Two Serpents Rise (22 page)

He didn’t say anything.

She sighed. In the depths of Seven Leaf Lake, the trapped gods screamed. “This is the world we live in.”

“Why not try to fix things?” Even as he said the words they felt small. A broken window or a broken promise you could fix. The scene in the lake was beyond fixing.

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

She laughed, a sour, sad sound that hung on the station’s dead air like a corpse on a rack. “Everybody needs to make a sacrifice sooner or later, to survive. I guess this was my first—or the first one to hit me so close. I prepared for this moment years ago. I told myself I had.”

He didn’t ask what “this moment” was. In the flickering light, he could barely recognize Mal. Maybe she couldn’t recognize herself. He moved to the bed, which gave slightly under his weight. The mattress was a firm lie: the world beneath was only water. He slid next to her and touched her shoulders. Her muscles were knotted steel cables. He pressed into those knots with his thumbs and the heels of his hands. Mal stifled a cry as he began. He tried again, with a lighter touch. “Thank you,” she said this time.

The cropped fringe of her hair feathered against his fingers. Small, downy hairs trailed down the nape of her neck, an arrow pointing to her back and shoulders. He had expected her skin to be cool to the touch. Everything down here was. She was warm though, feverish.

So close, he studied her: smooth skin a shade lighter than his own, shoulders and neck dark and freckled by sun. He could not feel her glyph-marks—the Craft left no scars, unless you knew how to look for them.

He studied her to capture her, to capture the moment, but also to distract himself from the tortures outside the window. Why would she choose to face that? Maybe she felt it was a part of her sacrifice, or Allesandre’s. He pressed against her skin, and thoughts of sacrifice faded. He worked her shoulders until the steel melted and became almost human.

Sitting on Mal’s bed, massaging her back, Caleb felt time stretch and transform. This moment was a door ajar.

He leaned into her, silent, and she leaned into him. His arms drifted around her. Mal’s breath fluttered like wings. The tips of his fingers explored her jaw and throat, the slim even lines of muscle and the gently pulsing vein. She clutched his arms. He felt the line of her collarbone, the skin above the swell of her breasts.

It was wet. In surprise he lifted his hand from her and held it up to the light of tortured gods. His fingertips glistened dark and red.

Later he could not recall whether he recoiled from her, or she from him. One of them moved, or both, and seconds later she sat a foot away from him on the bed, in profile like a temple statue. Beneath the open collar of her shirt ran two long cuts, one on the left side and one on the right. Other cuts, long healed, lay below them, parallel to her collarbone: a necklace of scars. Her eyes glittered.

“Mal. What the hells, Mal.” The object she had placed on the nightstand was a knife—not the Craftwork blade that killed Allesandre, but a length of black glass with a handle of beaten gold and silver wire.

The half of her that faced him was in shadow. The half that faced the gods reflected the bitter green glow of their pain.

Behind her, on the windowsill, sat a stone carving, three inches tall and no broader than a woman’s arm: a hollow cylinder formed by the bodies of two serpents intertwined. Twin trails of thin gray smoke wisped from a coil of incense at the idol’s center. Rising, the wisps wound around each other and faded into air.

“It’s called—” she began.

“I know what it’s called,” Caleb said before she could finish. “Autosacrifice. Bloodletting. Cutting.”

“It’s not cutting.”

“What’s the difference?”

She wiped the blood with a handkerchief, folded the handkerchief and set it beside the knife. “I told you to leave.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Hells, Caleb. You saw what I did up there. You see what’s happening outside. I need to atone.”

“Atone?” The bed shook with the force of his standing. He reached around her and grabbed the idol off the windowsill, leaving the incense and its excrement of ash behind. “Aquel and Achal.” He threw the statue onto the mattress beside her. It bounced, and rolled to rest with Aquel facing down and Achal snarling up. “These are bloodthirsty creatures. We have them locked up, and I’m glad for it. We killed people for them. Cutting yourself before that statue—do you know what it stands for?”

“Of course I do!” Metal walls reflected the force of her shout. Caleb stepped back. She stood, her half-open shirt flaring like the robes of a Deathless King. “The priests killed. Sure. But are we any different? Am I, after what I did today? You’ve seen Skittersill, and Stonewood, what our city does to the people who lose. Your father—”

“Don’t bring him into this. My father’s a criminal. A madman.”

