Two Serpents Rise

by Max Gladstone

  “Dad.”

  Temoc stopped. The corners of his eyes smiled.

  “This is a huge risk, coming here,” Caleb said. “Even in disguise.”

  “What disguise? This is how I look now. I wander from safe house to safe house, avenging wrongs and fighting the State. It’s not a bad life.”

  “You’re a bum, is what you’re saying.”

  “A fool, perhaps. In the old days we had holy fools. Madness claimed a few of those who saw the Serpents, and their madness made them sacred. Now the fools are all that’s holy.” He patted his chest. “My life could be worse.”

  “Meaning, you could be me, I suppose.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re my son. I love you. You work for godless sorcerers who I’d happily gut on the altar of that pyramid”—he pointed to 667 Sansilva—“and you are part of a system that will one day destroy our city and our planet, but I still love you.”

  “Thanks, I suppose,” Caleb said. “You realize that if you actually killed the King in Red, this place would be a desert in days. Water isn’t free.”

  “It used to rain here more often.”

  “Because you sacrificed people to the rain gods.”

  “Your system kills, too. You’ve not eliminated sacrifices, you’ve democratized them—everyone dies a little every day, and the poor and desperate are the worst injured.” He pointed at one of the street cleaners. “Your bosses grind them to nothing, until they have no choice but to mortgage their souls and sell their bodies as cheap labor. We honored our sacrifices in the old days. You sneer at them.”

  “Yeah? If being sacrificed was such an honor, tell me: how many priests died on the altar?”

  They retraced their old arguments without rancor, knife fighters circling one another out of habit, armed only with blunt sticks.

  Revenants shambled down the street, sweeping though no dust remained to clean. Silver studs on their wrists glinted in the streetlamps’ light.

  “How did the Tzimet get into the water?” Temoc asked.

  “Like you don’t know.”

  “I’ve spent all night fighting small demons. Saving lives. Do you think so little of me as to imagine I’d do this?”

  “It has your signature in foot-high yellow paint. Yours, or one of your friends’.”

  Temoc chuckled.

  “I missed the part where this was funny.”

  “The King in Red’s unholy systems have let demons into the world, and you blame me.”

  “Is that why you’re here? To send another message to the King in Red? He almost killed me last time you tried.”

  “I knew you would be safe. Besides, if Kopil tries anything, you can defend yourself.”

  “Dad,” Caleb began, but he could think of nothing more to say that he wouldn’t have to scream. He stared into the dregs of chocolate at the bottom of his mug. “I couldn’t defend myself against him.”

  “You don’t know the strength in your scars. Kopil and I fought each other for days at a time, in the God Wars.”

  “He’s grown stronger. He almost crushed me without meaning to.”

  Temoc shrugged.

  “Why are you here, Dad?”

  “To wish you luck.”

  “How do you know what I’m about to do?”

  “You sleep like a stone most nights. But now you’re fretting over a mug of chocolate. You’re worried about something big. You have a task ahead, and you don’t know whether you’ll be good enough, strong enough, smart enough.”

  “You came, defying Wardens and Deathless Kings, to tell me everything will be all right?”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  “Everything won’t be all right. I didn’t turn the water black, but someone did. Likely the same person who blew up North Station, and poisoned Bright Mirror. The Wardens are so busy hunting me they haven’t found a trace of their real enemy. A dark force moves against Dresediel Lex with strength and subtlety. You aren’t safe. No one is. I came to wish you good luck, and warn you to be careful.”

  A gust of hot wind stung Caleb’s eyes. He knew even as he blinked that when his vision cleared, Temoc would be gone.

  He sat for a while on the empty bench, then set his cup on the curb and shuffled off to his cold bed.

  24

  Gray dawn brought Caleb bleary and blinking to the pyramid’s parking lot. The previous night’s protesters had swelled to a crowd. Men and women across Sansilva and downtown woke to find their showers would not shower, their faucets would not run. Some sent angry letters by rat. Others came to 667 Sansilva and complained in person.

