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

by Max Gladstone

  “You want to collapse Alikand, and wall off the dead city.”

  Possibilities compressed to a single solution. “Vane told you.”

  “When she woke up. She thought it would piss me off. She was right.”

  Bescond sighed. “There is this problem with a certain sort of knowledge worker: since so much of their job involves following instinct—listening to hunches, chasing discovery, seeking the logic underlying personal misgivings—they can be too damn loyal to their baser urges.”

  “That’s not an explanation.”

  “We proceed with the launch because it is in our best interests to do so.”

  “My sister thinks you’re going to destroy the city.”

  “Your sister,” Bescond replied, “has different views on the meaning of destroy, and save, than the Rectification Authority.” She set down the knife, and stood, and took her glass of port to the windowsill. Music and light issued up from the city below; the air bore cooking smells and perfume and sewer-stink, but only the light reached her window, pure and clean. “We have fought for a century to build a lattice on which civilization can grow. Every year, the Authority expends untold souls maintaining this bastion against the pull of the wound at its heart. We should have abandoned Agdel Lex decades ago, let the Wastes take the whole city. Instead, we built a ruin of angels into a haven for man. Arts and culture and business thrive mere miles from the Wastes. I’m not foreign to this city, Ms. Pohala. My family has lived here for generations. I want my home safe.”

  “I’ve seen the figures. The Iskari get way too much out of Agdel Lex—resources, taxes, tactical advantage—to claim an altruistic motive.”

  “Does the Kavekanese priesthood give its services away?”

  “We,” Kai said, “don’t oppress people.” But Bescond could see that protest rang hollow, even for her.

  “Are you certain? Show me your pilgrim rolls, tell me how morally your clients make their fortunes. I can see the truth on your face. Of course, you also is no fit moral argument—your errors do not make mine excusable: two failures at addition don’t make math wrong. You don’t like me? You find my methods grotesque?” The port in her glass looked like blood. “I agree. That’s why I must take this step.”

  Kai said nothing. Bescond decided this was disbelief.

  “I am destroying my job. I was ordered to do so: the Iskari Demesne wants to incorporate Agdel Lex directly, as soon as the city is no longer at constant risk. I could have dragged my feet. Many officers would. But I want the Rectifiers gone. We are brutal tools, necessary only because some locals do not recognize the need to use proper names for proper subjects. Once the world is whole again, once there are no more gaps through which a wanderer might fall, once people no longer risk their lives seeking useless trivia in an apocalypse, then Agdel Lex itself, its streets and architecture and bureaucracy, will do the Wreckers’ work: it will impose limits, structure interaction, self-manage. Your sister’s masterpiece will force everyone onto the same page. We can take it from there.”

  “People will die.”

  “Ask Vane about that. Or your sister. They proposed the approach. The church agreed. I am a tool of policy.”

  “You love to push responsibility onto other people, don’t you.”

  “What do you think that is?” She nodded back to the paperwork. “Three hundred pages explaining why I let a fugitive escape. Because I promised you I would. I kept my bargain, and now I am taking responsibility. I could lose my job over this—or worse.”

  “Don’t give me that,” Kai said. “You wouldn’t have let her go if I didn’t force you. I still don’t know she made it. She could be dead right now, in the Wastes. And if she’s alive, she hates me.”

  “I do the best I can,” Bescond said. “If you can undo history, if you know how to go back in time and force people to make better decisions so those of us left today aren’t stuck making worse ones, please, do so. With my blessing. Failing that, I’ll manage the present.”

  “You’re a bully, and a thug.”

  “There are two kinds of people in this world, Ms. Pohala. Some build and maintain. Others destroy. I have never understood those who destroy. I build, and protect those who build.”

  “You’re building over graves.”

  “Our planet is a tomb. I am building a system that will work. I am burying the skeletons of the past, so we can move on. I’m sorry you were drawn into this. Most people don’t like to think about necessities.”

  “It’s only necessary,” Kai said, “because you want it to be.”

