Two Serpents Rise cs-2

by Max Gladstone

  The lords of the earth and the bums in rags and tatters hid from that light, under ratty blankets or in the perfumed caves of nightclubs and dance halls. Across town by the shore, five students doffed their clothes and ran naked into cold dark water. Dresediel Lex by night was a brilliant menagerie. The animals trapped inside scraped at the bars of their cages.

  Caleb arrived early at the Rakesblight Center, a black square box a thousand feet on each side and four stories tall. Animals were bought here, butchered, and sold—unsuspecting pigs herded a hundred at a time into rooms that smelled nothing at all like death, so well did the center’s Craft scrub away the stench and spiritual taint of slaughter. From those rooms the pigs’ corpses moved to wheels and metal jaws and conveyor belts. By the time their meat reached the sale floor, it had become cold flesh in a small box, nothing left to suggest it once squealed or rooted in muck.

  Two years before, the King in Red had bought the place from Illyana Rakesblight, the Deathless Queen who designed the center to replace the fallen Goddess of Plenty. After the purchase, Illyana retired to an island she raised from a distant ocean, and the King in Red assumed her role. Each knife and abattoir became an extension of his power. Caleb’s job had been to review the plant and ensure RKC would profit enough to offset operating costs. The center was a good investment, he decided after weeks of waking up shivering from nightmares of nothing-wrong, of smiling as he was flayed alive by sharp, spinning wire; the King in Red agreed. Caleb earned a promotion from his nightmares, never entered the Rakesblight Center again, and renounced all meat for seven months after the deal cleared.

  He skirted the edge of the center’s parking lot. No true night ever fell in Dresediel Lex, but there were shadows enough to hide. Soon he reached the alley between the center and the warehouse next door, which belonged to a demon-summoning Concern. He found a fire escape set into the center’s wall and began to climb.

  Cliff runners flitted across the gap between the buildings above, silent as falcons falling, so swift he might have missed them between blinks.

  He climbed faster, and tried to calm his heart. Reaching the top of the ladder, he clamored to the roof and stopped, amazed.

  The runners waited, arrayed for war.

  Some stood and some crouched on the flat black roof, uniform in their lack of similarity. Short hair and long, thick and thin, skin tattooed or clean or pierced, dressed in basic black or strips of multicolored cloth, armored with chain or girded by soft leather. Caleb felt underdressed in his denim pants and cotton shirt.

  The runners did not speak to him or to each other. Noise might attract Wardens and other undesirables. They communicated through gesture and glance.

  Fifty curious gazes turned to him. He ignored all but one.

  Someone had chalked a white line on the roof from north to south. Beyond that line the city rolled over buildings and below skyspires, to the black ocean and the cold sand.

  Mal stood on the line, arms crossed, waiting.

  As he approached her, the air grew warm. She’d slicked her hair back against her scalp, and bound it with a leather strap.

  “I’m glad you made it,” she said.

  Rooftop gravel ground beneath his feet as he approached her.

  “Why are you chasing me?”

  “I’m trying to protect the city.” He took another step. “And you.”

  The cliff runners watched.

  Ten feet. Five.

  “You’re the one who needs protection,” she said.

  Three. Two. One. He smelled sweat, sandalwood, and leather. “I’ll take my chances.” He reached for her.

  He blinked.

  When his eyes opened, Mal was halfway across the roof already and gaining speed. Caleb had no time to drop into a crouch: he fell forward, caught himself with his leg, and pressing off the ground he fell and caught himself again, tumbling more than sprinting after her.

  Mal reached the roof’s edge first, and leapt to an outbuilding a story lower than the warehouse. She landed with a roll as Caleb launched himself into the yawning gulf.

  12

  The world opened beneath Caleb, six stories’ drop onto solid gray asphalt. Emptiness and wind tore at his mind, but he landed on the neighboring roof, and rolled. His knee throbbed. Adrenaline dulled the pain, and he staggered to his feet and ran again.

  Mal had already reached the outbuilding’s edge and leapt, this time across a twelve-foot chasm toward a stockhouse that supplied the Rakesblight Center with victims. Caleb gaped in disbelief. The distance was too great. Not even Mal could make such a jump—nor did she.

