Two Serpents Rise (28 page)

In a black blur, she fled up the long hallway. A guard barred her way, but she struck him and he fell. Caleb ran to the guard and knelt beside him, felt his pulse. Still strong. Good. He rose to follow Mal, but another guard blocked his path.

“Get out of my way,” Caleb said.

“Who in all the hells was that?”

“My girlfriend,” he almost said, but stopped himself. “My boss.” That was also true, technically, and confused the guard long enough for Caleb to brush past.

“We’ll head her off at the beach,” the guard called after him.

“No,” he shouted back. She might hurt someone before the guards brought her down. “No. She’s just confused. This is her first time to Bay Station.”

“Oh,” the guard said. “That explains it.”

Caleb began to run.

*   *   *

He found her on the starlit beach. Silver waves lapped the sand, and the calm sea reflected the fat full moon. No halo of Craft clung to her, no ichorous claws tipped her fingers. Lit by the night, she resembled a cave drawing: a life defined in five lines of ink. He could almost ignore the guards surrounding her with weapons raised.

She turned to face him as he approached through the cordon.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he replied. “Shall we go?”

“Yes.” She held out her hand. Her skin was cool to the touch, colder than the night air. She stepped onto the water. The ocean buoyed her up, and he walked beside her away from shore.

“Don’t look back,” he whispered. “The guards are hair-trigger tense. They won’t relax until you’re gone.”

“I can’t believe I did that.”

“It happens. Everyone takes their first sight of Qet in a different way. I’ve seen grown men kneel; one Craftsman I know wept.”

“I can’t— I mean, I knew, or a thought I knew. I thought I could handle it. The expectation, and the shock, and everything at once—I can’t believe I let you take me. I’m an idiot.” She spat the last word.

“Don’t talk that way.”

“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do.”

“I should have listened when you asked me to stop, when you asked me not to show you. I’m sorry.” A rising swell shifted his weight sideways, into her. She kept him from toppling. “I’m a bit of a jerk, I guess.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“It was a stupid thing to surprise you with.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Stupid.” The sound of surf faded into rolling ocean silence. Dresediel Lex burgeoned on the horizon, a tumor of light that dulled the stars and blunted the moon. No ships passed them in the dark. Barges stood at anchor beyond the harbor’s mouth. “Think it’s safe to look back yet?”

“Yes.”

She glanced over her shoulder. “The island looks bigger from this distance. Less human.”

“It camouflages itself with Craft. If you could see the real island, you would know where it was, which would make it easier to attack.”

“Elegant system.” She stopped walking. “Can we stop here?”

She sat cross-legged on the water, and he sat beside her. The ocean surrounded them like a meadow.

“I thought it would be like the Serpents,” she said. “But it’s worse.”

“Yes.”

“They’re beasts, however big they are. Terrors. But that’s a God. Not a half-conscious spirit like the ones we bound in Seven Leaf. Qet ruled us, once. Loved us. And we loved him.”

“Yes.”

He traced ripples in the water in front of them.

“He’s not … dead.”

“No. Not exactly.”

“I heard he lived somewhere, in chains.” She sounded strangled and slow, as if every word had to be won from her throat by single combat.

“Those are chains,” he said, “of a sort. Qet fought the King in Red during Liberation. The Sea-Lord was broken on his own altar. But he didn’t die.”

“He didn’t survive, either.”

“Yes. He’s not strong enough to have a mind anymore. Flashes of awareness at most, on high holy festivals. Once in a while, he cries out, or babbles nonsense. But his power remains.”

“And so you use him. In pain.”

“We use what’s left of him. He was the bringer of rains from the ocean, Father of the Green Beside the Desert. We pump saltwater into his heart, and as the water runs through him, he removes the salt. He didn’t have such a physical form, before—like most gods. What you saw was a salt statue grown in his image. Pipes and pumps draw purified water back into the reservoirs of Dresediel Lex. Whenever a tap is opened or a glass raised in this city, Qet is there. Or what’s left of him.”

“Why did you show me this?” Her hands rested in her lap, one inside the other. Her thumbs pressed together, their tips white.