  And she walked out before Bescond could answer. Unfortunate. Bescond hated when emotions interfered with argument. Pohala couldn’t see—perhaps something in her background blinded her. Bescond looked down into the ruby of her glass. I have never understood those who destroy.

  I should learn.

  This paperwork would not finish itself. And yet.

  Bescond drained the last of her port, and prayed for a prisoner to be delivered to interrogation.

  Chapter Sixty-six

  WHEN THE WRECKERS CAME for Raymet, she fought. They’d been ready for Gal, but they didn’t expect much from a tiny lapsed academic, an underestimation Raymet had relied on to see her through many a back-alley scrap. She grabbed the first Wrecker by the cloak and struck it in the face with her forehead, slipped past while it reeled, almost reached the door before a tentacle caught her. She tripped and sprawled onto the bone floor; with clawed fingers she caught a door jamb, pulled herself upright, kicked free of the tentacle, made it to the hall. She got to the lifts before they tackled her, and even then she did not go quietly—never would while she had teeth.

  It took three of them to drag her to the small bone-white room, sit her in a chair that grew from the floor, and chain her. That Lieutenant from the Wastes, Bescond, watched from the shadows. Raymet felt the bruises she’d have tomorrow.

  Tell them a story, Gal said. Tell them the truth.

  “Doctor Haaz,” Bescond said. “This is a purely informal interview, preliminary to questioning.”

  “I know exactly what this is.”

  “We’re attempting to fill in a few gaps in your résumé, so to speak.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “This isn’t an adversarial proceeding.”

  Raymet glared at the Lieutenant and imagined strangling her, imagined wrestling her to the ground and breaking her arm, imagined knocking out those perfect teeth with a stiff elbow to the face. She imagined the blood and spray, the crack as bone gave, and hoped all that translated, somehow, through her eyes.

  “In fact, this interview may lead to a job. We’re always looking for new talent.”

  She imagined the arm breaking: Bescond’s bone in her grip, her shoulder straining, and—

  “When did you start to delve?”

  The vision faded.

  “Was it before you defended your dissertation, or after?”

  If they knew that, they would have an excuse: lean on professors and student clubs and drinking circles, civilly at first, pardon me, fellow students, but has anyone in this vicinity been engaged in seditious thought? They knew already, of course. The Wreckers built lists, in this obscene tower, of people identified in confession, of friends sold out by friends. They used the lists when it pleased them, or when they were bored.

  “It’s a simple question.”

  “No question’s simple.”

  Bescond sighed, and stood. She removed her jacket, and rolled up her sleeve. “Was it a funding issue? I know it’s difficult to make ends meet on a graduate stipend. The funding collapse, plus your own lack of family resources, must have hit hard. You went to a prestigious school. Many of your peers came from families of means. Might have driven even the most law-abiding individuals to ends they’d never consider under normal circumstances. Or was it simply a knowledge issue? You studied languages, culture, architecture—hard to resist the temptation to see what was lost, despite the danger. There’s no shame in being
drawn out of your depth. In making a mistake. I just want to understand.”

  “Get it over with,” Raymet said, before the knuckles met her cheek.

  Minutes later, spitting blood, stars dancing in her vision, she heard Bescond’s voice, unchanged. “When did you start to delve?”

  She’d counted on the woman to break. To get angry and dumb. It was easy to clam up and spit insults, to meet rage with rage. But Bescond didn’t sweat, didn’t fight her, just asked, in an even, measured voice, without even the fucking decency to lose her breath. Her arms moved, and her body, but the mind seemed cut out of the mix. Not a passenger, even, but an advisor, a central authority directing distant hirelings to take unpleasant actions, like a slur-voiced crime boss in a mystery play.

  “What about your companions? Tell me about them.”

  She glared through blood.

  Eventually Bescond brought in Wreckers. Raymet’s heart rushed when she saw them, and she fought against her cuffs. When they started feeding her pleasure she dug her nails into her palms to edge that joy with pain, to anchor herself to herself. That worked, until they saw what she was doing and straightened her hands for her. She almost bit through her cheek before they forced her jaw open. And the whole time, that infuriating level voice asked: “Why?”

