“Of course I do!” Metal walls reflected the force of her shout. Caleb stepped back. She stood, her half-open shirt flaring like the robes of a Deathless King. “The priests killed. Sure. But are we any different? Am I, after what I did today? You’ve seen Skittersill, and Stonewood, what our city does to the people who lose. Your father—”
“Don’t bring him into this. My father’s a criminal. A madman.”
“Your father led the Skittersill Rising! He tried for years to make peace between theists and Craftsmen, and when that failed he tried to protest. And they rained fire on him. They burned his followers by the hundreds.”
“He wanted to kill people. That’s the freedom they were fighting for, him and his followers. Freedom to kill people.”
“Freedom from persecution. Freedom to practice their religion. Freedom to sacrifice volunteers—people who wanted to die.”
“That’s murder! It’s murder when you carve someone’s heart out of their chest, no matter if you’re doing it because a god tells you to.”
Muscles on the side of her jaw twitched. “Fine. But what I just did was murder, too. When we sin, we shed blood to atone. That’s what my parents taught me.”
“Then they were crazy.”
He said the words before he knew them: they sprang to his mind, slithered down the spine to his lungs, infested the air, and burst out his mouth. Mal’s eyes widened, and her lips pressed thin together. Caleb opened his mouth to say something, anything, to apologize or explain.
The gods’ light faded, and it was too late.
Night filled the room. A great hand seized him, and threw him like a stone. He struck the wall, or perhaps the floor or ceiling. Directions no longer met in his mind. Weight pressed against his chest, the weight of thousands of miles of water. His ribs creaked and he fought to breathe.
“You don’t get to say that.”
She was talking. Good. Talking meant she wouldn’t kill him straight off.
Blood and silver, he thought, when did her killing me become a possibility?
He remembered her standing over him goddess-like on the border of the Skittersill. Deities kill those that follow them. He opened his mouth, but only a dry croak escaped his lips.
“My parents were good people.” Her voice was an anchor in his whirling world. “They were faithful, and they were angry, but they were good. They stood against the Red King in the Skittersill Rising, and fell. And burned. My mother took a week to die.”
He struggled against her Craft, but his arms did not move, his scars would not wake. Blood pounded in his ears. His lungs ached for air.
The Rising had been his father’s fault. When Temoc decided to walk a path, fools always followed in his footsteps. A peaceful demonstration, they claimed, and it was at first, but as weeks rolled on his control of the mob wavered. On the tenth day, some idiot threw a stone, a child died, and the Wardens moved in.
Battle lines were not drawn. There were no heroic struggles. Those who resisted, fell.
Caleb was ten. Mal could not have been more than twelve.
After the bodies cooled, the King in Red issued a public call for peace, and Temoc became an enemy of the state.
Caleb’s father had already gone, leaving his scars behind.
Caleb was also, in his way, an orphan of the Rising.
Mal’s parents lay burning in the streets in Skittersill. No amount of water could quench those flames, and their bodies would never fall to ash.
Mal, too, took power from her scars.
“I’m sorry,” he said as spots of black deeper than black swelled behind his eyes.
The weight lifted from his chest, and darkness drained away down the hole in Mal’s mind. He slumped, but though his legs felt like stretched and fraying rubber, he did not fall.
Mal stood between him and the gods, blanched and wan as a crescent moon. The draining dark had taken something from her.
“Sorry,” she said. “Yes.” And: “You should go.”
He reached blindly for the door, opened it, and backed out without looking away from her. He had to say something, but there was nothing to say.
She grew smaller as he withdrew. When he crossed the threshold of her room, she was the size of a statue. Three steps more, the size of an idol.
The door closed between them, and he turned away and ran.
INTERLUDE: DREAMS
Snow fell on Dresediel Lex for the first and last time, covering the bodies of men and gods that littered the streets. Where the snow fell in fire, it hissed and burst to steam. A falling god had cracked the face of a pyramid with one flailing hand, and rubble covered the broad avenue below. Rage and sorrow burned in the mottled sky.