“I wanted,” he began, but he could not complete his sentence. The false serenity of her face terrified him: still as the surface of Seven Leaf Lake before the gods began to scream. “You asked what we sacrifice, to live the way we live. This is our sacrifice.”

“This isn’t a sacrifice,” she snapped. “This is abuse. Exploitation.”

“We drained the water table around Dresediel Lex a hundred years ago, maybe more. We suck lakes, rivers, streams dry like a starving leech. Even Seven Leaf won’t last long. Ten years, twenty at the most, before we have to reach further afield. We’ve studied Qet day and night for five decades and no Craftsman has been able to duplicate his methods. We can take from him, though, and we do, and so we survive.”

“Why don’t you show the people what you’ve done?”

“Think how you reacted when you saw the truth. Can you imagine that magnified through an entire city?”

She did not answer.

He leaned back, unfolded his legs in front of him, and thought for a long while.

“The sacrifice,” he said, slowly. “We come out here, learn the price of our world, and we go back convinced it’s worthwhile, because we don’t have any choice. Whenever I pass a beggar in Skittersill, when I hear about riots in the Deep Vale, when I run afoul of True Quechal punks or when some fool like my father tries to start a revolution, I know that they’re all of them party to Qet’s torture. Spend long enough with that in your mind and you can’t fight for anything anymore. You wander through this city, and wonder if anything you do will make up for the horror that keeps the world turning. To live, you rip your own heart from your chest and hide it in a box somewhere, along with everything you ever learned about justice, compassion, mercy. You throw yourself into games to mark the time. And if you yearn for something different: what would you change? Would you bring back the blood, the dying cries, the sucking chest wounds? The constant war? So we’re caught between two poles of hypocrisy. We sacrifice our right to think of ourselves as good people, our right to think our life is good, our city is just. And so we and our city both survive.”

She rocked beside him, or else the waves rocked her. Her gaze rested in the cup of her hands, like a statue of a monk from the Shining Empire. Their sages claimed that all was nothing, or nothing all. For a moment, he understood.

“It’s funny,” he said. “The first time I saw Qet, I couldn’t handle it either. I didn’t call upon dark magic or anything like that, but I tackled my boss, demanded an explanation. You did the same to me tonight.”

“What’s funny about that?”

“We have a lot in common. We both keep secrets, and maybe we don’t even know we keep them. When we try to share ourselves with other people, we don’t know how to begin.”

“Is that what drew you to me?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“Everything I said just now—about Qet, and sacrifice, and what it does to us—it’s not an answer. It’s an escape. The question remains: how are we supposed to live? The world can’t be a war between the too-certain and the bankrupt, between my father and the King in Red. But what else is there?

“It took me a long time to figure out why I chased you. You’re beautiful, and compelling, but I’ve known beautiful and compelling women before, and none of them caught me like you did. I think, somehow, I decided you had the answer. Maybe you don’t. Maybe no one does.”

She placed a hand on his shoulder, and he fell silent.

She leaned back and lay on her side, body rolling softly with the sea. Her lips opened. Inside them he saw a waiting darkness.

“I don’t know all the answers yet,” she said. “I think I will, though. Someday soon. I’m working on it.”

“I can wait.”

“Dangerous, to trust someone else’s answers more than your own.” Her fingers traced the curve of his collarbone, finding a nest for the heel of her hand. “You might not like what they have to say.”

“I think I will.”

From the ocean behind them came a dull pop as if a cork had been pulled from a giant wine bottle. A needle of sparks knit through the night, apexed, and burst into a brilliant blue sphere.

The second explosion came faster, a red globe within the blue, and the third faster still, a mist of yellow-white stars that twisted and schooled like fish made from light. The fireworks, he thought, were as tall as the Serpents would be if they reared above the city.

“Look,” she said.

“I see them.” Her eyes mirrored the explosions, and the stars behind.

She kissed him, and drew him toward her. He gave himself to the kiss, wrapped an arm around her curving back, and pulled her toward him in return.

