Two Serpents Rise (34 page)

Caleb’s left hand, and Temoc’s right, wound through the amulet’s leather lace. Caleb’s right hand clasped Temoc’s left wrist, and Temoc’s left clasped Caleb’s right. Teo walked in the circle of their arms.

Seeing not, Caleb repeated to himself. Look anywhere but here. A closed eye shone in his mind, surrounded by billowing clouds. No, not closed—stitched shut.

“You must empty this space in their minds,” Temoc had said. “We become a moment of distraction, a daydream. I will fill the gap that remains.”

Look elsewhere. Keep your head down. Nothing new about that. Kopil had been right, months ago. Caleb did not want the world to notice him. Everyone the world noticed, it burned.

Poker worked this way. Bet aggressively, and others will respond in kind. Play as if you have nothing to loose, and you will lose everything. Play quiet, play calm, and win.

Men and women stepped aside for them, and closed after they passed. In the heart of the crowd, someone struck up a chant, and a few hundred others joined: “Hear us! Hear us!”

The shark’s tooth glowed blue. Caleb gripped a line of ice, of fire. His scars cracked and burned, casting shadows into the crowd, and onto Teo.

Don’t look. Don’t see.

They closed half the distance to the Canter’s Shell, and half that distance again.

Hide. Live a good life, safe. Guard against disaster. Wrap yourself in cotton.

Mal’s voice in his ears, flying north to Seven Leaf Lake.

We cushion ourselves against death. We live in ignorance.

The closed eye in his mind pulled against its stitching.

Twenty feet.

Ten.

The crowd thinned as they neared the shell. Only the strongest protesters had reached this point: thick men and determined women, daring to approach eternity. On the other side of the blue shell lay piles of ash that had once been human.

In the crowd near the shell’s edge Caleb saw a yellow smiling face tattooed onto the back of a shaved scalp. He looked again, and saw Balam, the old cliff runner scowling and shouting at the pyramid. “Cowards hide! Cowards run!” Of course. Where else would Balam be as the city fell apart? Sam was here somewhere, too, or else rioting in Skittersill. He did not mention this to Teo. She knew already. She had to know.

They passed within feet of Balam; his drill sergeant voice boomed in their ears. Caleb shivered as the man raged at him, and through him, unseeing. He did not break stride. “Cowards!” Fair enough.

Temoc stopped beside the dome, and released Caleb’s wrist. Caleb did not let go of Temoc’s arm. His father took a leather ribbon from his belt and draped it around Teo’s shoulders like a stole. The leather stank of herbal unguents.

“Dad,” Caleb whispered, as Temoc produced a second ribbon. “What is that?”

“God-bearer,” Temoc replied, and reached for him. Caleb pulled back.

Gods lived beyond the mortal world, beside, above, below, permeating it with their presence. Yet deities had anchors: statues, idols, prayers, and god-bearers, relic holders made from cured human skin.

He tried to find a better way to phrase the question, but settled for: “Who was it?”

“One of the lesser corn gods.”

“I wasn’t talking about the god.”

“Caleb, put it on. We don’t have time to argue.”

Seeing. Not. Seeing.

“Cowards!”

“Caleb,” Teo said. “Do it.”

Stitches strained, burst. The shark’s tooth burned blue.

“He died centuries ago. A sacrifice. This is the only way to pass through that shell. You must carry a god within you.”

“You could have told me before.”

“I hoped to avoid this conversation.”

“Excellent job you’ve done.”

“I have set this city and all our souls at risk out of respect for your reluctance to shed blood,” Temoc said. “Do not balk at a millennia-old death.”

“My
reluctance
?”

“Caleb,” Teo whispered. “Can we have this conversation when we’re on the other side?”

“Put it on.”

“Fine,” Caleb said, and grabbed the stole.

Temoc stiffened. Teo swore.

Caleb froze with his hand on the leather. He had let go of Temoc’s wrist.

The amulet’s glow guttered and died.

Silence fell over the crowd. A hundred thousand eyes fixed at once on Caleb, Teo, and Temoc. Caleb’s half of the link had failed, but Temoc’s had not—and so the crowd looked upon them, and saw something greater. An immense impossible presence filled the space where they stood.

Couatl screamed overhead, and their wings beat closer. Green light flickered about the serpents’ claws: weapons of Craft, building, burning.

Caleb grabbed Temoc’s wrist, but panic gripped his mind, and he could not blur them to insignificance again.

The burly men and broad women nearby had stopped shouting. Balam curled his massive hands into fists. He saw, they all saw, a target for their rage. He took a step toward them, and another.

The Wardens dove to attack. The green light in their Couatls’ claws sharpened to barbed spears.

Caleb grabbed the god-bearer, wrapped it around his neck, and dove into the blue. Teo and Temoc followed.

42

Imagine a cerulean field that stretches to the farthest star. Plummet through that field. Close your eyes. Forget them. Forget the body that falls, and leave only the sense of falling.

He could not see Teo, or Temoc. Were they near? What did that term mean? Between any two points stretched infinity. Could one infinity be larger than another?

He fell, but he was not alone. Another mind woke within his, powerful and still. Caleb gibbered at empty time, endless space. The stranger did not.

Let me in, the stranger whispered.

At first Caleb shrank from the voice, fleeing across forever. The stranger did not need to pursue. All space and time were equal before it.

You will fall, screaming, through ten thousand ages until your mind breaks and body crumbles, and nothing will endure but a scream. Listen and you can hear them, cries that outlast the throats that gave them voice.

Listen, and let me in.

Caleb heard: high-pitched and low, screams of women and men and children, unending.

He opened his mind.

