Two Serpents Rise (2 page)

Some, like Caleb, solved problems.

Caleb was the highest-ranking employee on site so far. He had expected senior management to swoop in and take charge of a case like this, with death and property damage and workplace safety at issue, but his superiors seemed intent to leave Bright Mirror to him. At the inevitable inquest, he would be the one called to testify before Deathless Kings and their pitiless ministers.

The RKC brass had given him a wonderful opportunity to fail.

He wanted a drink, but could not afford to take one.

For a frenzied half hour, he’d ordered junior analysts and technicians through the routines of incident response. Isolate the reservoir from the city mains. Pull some Craftsmen out of bed to build a shield over the water. Find a few tons of rowan wood, stat. Check the dam’s wards. Cordon off the access road. No one comes in or out.

Orders given, he stood, silent, by the blood and the water.

Glyphs necklaced Bright Mirror Reservoir in blue light. The dammed river ran glossy black from shore to shore. He smelled cement, space, the broad flatness of still water, and above all that a sharp ammonia stench.

Two hours ago, a security guard named Halhuatl had walked along the reservoir, casting about in the dark with a bull’s-eye lantern. Hearing a splash, he stepped forward. He saw nothing—no night bird, no bat, no swimming coyote or bathing snake. He scanned the water with his lantern. Where the light touched, it left a rippling trail.

That’s strange, Hal must have thought, before he died.

A chill wind blew over the water, producing no waves. Caleb stuck his hands deep into the pockets of his overcoat. Footsteps approached.

“I grabbed this from the icebox in the maintenance shack,” Teo said, behind him. “The foreman will miss his lunch tomorrow.”

He turned from the water and reached for the parcel she held, white wax paper tied with twine. “Thank you.”

She didn’t let go. “Why do you need this?”

“To show you what’s at stake.”

“Funny.” She released the package. He undid the twine with his gloved hands, and opened the paper. A frost-dusted slab of beef lay within, its juice the same color as the blood on the concrete.

He judged the distance to the water, lifted the beef, and threw it overhand.

The meat arced toward the reservoir. Beneath, water bulged and reared—a wriggling, viscous column rippled with reflected stars.

The water opened its mouth. Thousands of long, curved fangs, stiletto-sharp, snapped shut upon the beef, piercing, slicing, grinding as they chewed.

The water serpent hissed, lashed the night air with an icy tongue, and retreated into the reservoir. It left no trace save a sharper edge to the ammonia smell.

“Hells,” Teo said. “Knife and bone and all the hells. You weren’t kidding about teeth.”

“No.”

“What is that thing?”

“Tzimet.” He said the word like a curse.

“I’ve seen demons. That’s no demon.”

“It’s not a demon. But it’s
like
a demon.”

“Qet’s body and Ilana’s blood.” Teo was not a religious woman—few people were religious any more, since the God Wars—but the old ways had the best curses. “That thing’s living in our water.”

Her voice held two levels of revulsion. Anyone could have heard the first, the common terror. Only someone who knew how seriously Teo took her work with Red King Consolidated would detect her emphasis on the word “our.”

“No.” Caleb knelt and wiped the meat juice off his gloved fingers onto the ground. “It’s not
in
our water. It
is
our water.” Stars glared down from the velvet sky. “We’ve isolated Bright Mirror, but we need to check the other reservoirs. Tzimet grow slowly, and they’re clever. They could be hiding until they’re ready to strike. It’s blind luck we caught this one.”

“What do you mean, it
is
the water?”

“The Craft keeps our reservoirs clean: wards against germs, fish, Scorpionkind larvae, anything that might pollute or corrupt. Charms to curb evaporation. The reservoir’s deep, with dark shadows at the bottom. When the sun and stars shine, a border forms between light and darkness. The Craft presses against that border. If there’s enough pressure, it pokes a tiny hole in the world.” He held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Nothing physical can fit through, only patterns. That’s what these Tzimet are.” He pointed to the reservoir. “Like seed crystals. A bit of living night seeps into the water, and the water becomes part of the night.”

“I’ve never seen a crystal with teeth.” She paused, corrected herself. “Outside of a gallery. But that one didn’t move.” She pointed to the blood. “Who was it?”

“Security guard. Night roster says the guy’s name was Halhuatl. The Wardens thought this was a homicide until the reservoir tried to eat them.”

