Two Serpents Rise

by Max Gladstone

  Before the Craftsmen came, the petrified forest to the city’s southeast stood barren, uninhabited and uninviting. After Liberation, refugees flooded in, hoping for new lives, jobs, family, free of gods. Some found what they sought, and others—drunk, mad, or simply poor—pitched their tents in Stonewood, and banded together in loose clans for protection against the giant spiders that spun steel webs between dead and ancient trees.

  The people of Stonewood were less organized than the Skittersill mob, but jealous of their territory. Every few years, some enterprising hoods ventured south from Skittersill to stake a claim among the poor and lost. Their bodies were never found. The bodies of men and women from Stonewood who crept north to work or beg or whore appeared often indeed.

  Ten acres of shattered buildings and blighted land separated the two districts, and preserved them from constant bloodshed. During Liberation, a god had died there, draining life from soil and air in his desperate bid for survival. After sixty years, living beings still walked uneasy on those streets. Beggars who slept on the broken roads did not wake, or woke transformed by nightmare visions. No one visited the borderland, save cliff runners who came to drink and dance in the ruins.

  Caleb waited for Sixthday, when, Shannon said, Mal came to run. He suspected she was a high-pressure professional of some sort, Craftswoman maybe. Cliff running was her passion and escape, hence the late-night trips into the mountains, the precautions against being seen.

  At dusk he donned denim pants and caught a driverless carriage through the Skittersill. When the cab refused to take him farther south, he paid the horse and walked.

  The Skittersill ended in a jagged row of abandoned buildings, and the border began: rubble, ruined stone, rusted steel, the skeletons of shops, temples, towers broken by the dying god.

  Two blocks in, he saw firelight rise from the roofless wreckage of a warehouse. Caleb approached the ruin, and ignored the shadows that detached from rock and fallen wall to follow him.

  He met no sentries, only men and women lying drunk near fallen statues, smoking weed as they reclined against the foreheads of dead kings. Marks covered every surface, painted warnings and boasts in arcane calligraphy. Runners flitted between broken towers above, or scaled walls, spiders racing spiders.

  One wall of the warehouse lay collapsed, felled by time or a flailing divine limb. Cliff runners gathered inside, corded with muscle, covered with scars and tattooed on arm and chest and neck.

  A collection of pillars to the rear of the warehouse had once supported a lofted office, long since gone. Runners tested themselves there, jumping between pillars. Some landed and leapt again with ease, and others fell into packed dirt. A thick middle-aged man in a leather jacket shouted encouragement and abuse to them from below. A yellow tattooed face grinned on the back of his shaved head. This had to be Balam. Older by at least a decade than any of the other runners Caleb had seen: a survivor, fortysomething and ancient in a young man’s endeavor, his peers long since retired or dead.

  Caleb approached, waited for a lull in Balam’s tirade, and said, “Excuse me.”

  The man turned to him with thin-lipped surprise and contempt. Caleb had dressed to blend in, but jeans and leather jacket left him several pints of ink and a handful of piercings away from looking like he belonged. He’d debated dressing to show his scars, and decided against it; the scars would earn him respect, but also the wrong sort of attention. Who knew where the Wardens had informants? So he endured scorn, and pressed on: “Shannon said you could help me find Mal.”

  “Maybe I could.” Balam spoke slowly, as if his words were tough meat he had to chew for flavor. “But why would I?”

  A semicircle of runners gathered. Their leathers and spikes were uniforms of a sort, Caleb thought, sure as ancient Quechal paints and piercings.

  “Mal challenged me to find her. I’ve traced her here.” He sounded more confident than he felt.

  Balam’s stomach protruded from his jacket, a swell of muscle beneath a thin layer of flesh. His skin glowed roundly in the firelight. “You can’t catch her.” He looked Caleb over, examining the thin arms under his jacket, the slender legs inside his trousers. “Might kill you even to try.”

  “She challenged me.”