“Your father led the Skittersill Rising! He tried for years to make peace between theists and Craftsmen, and when that failed he tried to protest. And they rained fire on him. They burned his followers by the hundreds.”

“He wanted to kill people. That’s the freedom they were fighting for, him and his followers. Freedom to kill people.”

“Freedom from persecution. Freedom to practice their religion. Freedom to sacrifice volunteers—people who wanted to die.”

“That’s murder! It’s murder when you carve someone’s heart out of their chest, no matter if you’re doing it because a god tells you to.”

Muscles on the side of her jaw twitched. “Fine. But what I just did was murder, too. When we sin, we shed blood to atone. That’s what my parents taught me.”

“Then they were crazy.”

He said the words before he knew them: they sprang to his mind, slithered down the spine to his lungs, infested the air, and burst out his mouth. Mal’s eyes widened, and her lips pressed thin together. Caleb opened his mouth to say something, anything, to apologize or explain.

The gods’ light faded, and it was too late.

Night filled the room. A great hand seized him, and threw him like a stone. He struck the wall, or perhaps the floor or ceiling. Directions no longer met in his mind. Weight pressed against his chest, the weight of thousands of miles of water. His ribs creaked and he fought to breathe.

“You don’t get to say that.”

She was talking. Good. Talking meant she wouldn’t kill him straight off.

Blood and silver, he thought, when did her killing me become a possibility?

He remembered her standing over him goddess-like on the border of the Skittersill. Deities kill those that follow them. He opened his mouth, but only a dry croak escaped his lips.

“My parents were good people.” Her voice was an anchor in his whirling world. “They were faithful, and they were angry, but they were good. They stood against the Red King in the Skittersill Rising, and fell. And burned. My mother took a week to die.”

He struggled against her Craft, but his arms did not move, his scars would not wake. Blood pounded in his ears. His lungs ached for air.

The Rising had been his father’s fault. When Temoc decided to walk a path, fools always followed in his footsteps. A peaceful demonstration, they claimed, and it was at first, but as weeks rolled on his control of the mob wavered. On the tenth day, some idiot threw a stone, a child died, and the Wardens moved in.

Battle lines were not drawn. There were no heroic struggles. Those who resisted, fell.

Caleb was ten. Mal could not have been more than twelve.

After the bodies cooled, the King in Red issued a public call for peace, and Temoc became an enemy of the state.

Caleb’s father had already gone, leaving his scars behind.

Caleb was also, in his way, an orphan of the Rising.

Mal’s parents lay burning in the streets in Skittersill. No amount of water could quench those flames, and their bodies would never fall to ash.

Mal, too, took power from her scars.

“I’m sorry,” he said as spots of black deeper than black swelled behind his eyes.

The weight lifted from his chest, and darkness drained away down the hole in Mal’s mind. He slumped, but though his legs felt like stretched and fraying rubber, he did not fall.

Mal stood between him and the gods, blanched and wan as a crescent moon. The draining dark had taken something from her.

“Sorry,” she said. “Yes.” And: “You should go.”

He reached blindly for the door, opened it, and backed out without looking away from her. He had to say something, but there was nothing to say.

She grew smaller as he withdrew. When he crossed the threshold of her room, she was the size of a statue. Three steps more, the size of an idol.

The door closed between them, and he turned away and ran.

INTERLUDE: DREAMS

Snow fell on Dresediel Lex for the first and last time, covering the bodies of men and gods that littered the streets. Where the snow fell in fire, it hissed and burst to steam. A falling god had cracked the face of a pyramid with one flailing hand, and rubble covered the broad avenue below. Rage and sorrow burned in the mottled sky.

Blood-slick, Alaxic stumbled through the city’s doom. Cold air stung his throat. Pain from the wounds in his chest, and arm, and leg, pierced and beggared thought. At dawn he had ridden into battle on a feathered serpent, bedecked with the blessing of the gods. The serpent lay dead two blocks away, and he was tired.

“Hello, Alaxic,” someone said behind him.

The voice was deep and familiar, but alien to this time, this place. He turned, fast as his wounds would let him.

