Two Serpents Rise (17 page)

In the crimson flat, Kopil watched the darkness recede from his closet.

“Interesting,” he said. If he had eyes, they would have narrowed. After exhausting the few seconds he could spare to puzzle irrelevant mysteries, he snapped his fingers and one of his kitchen walls swung open. Chihuac waited in his office with stacks of paperwork. The night was, unfortunately, still young.

23

Caleb could not sleep in his soulless room. RKC kept emergency quarters at 667 Sansilva for visitors and workers too busy to travel home: efficiencies with all the comfort and warmth of a grain thresher. He tumbled on the hard bed for an hour before he gave up, dressed, and rode the lift down to the street.

Stars menaced the silent city. Even the protesters were mostly asleep, coats bundled to serve as pillows: bow-backed men and broad-shouldered women, young and old, poor and middle-class. Children slept in a clutch on the sidewalk. Ancient men huddled near a flickering portable fire.

Zombies in burlap jumpsuits shambled among the sleepers. They swept the street with broad stiff brooms and speared garbage with rakes and pikes. RKC contracted with a minor Concern to keep the local streets clean, and the revenants came every evening, rain or sleet, protest or riot, earthquake or conflagration, to do their duty.

Sea wind bore the scent of fish and salt off the shark-infested Pax. A few blocks in from shore, the stench of crowds, pavement, and livestock mugged the wind in a dark alley and took its place.

The Wardens guarding RKC’s perimeter shifted to let Caleb pass. He stepped over an unconscious child and turned left toward Muerte Coffee.

The shop’s windows were beacons in the bruised night. Caleb bought a cup of spiced chocolate from a clerk no livelier than the street sweepers, and retreated into grave-cool darkness. He sat on a sidewalk bench and watched dead men move among the sleeping. Chocolate sank a plumb line to his core.

Fifty years ago, at the God Wars’ height, Craftsmen had used a terrible weapon to bring the Shining Empire to its knees. Skies shattered, sand turned to glass, men and women and trees burned so quickly not even their shadows could escape. Those shadows lived still, travelers whispered—pinned to the ruined city by day and wandering at night, wailing after their lost flesh.

He felt like one of those shades, nailed to the city walls, the bench slats, the stone beneath his feet, the cup warm in his hand.

“Hello,” said Temoc beside him.

Caleb let out a strangled squawk and spilled chocolate over his hands onto the sidewalk. Temoc passed him a handkerchief. He dried himself off, returned the sodden cloth, and took another sip before he faced his father.

Temoc sat like a statue on the bench. A coat the size of a tent swallowed his massive body, and a long scarf concealed the bottom half of his face. In the last few weeks he had even let his hair grow, to cover the ritual scars on his scalp. A passing Warden would see only a large, amiable derelict seeking conversation in the small morning hours.

“What are you doing here?”

Temoc sighed and leaned back. The bench sagged with his weight. “Why shouldn’t a man visit his son?”

“Dad.”

“You know, from time to time, see how he’s getting on.”

“Dad.”

“How else am I supposed to brag about you to my friends in the old freedom fighters’ home?”

“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.”