’s mouth, and Jack climbed further and further in, always seeking the hole that unmade him, and with each inch he climbed his skin came further off.

  There was a lidless eye the size of Izza’s head, in the room, and it watched her and watched her watching it and watched itself watching her and it knew her and knew there was a hole in her and knew it could fill the hole if it understood its depths, and so it modeled the hole, and modeled the story, and climbed into itself, and deeper in, and it knew her and through her knew Someone Else, a fleet Form within its mind, never wholly compassed by its gaze, always one step ahead, but the eye would catch Her, yes, would, must, know Her completely, must find Her where she hid, somewhere deep within this wood, somewhere down these dirty side streets, somewhere in this rain puddle, somewhere far down at the bottom of this bag of knives.

  There was a lidless eye the size of Izza’s head, in the room, and it closed, and a door opened.

  Chapter Sixty-five

  LIEUTENANT BESCOND COULD HAVE been the last woman in the world, for all she cared—she had her blood-streaked paperwork, reams and reams of it, she had her ruby port and high tower view of Agdel Lex in shining regular beauty, and she had the knife she spun, tip down, on her ink blotter while she reviewed the paperwork for errors. The blade’s tip curled pig’s tails of leather from the blotter, drilling toward the baseboard, and if she kept at this job long enough she’d eventually pierce into the wooden desktop. She would leave few marks on the world, but at least she’d leave this private scar.

  There was a knock on the door.

  Bescond felt her forehead wrinkle. Her Lord twitched against her chest, and its rubbery arms uncurled to caress her neck. Together, Bescond and her Lord searched their collective memory for the knock’s pitch and volume, but before they could reach a conclusion, Kai Pohala opened the door.

  A detective in one of the stories Bescond read when she was young could have deduced, no doubt, why Ms. Pohala had come, and even the path she’d taken, from the wrinkles on her skirt and stocking, from hairs out of place, from patterns of uncertainty in the track of her gaze through Bescond’s office. Bescond sometimes missed the
comfort that came from believing in those stories—the comfort of feeling, even if just in fiction, that a single mind might compass the world. If only there were some way to live effectively, she thought, without letting our ideals wither.

  Her Lord shivered at her chest, and gave her certainty in the vein, and she reflected that, while no human mind could compass the whole world, this was only a sign that human minds needed help.

  Kai wasted no time in greeting. “Why are you going ahead with the launch?”

  “Ms. Pohala. The secretary let you in?”

  “The building did.”

  Kai always sat oddly on Bescond’s gaze, which bothered her. The bother lay in no particularity: so far as she could tell, Pohala’s transformation was perfect, as were the alterations of all those remade in Kavekana’s Pool. Even Bescond’s Lord could find no flaw, no trace of Craftwork or divine grace. Kai Pohala had, quite simply, rewritten herself from first principles. No, the bother lay in the fact that she, Bescond, could not help searching for a sign. She believed there should be something to perceive, and so she insisted on perceiving.

  The detective observes, but the detective also decides what to observe.

  “I’m busy,” Bescond said. She returned her pen to its stand, and tapped the stack of forms with the tip of her knife. “Our procedures aren’t so different from those of standard police. Our forms must be properly formatted, to keep the squid from suffering indigestion.”

  “You actually feed the paperwork to the squid?”

  “Paper goes into squid, the squid share fluids, and thus information propagates.” Bescond signed the form with a flourish.

  “Why are you going ahead with the launch?” Kai repeated.

  “What do you know about that?”