A skeleton in a red suit stood in the road, between the burning corpses of two demigods. He bore no weapons save a cup of coffee.

The snow did not fall in the coffee, or accumulate on the skeleton’s robes.

“What are you doing in my dreams?” Alaxic asked.

“At the moment,” the skeleton replied, “I am pondering why of all the places and times you might choose to dream, you would select the Liberation of Dresediel Lex. This was not your finest hour.”

“It was a noble struggle.”

“You fought us and we crushed you.”

“You besieged and blockaded us. We had no choice.”

“Your people tore out my lover’s heart. What did you think would happen after that?”

“I had no part in that decision.”

“As the inquest found, or else we would have sunk you into solid bedrock, or trapped you in the corridors of your own mind, or tied you to a mountain somewhere with a regenerating liver and an eagle that likes
foie gras
.” A band of skirmishers ran past, bound to nowhere. “So, why do you come back here?”

“My friends died in this battle. And we do not all choose where we dream.”

“You are a strange person,” Kopil said. “You were a priest, but became a Craftsman. You do not control your own dreams. You refuse to leverage your soul, though it means you won’t survive the end of that slab of meat you call your body.”

“The Craft,” replied Alaxic, “is a tool. Not all of us let our tools rule our life.”

Kopil sipped his coffee. “Tell me about Seven Leaf Lake.”

“I heard there were problems.”

“One of your employees went mad. Killed everyone on the station.”

“Horrible,” Alaxic said. “I don’t know what I’d do if I were in your shoes. Makes me glad I’m retired.”

“Are you really?”

“Glad?”

“Retired.”

He exhaled fog into the cold. “You’ve watched me for the last few months, you and your spies. What do I do?”

“You drink tea, and you read.”

“I drink tea, and I read. I don’t plot, I don’t scheme. I don’t want the old world back any more than you do.”

A winged serpent flew overhead, and was transfixed by arrows of light. It shrieked, and fell in bloody pieces to the street around them.

“Yet you still dream of old battles.”

“And you haven’t forgiven me, in five decades, for surviving this one. You resented my success in the Hidden Schools. You opposed the Wardens’ decision to set me free after the Skittersill Rising. You plotted against me as I built Heartstone, and took it from me when you had the chance.”

“You were a rebel. An anarchist.”

“I am a populist.” He looked up to the sky, where Craftsmen clad in engines of war tore gods asunder. Heavenly blood fell, mixed with snow. “At least I only dream about old battles,” he said. “You’re still fighting them.”

A wave of night rolled over the world. When Alaxic looked again, the King in Red was gone.

Book Three

HEARTSTONE

29

Caleb left Seven Leaf Lake soon after dawn, with an escort of two Wardens. He told Four that the King in Red wanted a report on their success, that Mal would stay until reinforcements arrived. This was not, exactly, a lie. Mal could have stopped him, but she didn’t.

They took flight as the first rays of sun glanced off the long flat plane of the lake. Sleep had haunted him all night, ambushing from the darkest corners of his mood. Sharp-fingered devils charged his fitful dreams, demons with his own face devouring the flesh of screaming gods.

He shaded his eyes against the sunrise, leaned back into the gondola, and drowsed.

The Couatl carried him south. Lake gave way to waterfall and smooth-flowing river. Every few miles, stone circles protruded from the forest, their centers thick with shade. Silver glyphs glowed against gray granite. The standing stones bled Seven Leaf Lake south, to slake his city’s thirst. Soon the falls would cease to thunder, and the river shrink to a stream.

One hundred twenty eight million acre-feet of water. After a decade or so, the city’s growth would outpace the lake’s ability to refill itself. The forest would feel the effects long before then.

After three hours they stopped for lunch on a cliff overlooking a deep valley, and ate bread and cheese and drank stale canteen water and agave liquor.

The Wardens napped on the cliff after lunch. Caleb, restless, walked a hundred feet into the woods, found a sturdy birch tree, and struck it with his palms, with his feet and the sides of his hands, scaring away broad-winged birds that roosted in the canopy. He ripped his knuckles’ skin, and left a smear of blood on the white bark. He pushed against the trunk until his shoulders, arms, legs, belly all convulsed and he let out a long, low cry.