Two Serpents Rise cs-2

by Max Gladstone

  Bedrock and packed earth did not stay the Serpents. Slithering upward they carved tunnels that caved in as they passed. The land rolled. Glass broke in skyscraper windows. Towers swayed and bowed their heads. Only the pyramids stood strong: they were built to outlast the world.

  Sansilva bisected Dresediel Lex from east to west. Foreign visitors often wondered why the ancient Quechal had built so broad a road through the center of their city. Little freight passed through Sansilva, and few commuters—the priests had lived on their temple grounds.

  They wondered on a false premise. The road had not been built for human use.

  * * *

  The second quake began like the first, shaking pitching ground, men and women crying out in alarm and pain, but rather than receding it built. Balam and his comrades stumbled against one another. They thrashed and pitched like froth, and this too was normal—but over their cries Balam heard another note, a high creaking cascade, everywhere at once, scraping against the pate of his skull.

  In the surge and thrust of angry limbs, at first he could not find the sound’s source. When the screams began, he saw: broken glass rained from skyscrapers and pyramids all around. Shattered panes fell from shaking towers. Transparent knife blades tumbled, sparked by the dying sun. Striking, they severed flesh. Screams cut short before others took their place. Bodies pressed against Balam from all sides: ten thousand people simultaneously forced themselves toward the center of Sansilva Boulevard, away from the glass and blood.

  This was not Wardens’ work. They would not break the buildings they were sworn to defend. Real estate was sacred to them. Above, their Couatl wheeled, wings beating rapid, roaring with jaws unhinged by panic.

  Couatl feared nothing—not fire, not death, not the shifting earth. No mere earthquake would make them cry. But if not Wardens, and not an earthquake, what was happening?

  The groans and cries changed tempo and tenor, rising, gaping, higher. Hot wind blew across Balam’s face, and the crowd convulsed again, pressing him not toward the center of the road this time but forward, toward the lethal blue border of the Canter’s Shell.

  He turned, straining against the tide, and saw fire.

  * * *

  Asphalt glowed like broken coals. Mal flailed in flame, in hunger. She strained against the weight of stony sleep. Air melted to plasma. Below, demonstrators fled, screaming.

  In the old days, the rooftops had boiled with spectators, risking their sanity to see.

  The fleeing protesters thought the quakes, the flames, were the Craftsmen’s vengeance.

  They would understand soon.

  The world held mysteries more worthy of their fear than human Craft.

  Tar bulged, rippled, burst. A forked fiery tongue spouted from the molten flow, and retreated into a blunt mouth a hundred yards across. Two eyes of white flame flared from an immense arrow-shaped face. Aquel bared fangs the size of trees. A thousand years of sacrifices stared out from the diamonds that lined her gullet, Quechal faces trapped in agony. She roared a volcano roar.

  Her sister too broke free, and they rose together, sinewy, strong, hungry. They cried doom.

  * * *

  The city shook. Elders trembled as nightmares wormed from the rotten timbers of their memory. Madmen shouted prayers in High Quechal, though they did not understand the words spilling from their lips. In hospital coma wards, patients silent for years opened their mouths to speak:

  “Blessed Be They.”

  In the Skittersill a burning building collapsed around a three-year-old girl and left her unharmed. A Warden’s mount plummeted from the sky, dead; the Warden’s partner swooped to save him from a bloody landing.

  From Fisherman’s Vale to Monicola, from the Pax Coast Highway to Stonewood, Tzimet exploded into steam. In the fountain of the Monicola Hotel, the beast of water and black ice shattered. Insect-sized demons popped like blisters. They fled the approach of greater monsters.

  * * *

  In Balam’s childhood when his grandmother lay drunk on corn beer on cool dry winter afternoons she had told him tales of old gods and heroes. Beyond these he knew no sacred signs, no holy chants beyond those repeated before an ullamal game. But he recognized the cobra-hooded coils above Sansilva, the house-sized scales slick as water if water burned, taller than the pyramids, tall enough to eat the sun, or kindle it aflame again with the darting forked lava spouts of their tongues. Shining in every color and none, cored white as alabaster: Aquel and Achal, greater than goddesses, fiercer than demons, the world’s first children.