  She struck the wall feet-first, caught the ledge overhead by her fingertips, and pulled herself onto the roof. How had she learned that? If her first try had not been perfect, she would not have survived for a second.

  No time to speculate. Caleb jumped, and closed his eyes.

  Dresediel Lex was built of stone, glass, and contracts—promises stronger than steel, tying the city together by pledge and payment. Bonds of contract were invisible, unless you looked at the world as Craftsmen learned to look, with eyes closed and mind open.

  The black behind Caleb’s eyes came alive with blue-white webs, strands several feet thick, as if woven by pyramid-sized spiders. The contract lines stretched to the horizon. They bound building to building, tied skyspires to the earth, lit streetlamps, pumped water through subterranean pipes, cooled hallways and made the desert city livable. Ahead, these lines converged on the nova palace of North Station.

  Falling, Caleb grabbed a silver cord.

  Scars all over his body burned as they woke and drew on the cord’s power. He shot forward, dragged by a line of lightning. Cold fangs sank into his arm. His eyes snapped open from the speed, and the visible world resolved blue around him again. The contract cord had carried him almost a hundred feet; he flew over the stockhouse’s rooftop. With a shout of triumph, he released the cord and fell to the gravel, landing with knees bent. The chemical stench of close-kept pigs enveloped him; wards burned off most of the stink, but not all.

  Mal sprinted ahead of him, toward North Station. With eyes open, Caleb could no longer see the station’s burning soul, the blaze of contracts—only its colossal physical form, a sprawling complex of cooling towers and thick pipe, lit by ghostlight and gas flame, and surrounded by a barbed wire fence.

  Once Mal crossed that fence, alarms would sound, and Wardens would arrive. She’d be caught, and his work to find her, to learn what she knew and keep her free of the Wardens’ hands, would be meaningless.

  He could not let that happen.

  Bloodstained aprons, sheets, towels fluttered on clotheslines at the far end of the roof. Mal left a wake in sanguine cloth. He followed her, reached the roof’s edge steps behind, jumped.

  Lava coursed in his veins and melted his muscles. Every exhalation broke upon a rushing indrawn breath. He gripped the reins of Dresediel Lex and they scorched him with their chill. Already his hand felt frozen. His flight, like everything, had a price. These cords took his soul as they carried him. Soon they would drain him completely and he would fall.

  Mal landed on the fence, climbed without apparent concern for the barbed wire—another cliff runner’s trick, maybe, or else enchanted gloves—and dropped to a service shed on the other side. As she landed into North Station, the sky erupted in red light. A banshee shrieked, and others around the station perimeter cried out in answering alarm. Mal paused atop the shed like a locust on a blade of grass, then sprang onto a thick conduit and ran toward a cyclopean cooling tower at the station’s heart.

  He landed on the conduit behind her. The noise of his impact caused her to glance back. Her eyes widened; she fled, and he followed. As they ran through the forest of vents and ducts and pipes, he called to her, panting: “We need to talk.”

  “You’re persistent.” Her voice was even, conversational.

  “It’s a virtue.”

  “How are you flying?”

  “I made a gamble.�
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  “I hope you didn’t risk anything valuable.” She ducked under a chest-height conduit; he vaulted over it and struck his shin on a jutting metal bar. His pants tore.

  “Only my soul.” He grabbed for her, but she sprinted ahead, reached the coolant tower, and began to climb.

  From the pipe she leapt to the lowest rung of an access ladder, climbed that and jumped again, this time to a duct that ivied around the tower. She moved from handhold to handhold easily as a guitar player changing chords.

  Groping blind, he found a line of Craft that spiraled up the tower, and gripped it with both hands. Chill fingers clawed at him as he rose. His heart beat to burst the cage of his ribs and rain blood on the city.

  More banshee cries shivered through North Station as other cliff runners crossed the fence. Wardens would come soon, Couatl mounts beating terror through the night sky. A Couatl could outpace Caleb in the air, read a newspaper three miles away in the dark, track a rat in its nest or a man in a mob. Even if Mal could evade them, he would not.

