Two Serpents Rise cs-2

by Max Gladstone

  “Why not use the Serpents?”

  An opening door shed light into the dark conference room, and Mal stood on its threshold. Caleb’s first impulse was to run toward her, but he suppressed the urge, and watched.

  Mal’s words rippled through the room. Ostrakov swore in a language Caleb did not recognize. Chihuac and Mazetchul turned to the King in Red, either for reassurance or to watch his reaction. Tollan grimaced.

  Kopil spoke, his voice heavy with death and time. “I summoned Ms. Kekapania to this meeting. I am glad she has chosen to attend. If Heartstone has exposed us, Heartstone should stand to account.”

  The door closed behind Mal. “Sorry I’m late. The crowd’s grown outside.” Her footsteps approached through the dark. Stripes of lamplight revealed and concealed her by turns as she circled the table. “I’ll do better than stand to account. I can fix this.”

  “Explain.”

  “The Serpents have all the power we need. You’ve wanted an excuse to draw on them for months.”

  Caleb glanced down at his notes, turned a few pages, and found the figure he sought. “We’d have to spend more power keeping them asleep than we can draw from them.”

  “Much more,” Mal said. “But over a longer time. The Serpents grant you a reprieve. Think of it as a loan to yourself, with interest.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. We can’t loan soulstuff to ourselves.” He expected others to join in, but no one spoke. All eyes had turned to Kopil.

  The King in Red‘s eyes burned in shadow. “Your people have caused this chaos. Why should we trust you to fix it?”

  Before the dread lord of RKC, Mal looked smaller than he remembered.

  “Because I can imagine what you’ll do to us if we fail,” she said.

  “Can you.”

  “I have a powerful imagination.”

  “It will be worse than you imagine. For you not least of all.”

  “Give me a chance. Use the Serpents to preserve the illusion of your strength. In three days, I can fix Seven Leaf Lake.” She held so still the world seemed to spin around her. “If all the demons from all the hells stand in my way, I will break them.”

  In the ensuing silence Caleb heard the breaths of the four people in the room who still breathed: Tollan, Chihuac, Mal, and himself. Most of RKC’s executive board had discarded lungs and blood on the thorn-paved path to their current positions.

  “So let it be,” Kopil said. “We will send Caleb with you.”

  The number of breaths reduced by one. Stunned to strangulation, Caleb looked up at his boss. Bony hands rested on the table beside Kopil’s mug of cold coffee.

  Mal bore the King in Red’s gaze, and Caleb’s, and the board’s, as if they were the stares of frightened rabbits.

  “Alone?” Caleb asked.

  “Of course not.” The King in Red struck his teeth together, and Caleb heard laughter echo up from a deep well. “You’ll travel with an escort of Wardens, on our fastest Couatl. Leaving tomorrow morning, you should reach Seven Leaf early the following day. Assess the situation and determine what aid you require. Fix the problem within three days; if you cannot do so, whisper my name thrice before a mirror in darkness, and I will send aid.”

  “I understand,” Mal said.

  The conference room stretched cavernous about them. Mal turned from Kopil to Caleb, and smiled a cliff runner’s smile.

  “This should be fun.”

  22

  Mal excused herself to prepare. Caleb wanted to follow her, but he could not snub the Directors in their power. They wrung information from him: captives in a hot, dry cell, fighting for a drink from the same mangled sponge.

  “How much water can we cut back from manufacturing and agriculture in the next week without damaging crops?” asked Alana Mazetchul, who had little love for RKC’s industrial business. Ostrakov, whose department served farmers, makers, and builders of things, cut in before Caleb could answer Mazetchul: “How many souls are lost every minute our manufacturing plants stand dead?” More questions followed that, each one pointed, though Caleb could not see the purpose of every barb. He answered in raw figures with no commentary. He could not allow himself to be torn between these fanged eminences. He had problems enough already.

  For thirty minutes they grilled him, and as each minute passed he felt Mal retreat further into the night.

  The King in Red listened, and made occasional notes on his yellow notepad with a quill pen. He did not speak.

