Two Serpents Rise

by Max Gladstone

  Magma breathed sirocco in his face, dried his parchment skin. “I could remain here,” he said, “until lava cured me into dust. That would be better, I think.”

  “You’ll like retirement,” said the woman at his side: Allesandre, his patient, loyal student; his sacrifice. “Or maybe you won’t, but it’s for the best. We’ll take everything from here. Don’t worry.”

  “I have spent six decades worrying.” The old man lifted his hands from the railing and placed them into his pockets with care, as if his bones were porcelain. “Since the God Wars. Since the Skittersill Rising. My life lies down there.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, and gripped his shoulder. “We will finish what you started.”

  Alaxic felt her strength, and wondered at time, distance, and the wheels of age that grind the great to powder.

  Calm and quiet, he left the cave.

  Book Two

  SEVEN LEAF LAKE

  16

  Serpents covered the gallery wall, asps and vipers, hooded cobras, slender finger-wide coral snakes and bulge-bellied anacondas. Writhing, they ate each other.

  Caleb watched close up, his nose inches from rippling scales. A diamondback rattler devoured a garden snake; a fat flat-headed serpent from the jungles of southern Kath ingested the rattler’s tail in turn. Hisses filled his ears.

  “Grotesque,” he said, and shivered. “I don’t know what you see in Sam’s work.”

  “Grotesquerie,” Teo said from behind him.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Not what I meant. That’s the name of the piece. Urban Grotesquerie.”

  “I see where it comes from. This is sick.” The rattlesnake wriggled forward, as if by devouring prey it might escape the jaws behind.

  “It’s art. If you’re looking at it, it’s working.”

  Caleb turned away.

  Teo’s gallery was floored in varnished wood and lit by tall windows facing south. Sam’s work hung on the white walls: twisted, inhuman creations, sculptures of men devouring the entrails of other men in a cannibalistic network, bas reliefs of cities that had never been and would never be. On the exhibition’s opening night three weeks before, as Teo chatted up donors, buyers, and benefactors, Caleb had spent twenty minutes staring at the only thing on the walls that qualified, as far as he was concerned, as a painting: an image of two triangles interlaced, in oils on unfinished canvas.

  Those triangles haunted his sleep for ten days afterward, towering yet so small he could hold them in his palm. In dreams he tumbled into that painting, his soul stretched long and thin—a thread in rough canvas. Around him he heard other threads, men, women, children, falling forever and screaming as they fell.

  Teo sat beside a small table upon which rested an open bottle of champagne and Caleb’s empty glass. She drank from her own glass, and smiled as she swallowed. Caleb poured more wine, and offered Teo the last drops, which she refused—“You need good fortune more than I do!” He sat down facing her.

  “To fortune,” he murmured. They touched glasses and drank together. He watched her as she watched the snakes. A trick of Craft projected their hisses out into the room, so that no matter how Caleb shifted or where he stood, serpents seemed to hover at his back, forked tongues flicking the saddle ridge of his ear. “That’s uncomfortable,” he said, swatting at empty air.

  “It’s art,” she repeated. “Supposed to be uncomfortable. Makes you think.”

  “Makes me think about getting eaten by snakes. I saw a snake eat a deer once, out in the Badlands. The deer had been paralyzed, maybe stung by the Scorpionkind or something. This big viper wriggled out of a hole, wrapped the deer up, killed it, and ate it. Some of my nightmares look like that.”

  “What do the other ones look like?”

  He pointed at the wall of serpents.

  “This doesn’t speak to you? Thousands of snakes, pressed so close together they have to kill one another to eat?”

  “You think she’s talking about the city.”

  “Of course she’s talking about the city.”

  “It’s different.”

  “How, exactly?”

  “Well. The snakes eat one another,” he said, but when she smiled at that he tried again. “People in Dresediel Lex aren’t so close together,” but that was a difference of degree, and he wanted a difference of kind. “Gods, I don’t know. That, though”—he waved vaguely at the wall of snakes—“isn’t everything. What about compassion? Love?”

  “We get those all the time from cheap romances. Only a true artist can show us this.”

