Two Serpents Rise cs-2

by Max Gladstone

“I’m an arrow in flight.”

  “Arrows don’t have a choice. People do.”

  “What choice?” She smiled, sad, distant. “My choices were made twenty years ago, when my parents died. Or sixty years ago, at Liberation. Or earlier than that. The world’s tossed in bad dreams. Someone has to wake it up.”

  “There are other ways.”

  “Not for me.” She approached. The Serpents shifted to flank him. Three mouths moved in tandem. Who was the speaker, and who the puppet? “You don’t have to fight me.”

  “I do.”

  “I’m sorry.” She reached for his face. The heat of her touch seared his cheek, boiled his skin. He should have recoiled, but did not.

  He wanted to take her in his arms, to shrivel to ash, to kiss her with melting lips.

  “You don’t have a chance. Temoc stopped his sacrifice.”

  “I know. I kept him from killing my friend.”

  “You’re too sentimental for your own good.” Her eyes were an ocean, luminous. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you, either,” he said, and gave her his soul.

  * * *

  The heart is the spirit’s anchor, Temoc had said. Aquel and Achal hungered not for flesh, but for Quechal souls.

  When Caleb bet in a poker game, a piece of him flowed into the game, into the goddess. Each player gave her a part of himself, and at game’s end she divided her favor among them according to their victories and defeats.

  What if the goddess outlasted the game? What if she stretched through centuries, beyond any purpose she might once have served?

  Living, she would grow hungry.

  Perhaps the myth was true. Perhaps the Serpents existed before the Hero Twins found them, great beasts that broke the world with their madness. Perhaps not. Perhaps the Quechal threw two sacrifices into the heart of a volcano, and the sacrifices endured, and received sacrifices in turn. They clutched one another in the heat of their dying, and survived.

  Caleb gave his soul to Mal, and through her, to the Serpents—his soul, and the souls he bore, so many that they carried him on a flood. There was no bargain, no quid pro quo. He streamed into Aquel and Achal, and became more.

  In their diamond mouths, in their gleaming teeth, in their molten hearts, they received him. All were received. All lived. No, not lived—all endured, sleeping through centuries: every sacrifice, every victim, caught and one with the Serpents.

  He felt the stone knife plunge into his chest ten thousand times, and ten thousand times his death cry rose over the chants of the priests, in High and Low Quechal and languages older still. The dying souls rose with their hearts, dreaming last dreams of a mother’s smile, of a coyote’s laugh at nighttime, a mug of chocolate, a victory dance, a lover’s embrace. Dreams fell into the Serpents’ mouths, and the Serpents ate them, and became them. Soul, accreted onto soul, accreted onto soul, down millennia.

  When the sun died, the Hero Twins gave their hearts to the Serpents, became one with them, to save the world.

  The Quechal were the Serpents.

  The Serpents were Quechal.

  Caleb was a thousand, a hundred thousand. He was the smile of Kopil’s lover on Sansilva Boulevard beside the pyramid of the Sun.

  Somewhere, he heard Mal scream.

  You can’t sacrifice other people anymore.

  You have to sacrifice yourself.

  Serpentine thoughts twined and spun around him, minds linking to minds. Aquel and Achal joined with the souls he had borne. Their hunger ebbed. He opened four immense eyes and stared out on a crystal world.

  Mal burned within him, around him.

  “Stay with me.”

  She spoke through his mind, through all their minds. Voices in forgotten tongues cried out at her touch.

  “The murderers, the Craftsmen, the rulers of this world, they tempt you with death, satiety and sleep. They will destroy this planet, and all life with it, unless we stand against them.”

  She called to him, and he ached to follow her. He burned for her, with her, through her. His heat radiated from her skin, his lightning arced between her teeth.

  Three thousand years of Quechal sacrifice lived in the Serpents. Dead generations woke to burn, to melt and mold and reforge. They were the world’s last defense, its guardians. Death bowed to their fangs.

  “Fight,” she said. “Do not give in. Do not sleep. Victory is near. See our triumph.”

