Two Serpents Rise cs-2

by Max Gladstone

  He started to gather his cards, but they seized him before he could finish.

  * * *

  Either the demons could not talk, or they chose not to. They twisted Caleb’s arms behind his back and thrust his head down. He staggered through white-walled halls, until they arrived at a dark, small room with a table and two chairs. The demons threw him inside, and closed the door.

  He sat under a punishing spotlight, and wondered if the Wardens would come, if there was any law against lingering outside a woman’s door and waiting for her to return.

  Probably.

  He would have played more solitaire, but half his cards remained on the floor outside Mal’s apartment, with the flowers. Instead he practiced palming the cards that remained, sleeving them, sliding them into and out of his pockets. He did not cheat, but even an honest player should know how. When sleights of hand grew dull, he placed his feet up on the table and tipped his hat down over his eyes.

  He woke to the click of an opening latch.

  He blinked, blinded by light. Exploding galaxies faded into a dim mess of purple and red.

  Demons stood in the door.

  He did not struggle when they took his arms in their scissor-grip and marched him out.

  “Where to now, gentlemen?”

  No answer. He hadn’t expected one.

  When they did not steer him down the stairs toward the exit, he started to worry. Not handing him over to the Wardens, then—unless the Wardens used a different landing structure than the spire’s residents. But he had seen no such structure from the air. If they didn’t plan to hand him over or let him go, why move him from the cell?

  Unless they had other uses for him. What powers ruled in a skyspire? The city’s law, or the law of the Craft, or no law at all? And what if the demon guards had not in fact reported his capture, and were only waiting until the rest of the spire would be too fast asleep to hear his screams?

  Demons, he recalled, kept peculiar diets.

  As they marched him up a winding stair, he searched for opportunities of escape. None suggested themselves.

  When they turned onto the third floor, he began to look more intently. They brought him to Mal’s door, opened it, and thrust him in.

  He stumbled, and caught his balance on a hardwood floor.

  Shadow soaked the small bare room. Moonlight filtered through the large rear windows, illuminating gray carpet, a leather chair, a small coffee table, and a machine designed for either torture or home exercise.

  The city burned below.

  Something moved to Caleb’s right, and he turned, expecting to see Mal.

  Instead, he saw snakes: a wall of them, writhing.

  He swore, jumped back, and after a panting, panicked moment, he recognized Urban Grotesquerie. Sam’s piece. Sold at auction. “Seven hells.”

  Demon laughs sounded like spider legs skittering across a steel floor.

  “Give us a few minutes.” He recognized Mal’s voice, from the corner beside the exercise machine. He turned to her as the demons withdrew and closed the door behind them.

  He pointed at the snakes. “I know the woman who made this. Girlfriend of a friend of mine. I’ll tell her you put it on display.”

  Mal moved between him and the city, and pointed to the ceiling. Recessed ghostlights glowed, and details filled in the room. Closed doors led off the main chamber. A photograph, framed, hung on the wall opposite Grotesquerie: a girl, a man, and a woman, in front of an adobe house of the kind that had been common in the Skittersill twenty years before. “You’re lucky I saw the cards,” she said. “And the flowers.”

  “I thought they’d have cleaned up after they grabbed me.”

  “Demons don’t clean. Another hour, and the maid would have come by, and who knows how long you’d have been stuck there.”

  She looked much as he remembered her: hard and elegant. She wore a dark suit and a pencil skirt.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wear a skirt.”

  “Formal dinner. Dress to impress.”

  “Looks nice.”

  “I thought about leaving you in that cell, for the Wardens. I thought about throwing you off the top of this spire. Tell me why I shouldn’t.”

  He opened his mouth, but no words emerged. His rehearsed, stolen speech would not fit through his throat.

  Mal started to turn away.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She waited.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  Still, she said nothing.

  “I didn’t think. It’s hard to live in your parents’ shadow. Believe me, I know. I don’t want you to forget them. Even if I disagree with them. Even if I disagree with you.”

  “What do you want?”

  “You,” he said at last. “If you’ll have me.”

  She turned away. “You don’t have the first idea of the trouble you make for yourself, wanting me. Go. I’ll persuade the building not to press charges.”

  “No,” he said with more conviction than he felt. He walked to her, placed his hand on her arm. Her skin was tawny and soft. She did not pull away. Traffic surged through the streets and skies beneath them. “Without you, there’s no race. I’m just running, in the dark, alone. And so are you. Burdened, with no one to share the burden.”

  “This won’t work.”

  “I’ll take that risk, if you will.”

  “I’ll destroy you.”

  “Possible.”

  “I destroy everything I touch.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I wish I could believe that.”

  “Do.”

  Leaning in to her felt like leaning toward a cactus—every second swelling with the promise of pain. Her lips were round, and close, and still the pain did not come.

  He kissed her, and did not die. He was so shocked by this that he pulled back, but she followed him, and kissed him in turn.

  A minute passed, an eternity. A scythe-claw rapped on the door, and Caleb heard a muffled voice like the death of something beautiful. Mal replied in the same language, and stepped back. He shivered from her absence.