  At last, Caleb exhausted the pool of questions. The meeting adjourned with a solemn incantation: “We wait, and we rise; we move, and the earth trembles.” They stood as one and left the room severally—somber, disturbed, and determined not to betray their exhaustion as they retreated into shadows. Sixty years ago, these men and women broke the heavens, and made the gods weep. They had spent the time since learning how hard it was to run a world.

  Tollan joined Caleb at the front of the room. “Well done,” she said, with a ghost of a smile. “Don’t die up there.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  She left.

  Two others remained in the conference room. Chihuac waited by Kopil’s throne; in the crook of one arm she carried a scroll as long as a sword. The King in Red leaned on the table and levered himself to his feet. The sparks of his eyes dimmed, and Caleb heard something like a cough rattle where his esophagus once had been.

  “Sir?” Forgetting his notes, he moved to the King in Red. “Are you okay?”

  “Of course,” the skeleton said. “Thousands cry out to me that they thirst, that they are wounded; thousands more will join them soon. Their need tears at my soul. I could die, satisfying them, and if I die, so will they. Yet if I do not satisfy them, they will also die, and the city will die, and I will die at last. I am, in short, a perfect image of health. Someone will carve me on a monument.”

  “I’ve drawn up figures,” said Chihuac, “for increased Warden deployment over the next week.”

  “We will discuss them in my office in ten minutes. I must speak with Caleb. Alone.”

  She withdrew. Her shoes were soft-soled, her step light. She walked into shadow and disappeared. He heard no door open or close in her wake.

  “What’s your plan?” Caleb said when they were alone.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why are you sending me north? I won’t be able to help.”

  “Your mere presence will suffice.” Kopil lifted his coffee and his notepad and walked into the unbroken black. Caleb followed.

  The last trace of light failed. Cloak and King were different textures of darkness. Caleb blinked, and with eyes closed he saw a hallway outlined about them in silver-blue fire, and the King in Red a lightning mosaic, a many-limbed spider with a thousand slavering mouths.

  He opened his eyes, and saw nothing.

  Liquid shadow welled about his legs. Viscous, palpable, it rose from his ankles, to his knees, to his waist. The tips of his fingers trailed over the surface of the shade. Shadows covered his chest, his neck. When they reached his mouth he expected to choke, yet when he inhaled they sat sweetly in his lungs. The dark enclosed him. He could not see the red of Kopil’s cloak. His body was ice. He closed his eyes.

  His next step pressed him against a cobweb wall. His heart quickened, but he strode forward. The King in Red did not mean to kill him. Dead, he could not go on this mad mission to the north.

  Except as a zombie, of course.

  He wished he’d thought of that earlier.

  The shadows parted, as if he were floating upward through a subterranean lake and suddenly breached the surface. He blinked cobweb from his eyes, and clutched at the retreating liquid dark. He caught a handful, black and quivering like mercury in his palm.

  He glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see the conference room at the end of a long hall, but saw only a closet of red: crimson robes, scarlet suits and ties, shirts the color of blood both fresh and dried.

  “Can I get you a drink?” aske
d the King in Red.

  Caleb wheeled around. He stood in a bedroom, large, elegant and sparsely furnished, walled on two sides by smoked windows. Thin metal pillars supported a high, unfinished rock ceiling that glimmered with ghostlights. Bookcases lined the walls, stuffed with red and black leather volumes polished by age and use. The room’s opulence was almost obscured by mess: books piled on desk and floor and furniture, a stack of scrolls collapsed by the chair, a crimson duvet rumpled and askew on the king-sized bed. In an adjoining kitchenette, the King in Red poured reposado tequila into a lowball glass.

  “Nothing for me, thanks.”

  Kopil emerged from the kitchenette. He snapped his fingers twice and two cubes of ice fell into his tequila.

  “You don’t live here,” Caleb said. As he watched, the duvet straightened, books floated to the shelves of their own accord, and piles of scrolls snapped to order. “You have a mansion at Worldsedge. I’ve seen pictures.”