  The trainer rested his thick fingers on the mound of his belly. “Mal runs like there’s something after her with teeth and something ahead brighter than gold. If you go against her, you will fall, and you will shatter. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Caleb said. I just want to talk with her, a small part of him railed. He ignored it.

  “You like the ground too much. Run from it, and it’ll break you.” Balam turned back to the pillars. The runners there, who had paused to watch the conversation, sprang once more to motion. The audience on the ground remained, because Caleb remained. Balam ignored them. His fingers tapped his stomach like a drum. He smelled of leather, and smoke, and animal sweat.

  “I’ll find Mal.” Don’t blink, Caleb told himself, any more than normal. Count your heartbeats. This is no different from bluffing any player at any table in the world. “Or I’ll tear the city apart looking for her.” Or the Wardens would.

  “Best get started.”

  Caleb had almost decided to leave when he noticed the runners beside him staring into the southern sky. Beyond the pillars rose the warehouse wall, and on top of the wall a woman stood silhouetted against the gray night. Caleb recognized her, even before wind fanned the flames behind him and threw flickering red light on her face. She was a blaze of sunset wrapped in skin: hands on hips, elbows out, head back. She wore tan trousers, thin-soled boots, a sleeveless shirt and brown gloves, all worn, all torn.

  Caleb recognized her, and ran. There were no ladders, no stairs leading up the wall, but a few pillars rose nearby. From those he could leap and reach the wall, grip the edge, pull himself up. She could escape before he reached her, but if she wanted to escape why show herself at all?

  Long use had worn handholds into the nearest pillar. He climbed. She watched him. The other runners paused.

  He reached the top of his pillar. Monkey-fear seized his gut as he sought the next: five feet away. Five feet, easy, he told himself, you used to jump from rock to rock in your back yard all the time, five feet apart give or take. Nothing to worry about, only tense and go.

  He landed before he realized he had jumped, and the shock shot through his body, every cell screaming: never do this again. He might have listened, but his balance was too far forward. Stopping wasn’t an option.

  He leapt to the next pillar. Fear pounded through his veins instead of blood. Three more pillars, two, one, and then only the gap between pillar and wall. He was moving too fast to stop, and airborne above broken stone.

  He struck the wall chest-first. The world inverted, and he coughed up dust and dry rock and coppery blood. He didn’t fall.

  His arms splayed out atop the ruined wall, and the rest of his body dangled over the drop. Legs flailed for a foothold in pitted brickwork. His fingers slipped and found no purchase.

  He tried to pull himself up, but his left arm was a solid bar of pain, an exploding universe contained in the shoulder joint. Broken? No, that would hurt more. Dislocated, maybe. Damn.

  Footsteps on brick. Brown thin-soled boots stepped between his arms, and she knelt. He saw the curve of her calf, and remembered her jumping, twisting, falling from Bright Mirror Dam into night. The closed-eye pendant dangled around her neck, but it did not glow. She cocked her head to one side like a bird either curious or about to strike. Her eyes were wide, her eyebrows raised.

  “If it isn’t the policeman,” she said.

  “I’m no Warden. I’m not trying to arrest you.”

  “Then why are you here? You’ve gone through a lot of trouble to find me.”

  “I need to talk to you. For your own safety.”

  “You do know how to make a girl feel safe,” she said, and: “A week from tonight, on top of the Rakesblight Center, at ten. Come. Race.
If you catch me, then we’ll talk.”

  “I’ll catch you.”

  “Let’s see.” She touched the back of his right hand with her fingertip, cool and smooth and hard-polished from gripping rock. He closed his eyes, consciousness slipping; when he opened them again, she was gone.

  He fell, right arm wheeling and left jutting at an odd angle from the socket: an angel with one wing broken. He struck something heavy and round and human, and thick arms set him gently on the broken ground. Caleb looked up into Balam’s blunt face. Other cliff runners peered down, astonished and confused. They crowded him with warmth.

  “You still want to catch her?” Balam asked as Caleb struggled against his body’s weight to rise.

  “Yes.”

  The trainer didn’t reply.