Blood-slick, Alaxic stumbled through the city’s doom. Cold air stung his throat. Pain from the wounds in his chest, and arm, and leg, pierced and beggared thought. At dawn he had ridden into battle on a feathered serpent, bedecked with the blessing of the gods. The serpent lay dead two blocks away, and he was tired.
“Hello, Alaxic,” someone said behind him.
The voice was deep and familiar, but alien to this time, this place. He turned, fast as his wounds would let him.
A skeleton in a red suit stood in the road, between the burning corpses of two demigods. He bore no weapons save a cup of coffee.
The snow did not fall in the coffee, or accumulate on the skeleton’s robes.
“What are you doing in my dreams?” Alaxic asked.
“At the moment,” the skeleton replied, “I am pondering why of all the places and times you might choose to dream, you would select the Liberation of Dresediel Lex. This was not your finest hour.”
“It was a noble struggle.”
“You fought us and we crushed you.”
“You besieged and blockaded us. We had no choice.”
“Your people tore out my lover’s heart. What did you think would happen after that?”
“I had no part in that decision.”
“As the inquest found, or else we would have sunk you into solid bedrock, or trapped you in the corridors of your own mind, or tied you to a mountain somewhere with a regenerating liver and an eagle that likes foie gras.” A band of skirmishers ran past, bound to nowhere. “So, why do you come back here?”
“My friends died in this battle. And we do not all choose where we dream.”
“You are a strange person,” Kopil said. “You were a priest, but became a Craftsman. You do not control your own dreams. You refuse to leverage your soul, though it means you won’t survive the end of that slab of meat you call your body.”
“The Craft,” replied Alaxic, “is a tool. Not all of us let our tools rule our life.”
Kopil sipped his coffee. “Tell me about Seven Leaf Lake.”
“I heard there were problems.”
“One of your employees went mad. Killed everyone on the station.”
“Horrible,” Alaxic said. “I don’t know what I’d do if I were in your shoes. Makes me glad I’m retired.”
“Are you really?”
“Glad?”
“Retired.”
He exhaled fog into the cold. “You’ve watched me for the last few months, you and your spies. What do I do?”
“You drink tea, and you read.”
“I drink tea, and I read. I don’t plot, I don’t scheme. I don’t want the old world back any more than you do.”
A winged serpent flew overhead, and was transfixed by arrows of light. It shrieked, and fell in bloody pieces to the street around them.
“Yet you still dream of old battles.”
“And you haven’t forgiven me, in five decades, for surviving this one. You resented my success in the Hidden Schools. You opposed the Wardens’ decision to set me free after the Skittersill Rising. You plotted against me as I built Heartstone, and took it from me when you had the chance.”
“You were a rebel. An anarchist.”
“I am a populist.” He looked up to the sky, where Craftsmen clad in eng
ines of war tore gods asunder. Heavenly blood fell, mixed with snow. “At least I only dream about old battles,” he said. “You’re still fighting them.”
A wave of night rolled over the world. When Alaxic looked again, the King in Red was gone.
Book Three
HEARTSTONE
29
Caleb left Seven Leaf Lake soon after dawn, with an escort of two Wardens. He told Four that the King in Red wanted a report on their success, that Mal would stay until reinforcements arrived. This was not, exactly, a lie. Mal could have stopped him, but she didn’t.
They took flight as the first rays of sun glanced off the long flat plane of the lake. Sleep had haunted him all night, ambushing from the darkest corners of his mood. Sharp-fingered devils charged his fitful dreams, demons with his own face devouring the flesh of screaming gods.
He shaded his eyes against the sunrise, leaned back into the gondola, and drowsed.
The Couatl carried him south. Lake gave way to waterfall and smooth-flowing river. Every few miles, stone circles protruded from the forest, their centers thick with shade. Silver glyphs glowed against gray granite. The standing stones bled Seven Leaf Lake south, to slake his city’s thirst. Soon the falls would cease to thunder, and the river shrink to a stream.
