Two Serpents Rise (12 page)

“Do you believe him?”

“I don’t know. He seemed sincere.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m no Craftsman, but I’m no terrorist, either.”

“Where do you stand, then?” asked Kopil.

“On my own side.”

“Your side hurts.”

“Yes,” Caleb said when he realized what the King in Red meant. “It does.”

Kopil crossed the red rug and stood before Caleb, six feet tall and slender in his crimson robe. He radiated cold power. His skin had rotted decades past, sinews and muscles crumbled, heart shriveled into dust. He endured. A cold wind blew between them.

“Let’s fix that,” Kopil said. Darkness rolled out from him to drown the world.

Caleb could not flinch or flee. Five arrows struck him in the chest—no, five fingers, and they did not pierce his skin but passed through it as if dipping into a pool of water, water that could feel, and think, and scream. He opened his mouth, and shadow crawled past his lips, over his teeth, wriggled down his throat to nest in his lungs. He could not breathe, but he did not die, and the King in Red began to work.

A second skeletal hand joined the first in Caleb’s chest, hot as hatred and cold as love. If not for the shadow filling his mouth, he would have ground his teeth to powder, bit through his tongue. His broken ribs were two arches of jagged glass. Kopil’s hands moved over that glass, smoothing and joining. Pain rose in a fugue, variations on a theme of agony.

The music stopped. Light returned. Kopil drew his hands from Caleb’s chest. Bits of tissue and spare red drops clung to his skeleton fingers. The mortal refuse smoked, boiled, and burned from the King’s pale bones.

Caleb could move again. He touched his side, and found it whole.

The King in Red shook his hands as if to dry them. “Lift your arm. Do you feel any pain?” Caleb did, and felt none. “Inhale.” Sweet air filled his lungs. His muscles trembled, and laughing he breathed again.

“How do you feel?”

“Like I just ran here all the way from Fisherman’s Vale. Tired in the bones. My stomach’s cold.”

“Eat well tonight. You almost killed yourself yesterday; I took as little power from you as I could for the healing, but you’re weak as if you haven’t eaten in days. Go to a restaurant tonight. Order enough for three men. Drink plenty of fluids.”

A wrenching, horrid screech erupted from the floor behind the King in Red. Black glass warped open to reveal a staircase that spiraled down into the pyramid.

“Go,” the skeleton said. Caleb attempted to walk, staggered, and caught the edge of the altar-desk. He steadied himself, tried another step, and made it halfway to the stairs before Kopil’s voice stopped him.

“I know what it’s like to be on no one’s side but your own.”

The King in Red had lifted the picture in the silver frame.

“Sir?”

Kopil opened his palm as if setting a bird free. The picture slid through the air. Caleb caught it, and looked for the first time at the image: an old-fashioned sepia miniature. Two men embraced at the foot of a black pyramid. They were young and smiling and obviously in love, both dark as magisterium wood, one shorter than Caleb, the other tall for a Quechal man, six feet at least and thin, with narrow sloping shoulders. His eyes were black, and his smile looked familiar.

Thin, Caleb thought, so thin he could almost see the bones of the tall man’s skull.

Kopil stood beside the desk, beside the altar, his finger bones spread on bloodstained glass. His shoulders were narrow and sloping, and his smile had not changed.

“Eighty years,” Caleb guessed.

“More than that.”

“What was his name?”

“Timas.”

“I’m sorry.”

“They took him for the sacrifice to the Hungry Serpents.” Kopil tapped the surface of the altar. “He’s still here. A piece of him, at least. Two or three drops.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“We all think we’re on our own side, until the time comes to declare war.”

Caleb released the picture. It flew back and settled on the desk beside the King in Red.

“Go,” Kopil said, and Caleb descended into the office building that was once a temple.

INTERLUDE: FLAME

The lake of fire coruscated red and blue and orange. Alaxic, lost in thought, traced the patterns and colors of heat.

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 you 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.”