  Caleb closed his eyes, and thought about Mal, and about this strange massive man, old in middle age, and about Shannon and her scar. Who was Mal, to have this hobby?

  He levered himself into a sitting position, and the pain from his arm almost made him vomit.

  “You love the ground too much,” Balam said. “Or it loves you.”

  “Where’s the nearest hospital?”

  All told, once he escaped the god-shattered wasteland, once he staggered into a hospital waiting room, once the doctor looked down over the gold rims of her glasses and reached through his skin to set his shoulder from the inside, once he woke from the swoon of pain and soul-loss, he judged the evening a success.

  Seven days. More than enough time to heal, and prepare.

  When Teo met him in the hospital, she looked so worried he almost didn’t tell her the story.

  “I suppose you’ll call the whole thing off now,” she said as he tested his mended shoulder’s strength. “Hand her over to the authorities.”

  “I can’t quit now.” He reached for his pants. “I’ve almost won our bet.”

  10

  Two days later, wounds healed and mind unsettled, he stalked Teo’s office.

  “What do I have to do,” she said, looking up from a pile of paperwork, “to get you out of here so I can focus?”

  “Thanks for your support. I’m in trouble.”

  “What happened to the cocky attitude? I’ve almost won, all that stuff?”

  “I have almost won.”

  “But you’re pacing.”

  “I’m so close. It’s this last little part that’s the problem.”

  “The part where you have to beat a runner at her own race.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “You know what you should do. Tell Tollan, fall on your sword and”—she waved the quill tip of her pen at the door—“walk away.”

  “Would you give up, if our situations were reversed?”

  “Of course.”

  “I think she’s innocent.”

  “You’re infatuated.”

  “I’m not. I want to help her.”

  “Because she’s pretty.”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “And pretty is not even the right word. She burns. She’s a verb.”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “You fall for people all the time.”

  “Fall is certainly the operative word in this case.” Teo returned her pen to its copper stand with an exasperated click of quill on metal. “I’ve never dated a key suspect in an ongoing investigation. As far as I recall, and feel free to correct me, I’ve never come back from a date with anything worse than a hangover. How many bones did you break last week?”

  “That’s beside the point,” he said, though it wasn’t. He studied one of the paintings on her office wall: a canvas awash with orange and brown and splashes of blue. A city rose, or fell, from the angry brushstrokes—a city suspended between two hells. “Would you rather I fold?”

  She crossed her arms and reclined in her chair. Leather creaked to cradle her. “That isn’t fair.”

  “I’m not blaming you. You’re right. I never would have let that hand pass four years ago. I got scared, got tight. I’m afraid of losing my job, my house, the shreds of soulstuff I’ve squirreled together. But this woman doesn’t deserve to be handed over to the Wardens just because she doesn’t listen when the world tells her where she can and can’t go.”

  “She’s dangerous.”

  “She’s amazing,” he agreed.

  “I don’t think you get my point.”

  “I don’t think I care.”

  Teo leaned forward. Caleb steeled himself against whatever she was about to say.

  A bell rang, interrupting them both. She grimaced and pressed a button on her desk. A tiny door opened in the baseboard behind her wastebasket. Two hesitant red eyes peered out from the shadows.

  The white rat stepped cautiously into the room, nostrils flaring. Satisfied of its immediate safety, the rat darted up Teo’s desk and sat atop her paperwork. It wore black velvet barding blazoned with a silver spiderweb; a leather scroll case the size of a cigarette hung around its neck. Teo opened the case with a flick of her forefinger, and tapped a parchment scroll into her palm.

  The rat accepted a few thaums of her soul in payment for the delivery, sketched a mechanical bow, and darted back through its hidden door, which snapped closed. Teo unrolled the scroll, read the message there, and swore.

  “Heartstone?”

  “Heartstone,” she confirmed. “This deal will kill me, or else I will kill every single person involved in it.”

  “Please don’t. That would include me.”

  “I might kill you anyway,” she said. “They want all our customer complaints for the last year, to prove some damn thing or other about our service. As if I didn’t have enough on my mind.”