  He almost froze in awe and wonder, and if he had, he would have been lost. The crowd saw, and whatever they understood, whether they recognized the Serpents or thought them Craft-born terrors or demons run loose, they knew to flee. Desperate they stumbled away from the Serpents: down alleys and into swaying buildings, despite the rain of glass. But most ran along the path of least resistance, down Sansilva Boulevard, and their tide carried Balam toward the Canter’s Shell and forever.

  Balam pushed against the crowd, with muscles built down decades of cliff running and decades more of teaching runners. A stone statue stood fifty feet upstream, some robed Iskari goddess, a break in the human tide. Fifty feet might as well be miles. He thrust himself into spaces between people, he struck men in the stomachs, he tore free from clawing fingers, and pressed toward the statue.

  Heat passed over him, raised rivers of sweat on his arms: the heat of the Serpents’ gaze, or else their distant breath.

  His legs ached. A flailing elbow caught him above the eye and tore his skin. Blood ran down his face. He growled, and fought harder, in and down, gripping cobblestones with his feet, desperate not to lose the slim scrape of traction that bound him to the earth and kept him safe from pounding feet and pulsing legs.

  Men and women died around him. They fled the Serpents like ants flee the beam of a magnifying glass. Those too slow were crushed, or burned.

  The air stank of panic and sour sweat.

  Ten feet left. An eternity. He could not cross the distance. He could count his wounds, and weaknesses: a finger broken when a woman he was fighting past shifted left instead of right. Blood in his eyes. A back twisted by too much running, by a youth spent sprinting over rooftops. Forty years of fat.

  Damn the crowd. Damn the Wardens for circling above the damage. He might not make it, but for one more moment he would fly.

  Six feet. He released his hold on the ground, but rather than let the tide carry him forward he grabbed the shoulders of the men pressed against him and pulled himself up, onto them, over their bodies, through the forest of arms and heads, a cliff runner’s last leap—

  Too short. He landed a foot shy of the open space around the fountain; his weight pressed bodies beneath him to the ground, but others surged over him, over them, dragging him back. He roared in frustration, reaching toward that stone Iskari goddess to strangle her promises of victory.

  A hand closed around his: a steel grip, slender but implacable, a rock against the tide.

  He pulled with strength that could tear stone, and the hand pulled back, and in a tumble he lay panting in the statue’s shadow beside his savior, a woman, not even Quechal: blond hair in tangled braids, a scar on her temple. Her eyes were wide with terror, and she sucked in breath like a horse after a sprint. So did he. He swore, and cursed, and spit.

  “Thank you.”

  She nodded.

  “Balam,” he said, and tapped his chest. He could not raise his hand to offer it to her.

  “Sam,” she said. Around them, the world continued to end.

  * * *

  Mal tossed, spun, caught inside the Serpents.

  “Stop,” she said, in High Quechal and then in Low: “Stop.”

  The Serpents swayed, brighter than the dying sun. She hovered level with round crystal eyes a hundred feet tall. Heat scored her skin. Sweat ran down her face—altar sweat, the sweat of the bound woman who sees the knife. The Serpents’ scales pinged and hissed and cracke
d as the air tried and failed to cool them.

  They waited for her.

  A smile crept across Mal’s face.

  The Serpents twitched, and her smile faltered.

  The smell of sacrifice rose from the pyramid at 667 Sansilva. The serpents smelled it, and so did she.

  Temoc. No other priest remained to make an offering. Alaxic had killed the others, one at a time down the decades, with poison, blade, and Craft. Temoc should have been the last. Somehow, he must have escaped, and reached the altar with a victim.

  No matter. She would burn him from his place of power.

  She flew down Sansilva toward pyramid, sacrifice, and victory. The Serpents slithered after her.

  * * *

  Sea was the word for world, rocking, rolling, turning. Sea, and Caleb floated upon it beneath a woman who laughed knives and kissed with steel. His pain floated up toward a sun like a burning ring in the heavens: a hollowed sun, a hallowed sun.

  Caleb followed the pain up, toward the light.

  He blinked at the gray arch of the crystal dome. His skull throbbed. So did his hand, his ribs, and the rest of his body.

  Incense coiled in the air.