  “I need you to leave,” she said. “I have documents to review, and work tomorrow.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “But—”

  “Sorry.”

  He tasted her lips on his lips. “See you next month, I guess?”

  “We don’t have that long.” She hugged herself, looked down at the city, looked back. “I’ll wait for you in the foyer at RKC, tomorrow night, at five.”

  “You’ll wait for me?”

  “For you,” she said, “and no one else. Now go, or else the demons will eat your soul and I’ll have to take a husk to dinner.” She snapped her fingers, and the door opened.

  He almost left without kissing her again.

  Almost.

  32

  The next day Caleb worked like a man possessed. He tore through stacks of memos, processed claims and ran figures, outlined complex deals and hedges against failure. Her fire would devour him if he let it, so he buried his mind in news and risk reports.

  The nightmares had not stopped after Seven Leaf. Madmen crowded hospitals, crying the Twin Serpents’ names. An itinerant philosopher in Stonewood immolated himself in a public square at noon, ranting about Aquel and Achal. When others rushed to douse him, he fought back with burning flesh, melting skin, crisping meat. A mother in the Vale nearly threw her two young children out of a second-story window, before her husband stopped her. She claimed to doctors and reporters that she had seen snakes of flame coiled inside her babies.

  Somewhere, Temoc was laughing. Caleb felt sure of it.

  Incidents of madness clustered near Heartstone installations. Caleb wrote a memo, a call to discontinue the Two Serpents project, with the frankness of a man certain he would be ignored. The Serpents had come to the city’s aid in its hour of need. If their use entailed risk, well enough—they required more study before they
were used again. The first investigations into the Craft had transformed kingdoms to deserts. This was no different.

  At four forty-five he closed his books, capped his pens, cleaned his quill, sharpened his chisel, and walked to the lift. As he descended, he ran through an inventory of doom.

  The doors rolled back, and he saw her across the hall, ablaze in a white linen dress. Arms crossed, one eyebrow raised, Mal looked inviting as the emptiness beyond a cliff’s edge.

  He didn’t run to her, but he walked quickly. She kissed him on the lips.

  “You’re wearing a dress.”

  “I do that sometimes,” she said. “Come on. Let’s get something to eat.”

  * * *

  “Something to eat” turned out to be dinner at an Iskari restaurant named Esprit, on the lowest level of a skyspire overlooking the ocean, the kind of place a wealthy couple in a mystery play might eat. At first the eremite decor, the silver place settings and expensive porcelain and sunset view crushed Caleb into insignificance. Then he looked across the table at her.

  They discussed ephemera: the color of the sky, the sharp bright bubbles of the champagne, the transgressive thrill of spending so much on a single meal.

  “We don’t have much time, when you think about it,” Mal said. “I want to appreciate as much as I can before it’s gone.”

  “Morbid,” Caleb replied. “But I won’t argue.”

  As tuxedoed waiters served course after airy, delicate course, Caleb and Mal spoke of wine, of ullamal (Mal was not a fan, and Caleb found himself defending the conduct of players he would have condemned to Teo), of childhood games, and art. A string quartet behind a curtain played a gavotte he didn’t recognize. At first Caleb thought it strange that no one danced, but the entire evening was its own kind of dance, with subtle steps and pleasant turns. He blundered through, cheerful as a child at a waltz, and laughed when Mal recounted the story of their first meeting back to him.

  “You had the most serious expression I’ve ever seen on a human face. I would have laughed, but I thought that might make matters worse.”

  “You did laugh, if I remember right.” He sipped a dessert cordial, and felt it go down slow. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the Tzimet in the lake, and the Serpents.”

  Her smile faltered. “What do you mean?”

  “I spent all day doing damage control. When we draw power from the Serpents, their, I don’t know, their hunger bleeds out into the city. A woman almost killed her kids, a guy burned himself. More people going mad all the time. We’re responsible.”

  “What choice did we have?”

  “I don’t know. But I can’t stop thinking about Hal, the guard who died at Bright Mirror. We took reasonable precautions against Tzimet. No one can blame us for what went wrong—but maybe they should. We could run a perfect operation: a Concern that hurt no one, every risk sorted and managed, each contingency accounted for. It would cost hundreds of millions of souls even to come close. Too much. So he died.” The ocean rolled green and gray as slate below them.

  She wore a string of tiny pearls at her throat. The pearls smiled even when she did not. “There are always risks. The world isn’t safe.”

  “Why not feed the Serpents? If they weren’t so hungry, they wouldn’t drive people mad.”

  “We can’t feed them without killing people.”

  “You can’t give them soulstuff because…”

  “Because the Craft is built on exchange. We give, and receive something in return. That’s the reason we can’t just magic ourselves food or water: use Craft to force a field to grow, and you’ll wear the earth to desert in a year. If we funneled souls into the Serpents, their power would flow back into us, and they’d get hungrier. All we can do is keep them sleeping, and that’s only if we’re careful.” She toasted him with cordial. “Here’s to being careful.”

  “Here’s to that.” He drank. “Why not leave the Serpents alone? Let them sleep.”

  “And one day they would wake, whether we called for them or not. Our grandparents feared Aquel and Achal. I think we should use them, not cower from them.”