  Red warning flares cast a hellish pattern on the balloon of an airbus approaching the tower—lower, and nearer to North Station, than an airbus should fly. Irrelevant. The world was an incandescent maze. Chest heaving, brain blood-battered, Caleb approached the lip of the cooling tower.

  He let go of the line, and, for a moment, flew.

  Momentum thrust him skyward. He tumbled toward stars and skyspires, and at the apex of his flight let out a whoop of triumph that turned to fear as he began to fall.

  There was no time to think. The stone tower thrust at him, a sword point with the world’s weight behind it.

  Rock struck him hard in the chest, in the legs, and everywhere else. After a few seconds, he realized he was still alive, prone on the lip of the tower, boiling steam to his left and void to his right. Hot air and sulfurous fumes engulfed him. Arms splayed, he embraced the stone.

  He was alone.

  He sat up, teetered, and nearly fell into seething smoke.

  A gloved hand crested the tower, followed by the rest of Mal. Her hair was a black nimbus, her face and arms sweat-slick. Fierce eyes stared at him through smoke.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Couldn’t think up a better line”—she gasped for air—“on the way up?”

  Caleb couldn’t think of anything to say, and anyway he could not speak for his lungs’ heaving. He edged toward her around the precipice.

  “So what happens now,” he said when he drew near.

  “Now.” She stood, and fixed him with a broken glass grin. “We see how much farther you’re willing to go.”

  He lunged, too late. She dove off the tower’s edge.

  The force of her leap carried her clear of ducts and ladders and platforms. She fell, spun, tumbled—and landed, on the balloon of the airbus passing below. Gray silk dimpled around her body.

  Sirens wailed. A fresh breeze feathered Caleb’s brow.

  He jumped after her.

  Sharp wind buffeted him. Falling, he strained with fingers, arms, and tortured shoulders for the contract-cords that guided the airbus. Cold talons tightened around his heart.

  He clutched at nothing.

  Blue fire tore through his arms and chest.

  Caleb halted two feet above the gray balloon. Pain jolted his eyes open. Mal lay beneath him as if on a pillowed mattress.

  “You made it,” she said, shocked.

  “Couldn’t think of a better line on the way down?”

  “You’re an interesting man.”

  He was about to say something inane about living in interesting times, when a thousand suns exploded over Dresediel Lex.

  His shadow fell across Mal. Light bellowed through his body.

  A woman a thousand feet tall, four-armed and six-winged, emerged from North Station like a swimmer from a shallow pool. She opened many mouths and roared.

  Flame and figure both vanished in a heartbeat. The city’s million lights went dark. Night closed around Caleb like a warm fist.

  The canvas struck him in a rush. Blinking galaxies from his eyes, he scrambled on the slick fabric, found no grip, and started to slide.

  The more he fought, the more he slipped. He heard Mal call for him; he reached for her and slid farther. Fingers brushed his grasping outstretched hand and she was gone, and the balloon was gone. He tumbled into the sky. Dresediel Lex wheeled below, above him, and he saw North Station’s towers fallen. Fire clung to broken rock.

  He fell for hours, or seconds, until something struck him hard in the chest. Darkness rushed in, writhing with terrible dreams.

  13

  When Caleb woke, he was staggering through a familiar hell. Ixaqualtil Seven Eagle ruled a realm of darkness where fire shed no light and no stars shone, a vast vacant universe that resounded with the cries of dying and damned, with demonsong, with the crackle of flame and the slither of invisible blades on invisible whetstones. Within that cacophony Ixaqualtil crouched before the Sun’s empty throne, feasting on all who dared approach his master’s perilous seat.

  The Sun-God was dead, slain by the King in Red during Liberation, but His servant yet awaited the unwary, two hundred fifty six dagger-teeth bared in a hungry smile.

  In Ixaqualtil’s hell one did not move for fear of stumbling into a hidden pit, a black fire, a beast’s waiting mouth, yet Caleb was moving. Walking. Each step poured sharp pain down his side. He tried to stop, but could not. His left arm was wrapped around a woman’s shoulder, her arm around his back. When his feet faltered, she pulled him along.