  “Qet Sea-Lord, Exchilti Sun-Shaper, Seven Stone, receiver of offerings. The Twins gave of themselves when the sun their father died. Yes, they gave of themselves—suckled the Serpents on their blood and heart-flesh. In innocence they suckled them, and we give innocence in their memory.”

  The words were High Quechal, spoken in the vocative of address to the divine, with a priest’s conjugations and declensions. The voice belonged to Temoc.

  He remembered: the blow to his head, Temoc’s arm around Teo’s neck, the rage and fear in her eyes as she went limp.

  His vision cleared.

  Temoc bent over the altar, his back to Caleb. Shadow flowed silken over his skin, wreathed his body from head to foot in a darkness like priestly robes.

  Mounds of copal incense burned at the altar’s head and foot. In one large hand Temoc held a hook-bladed obsidian knife.

  Blood dripped from the knife’s tip, and from the gargoyle mouth in the altar’s side.

  Caleb’s world chilled, and drained of color.

  “Let me go!”

  Teo. Still alive. Gods. Temoc was bleeding her before the sacrifice.

  “Each age is called to give of itself,” Temoc chanted. “We fortunates are called to give our hearts.”

  Caleb rose. His father rocked with priestly fervor. Teo lay spread-eagled on the altar, hands and feet locked in obsidian cuffs. She pulled against her bonds, and shouted obscenities. Blood ran from her left wrist down grooves in the glass, and dripped from the altar’s mouth into a coffee cup.

  He searched for a weapon, but saw none. The King in Red was more partial to deep magic from before the dawn of time than to up-swords-and-sally-forth. Nothing useful in the office clutter, either. Books, few large enough to do damage. Chairs too heavy to lift or swing. Temoc had pushed the detritus of Kopil’s desk onto the floor to make room for Teo: papers, a coffee mug, the picture of Kopil and his dead lover.

  The picture, in the heavy silver frame. Caleb hefted it, testing its weight and the sharpness of its corners.

  Teo’s stream of invective paused for breath. Her head lolled to one side, and she saw Caleb. Her eyes widened.

  Caleb swung the picture frame with both hands into the side of his father’s head.

  * * *

  “We have to go,” Sam said.

  Balam shook himself back into the world. “Go where?”

  “Anywhere. That pyramid over there, on the left. Those things are coming.” She peeked over the lip of the fountain, and ducked again. “This way.”

  “The Serpents.”

  “What the hells else do you think I might be talking about?”

  “We’ll die. We can’t fight through the crowd like this.”

  “They’re headed for RKC. We’re in the way. We move or melt.”

  “We move and die.”

  “I’m going.”

  He shook his head. “Wait.”

  “No.”

  “Wait!” He put all his anger and his trainer’s authority into the shout. She paused halfway to her feet. “When they’re nearer, the crowd will thin out. Then we go. And hope.”

  She sunk back onto her calves. The air around them swelled with heat.

  * * *

  Temoc staggered; Caleb struck again, harder, and the priest sank to his knees.

  He jumped over his fallen father onto the altar.

  “Caleb.” Teo was hoarse with shouting; Temoc had cut her shirt open, and drawn a charcoal cross at the base of her sternum to guide the knife. Wet streaks ran from the corners of her eyes. Blood pulsed from two precise cuts in her left wrist.

  “I’m sorry.” He tore at the manacle on her left hand. “Gods, I’m sorry.” Scars flared on his arm. Obsidian pulled and snapped like taffy. He reached for her right.

  An arm strong as an iron post circled his waist and flung him to the ground. He hit, skidded, and staggered to his feet.

  Blood streamed from a deep cut on Temoc’s scalp, over his ear and down his neck; rivulets ran to his chin. “Caleb,” he said, kneeling to retrieve his knife. “Do not stand in my way.”

  “Why are you doing this? We had a plan!”

  “Your plan will not work.”

  “You didn’t even try!”

  “I do not need to try. Aquel and Achal hunger for life. There is only one way to feed them. This is better, surer, than I thought possible. An altar maid’s heart offered by a high priest atop Quechaltan, as of old.”