  A line of Wardens separated the crowd from the parking lot. RKC golems and revenants waited behind the Wardens, clanking and moaning whenever a protester staggered too close.

  Cheery, middle-aged customer service reps staffed complaint tables just outside the Wardens’ line, listening to those customers who could explain their troubles, and suffering verbal assault from everyone else. No violence yet, so far as Caleb could see. The crowd still shied before the gaze of the dead, and the Wardens.

  Mal elbowed toward him through the press of humanity. A golem lumbered to block her way, but she struck its chest with her palm; the air around the golem rippled, and it stumbled aside to let her pass.

  Once through the line, she sauntered over to him, smiled, and thrust up her chin in greeting. “Great complaints department you have here. I especially like the guys with the melty faces. Way to make your clients feel at home.”

  “Life is hard, undeath is harder. We need someone to keep us safe.”

  “I’ll watch out for you.”

  “Who will watch out for you?”

  “You’ll think of something.”

  “You have an exaggerated sense of my abilities.”

  “In that case, I’ll have to trust them.” She pointed up.

  Caleb’s chest thudded with the approach of massive beating wings. A scimitar shadow passed over him, and another. Couatl circled in the sky, sharks pondering their prey. These were larger than the common Warden’s mount, beasts bred for distance and battle. Baggage studded straps around their bodies: tents, supplies, weapons.

  Eight Wardens, come to bear him north to war.

  The Couatl swooped lower. Mal frowned. “Our ride’s here.”

  * * *

  The Wardens slung a wide, flat gondola under the largest Couatl for Mal and Caleb, who reclined inside as they flew north. The rising sun burned off the morning fog, but factories and foundries had already lit their fires. An industrial haze cushioned sky and earth, and did not abate until the flying caravan cleared the northern reaches of the suburbs.

  Their course curved west over a broken-scab carpet of farms: acres of orange groves, miles of avocados, artichokes, tomatoes, peppers, garlic, grass pasture and waving wheat, all green, all growing, in defiance of the desert two hours’ flight away. Eight-tenths of the fresh water from Bay Station went directly to these fields, where revenants and colossal machines planted and harvested the food that fed not only Dresediel Lex, but cities across the continent and beyond the Pax. A few sapient men and women lived on these farms, tenants for the Concerns that owned the land, but for the most part the fields belonged to iron and the dead.

  After three hours of northward flight the farms gave way to rolling hills, the hills to mountains. Rather than follow the First Highway up the coast toward Regis, they curved inland and soared between snowcapped peaks. The air grew cold; Caleb wrapped himself in an alpaca blanket, and Mal produced a long, fur-lined leather jacket from her backpack and draped it over her shoulders. Wind whipped the jacket’s tail behind her as they dove into a ravine.

  “I’ve never seen the mountains from up here before,” he said as they flew past temples hung from sheer cliffs by forgotten sages.

  “Have you seen them at all? I thought you were a city boy.”

  “When I was too young to live in town by myself, Mom brought me out here on her business trips.”


  “She raised you alone?”

  “Temoc sure didn’t help. You know how it is,” he said, though he realized with a pang of guilt that, being an orphan, she might not. “Mom’s trips into the Badlands took months at a time, but she brought me along anyway. Better than leaving me in DL to get into trouble.”

  “What did she do out there?”

  “Research, mostly. Interview people, take notes. She works for the Collegium, studying nomadic Quechal tribes in the mountains and the desert.”

  “Exciting.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “For the most part that meant wandering through the Badlands, following a bunch of people with a host of diseases any doctor could cure with a handful of pills and halfway decent nutrition. Life out there is a tapestry of danger: Scorpionkind and snakes, desert wolves, trickster spirits and wandering godlets who’ll burn you if you don’t worship them. Then she’d come back to the city and write books about deep truths the tribes know that the rest of us have forgotten. Seems silly to me. I always thought we had life better in DL than they do in the desert—at least as far as the lack of constant danger is concerned.”