  Caleb saw only suggestions of shape within the velvet dark, but he knew Mal walked beside him.

  “You shouldn’t be in hell,” he said.

  She started at the sound of his voice. So did he: cracked, hoarse. “You don’t know me well enough to say that. I’m not, though, yet.”

  “What happened?” He struggled to place one foot in front of the other. Clouds of noise and flame obscured his mind.

  “You fell. I caught you.”

  “Caught me how? You were lying”—he remembered—“on top of the airbus.”

  “It would have been bad manners to let you fall.” In the distance, he heard the subsonic roars of Couatl. Wardens, hunting. Still alive, then. Probably. No doubt there were Wardens in hell. The Couatl roared again; Mal flinched beside him, and spoke, as if to block them out: “I don’t know why I saved you. If I thought about it, I might not have. I rolled off the balloon, caught the airbus’s rudder, and grabbed you with some Craft.”

  “You’re a Craftswoman?”

  “A bit of one.”

  Caleb remembered a rush of wind, and a winged, sun-bright woman. When he closed his eyes he saw her in negative.

  “I remember a woman of light.”

  “You faced the blast,” she said. “I saw its reflection, and the darkness after. At first I thought the light had blinded me. Then I realized the power was off.”

  He blinked, and saw their hell with clear eyes. Darkness grew texture and depth; hints of black and red and violet adhered to brick, to glass and pitted pavement, pipe and cobblestone and palm tree. They staggered down an avenue walled with stores and small restaurants: Salamanter’s Deli, Cusko & Sons, a Muerte Coffee franchise. Shards of broken shop windows covered sidewalk and street; they should have caught streetlamp light like diamonds on a jeweler’s cloth, but there were no streetlamps. No lights in the shops, either, or the upstairs apartments. Neither stars nor moon relieved the darkness.

  Caleb saw by firelight reflected off the belly of the clouds. The city was burning.

  “We’re in the Vale,” he said. “My home isn’t far.”

  “I know. I found your address in your wallet.”

  “I have no secrets from you now.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “You saved my life.”

  “It does look that way.”

  He tried to laugh, but his ribs hurt. “The other runners, who ran into the station after us…”
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  “I don’t know.” He thought at first she might say no more, but she continued: “We won’t learn anything tonight.”

  “I hope they escaped.” He imagined Balam’s reaction to his students’ death. The ground will break you, he had said.

  “So do I.”

  Terror passed overhead on beating wings. A roar below human hearing shivered him. The Warden swooped away toward the fire, and Caleb could move again.

  “Gods.”

  “Watch your language,” she cautioned.

  “What else could it be? An explosion that powerful, with blackout and riots just after. Gods,” he repeated, less a curse than an expression of wonder, “and their faithful. They hit North Station. One of the True Quechal must have smuggled a god inside somehow. Or a goddess.”

  His foot slipped on a stone. Her grip tightened around his waist, and pain flowered in his ribs. He recovered his balance, and they walked on.

  “This is me,” he said when they reached Three Cane Road, and they turned onto it together. Caleb barely noticed the road’s gentle slope on his morning commute, but it was a mountain path tonight.

  Fresh black paint disfigured the houses here. Some gang of fervent amateurs had scrawled scenes of scripture and sacrifice on the pale adobe walls: Aquel and Achal devouring the Hero Twins; Qet Sea-Lord giving his body to the deep.

  After ten minutes’ agonizing climb they reached Caleb’s squat two-story. A small gang gathered on his lawn, three men and two women bearing paints and brushes and knives. The tallest man had defaced Caleb’s front wall with a crude, violent cartoon of Aquel chasing demons from the earth.

  “Hey!”

  The painters turned. In darkness Caleb could not see their faces. They might have been his neighbors. Paint glistened like blood on the wall.

  “Get the hell away from my house,” Caleb said.

  The tall man set down his brush. His shoulders were broad, his steps heavy.

  Caleb twisted free of Mal to meet the man’s advance.