  The Serpents’ rage flowered as she called, and flowed along channels she prepared. They would not sleep. She was too strong.

  But Caleb could use her strength.

  Months ago, drawing pictures on his skin in her tent, she had told him: battles of Craft are fought on many fronts. The world is an argument, and there are many ways to win or lose.

  He could not fight Mal with her hooks caught in his mind. When she pulled, he would follow.

  But he could follow in the manner he chose.

  See, he echoed her, a whisper in the Serpents’ minds.

  Towering over Dresediel Lex, they saw.

  The city lay broken around them.

  Glass ran like water down Sansilva Boulevard, and blood melted into steam.

  There were old souls within the fire, so ancient they spoke in song and rhyme. They did not recognize Dresediel Lex. To them it was a shadow on a cave wall, an echo, a story, a dream.

  But the new souls, the ones Caleb brought, they knew. Sun-baked streets wavering with summer heat. Surf rolling against a cold beach at dawn. Dark corners in well-lit bars where a man could drink in peace. Summer nights when skyspires shone with echoed starlight.

  Tollan, surly and pacing with her whiskey at midday. Mick, his desk hung with mementos of faded glory. Shannon, biding time with cards in the Skittersill and dreaming of the day when she could dive again off rooftops. Kopil, who broke gods to avenge his dead love. Teo, laughing and drinking, dancing in aisles and toasting with champagne.

  Below, on the broken boulevard, he saw Balam, and Sam, staring up, waiting, scared, and hopeful.

  All of these, and more. Millions more.

  “Make it new,” Mal said. “Burn it clean.”

  The city has never been clean, answered voices old and young. Nor has the world. The people were never clean. But they are worth defending.

  Mal pulled at the Serpents’ minds with ropes of Craft, and the Serpents pulled back. Her Craft strained, and snapped.

  She flared like a star in the sky, and went out.

  The ground gaped beneath him.

  Caleb fell.

  EPILOGUE

  Caleb woke in a cold hospital room, under cotton sheets and an unfamiliar ceiling.

  The world was flat monochrome. Bandages swaddled the right side of his body. A bell and a parchment envelope rested on the bedside table. He ignored the bell, and reached for the envelope. Pain called to him from the bottom of a deep narcotic well.

  The envelope bore his name in an italic hand. It held a folded note and a shark’s tooth pendant.

  The note read:

  If you wake, you will be recovered enough for the healing to begin. Ring the bell.

  The rest of your clothing burned. The tooth remained. Perhaps it will remind you.

  No signature except a death’s head drawn in crimson ink. Of what the tooth was meant to remind him, the note did not say.

  He rang the bell.

  * * *

  Three weeks later, Caleb stood at the end of Monicola Pier, looking west. He wore a black suit and a white shirt, and walked with crutches.

  The merry-go-round wheeled. Children played ullamal by the seashore. A pall hung over the city, the nurses had said. A palpable fear. He couldn’t feel it.

  He couldn’t feel much.

  Soul fatigue, they called his condition in Kathic; among themselves the doctors used a longer Telomiri name. When the soul’s been too often emptied and expanded, it recovers slowly. He was near dead when they found him, empty of soulstuff, apperception broken. H
e didn’t know what that meant, and no one had given him a decent answer. Not quite asleep, not quite dead. A little of both. Soulstuff from his savings had revived him, and he woke with vague memories of fire, of Mal, of a battle within the Serpents. Perhaps a part of him survived inside them, inside the world, slumbering and waiting to wake again. This was his afterlife—this, or else the flame.

  Behind him the city’s masses scrambled in the shadow of broken buildings. Cranes rose. Construction crews shouted from scaffolding. Airbuses slid by silent overhead.

  He removed the shark’s tooth from around his neck, and held it out over the water.

  Mal was gone. The Wardens found no trace of her body. Of course not. The Serpents’ heat had burned her to vapor.

  The tooth pointed down into green-black ocean. Waves rippled his reflection, and the burn scar on his cheek seemed to disappear. He stared off the end of the pier toward the horizon, but saw no light there, not even sunset.