  He had loosened Teo’s right manacle enough for her to pull both hands free. Blood gouted from her wrist. She clasped her palm over the vein, and tugged against the bonds on her feet, but they did not give.

  “What would you have done if Teo didn’t come? Kill me?”

  “Even had we barred her way, she would not have remained behind. She is well-suited for a sacrifice. Noble intentions, and noble blood, too, if I do not mistake her features. Unsullied by man. Strong of spirit, strong of heart. She must have sensed my plan, known her fate.”

  Teo slumped to one side. Her arm and head hung over the altar’s edge, and her outstretched fingers brushed the floor.

  Caleb rushed toward the altar, and once more Temoc threw him. Falling, Caleb dug his fingers into his father’s shadow, and it tore. Cold strength rushed into him. He spun in midair, and landed on his feet. Darkness clung to him like a halo, and his scars glowed from within.

  A bright light rose to the south.

  “See,” Temoc said. “The Serpents wake. They smell their meal. Our time is short. I will save this city, with you or in spite of you. I will take her heart.”

  “I’ll stop you.”

  Caleb ran forward; Temoc swung the dagger’s pommel around to where his son’s temple had been a moment before.

  Caleb ducked, grabbed Temoc’s leg, and pulled up. Temoc sank his weight against Caleb’s pull, and did not fall. He kneed Caleb in the ribs, scattering shadows and knocking him to the floor.

  The world swam as Caleb stood. He tried to raise his fists, but could not move his right arm.

  “I don’t want you to lose,” Temoc said sadly. “You put up a good fight, for an untrained boy. You have shown courage. I’m proud of you.”

  “Thanks.” Caleb panted. He heard something tear.

  “But I can’t let you win. I hope you understand.”

  “I wasn’t…” Exhale, inhale. Take the moment slow. “I wasn’t trying to win.” The dome darkened. He smelled ozone and the pits of hell. “I just had to distract you long enough for Teo to rip up the Heartstone contract.”

  Temoc blinked. A cold gust of wind blew over them. Somewhere, heavy velvet curtains swayed.

  Teo sat upright on the altar, holding a torn, bloodstained piece of parchment—one half in her right hand, the other half in her teeth. Sparks trailed from sundried silver glyphs. Her shirt hung f
rom her shoulders. Blood leaked through the fingers she’d clasped over her vein. She spat out the piece of parchment, and it drifted to the floor, landing signature side up.

  Incense flames guttered and died, and with them light and life.

  The dark of deep space devoured all. There was no pyramid, no dome, only emptiness, and at its core, immense, astride the husks of dying stars, the King in Red. His eyes flared like the birth of the world.

  He smiled.

  “Temoc,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

  47

  As Mal advanced, the sky turned against her.

  Wardens swarmed her on Couatl-back, black serpentine streaks striking with arcs of lightning, with silver spears and nets of green thread. Wingbeats and thunder thickened the air. A golden lasso caught Aquel’s neck; the Serpent hissed in frustration.

  Of course the Wardens had come. Lapdogs of the King in Red and his brothers, murderers, servants who did not ask why they served, who let themselves be shaped into weapons against their own people. The Wardens had burned her parents in the Rising, had unleashed fire on screaming crowds. They had missed Mal in their cull, and now they realized their mistake.

  She smiled, and her teeth were pointed as the Serpents’ fangs. Let them come.

  Aquel pulsed sun-brilliant and threw a wave of plasma against the Warden who had caught her. The golden line snapped, and the Warden who threw it fell in smoking pieces to the ground.

  Mal laughed, but in her joy an emerald net snagged her limbs, her mind. The world collapsed to a projection inside a nutshell where she hung suspended, bounded empress of space. She lived and died in the net, lived and died again, infant with every indrawn breath, growing, swelling to maturity with the filling of lungs, dwindling as she exhaled to a fragile age, arms and legs thin as mast-cord, skin taut and dry, dying to inhale and be born again.

  No. She was more than this. She was rage, dying, and born again she was vengeance. The Wardens would not bind her.

  Fire burst from Mal, and she was free. Spears of flame lanced in all directions, burning holes through pyramids, reducing Wardens to ash. She felt each death. She was Dresediel Lex. She was Quechal. They were her children, though twisted and deformed. She wept and moved on.