  “I have a mansion at Worldsedge,” Kopil acknowledged. “And one in the Skeld Reaches, and a penthouse in Alt Coulumb, and three extensive estates on this coast alone. Plus the occasional island. But do you have any idea how long it takes to commute from Worldsedge? Even flying, I’d waste an hour every day, and I have no interest in spending all morning lurching through a crowded sky. Not to mention the expense, which I assure you would be considerable. Easier to sleep where I work. This room isn’t large, but the whole building belongs to me, so I don’t feel cramped.”

  “Not much good for work-life balance.”

  “I haven’t been alive for more than seventy years.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s not so bad.” Kopil swirled tequila and ice. “RKC is a part of me, literally and figuratively. I built this Concern, and I have become a gear moving at its heart—a larger gear than many, but a gear nonetheless. When I sleep I see in my dreams the beast to which I have given birth. Thousands of miles of tunnel and pipe. Millions of people drink of us and live. Billions more spread throughout this mad world draw strength from Dresediel Lex. Men on the other side of the globe, in the southern Gleb, borrow our might to fight their wars. Ignorant children on six continents eat our grain and rejoice, though they do not know our name. So much depends on us. On me. Even at a time like this.”

  He didn’t know how to respond, so he tried, “That must be stressful.”

  “It’s no more than I asked for—than any of us asked for.” He sighed. “There is one thing you must understand about destroying gods, boy.”

  “Only one?”

  “You must be ready to take their place.”

  “I was thinking something like that myself, at the end of the meeting.” Caleb glanced around the room, wondering how to change the subject without offending his boss. He blinked. “This room doesn’t have any doors.”

  “Who needs them?”

  “Most people.”

  Kopil shrugged, and sipped tequila.

  “Sir, why are you sending me north? Lives depend on this mission. But you’re sending a handful of Wardens, a Craftswoman, and a mid-level risk manager. Why not specialists? Why not an army?”

  “If we send an army and we didn’t need one, we’ll have left Dresediel Lex weak for no reason, with an enemy loose inside our gates. If an army is needed, an army will be sent. The dead travel fast.”

  “In that case why send Mal—I mean, Ms. Kekapania? I doubt she knows anything about pipelines and Tzimet that Ms. Mazetchul doesn’t. Or any of a hundred other Craftsmen and Craftswomen.”

  “I’m sending her because I trust you.” The King in Red placed special weight on the last word in that sentence.

  “You trust…” Caleb blinked. “Oh.”

  “You see the outlines of my design.”

  “You trust me. But you don’t trust her.”

  Kopil could have been dead indeed for all the reaction he betrayed: a corpse arrayed in funeral red with a cup of sacrificial liquor in his hands. Beyond the windows, Wardens circled above Dresediel Lex.

  “You’re sending her because you want to give her a chance to betray you. You think Heartstone sabotaged its own project, and you want to give Mal a chance to fail, or turn on us.”

  “Those are two possibilities.”

  “You know she and I are romantically involved.”

  “I do.”

  He saw the rest of it, and cursed himself. “It’s a long journey on to Seven Leaf by Couatl. Lots can happen on the way.”

  Ruby stars glimmered in endless night.

  “If Ms. Kekapania is a traitor, any observer you sent with her might not reach Seven Leaf Lake. Even their death would tell you nothing. Accidents happen. So you send an observer you think she likes, someone she would hesitate to destroy.”

  “You are far too comfortable with conspiracies, Mr. Altemoc.”

  “Comfortable isn’t the word I would choose.”

  The skull shifted to one side, considering. “Say, in theory, that you have the following problem: the perfect woman for the job at hand was trained by an enemy so bitter that you devoured his Concern so he would no longer trouble you. Say he feels about you the way you feel about him, and say also that he is given to laying long plots and deep plans.”

  “Do you really think Alaxic might be involved?”

  “Al was always more of your father’s party than of mine.”

  He thought of the old man’s face, cast lava red by the Serpents’ light. “Can I speak frankly, sir?”

  Kopil waved him on.

  “You’re playing long odds. Mal won’t betray the city.”

  “If you trust her, why are you afraid to travel with her?”