  She rolled onto her back, laced her fingers behind her head and looked up into the scaled belly of the beast that bore them. “Maybe that’s what the tribes know. The danger, I mean. How often do we really feel close to death anymore? Everyone in Dresediel Lex is wrapped in cotton: ladies worry about a patch of sagging skin, pale women want to be darker, dark women want to be paler. The men are no better. You live in Fisherman’s Vale; you must see them jogging shirtless in the mornings, bodies sculpted for no purpose grander than vanity. In the Badlands nobody has the luxury to worry about stupid shit like that.”

  He struck his own stomach, which was flat but hardly sculpted. “I thought that way until I saw my fourth person die of a blood infection.”

  “What about the five hundredth person dying on the streets because they don’t have a job, or can’t afford a doctor, or water?”

  “Those same people wouldn’t last two weeks in the desert.”

  “And you would? If you think we should kill everyone who can’t survive in the wild, you want a lot of blood on your hands.”

  He stilled the dozen sharp replies that rushed to his tongue. “No, that’s not what I meant,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’ve fought this stuff over and over with my father. It’s hard to talk about it without getting emotional.”

  “It’s a sensitive subject. There are no easy answers.”

  “No,” he said after a long hesitation. “I guess not.” Their Couatl rose toward and through the low thin layer of clouds. Water vapor flecked Caleb’s face and lashes and wet his hair. Three wingbeats, four, and the clouds gave way to unbroken sky. The sun warmed them; it cast Caleb half in shade and left Mal in light.

  She gathered her legs and stood, slowly, gripping a gondola cable for support. Her coat flared like wings. She wore a tan shirt open at the collar. A row of short scars marred the skin at her collarbone. “Here,” she said, “let me show you what I mean.”

  He realized what she was about to do an instant before she released the cable and tumbled off the side of the gondola.

  With a wordless cry he leapt for her; his stomach wrenched and his hand shot out. He reached, grasping, desperate, into the clouds.

  Too slow, he knew in his bones, too slow, even as a firm grip clamped around his wrist. The sudden weight almost tugged him from the basket. He looked over the edge, and laughed in relief. Mal dangled from his arm. Her coat whipped and snapped with the speed of their passage. Sharp joy gleamed in her eyes.

  “See?” she said, unperturbed by the open sky and the mile’s drop. She shouted to be heard over the rush of wind. “Don’t you feel alive?”

  “I feel terrified,” he shouted back. “And angry.”

  “Your heart’s beating, you’re breathing deep, you’re desperate. Have you ever felt that way in Dresediel Lex, except when you were running after me?”

  “What would you have done if I didn’t catch you?”

  “It’s a long way down. I would have thought of something.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “You’re not the first to say it.”

  He pulled her back into the gondola. When his arm trembled and his grip almost failed, she grabbed a rope and pulled herself the rest of the way aboard.

  “All things considered,” he said when they were both safely reclining once more, “I think I prefer the cotton-padded life.”

  She shrugged. He remembered chasing her across rooftops, and the chill in his heart as he flew.

  After a silence, he said: “What do you think went wrong at Seven Leaf?”

  She didn’t answer at first, but he refused to change the subject again, and she relented. “Animals, maybe, or a raid from the Scorpionkind, though there aren’t many of them in the mountains and it’d take a larger clutch than I’ve ever seen to hurt Seven Leaf Station. Could be a spirit rebellion, but we bound all the local ghosts and gods in the lake before we started pumping.”

  “Treachery?”

  “Possible. From within, or without.”

  “So what’s our plan?”

  “Fly north. See what awaits us. Deal with it.” She leaned back and let her eyes drift shut. “No sense worrying about the game before we see the cards.”

  Caleb didn’t agree, but neither did he argue. Mal’s breath settled, and she slept. He sat a few feet away from her, and tried to think as the world passed below.