  “I have five days to figure out how to run faster than the best cliff runner in the city.”

  “Practice.” Teo grabbed a pen and scrawled a list on a spare palimpsest.

  “Their practice almost killed me.”

  “Then cheat.”

  He raised one finger and opened his mouth. Ten seconds passed, twenty, and no words came out. A sun rose in his mind.

  “Teo, you’re a genius,” he said, and left.

  * * *

  Caleb couldn’t beat Mal if he played by her rules. He was neither Craftsman nor athlete. His skills lay at the card table.

  But Mal had challenged him to catch her, not to win. If he cheated, she might not talk, but since he couldn’t win by playing fair, he would lose nothing by stretching the rules. Balam would not approve, but Caleb didn’t need his approval.

  Cheating at a footrace was difficult. There were no cards he could hide in his sleeve, no tricks of shuffling or sleights-of-hand. Fortunately, Caleb had other alternatives.

  He descended winding stairs into RKC’s basement library, a labyrinth of twisting paths built centuries before as a ritual maze for the priests of Aquel and Achal. After the God Wars, the King in Red used the paths and dead-end chambers to store the millions of contracts by which the city maintained itself in the absence of divine grace.

  This library held no Iskari romances, no histories of the Atavasin Empire or treatises on gardening or the cultivation of dreamweed. Shelves strained to support ledgers, pacts, scrolls, codices of souls collected and paid. These documents, and the Craft they anchored, were RKC’s meat and blood.

  No windows opened onto the library. No candles burned. Ghostlamps offered the only light. Attendants wandered branching paths between high walls lined with forbidden tomes.

  After a half hour’s search Caleb found the Sub-Basement of Honorable Confusion and Folly, which held the industrial contracts. From the third oversized shelf in the fourth bookcase he removed a hand-bound sheaf of documents, spine embossed with “Rakesblight” and illuminated in gold leaf. He recognized this book, its prim, stiff binding and the green marble cover paper: he had written most of the reports inside. Rakesblight had been one of his first projects.

  He flipped through pages of contracts and graphs and sigils until he reached the gloss
y pictures at the book’s heart: plans of the Rakesblight Center, with lines of Craft drawn in blue. He sketched a copy of the diagram in a small notebook he carried, and stared at his sketch as if to drink its lines off the page into his mind. He made a small correction, and retrieved a larger book, labeled North Station in heavy letters, from the oversized shelf.

  North Station surrounded Rakesblight and its neighboring properties on three sides. The people of Dresediel Lex paid RKC and other Concerns for their lights, water, and food in slivers of soul. In North Station, Craft engines smelted this soulstuff into power free of memory, affection, or moral content. That power in turn set the city’s lamps ablaze and pumped its water down miles of pipe.

  Caleb laid the book open on a wooden table that creaked with its weight. North Station’s physical schematics were almost illegible below the blue lines drawn above and around them. Near North Station, the Craft twisted into thick ropes of obligation and interest and torment. Those ropes moved like belts in a machine.

  Perfect.

  Closing the book, he stood alone in the sub-basement. It was lunchtime, and the architects and students and junior Craftsmen who usually worked here would not return for an hour at least.

  The library dripped with Craft. Mystic bindings and filaments clogged the narrow avenues between bookcases. Craft lines tangled and knotted until only scholars could tell a consignment order from a service contract, a statement of work from a record of accounts receivable.

  Not so different from the air around North Station.

  Caleb pulled his chair into the center of the room, and stepped onto its seat. The legs wobbled, but did not give. He slid a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, unfolded the cloth and held it before him at arm’s length. The fabric hung limp in the dry basement air. He spread the fingers of his free hand beside the handkerchief, but felt nothing. He raised both handkerchief and hand above his head. No change. Carefully, slowly, he searched the air. At last he found the right spot: the handkerchief did not move, but a cool breeze blew against his hand. No. Not a breeze. More like a stream of water, if water were invisible, and not precisely wet.