  Caleb had no answer. “I should sleep,” he said at last, turning away. “And prepare.”

  There was no exit, so he walked toward the closet again.

  “Let me get that for you,” the King in Red called after him.

  Caleb did not stop. He tossed the liquid shadow cupped in his palm through the closet door. The shadow spread, like ink spilled in water, to obscure robes and suits and shoes. He stepped through; the black parted for him, and he was gone. Two steps, three, brought him out of the ink and into the boardroom.

  In the crimson flat, Kopil watched the darkness recede from his closet.

  “Interesting,” he said. If he had eyes, they would have narrowed. After exhausting the few seconds he could spare to puzzle irrelevant mysteries, he snapped his fingers and one of his kitchen walls swung open. Chihuac waited in his office with stacks of paperwork. The night was, unfortunately, still young.

  23

  Caleb could not sleep in his soulless room. RKC kept emergency quarters at 667 Sansilva for visitors and workers too busy to travel home: efficiencies with all the comfort and warmth of a grain thresher. He tumbled on the hard bed for an hour before he gave up, dressed, and rode the lift down to the street.

  Stars menaced the silent city. Even the protesters were mostly asleep, coats bundled to serve as pillows: bow-backed men and broad-shouldered women, young and old, poor and middle-class. Children slept in a clutch on the sidewalk. Ancient men huddled near a flickering portable fire.

  Zombies in burlap jumpsuits shambled among the sleepers. They swept the street with broad stiff brooms and speared garbage with rakes and pikes. RKC contracted with a minor Concern to keep the local streets clean, and the revenants came every evening, rain or sleet, protest or riot, earthquake or conflagration, to do their duty.

  Sea wind bore the scent of fish and salt off the shark-infested Pax. A few blocks in from shore, the stench of crowds, pavement, and livestock mugged the wind in a dark alley and took its place.

  The Wardens guarding RKC’s perimeter shifted to let Caleb pass. He stepped over an unconscious child and turned left toward Muerte Coffee.

  The shop’s windows were beacons in the bruised night. Caleb bought a cup of spiced chocolate from a clerk no livelier than the street sweepers, and retreated into grave-cool darkness. He sat on a sidewalk bench and watched
dead men move among the sleeping. Chocolate sank a plumb line to his core.

  Fifty years ago, at the God Wars’ height, Craftsmen had used a terrible weapon to bring the Shining Empire to its knees. Skies shattered, sand turned to glass, men and women and trees burned so quickly not even their shadows could escape. Those shadows lived still, travelers whispered—pinned to the ruined city by day and wandering at night, wailing after their lost flesh.

  He felt like one of those shades, nailed to the city walls, the bench slats, the stone beneath his feet, the cup warm in his hand.

  “Hello,” said Temoc beside him.

  Caleb let out a strangled squawk and spilled chocolate over his hands onto the sidewalk. Temoc passed him a handkerchief. He dried himself off, returned the sodden cloth, and took another sip before he faced his father.

  Temoc sat like a statue on the bench. A coat the size of a tent swallowed his massive body, and a long scarf concealed the bottom half of his face. In the last few weeks he had even let his hair grow, to cover the ritual scars on his scalp. A passing Warden would see only a large, amiable derelict seeking conversation in the small morning hours.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Temoc sighed and leaned back. The bench sagged with his weight. “Why shouldn’t a man visit his son?”

  “Dad.”

  “You know, from time to time, see how he’s getting on.”

  “Dad.”

  “How else am I supposed to brag about you to my friends in the old freedom fighters’ home?”

  “Dad.”

  Temoc stopped. The corners of his eyes smiled.

  “This is a huge risk, coming here,” Caleb said. “Even in disguise.”

  “What disguise? This is how I look now. I wander from safe house to safe house, avenging wrongs and fighting the State. It’s not a bad life.”

  “You’re a bum, is what you’re saying.”

  “A fool, perhaps. In the old days we had holy fools. Madness claimed a few of those who saw the Serpents, and their madness made them sacred. Now the fools are all that’s holy.” He patted his chest. “My life could be worse.”