One hundred twenty eight million acre-feet of water. After a decade or so, the city’s growth would outpace the lake’s ability to refill itself. The forest would feel the effects long before then.
After three hours they stopped for lunch on a cliff overlooking a deep valley, and ate bread and cheese and drank stale canteen water and agave liquor.
The Wardens napped on the cliff after lunch. Caleb, restless, walked a hundred feet into the woods, found a sturdy birch tree, and struck it with his palms, with his feet and the sides of his hands, scaring away broad-winged birds that roosted in the canopy. He ripped his knuckles’ skin, and left a smear of blood on the white bark. He pushed against the trunk until his shoulders, arms, legs, belly all convulsed and he let out a long, low cry.
A roar answered from the valley, larger, deeper, a sound made by no human throat.
Shaken, he returned to the Wardens, who stood with weapons bared, roused by his cry or the valley’s answer. They packed quickly, and flew south.
By day’s end the Drakspine peaks mellowed into farms and bare hills. Here, amid long dry rows of wheat, the Wardens kept observation posts, small adobe buildings beside barn-sized hutches where Couatl warmed their eggs. Caleb’s escorts spent most of the evening writing reports; afterward, he challenged them and the other attendant Wardens to a quick game. As he played, he did not look the goddess in the eye.
Talking over cards, he listened for news, but heard little more than farmers’ gossip, rumors of Scorpionkind raids on outlying settlements. When he asked about the city, the Wardens glanced at one another and claimed they had heard nothing certain.
They reached Dresediel Lex the next morning. Serpents of smoke tangled in the air above Sansilva. Caleb’s heart leapt, but when they crested the Drakspine he saw the damage was limited to the 700 block. Some shops burned, that was all, a few lives destroyed. Wardens circled above emptied streets.
They landed in the pyramid’s parking lot, strewn with broken bottles, rocks, clapboard signs, all the detritus of a protest turned riot. Two Wardens met them and rushed Caleb across the lot into the pyramid. Glancing over his shoulder he saw Muerte Coffee, empty, its front window webbed with cracks.
His escorts bore him wordlessly across a lobby manned with guards and security demons, into a waiting lift. By the sixtieth floor, he stopped asking questions.
The foyer of the Red King’s office was empty save for dark leather furniture, a grim portrait on one wall, and Anne, Kopil’s secretary, at her desk. She acknowledged Caleb with a curt nod, and turned a stone desktop idol counterclockwise; the double doors behind her, marked with deaths-heads, opened without sound. The Wardens thrust him into the shadow beyond, and the doors slammed shut.
“Caleb.”
The voice was weak, a bare suggestion of wind. For a confused moment he thought it belonged to his father, captive, tortured, and he turned in slow terror of what he might see.
He stood in Kopil’s office, beneath the crystal dome on the pyramid’s peak—the office without entrance or exit. There was no sign of the doors through which he had come.
A hospital bed rested near the altar-desk. The carpet was rolled back, and someone had drawn a mandala around the bed with white and purple and yellow sand. Red sheets clad the mattress, and a red robe wrapped the skeleton who lay upon it.
The shadows that clung to Kopil looked light and insubstantial. His gestures were weak, the sparks of his eyes dull and rust-colored. The Kopil who confronted Caleb in this office months before had been a river in flood, and here he lay at ebb.
Caleb stared. Everything he could say seemed wrong.
The King in Red beckoned Caleb with a twitch of his fingers. He approached.
Bare jaws worked silently until the Deathless King could speak. “What happened?”
“You look different,” he said, and wished he had said something else.
“I am different,” Kopil replied with a low, grating laugh like a snake’s rattle. “I lie reduced, and the water flows. It has been half a century since I last felt weakness. Do they appreciate what I do for them, I wonder.”
“There are people who have sacrificed more,” he said, though he didn’t know why, “and lived less comfortably, with death their only promise of release.”