  Bay Station crouched still at the harbor’s mouth. He could almost hear the beating of Qet Sea-Lord’s restored heart.

  “Good-bye, Mal” he said.

  The amulet twitched in his hand, and spun, pointing inland, south and west.

  He dropped it into the ocean, and left.

  * * *

  Two days later, Caleb visited Andrej’s in the afternoon. The bar had long since recovered. The stone railing and the doors Mal melted were easily replaced. Less so the white and black marble tiles, which the heat of her flame had fused and swirled to mottled gray.

  The band played, and he tried not to think about the last time he had visited Andrej’s around sunset.

  He walked with the aid of crutches to a table by the mended bannister. From Four he’d learned the story of his survival—she’d swooped in on Couatl-back to catch him, but broke his bones in the rescue. His plaster cast scraped the floor. He leaned his crutches against the railing, and lowered himself into a chair.

  The sun declined toward ocean. Rooftops and skyspires reflected and refracted tawny light. Tendrils trailed from the spires to the city: pulleys, block and tackle, raising steel girders and glass plates to repair crews in the buildings’ upper floors. Craning his neck over the rail, Caleb could see road workers repaving Sansilva Boulevard.

  A waitress came by, and he ordered a whiskey and water, and savored it, lost in thought.

  Teo arrived a little before five, and sat beside him with her drink.

  “Hey.”

  He sipped whiskey, felt it burn in his throat, and turned to her with a weary smile. “Hey. You got my letter.”

  “I was waiting for it.”

  “And you came.”

  “Of course I did. You look.” He wondered what she would say next. Wan? Bruised? Shrunken? “Better than you did in the hospital. How are you feeling?”

  “Used up.” He tapped his cast, propped on a chair. Then he touched his ribs, and his gloved right hand, and the side of his temple. “Hollowed out. The soul doesn’t fit the flesh.”

  “You should have saved more. Your account with RKC barely held enough to keep you alive. Couldn’t you have kept some of that soulstuff back?”

  “The Serpents needed a whole person, a real sacrifice to give the rest of the soulstuff shape.”

  “That was you. The whole person, sacrificed.”

  “Yes.”

  “So who am I talking with now?”

  “Still me. At least, that’s my opinion. Same body, same brain, a transfusion of my own stored soul to replace what I lost. Philosophers might argue. I don’t know.”

  Teo drank away that line of inquiry. “If you were all they needed, why not go in alone? Why take power from the King in Red?”

  “Aquel and Achal were hungry. One soul might not have satisfied them. We needed to feed the Serpents enough to keep them asleep for centuries. A mass sacrifice, concentrated in one person.”

  She looked him in the eyes, and he sensed the question forming: did you expect to die? She did not ask it, which spared him the need to answer.

  With a grimace, he pointed to crutches and cast. “Now I’m stuck healing the old-fashioned way. At least I’m drawing sick pay.”

  She waited for him to say more. When he didn’t, she filled the silence. “Sam’s fine, by the way. Burned her arm, twisted her knee in the earthquakes, but she’s recovered faster than you.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “She’s lucky. Artists.” She pronounced the word like an expletive. “She deserved worse, running off like she did.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  A crane lowered a steel girder onto the pyramid opposite. Welding sparks cascaded down the structure’s side. “Any word of Mal? Or Temoc?” She hesitated before saying his name.

  He drank, and thought about the amulet. “Temoc hasn’t shown himself since the eclipse, to me or anyone. But he won’t stay gone forever.”

  “Good,” Teo said. “When he returns, someone will make him pay.”

  “Good luck. My father is debt resistant.”

  Sparks fell like stars.

  “It’s boring without you. I go to Muerte on my own. A banker tried to hit on me the other day. I told her I already had a girlfriend. Tollan keeps asking when you’ll come back.”

  He checked his watch, and returned it to his jacket pocket. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

  “You’re quitting.”

  “Yes.”

  “What will you do?”

  He lifted his leg from the chair. “Hold on. I don’t want to have to do this twice.”

  “Twice? Who else do you expect?”

  “Me,” Kopil said from behind her.