  She was fucking fed up, is why: fed up with being poor, fed up with walking the line, fed up with Zeddig’s folks and the High Families and all the other godsdamn great-grandchildren of Senators who had retreated to their enclaves to mourn Iskari rule rather than fight back, who pretended they could live a closed life out of the occupier’s eye. Raymet never had that luxury. So why not break into the dead city and steal the High Families’ history out from under them? Why not learn and plunder, and make those Senators’ kids come to her? Why not fight the Iskari direct—not by building dreams of pleasant imaginary pasts, of perfect worlds that never were, but by burrowing straight through the illusion they called Agdel Lex into the slaughter on which that illusion was made?

  But she would not give the Lieutenant satisfaction of an answer.

  Gal’s advice: tell them a true story. You will in the end. But Gal had been trained for this, and given up everyone she cared about already. She came to Agdel Lex to die. Certainly not to love.

  Fuck the wracking waves of pleasure, fuck the pain they tried when that didn’t work, fuck that level voice. She had wadded-up animosity aplenty from thirty years of life in Agdel Lex, and did not owe Bescond an ounce of truth about her, her people, her self.

  “Why?”

  When individual Wreckers didn’t work, they dragged her to a wall niche and plugged her in, wadded her with squid things that tried to convince her she belonged. They were all in this together, they all wanted the same things, they only had to communicate, to recognize the problem. The squid was mother, the squid was father, yes you’ve been abandoned by your people, yes your dad’s a drunk working a third-rate steamer in Kho Khatang and Grandma took you back from Mom for a reason, yes you’re in so far over your head you can’t see sunlight, but we’re all Iskari together, we’re all Agdel Lex.

  Fuck you.

  You want me to belong? Same as wanting me to know my place. I’m making my place, and I’m making my people, I’m making a godsforsaken nation of people who want nothing to do with you. Why do I delve? For fortune, for fame, for thrills, to get laid, and because when I delve, I delve into a world I know for damn sure isn’t any part of yours.

  But she didn’t say any of that.

  She just grinned through the blood.

  It went on longer than she expected. They moved her again. They tried techniques.

  And at last, when even Bescond’s polite queries began to sour, they dragged her back to her cell and left her in a heap. The bars snapped shut. Her jaw ached from being so long clenched. She tried to move. Couldn’t. Maybe she was broken. Maybe she just lacked the will.

  “Raymet.”

  Gal’s voice.

  “Raymet, are you there?”

  She was. She tried to say so; it came out as a groan.

  Eyes, blue, shone beyond the bone bars.

  “Raymet,” Gal said, as if someone else was there to hear. Her name sounded heavy in Gal’s mouth, as if it hurt to say, as if the name was a splinter that drawing forth exposed a wound. “Why did you come back for me?”

  And still she did not, could not, answer.

  Chapter Sixty-seven

  THE TELEGRAPH WAS WAITING for Kai when she woke the day before the launch: come home.

  Home. What a concept.

  She hit the gym first. The Arms was enough of an overaccommodating piece of tourist fluff to have a full gym, benches and bar and even a squat rack, so Kai spent the better part of an hour destroying herself. No spots—the only other person in the gym this early was a centipede-looking individual in a tank top blazoned with the Zodograd 30K logo, skittering on the treadmill, and so far as she could see, it didn’t have arms. No help there. No sweat. Just don’t go overboard on weight, and mind your form.

  So of course she got herself in trouble on the bench, couldn’t make the last rep, arms shivering stuck halfway as breath ripped through her nostrils, overcome with clarity of failure. You can do it, godsdammit. Worthless. Useless. One last push, just three inches, bare your teeth, press your traps into the bench. Make it happen.

  She did.

  There was this thing people didn’t tend to understand about the way Kai psyched herself up in the gym, something her exes, especially Claude, never quite got: she wasn’t cursing herself. She was cursing the self she fought to overcome.

  When she stumbled back to her room, muscles singing, to shower, the telegram still lay on the table by the window, and Behemoth lay on the telegram, staring out at the waves, and past the waves to the Altus tower.

  Come home.