Gravel growled on the road behind: the golem-carts arrived at last. Caleb turned. Exhaust puffed from joints in the golems’ legs. RKC workers in gray uniform jackets walked from cart to cart, checking the rowan logs piled within. Two junior analysts stood beside the foreman, taking notes. Good. The workers knew their business. They didn’t need his people interfering.

“Horrible way to die,” Teo said.

“Quick,” Caleb answered. “But, yes.”

“Poor bastard.”

“Yeah.”

“Now we know Tzimet are in there, we can keep them from getting out. Right?”

“They can’t get into the water system, but to keep them imprisoned we need better Craftsmen than we’ve been able to get out here so far. Those glowing glyphs hide the reservoir from animals that want a drink. We’ve inverted them to hide the outside world from the Tzimet. They can’t hear us or smell us, but they could kill us no problem if they knew we were here.”

“You sure know how to make a lady feel safe.”

“The Craft division’s woken Markoff, Billsman, and Telec; once they arrive, they’ll build a shield over the water. Feel safe then.”

“No way Telec’s sober enough for work at this time of night. And Markoff will be trying to impress the shorefront girls with his rich-and-sinister routine.”

“Dispatch found them all, and claims they’re up for it. Anyway, the Tzimet aren’t a big deal in the meantime, long as they don’t get into the pipes.”

“Glad to hear it.” She grimaced. “I think I’ll lay off tap water all the same.”

“Don’t let the boss catch you.”

“I said I’d stop drinking it, not selling it. Can this kind of infection happen any time?”

“Technically?” He nodded. “The odds of Tzimet infestation in a given year are a hundred thousand to one against or so. We didn’t expect anything like this for at least another century. Poison, bacterial blooms, Scorpionkind, yes. Not this.”

“So you don’t think it was natural?”

“Might have been. Or someone might have helped nature along. Good odds on the latter.”

“You live in a grim universe.”

“That’s risk management for you. Anything that can go wrong, will—with a set probability given certain assumptions. We tell you how to fix it, and what you should have done to keep it from happening in the first place. At times like these, I become a hindsight professional.” He pointed at the blood. “We ran the numbers when Bright Mirror was built, forty-four years ago, and thought the risks were acceptable. I wonder if the King in Red will break the news to Hal’s family. If he has a family.”

“The boss isn’t a comforting figure.”

“I suppose not.” A line of golem-carts rolled past behind them.

“Can you imagine it? A knock, and you answer the door to see a giant skeleton in red robes? With that flying lizard of his coiled on your lawn, eating your dog?”

“There would be heart attacks.” Caleb couldn’t resist a slim smile. “People dying with the door half open. Every personal injury Craftsman in the city would descend on us like sharks when blood’s in the water.”

Teo clapped him on the shoulder. “Look who’s got his sense of humor back.”

“I might as well laugh. I have another three hours or so of this.” He waved over his shoulder at the carts with their cargo. A bleary brigade of revenants in maintenance jumpsuits lurched by, bearing rowan. They stank of grave-musk. “I won’t leave until three, maybe four.”

“Should I be worried that it takes demons to break you out of your funk?”

“Everyone likes to be needed,” he said. “I might be late to work tomorrow.”

“I’ll tell Tollan and the boys you were out keeping the world safe for tyranny.” She fished her watch out of her pocket, and frowned.

“You late for something?”

“A little.” She closed the watch with a click. “It’s not important.”

“I’m fine. I’ll catch up with you tomorrow.”

“You’re sure? I can stay here if you need me.”

“Fate of the city on the line here. I have my hands full. No room for self-pity. Go meet your girl.”

“How did you know there was a girl?”

“Who else would be waiting for you at two in the morning? Go. Don’t get in trouble on my account.”

“You better not be lying.”

“You’d know if I was.”

She laughed, and retreated into the night.

*   *   *

The maintenance crew poured ten tons of rowan logs into the reservoir. Revenants did most of the hands-on work, since they smelled less appetizing to the Tzimet. Soon, a smooth layer of wood covered the water. Caleb thanked the foreman as his people slunk back to their beds.

The rowan would block all light from stars and moon and sun. The wood’s virtue poisoned Tzimet, and deprived of the light that cast their shadows, the creatures would wither and die.