  “You don’t believe the world is that bleak any more than I do.”

  “I don’t have to agree with Sam to like her work.”

  “Especially if you’re sleeping with her.”

  “Exactly.” Teo sipped champagne. “Speaking of which, how is love working out for you so far?”

  He looked away from her. “Love has nothing to do with Mal.”

  “The hell it doesn’t. Love, lust, whatever you want to call it. Why else would you almost die trying to protect her?”

  He grimaced, and remembered the agony of healing. “To the King in Red.”

  “To Lord Kopil,” Teo said with a jaunty toast to Caleb and the snakes. “Long may he burden my soul with unearned thaums.”

  “The Heartstone bonus came through this week, I see.”

  She tapped the curved Iskari lettering on the champagne bottle. “You think I’d pay for a Hospitalier ’83 on my salary?” Despite her family’s wealth, Teo tried to live within her personal means. The soulstuff her parents pressed on her, she threw into the collection, curation, purchase and sale of art. “The bonus cleared last week. You haven’t seen your share?”

  “Not yet. Not that I’m hurting for thaums after winning our bet.”

  “You’re lucky I’m the trusting type. I never saw evidence of your victory.”

  “To your unwarranted faith in my honesty.” He drank, and closed his eyes, and the serpents’ hisses became the sound of steam in the cave beneath the world, the groan of shifting rock as Aquel and Achal tossed in their sleep. “I’m worried about this deal.”

  “We’ve done seven months’ due diligence. The King in Red wanted every avenue checked. You personally reread whole sections of that contract.”

  “I did. Sections. The thing is seventy thousand pages long. They folded space to fit it in one conference room for the signing. It’s not even all on paper: some paragraphs are carved on stone plinths, some on the pyramid itself. Nothing that complex is safe.”

  “Every morning you walk into your bathroom, put your hand to the tap, and fresh water flows out, courtesy of Red King Consolidated. That’s a complicated system, and you trust it daily.”

  “Pipes, filters, pumps I understand. It’s easy to tell when they’re broken. The Heartstone deal isn’t about water. It’s about Craft: power pledged on the promise of more power, demonic pacts, bargains with beings beyond our reality. Some of its clauses depend on the going price of souls in the Abyss.” An exaggeration; he’d been to some of the nearer hells on business trips, but their denizens did not seem so interested in the soul trade as stories claimed. “The structures of Craft involved are so complex even their creators barely understand them. We’ve fixed all the problems we can find—it’s the problems we can’t that worry me.”

  “That’s Sam’s point.” Teo waved at the snakes on the wall. “This city is stranger and more alien than we can conceive—snakes wriggling over one another, feeding on one another.” She interwove her fingers and twitched them.

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “Think about it this way,” she said. “Look at the snakes again.”

  “No.”

  “Do it.”

  They slithered, devouring but never satisfied: a twist of Craft allowed the serpents being eaten to writhe out of their predators’ gullets unscathed, only to be consumed again.

  “I’m looking.”

  “Imagine yo
u were a snake.”

  “I’d rather not. Especially in this context.”

  “Imagine you were a snake,” she repeated, and he did. He wound over and around himself, forever hungry, consuming as he consumed, his world a matrix of pain and fear. “All you see are snakes, and the world makes no sense at all. But from a distance we see the pattern of which the individual snake is only a piece.”

  “So you think I should stop worrying about the fact that I can’t see how Heartstone fits together?”

  “I think you should realize that the world isn’t all cut to your scale. Sam’s gallery openings and premieres and patrons keep these serpents alive, even though their little snaky brains can’t comprehend that stuff. RKC, Heartstone, they’re so big they might as well be gods. We shouldn’t expect to understand them entirely.”

  “What about the King in Red? Or Alaxic? Do you think they comprehend what they’re doing?”

  “They’re Deathless Kings. Their minds aren’t bound by brains and fleshy bits anymore. Maybe they think differently from the rest of us.”

  He remembered a small picture in a silver frame, and the way the King in Red leaned against his desk, shoulders slumped and head bowed. “Maybe.” Teo glanced at him, curious, but whatever she wanted to ask, she changed her mind.