  Showered, Kai walked downstairs in sweatpants, slippers, and a T-shirt, piled a plate with fruit and yogurt and eggs from the buffet, gulped a mug of not entirely terrible coffee (everywhere’s coffee was bad compared to Kavekana’s, but you couldn’t hold that against them, most places didn’t have volcanic soil), refilled the mug, and returned to her room, her desk, the paperwork the business center forwarded from the nightmare telegraph office. She spent an hour signing off and signing off, jotting memos, shifting investments. Then, she prayed.

  She worked her idols in groups, based on the type of worship: no sense shifting from ritual contortion to bloodletting to ecstasy and back to contortion again. Shifting, in the same pose, from contemplating the infinitude of one God to contemplating the infinitude of Another, required a peculiar frame of mind. That was why her pilgrims hired a professional. Kai’s idols were fine—slightly overexposed to the Imperial housing market, she should rebalance that, but, for the most part, healthy.

  After her ritual rounds, she prayed to the Blue Lady, to the figure dancing just out of reach in the woods of her soul. Izza, she prayed. I need you. Harder to admit: I miss you.

  She felt, echoed, confinement, tension, a grotesque smell. I’m a bit busy at the moment.

  Izza! Izza, you’re all right!

  Wouldn’t go that far. And I can’t pray much. They’ll hear me.

  Izza, I need your help. The Iskari want to— Want to what? They want to fix the city. Destroy Alikand for good.

  Pause. This isn’t our problem.

  They’ll feed Alikand to the Wastes, and Ley wanted to stop them, and we stopped her—

  How long do we have?

  The launch is tomorrow morning.

  Silence, at first. I can make it. Have to wait for nightfall here, but once that happens I can get Isaak out to a ship. We don’t have documents, but the Lady will provide.

  Izza, I don’t—

  Shit, from the other side of the prayer, and Sorry, and Kai was alone in her skin again. She had knelt, without realizing it, before the small table by the window, where the telegram lay.

  Come home.

  What was home, anyway? She
didn’t belong in Agdel Lex, in Alikand. These streets were not her streets, this pain was not her pain, this fight was not her fight. Her sister did not belong here either—but her sister clearly, painfully, loved a woman who did. Ley had betrayed Zeddig; she would give up everything to save her now.

  Kavekana was Kai’s home, with its cool evening breeze, its warm wet air, its smells of citrus and green, its beaches and bad poets. Kavekana, island among islands, which thrived by its ties to other lands across the sea, a hoop with an empty center. Without those bonds, without the sea and the winds and the ships, Kavekana was nothing.

  Kavekana was home, because it cared for her and she cared for it in turn: her gods, her calling, her friends, her family. Those, she could defend. And so, though Ley told her to run, she stayed, to grab her sister, hold her close, and drag her from the dark. To save her.

  But could you save someone by destroying what they would die to defend?

  What would a woman be, if you broke her world around her?

  And if that woman was your true home: What then? You could destroy yourself trying to save yourself. You could hold people so tight you might strangle parts of them you did not understand.

  Whitecapped waves rolled on a sea darker than her sea.

  She slid the telegram out from under Behemoth. The cat rumbled discontent, stood, paced, jumped into Kai’s lap, and dug in his claws.

  The window only opened a few inches, just enough to let the outside in. She watched the water, which no Iskari hand had shaped, and breathed in, and smelled the faintest trace of Alikand.

  Some blood remained in the silver bowl. She hoped it would be enough. She prayed out, and through, to Izza:

  I’m not leaving. I have to help.

  She heard no reply.

  Kai stood, spilling Behemoth from her lap. The cat yowled, hissed. Kai stroked her under her chin.

  Then she left. She had work to do.

  Chapter Sixty-eight

  ZEDDIG AND LEY STAYED in, the day before the launch. They didn’t wake until noon, having spent the night preparing. When noon came, they didn’t rise together—Zeddig rolled from bed, leaving Ley to sleep, cheek pillowed on clenched fist, while she made breakfast: eggs and flapjacks on the two-burner gas stove, sliced fruit, percolator coffee. They ate in silence, weighed down by the day.