Overhead, Wardens circled on their Couatl mounts. Heavy feathered wings beat fear through the sky, and Caleb felt serpents’ eyes upon him.

By sunrise, every executive in Red King Consolidated would be knocking on Caleb’s door, demanding to know how Bright Mirror was corrupted. Craftsmen could bend lightning to their will, cross oceans without aid, break gods in single combat, but they remained human enough to hunt scapegoats in a crisis. Sixty years after Dresediel Lex cast off the gods’ yolk, its masters still demanded blood.

So Caleb searched for a cause. Bright Mirror had been built with safeguards upon safeguards. If a mistake was made, what mistake, and who made it? Or was there some force at work more sinister than accident? The True Quechal, or another group of god-worshipper terrorists? Rival Concerns, hoping to unseat Red King Consolidated as the city’s water source? Demons? (Unlikely—the demon lords made a hefty profit from their trade with Dresediel Lex, and had no reason to hurt the city.)

Who would suffer for Halhuatl’s death?

Rowan logs bobbed on the still reservoir. Caleb’s footsteps were the only breaches in the night’s silent shell. City lights glowed over the dam’s edge, as if the world beyond was burning.

He walked the shoreline, searching for a sacrifice.

3

By the time Caleb reached the far side of the reservoir, he was so exhausted he almost didn’t see the woman.

He had not found his cause. All the equipment and wards seemed to work. No barbed wire was severed, no holes cut into the fence. No drums of poison stood empty beside decaying chemical sheds. He spied no pitons or carved handholds on the cliffs above the water.

When he closed his eyes and examined Bright Mirror as a Craftsman would, he saw an enormous web spun in three dimensions by a drunken spider. He could make no sense of that weave, let alone tell if it was broken.

He opened his eyes again. The dam’s edge cut the world in half, water and rowan below and sky above. To his right stood a dormitory shack, windows dark, inhabitants lost in sleep and demon dreams. Caleb was alone.

He blinked.

Not alone.

A woman leaned against the shack, arms crossed, one knee bent, her heel resting on the wall.

She did not seem to have noticed him. He engraved her on his memory: slender, and tense as a bent blade. Short black flames of hair blazed from her head. Thin lips, with sharp edges. She wore calf-length pants the color of sand and rock, a white sleeveless shirt, and dark gray close-toed sandals with leather straps that wrapped around her ankles and calves. She looked as if she had no business anywhere near Bright Mirror Reservoir.

She rubbed her bare arms, and shivered from the cold.

Either the woman had not seen him, or didn’t think he could see her. If the former, she’d see him soon enough; if the latter, no sense demonstrating she was wrong. He surveyed grounds, sky, water, and shed, as if she did not exist. Step by nonchalant step, he drew closer. She glanced at him, and smiled a self-satisfied smile. She did not greet him, nor did she speak, which settled the matter to Caleb’s satisfaction. She thought she was invisible. Fair enough.

When he came within range, he sprang.

He pinned her arms to the wall. She did not curse or struggle, only stared at him with wide startled eyes of a brighter black than he’d known eyes could be.

He was lucky, he realized, that she didn’t try to fight him. Her arms felt strong, and his groin was exposed to her knee.

“Who,” she asked, “are you?”

“That’s my line.”

“You don’t look like a Warden. Is this your hobby, jumping unarmed women in the middle of the night?”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m taking the air,” she said with a smile. “Waiting for a nice man to accost me. Only way to get a date in this town.”

“Give me a straight answer.”

“I fell from the sky.” She was beautiful, he thought, as weapons were beautiful. No. Focus.

“I work for RKC. This reservoir has been poisoned. The water’s infested with Tzimet. One of our workers is dead. I’m not here to joke.”

Her smile broke. “I’m sorry.”

“Who are you?”

“You first.”

“I’m Caleb Altemoc,” he said before it occurred to him not to answer.

“You can call me Mal,” she said. “I’m a cliff runner.” Caleb’s eyebrows rose. The rules of cliff running were as simple as the rules of murder: runners chose a starting rooftop and a destination, and met at moonrise to race, following any path they chose so long as their feet never touched ground. “I train in these mountains at night. I’ve come every evening for a couple months, but usually no one’s awake. Between the Wardens, the zombies, and the carts, I had to stop and watch.”