  “Regardless,” she said. “May more deals like Heartstone leave us rich in soulstuff and good wine.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Caleb said. On the wall, vipers hissed in a reptilian hell.

  17

  When Caleb and Teo reached the pyramid at 667 Sansilva, the giant auditorium was already crowded with RKC employees in work robes and formal dress. Snakelings wound about the pillars that supported the balcony, long bodies glistening. Humans, skeletons, and well-preserved zombies, a scattering of Scorpionkind, brass giants bearing the vision-gems of distant Craftsmen, and all the other rabble of RKC crowded in the seats and aisles.

  Caleb and Teo shouldered between a golem and a paunchy balding man in a skullcap. The speeches had begun; they could not see the stage, but the vaulted ceiling threw the King in Red’s voice down upon them.

  “The last three months,” Kopil said, “have been a time of trial. Together we spilled gallons of ink and blood. Together we moved mountains. Together we suffered grueling meetings in the Abyss.” The crowd murmured assent. Teo had ventured into the Abyss herself during the negotiations, painted in henna and silver wards against the odd intelligences that lived there. “Heartstone Holdings has remade the Craft of dousing and well-drilling in its own image. An analyst at Traeger Matins Laud once suggested that Heartstone might supplant us as provider of water to this city. For a few years, I almost believed they could do it.”

  The King in Red pitched that line as a joke, and was rewarded by a few uneasy chuckles. Shedding the confines of the flesh had not improved Kopil’s sense of humor, but people laughed anyway. Vast power made even bad jokes funny.

  Caleb squeezed past a young woman with blue skin and a zombie carrying a brain in a bubbling jar.

  “We decided that together we would be greater than either of us apart. Red King Consolidated, of which we are all limbs”—the young woman with blue skin touched her forehead, throat, and heart, as did others scattered through the crowd—“began the dance of union with Heartstone Holdings. Today, we achieve our goal. The contract is signed, the last sigil graven into stone. Red King Consolidated and Heartstone will be one.”

  A round of applause began, perhaps spontaneously or perhaps a junior executive’s attempt to curry favor. Either way, it spread from the front rows through the auditorium. The King in Red was watching. No one wanted to be the only person not to clap.

  “I present Alaxic, Chairman of Heartstone, and his Chief Craftswoman Ms. Kekapania, to seal the pact between our firms.”

  Caleb shouldered at last to the front of the standing crowd, stopped, and stared. Teo tripped and fell into his back, but he did not notice.

  Three hundred feet away, the King in Red commanded center stage, his robe bloody, his arms outstretched. Crimson sparks burned from his eye sockets. Shadow cloaked Alaxic beside him.

  Mal stood between them.

  She wore a charcoal suit, not a cliff runner’s leathers, but the cant of her chin and the defiance in her gaze had not changed. Her short hair swept up and back from her head in frozen waves. She looked upon Red King Consolidated, and smiled.

  “Mal,” Caleb said, and realized that he had spoken out loud, in the silent auditorium. Kopil paused, and searched the audience for the speaker. Mal’s smile widened. Had she heard? Did she recognize his voice?

  “Malina Kekapania,” said the King in Red, “has been my primary liaison with Alaxic throughout this process.”

  The old man raised his head and moved papery lips. His voice passed over the audience like crumbling windblown leaves. “My blood is shed upon the contract, and signing it, I am quit of Heartstone Holdings.” He bared long white teeth in a ghastly grimace of what Caleb hoped was pleasure. “Ms. Kekapania will seal the bargain in my stead.” He clutched his hands behind his back, retreated a step, and watched the stage with glittering black eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” Teo whispered.

  “That’s her.”

  “Her who?”

  “Mal.”

  “Some of you,” Mal said, to Caleb and to the crowd, “may be surprised to see us here.”

  No kidding, Caleb thought.

  “This deal,” she continued, “has hung for months on technicalities and minor disagreements, but its end was never in doubt. Heartstone prides herself on knowing what she wants. The question we’ve had through these negotiations has always been: what can we do together?” Her eyes scoured the room. “Now we’re here. What’s next is up to us.”