  Teo jumped to her feet. The King in Red looked the same as ever: forbidding, crimson, skeletal.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” Caleb said, and touched his cast again. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t stand.”

  Kopil crooked a finger. A nearby chair shuddered to life and walked over to him with groans of tortured steel. He sat. Teo shifted from foot to foot, then sat herself. Caleb focused on his drink.

  “I have come for your answer,” said the King in Red.

  “Am I missing something?” Teo asked.

  “After he woke, I offered Mister Altemoc a promotion to senior risk manager at Red King Consolidated. He has demonstrated his worth in a crisis.”

  “That,” Teo said, “is an understatement.”

  “I don’t think so,” Caleb replied, and raised one hand against objections. “I stumbled into Mal’s plot. I barely survived, and I stopped her by luck.”

  “You were effective. RKC values effectiveness.”

  “I know.” Caleb sipped his whiskey. “That’s why I hope you’ll agree to be my first sponsor.”

  Kopil blinked. “What?”

  Teo leaned against the table, face grave, and listened.

  “The God Wars aren’t over,” Caleb said.

  “I know several gods who would disagree,” Kopil said, “were they alive to do so.”

  “The God Wars never ended on this continent, because nobody signed a peace. The Iskari have a peace, and the Shining Empire, but here we’ve kept up the war in silence. Craftsmen score victory after victory, but gods are patient. Ideas don’t die easily. True believers pass faith, and anger, to new generations.”

  Kopil scraped a finger bone across the table surface. Iron rusted and stone blackened at his touch. “And each time they rise up, we will defeat them. We will fight until the sun burns to a cinder, and then we will fight among the stars.”

  “We won’t last that long.” Caleb pointed north, past mountains and orange groves, toward Seven Leaf Lake eight hundred miles away. “This city has doubled in size in the last decade, and will double again in the next. The Craft makes Dresediel Lex possible: we provide water, food, and shelter. But use the Craft to farm, and the soil dies. Use the Craft to drill wells, and the land itself sinks. We went hundreds of miles north to steal water from Seven Leaf Lake, and we’ll drain that dr
y before long. What’s next? War with Regis, Shikaw, or Central Kath? War with Alt Coulumb? Craftsmen against Craftsmen? If you thought the God Wars were bad, just wait. This isn’t just our problem. It’s the world’s problem.”

  “Our Craft will improve,” Kopil said.

  “It won’t, not the way we hope, not for a long time. The Craft takes as it gives. You can’t heal the land with something like that, any more than you could destroy the Serpents. It only makes the problem worse.”

  “You sound like a theist.” In the Deathless King’s voice Caleb heard breaking stone. “Or like your father.”

  Caleb’s hands did not shake. He met the King in Red’s gaze, and did not look away. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it. The old ways are gone, but we need peace with the gods. Their powers don’t drain and break the land. They can fulfill their function, and let the world of Craft fulfill its own. A partnership. The pantheons regain power and respectability. The city, the world, gets a new lease on life. People like Mal, like my father, like Alaxic and the True Quechal, lose the authority that fear and oppression gives them.”

  Kopil scraped a second trench in the stone.

  “I’m not a theist, sir. But think about the Serpents. We sacrificed to them for three thousand years, maybe more, because that was how we always conceived of our relationship. We never tried a different approach. That’s changed now. I changed it. I think I can do more. I can use power, your power, to fix the world, piece by piece.”

  “You’re proposing your own Concern.”

  “I don’t know what to call it. Something between a Concern and a holy order. We’ll take soulstuff from Concerns like RKC and use it to build bridges with the gods. Maybe we can even use it directly, to heal the soil, repair a water table, stop a war.”

  “You’re not a Craftsman. You’ve never built a Concern. You have little experience, and no skill.”

  “We’ll find Craftsmen. Specialists. And they’ll come to us. People understand this problem, even if they try to ignore it. When we give them a chance to help, they will. The business side, relationship building, all that—you’re right, it’s not my strength. That’s why I hope Teo will take a leave of absence and help me.” He was gratified to see her eyes widen in surprise, and interest.