*   *   *

The fireworks above Dresediel Lex that night cost thirty million thaums. A grown man earning a decent wage could work for four hundred years and still not earn that much. The Nightflower Collective, owners of the barges and their explosive cargo, conducted similar events every few weeks around the world: always there was a High Prince’s birthday to celebrate in the Shining Empire, some Iskari ritual that demanded dramatic accompaniment. Once, the Empire of Deathless Koschei ordered a solid month of festivities to celebrate the construction of the Dread Lord’s golem son. The Collective ordered its affairs with an army’s precision and an artist’s skill, each flood of light succeeded in rushing crescendo by the next.

Caleb and Mal rolled together on the waves in grand confusion. His hands tangled in her shirt; she ripped a button from his cuff with a sharp pull and it flew through the air to sink. Her pants slid off easily. Explosions overhead battered hearts and lungs as he gripped the curve of her hips, the taut muscles of her legs. When they kissed, the sky erupted in reflection of their minds, and they kissed often, lips finding arms and shoulders, stomach and sides as often as each other’s mouths.

A precisely timed sequence of blasts formed a pyramid in the sky, two serpents rising above with mouths flared. The ocean was smooth against Caleb’s skin, and it warmed beneath him as he scrambled among heaped clothes for the condom he had placed in his pocket before he left his house. She bit his neck, he clutched her, they fell together. The chill of Craft faded from her skin. Reflected flame burned in her eyes, and as they lay with each other, on each other, in each other, the flame built. She was a single purpose crafted into flesh, and as Caleb grappled with her, he forgot terror, forgot fear, forgot himself and became a single purpose too.

A great wave rolled from below, and a shark’s maw enclosed them. The solid sea surface shielded them from the beast’s teeth, but for a moment they were wrapped in the cave of its mouth. Mal let out a laugh that was a scream, her teeth gleaming white, her mouth red, surrounded by many ranks of fangs. Her laugh shook the world.

The shark released them and fled to safer depths. Caleb and Mal remained, set large upon the surface of the water. Mal panted, skin slick and bright as she crouched astride him. They breathed in unison, and clutched each other forever.

Fireworks burst and burned, flared and retreated. The sky broke open time and again only to reclaim its darkness. All was subsumed in flames, which were themselves dancers, singers, beaters of drums, flowering on the infinite to die.

The universe faded back into view, and found Caleb and Mal sleeping on the dark ocean.

Hours passed. She shivered and pulled him closer. A slit of pink tongue wet her lips. She swallowed.

“I’m sorry,” she said, but only the ocean heard.

INTERLUDE: TEA

Alaxic sat on the balcony of his villa in the Drakspine, and watched the sleeping city. His skin was thin as parchment, his bones twig-slender and brittle. An autumn leaf of a man, a cicada husk, he waited in his chair. He raised a steaming mug of tea to his thin lips, sucked hot liquid into his mouth, forced himself to swallow.

“You have not aged well,” said a shadow from the balustrade.

The old man fixed his gaze on the tea, and the reflections within: reflections of starlight, of the candle flame beside his chair, of the ghost he did not recognize as himself.

“The Craft,” he croaked, “does not reward one with a long and healthy life, if one wishes that life to end someday. I will not permit myself to be trapped within a skeleton for all time.”

“You will not find true death pleasant.” The shadow advanced. Candle flame chiseled out rocky muscles, massive fists, black eyes, scars that glowed on the dark skin. “You are a traitor to gods and man. Demons wait hungrily for your soul.”

“Nice to see you again as well, Temoc.” His voice wavered and cracked. “I’m glad you received my letter.”

“Such as it was. What did you want with me?”

“To pass the night before the eclipse with another priest. Is that too much to ask?”

Temoc hesitated at the light’s edge. “Perhaps.”

“And perhaps I am not so afraid of the world to come as you believe I should be,” Alaxic said, and drank another sip of foul tea. His face contorted, and he set the cup on the small table. “An annular eclipse tomorrow. The first in more than a century. Occlusion for fifteen minutes. What a celebration this would have been in the old days.”

“Much work for the priests. The gods would have feasted well. The Serpents, too.”

“Yes.” Alaxic motioned to the teapot, and the empty cup beside it. “Share a drink with me, in memory of what was.”

Temoc regarded the tea, and the cup from which Alaxic drank. At last he shrugged, poured himself a cup, raised it to the moon, and shed three drops with the tip of his finger. “Water in the desert,” he said.