  “Yes,” Kopil said. Caleb’s mouth formed the same word.

  The light faded, and Caleb’s mind opened to the universe. He fell a hundred stories and did not smash or splatter when he hit bottom, but spread like a drop of water through thin cloth.

  A silver-blue gossamer net connected the audience. Caleb breathed, and two thousand pairs of lungs breathed with him. Two thousand hearts beat in two thousand breasts.

  He sank into the ocean of Red King Consolidated. Blood rushed in his veins and water rushed in pipes under the desert. Lightning danced down his nerves, crackled along glyph lines across the city. Octopus arms of Craft wove through sea and stone, binding RKC to Deathless Kings and giant Concerns in cities across continents and oceans: to Alt Coulumb, to Shikaw and Regis, to the metropolitan sprawls of the Shining Empire, the mines of Koschei, the gear-bound desert cities of King Clock.

  The King in Red shone crimson. A million contracts wove through the iron bars of his spirit, and bound him. Caleb could not see where his soul ended and RKC began.

  Mal stood transfigured, a figure of adamant edged with razor blades. Space bent with her breath.

  In the dark behind them both, Alaxic lurked half-visible, avuncular ghost to their glory.

  The world doubled: Caleb saw the King in Red on stage, doll-sized by distance, a puppet of the cords that bound him, and saw himself also through the King in Red’s eyes, caught in webs of silver. They were all at once themselves and not themselves, human and Deathless King, mortal and immortal, bound by dread pact and mystic pledge.

  The King in Red turned to Mal, the blazing anchor of the world.

  “I stand embodied representative for Red King Consolidated, as majority owner of my soul and Chief Executive of this Concern.” Caleb’s lips did not open, but his mind echoed the words. The King in Red spoke for him, for all of them. “I accept the terms of our contract and the privileges and responsibilities stipulated there.”

  Mal, or rather Heartstone Holdings overshadowing her, stared into Kopil’s burning eyes and said through dagger teeth: “I stand embodied in this my servant; as Heartstone, I accept the terms and conditions of our pact, and the responsibilities and privileges therein. What we forge today never will be
sundered.”

  “What we forge today never will be sundered,” Kopil repeated and the audience with him.

  Mal drew close, walking six inches above the stage as if the air was solid ground. The King in Red embraced her, and she returned his embrace with arms of fire; their worlds tilted toward each other, and they kissed.

  It was not the kiss Caleb remembered from the night of the blackout. That had been soft and harsh and strong, but a human softness, a human harshness and a human strength. This was a god-kiss, skeletal teeth touching lips cool and strong as marble, two colossal powers driven by a need that was not desire, an eagerness that was not passion. One was the shadow cast by the other, but which was which?

  Or was each the shadow cast, and neither one the caster?

  Thorns pierced the King in Red and Heartstone-in-Mal, and spread, weaving through Kopil’s bones and coursing in Mal’s blood. Barbs curled out of Kopil’s eye sockets and burst Mal’s eyes from the inside, flowered between his teeth and ripped her throat and tongue as they tied, and tangled, and became one.

  Seventy-thousand-page contracts sitting in the RKC archives erupted with unearthly light. Blood signatures burned into reality; silver glyphs appeared on stone circles and obelisks throughout Dresediel Lex and in cities around the world, as if etched in an instant by giants with diamond chisels. The pacts built by hundreds of Craftsmen over thousands of billable hours were loose strands of rope, and the kiss one pull tightening them to a knot.

  Seconds passed, grains of sand falling down a well deep as forever. Through ticks of agony Caleb wondered how Mal could bear the pain.

  The deed was done. The thorns joined. Heartstone Holdings was itself no longer, subsumed into RKC; Red King Consolidated was itself no longer, transformed by consuming Heartstone.

  Mal’s lips clung briefly to Kopil’s teeth, so gently did he pull away. Before she fell, she clutched him tight, leaned in until her cheek brushed the side of his skull, and whispered into his earwell: “Still interested?”

  She sank to the stage. The lightning frame of Heartstone left her and wound about the King in Red, a separate form at first, then a swelling within the firestorm of his being, then merged entirely and gone.