  Caleb didn’t know what to think. Sunset burned in her eyes.

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  * * *

  They saw more of each other, though Caleb hesitated to call their meetings dates. Yes, they kissed, but they did not melt into romance. Mal studied the world around her, broke it into pieces. On their walks together, every mystery play or advertisement or empty storefront signified something about life or Craft, religion or politics or poetry. Being around her was a rush of genius and expectation. They danced, and talked, and danced again.

  Their meetings were a welcome respite from the business of the coming eclipse: insurance bargains to be signed and sealed with demonic agencies, water rights secured, Warden patrols doubled in case of accident or unrest. He swam every day through end-time prophecies, waiting for night and Mal to save him.

  He kept the shark’s-tooth talisman in his pocket, but every time he thought to mention it, he remembered Allie’s death, and their fight under Seven Leaf Lake, and decided to wait.

  Mal returned to the cliff runners as a goddess in white leather, offering no explanation for her absence. Caleb did not run with her, but waited beside Balam, and watched.

  She soared on currents of air, leapt and turned, rolled and ran. She was a monkey, a flame, a flash, an angel, a demon in flight. Caught between sky and earth, she was most herself. When she touched down, she stood lightly, as if one wrong step might break the ground beneath her feet.

  A week before the eclipse, on Monicola Pier beside the rolling Pax, he showed her the tooth.

  It hung from her fingers, caught by sunset, swaying.

  “Kopil says it burned when Allie died.”

  “And you think it means she wasn’t mad. That she betrayed me. Betrayed us. Poisoned Bright Mirror Reservoir, and all the rest.”

  “It seems likely. Doesn’t it?”

  “You have one explanation for the facts,” she said. “Perhaps she was working against you all along. Or she was only recruited after she saw the gods at Bright Mirror and decided she could not be a part of your world. Your adversary would have bound her to his purpose with subtle cords and bargains. When we turned her power against her, some might have flowed back through those bonds, and destroyed this tooth.”

  “I don’t buy it. She must have been a radical from way back.”

  She smiled sadly. “Why?”

  “She was only at Seven Leaf for a few weeks. People don’t change so fast.”

  “Maybe you don’t know people as well as you think. You didn’t handle Seven Leaf Lake well. Neither did I. What would we have become if we remained?”

  “What we do there is ugly, sure, but it didn’t make me want to set demons loose on the city.”

  “I doubt that was her goal.” She lowered the tooth.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think Allie didn’t want to cause harm. I think she wanted to recover something she’d lost. Seven Leaf confronted her with that loss, and she responded in the only way she knew.” When he looked at her uncomprehending, she tried again. “She saw spirits in pain, and wanted to stop their pain. That was the seed. Everything else—the power, the madness, the betrayal—followed.”

  “Their pain is horrible. But we need that water. She must have known that.”

  “Does our need justify our methods?”

  He remembered the torment beneath the lake, and did not answer.

  “We were born together,” she said, “men and gods: our first cave wall scratches let them into the world. We miss them. Allie missed them, I think. I sympathize with her.”

  “You miss our gods?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “They’re soaked in blood.”

  “So am I. So are you. So’s this city. You seem to think it’s different if we kill for gods or for water; either way the victim dies at the end.”

  “
Why not find another pantheon? Iskar still has gods, and they get along fine. Orgies and existentialism, the occasional burnt aurochs, once in a while a tentacle or two. Seems better.”

  “Iskar’s gods aren’t ours, though.”

  “Oh, I see, we need to preserve our heritage. Will you burn the pale skins out of Stonewood next?” Barges shifted on the water, pulled by broad-backed sea turtles forty feet across: firework ships moving into position for the eclipse. Their burning arrows would frighten hungry stars away from the wounded sun.

  She laughed. “Our economy would collapse. Every tie to the rest of the world would be cut. We must be cosmopolitan, without sacrificing our identity. Walk our own path.”

  “Isn’t that what we’re doing now?”

  “How many of the Craftsmen and Craftswomen in this city are Quechal, do you think? Twenty percent? Thirty, at most?”

  “Something like that.”

  “In a city that’s eighty percent Quechal.”

  “I don’t see your point.”

  “We’re occupied. We don’t talk about it that way, but we are.”

  “We’re not occupied. We’re a world city. There’s a difference.”

  “Are you sure?”

  A cold breeze off the ocean shivered her, and he placed an arm around her shoulder. From the sidewalk an observer might have thought them man and wife, or lovers. Caleb didn’t know what they were. No words seemed to fit. Children ran down the beach, volleying a ball back and forth. “You loved your parents. You value the things they valued. But our gods killed people. They’re gone, and I don’t miss them.”

  Mal stopped shivering, but she did not remove his arm. “You don’t get to choose your parents. Why should your gods be any different?”

  “What do you suggest? We should bring back the altar and the knife? People will fight you if that’s what you want, and I’ll lead them. We can’t do those things anymore.”

  “Of course not,” she said. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean, then?”

  “Think about your father. You don’t live the way he lives.”

  “No. I have a roof over my head, and I don’t have three quarters of the city out to kill me.”