  25

  An hour before nightfall, the Wardens guided their mounts down to survey a broad forest clearing. A brook bordered the clearing to the east, and the forty-foot-wide stump of a magisterium tree towered in the clearing’s center. The Couatls’ approach set resting deer and small birds to flight. The Wardens saw no danger, and made camp in the fork of a spreading root, between stump and water.

  Magisterium grew in deep mountains, at glacial speeds. The living wood was strong, and stronger after death—its sticky sap set fast, and dried smooth and hard as stone. Only lightning and Craft could topple such trees, breaking them before the sap stiffened. Felled magisterium was valuable: carpenters could shape the wood into the bones and masts of ships, lighter than metal, tougher, and resistant to most Craft. Prospectors combed the mountains every year after winter storms, seeking fallen wood to sell.

  Too old and weathered for the most desperate prospector, the stump by which the RKC team camped was well into its third century of wind and rain and insects’ futile attempts at tunneling. The Couatl nested on the stump’s flat top, and rubbed their hides against splinters sharp as steel nails.

  Caleb built a fire, which Mal lit with a glare, and they cooked and ate a simple, hearty meal, tortillas and cheese and dried meat heated over the flame. They did not talk much. No local beast or bird dared return to the clearing—afraid of the campers, or more likely of the Couatl. Caleb swatted a couple mosquitos at sunset, but even those made only a halfhearted effort.

  After they ate, Caleb leaned back, patted his stomach, produced a coin and walked it up and down his fingers. “I’m bored.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mal said, “that our covert mission isn’t exciting enough for you.”

  “Oh, I’m paralyzed with fear. But I don’t like paralysis.” He produced a deck of cards from his jacket pocket. “What do you say to a game?”

  “A game?”

  “Poker.”

  “With only the two of us?”

  “What about you guys?” He called to the Wardens across the campfire. Their quicksilver masks warped and reflected the flames, transforming blank features into the gates of hell. He raised the cards. “A game?”

  The leader of the Warden band, a blocky young woman whose badge numbered 3324, was the first to speak: “We’re on duty, sir.”

  “You aren’t all planning to stand watch at the same time, are you? A few can play while the others guard.”

  “We have to remain on duty in the fie
ld.” She raised one gloved hand and tapped the spot on her mask where her cheek would have been. Her glove disappeared into the silver. “It wouldn’t be fair.”

  “I don’t need to see your faces to take your souls,” he said as he slid the cards from the pack. “And don’t call me sir.” The rattlesnake shuffle of card against card sounded small and alien in the clearing.

  3324 acquiesced without further prodding. Three of her squad mates joined, for a table of six, while two slept and two more stood guard. All the Wardens bore the same initial numbers on their badge.

  “Does that mean something? The thirty-three?”

  “We’re an extraterritorial unit,” said 3324.

  “Arrest authority, but no responsibility to arrest,” added the Warden beside her.

  “Soldiers,” Mal said, with a sour voice.

  “No,” she replied. “We’re Wardens who don’t always have the luxury of bringing our suspects home to trial.”

  “A fine distinction. I’m sure your victims respect it.”

  If 3324 reacted, her mask gave no sign. “Sometimes we have ugly assignments. Sometimes the world is ugly. I’d be overjoyed if all I had to do was direct traffic.”

  “I doubt it.”

  She shrugged. “Doubt what you like. But until that day, we’re stuck with jobs like this—in the forest, riding to confront an unknown threat, probably outgunned, with two civilians in tow. No disrespect.”

  “You chose this life,” Mal said. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t believe you when you say you’d be happy to give it up.”

  “I chose to serve. Turns out this is what I’m good for. What we’re good for.” She motioned to her men, who sat statue-still and did not acknowledge the statement. “We wanted to serve our city, and we have talents for last-ditch action, and violence. The jobs that no one wants to do, but must be done. So here we are. Serving.”

  Mal opened her mouth, and Caleb almost interrupted her, afraid of what she might say. But he did not, and she settled for: “So you serve.” And, “Let’s play cards.”

  “Let’s.”