Kopil did not seem to understand what he had said, or if he understood, did not care. “Is Seven Leaf Lake ours again?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
Caleb did, though he left out many details. He did not mention his scars, or Mal’s acquaintance with Allesandre, or her bloodletting and their fight beneath the lake. Dates, times, names, these he related with precision. Four and her team deserved commendations for their service. Seven Leaf was safe again, and the water flowed.
He spoke of the agony of the gods in the lake, and shuddered when Kopil said, “Good.”
“The riots should stop now,” he said, but the King in Red waved the subject away.
“They were barely worth the name of riot. A tussle with the Wardens. Someone knocked over a few fire barrels, and the coals ignited a line of Sansilva shops. We couldn’t use tainted water on the fire—some Tzimet might survive the heat—so we flew saltwater in from the ocean.”
“The Vale looked quiet when we passed over.”
“Not much trouble there. Wardens arrested a few agitators, prophets proclaiming the Twin Serpents’ return, that sort of thing.”
“Do you think,” Caleb said, but stopped himself.
“What?”
“Do you think they knew we’re drawing the Serpents’ power? Do we have an information leak?”
“One of the men we arrested was a salesman from Centervale with three children and a pending divorce; another, a minor landowner; the third, a junior league ullamal coach. Their wives, husbands, children claim none had any religious history, not even the coach. They dreamed of the Hungry Serpents, and when they woke, they prophesied in tongues of flame.”
“A thousand people must go mad in Dresediel Lex every day.”
“Three thousand. But the visions here were all the same. They saw Aquel and Achal, waking.”
“We only have six weeks to the next eclipse.”
Kopil sighed. “I know. RKC has already volunteered to pay for the fireworks. Fifteen thousand souls for simple merriment. We could buy everyone in the city a cup of decent coffee for that. And yet the revelers must revel.”
“The Serpents are on peoples’ minds as the eclipse nears, is my point. When they go crazy, their madness takes a form to fit their fears. It’s just dream stuff. Nothing serious.”
“Have you ever read Maistre Schatten?”
“Who?”
“Schatten wrote about dreams and
myths and the unconscious: Sleeping Giants, The Shadow’s Refuge, The Ends of Time. Did you ever read them?”
“No.”
“I knew the man,” Kopil said. “Old in his fifties, shaken and shattered by a life of delving under the placid surface of his clients’ minds. Do not ignore dreams. They are a line from the past to the future. All nightmares are real.”
“You’re worried.”
“I’m worried,” the King in Red replied. He crooked one finger, and a brown paper envelope floated from his desk to Caleb’s hand. Caleb opened the envelope, and slid Mal’s shark’s-tooth pendant into his palm. The closed-eye glyph and the tracking pattern were cracked and blackened. “Yesterday, the sigils and enchantments on this pendant burned themselves out—around noon, when you struck down Alaxic’s aide.”
Caleb pursed his lips. Allesandre had spouted no True Quechal rhetoric, no promises of the gods’ return. Then again, she had been all but a goddess herself, at the end. And when she usurped Seven Leaf, she had let Tzimet into the water. She would have been a logical poisoner’s agent—she knew Mal was sneaking into Bright Mirror and North Station. As Alaxic’s aide, as Mal’s friend, Allesandre could have set Mal up, pointed her toward a dealer in Quechal artifacts who would give her the tracking amulet. Only the faintest strands of the deal would lead back to Allesandre herself. “Interesting,” he said.
“Are you still in contact with the cliff runner from whom you took this amulet?”
He blinked. “I could try to track her down. I don’t know if she’ll talk to me.” Both statements were true.
“The talisman is dead. Even the tracking signals have ceased. Only broken glyphs remain. My people copied the glyphs, studied the tooth down to its component atoms, and found nothing. This supposed link between your cliff runner and Alaxic’s aide is our only lead. Find the runner. Ask her if she recognizes a woman of Allesandre’s description. You may offer to return the talisman, if she requests it in exchange. Report back to me on your success.”
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