Sensation pierced him, charring synapses, wiring his body to an engine of pain. He remembered he had lungs, for they spasmed in agony; his flesh shriveled and his mind burst and he
was
—

Was golden sunlight on the tip of a blade descending, a knife’s edge drawn over flesh, a spurt of blood and a relieved sigh from upturned faces. Red droplets fell in rain, as a dragon vomited up the sun. The people wept and prayed and interned his corpse in soil to decay and be reborn in wriggling worm and fruitful seed, in the first brave green spear that pressed through the hard earth and swelled into corn.

He was gathered, he was burned, he was beaten and pounded into thin flat bread. Teeth tore him and he became flesh once more, breathing, sighing, loving in a million bodies until the dragon swallowed the sky, the raven stole the sun, and he lay again upon the altar. He writhed in drugged futile struggle against his chains; in his eyes he gathered the world, concentrated its wasted pieces into a perfect image of the universe—and in his death that world grew again from corn.

Death and rebirth became him, a cycle of time stretching back past Dresediel Lex to the Quechal homeland sunk below the sea, and further still, to men and women weeping over a grave in a trackless wilderness, bedraggled creatures with bedraggled gods, haunted by ghosts of language and ceremony.

Time was a ring, the cosmos a cycle. Space itself was curved, the Craftsmen claimed.

Spinning in emptiness, he gave his blood to the world, and the world cracked open to receive him.

*   *   *

Caleb struck the gravel hard and skidded. Rocks tore his shirt and the skin of his back. The impact jarred, the gravel stung, but the pressure and pain were gloriously real. He laughed in relief. The shark’s-tooth pendant fell beside him. He slid it into his pocket, patted the pocket, and stood, turning back toward the Canter’s Shell.

Teo fell into him out of the blue.

She was limp, and heavy, and made no sound. He staggered beneath her weight.

He set her back on her heels. She trembled, eyes closed, and did not move. Her chest rose and fell. Quechal symbols glowed from the god-bearer draped across her shoulders. Her lips moved, and she whispered in High Quechal: praise the mother who bears the twins, praise the father risen in the corn, praise the twins who die and rise again, on and on.

“Teo,” he said. She did not respond. He touched her cheek.

Her eyes flew open, and they burned. No trace remained of her pupils and iris. To stare into her was to stare into the sun. She chanted, louder. “Praise the mother and the father. Praise the mother who bears the twins. Praise the father risen in corn.”

He tore the god-bearer from her neck, but she did not wake. The leather coiled on the ground, and twitched as if alive.

Temoc stepped out of the Canter’s Shell, and approached Caleb. Walking over gravel, he made no sound. He regarded Teo as if appraising her for purchase. “She was not ready to host a god. Without scars, without training, the experience can overwhelm.”

“Wasn’t ready? You knew this wasn’t safe for her. You knew, and let her come anyway.”

“She insisted on accompanying us, though she knew the dangers. She claimed she could open the pyramid. She may still serve that purpose.”

Caleb looked back at Teo, and closed his eyes. A twitching ruby spider spirit hunched in her heart, preening with each repeated syllable of her prayer. A small god, feeding.

Caleb opened his scars. The spider in Teo’s body twitched as if it could smell him.

He bent to her ear and whispered in High Quechal: “I cast you out.”

The spider twitched. Teo spoke, and he heard another voice, like brushing cobwebs, paired with hers: “By whose authority?”

“My own.” His words were ragged with rage. “Leave her, or I will break your legs. I will blunt your fangs and blind all your eyes and you will die.”

The spider wavered, as if about to fight, then faded into darkness.

Teo stopped her prayers. Her eyes closed.

Caleb waited.

When she opened her eyes again, they were dark, and human.

“Hi,” she said.

He hugged her, and she embraced him weakly in return. “I appreciate the sentiment,” she said, “but I don’t swing that way.”

“You’re back.”

“Did I leave?” She stepped forward, swayed, and almost fell. He grabbed her by the arm, and she recovered her balance.

She shot her cuffs and straightened the shoulders of her jacket. Her hat had rolled to the ground, and she knelt to retrieve it. “I’ve never felt anything like that. The King in Red has been inside my soul once or twice, but … I lived a thousand years. I could hear time.”

“If you lived a century ago, you would have been prepared for the experience,” Temoc said. “Gods are not so common today as once they were.”

“Fine by me,” she replied.

*   *   *

Mal stood on air like a bride on an empty dance floor, waiting for the groom to emerge and the band to play.

Most days, downtown airspace was a muddy mess of airbuses and optera, Warden mounts and skyspires and flying machines. Every few hours a dragon passed overhead, beating three-hundred-meter wings on its journey to the Shining Empire. Dresediel Lex had an anthill for a sky.

Today, though, the sun shone at the apex of a bare blue vault, cut with smoke. Optera retreated to their nests. Skyspires fled. No private citizen would fly today, and the Wardens were busy.

She closed her eyes and saw Dresediel Lex as a sprawling web of power and Craft, the human stain wiped away to reveal the bent lightning at the city’s root. But this too was a mask, a deception—a way she had been taught to see.

She touched glyphs at her wrist and temples, and looked down, through basements, pipes, sewers, tunnels, caves, to the beating, blinding red heart of the planet, where two serpents quaked with unpleasant dreams.

Her pocket buzzed: a warning from the Craftsmen back at Heartstone. The Serpents’ hunger outstrips our power to contain them.

She opened her hands and waited for the eclipse.

*   *   *

Caleb, Teo, and Temoc approached the pyramid. No one challenged them. Teo glanced about, wary of security demons, but they were not attacked.

They left the parking lot and walked down a paved path flanked by topiary. Unconscious revenants sprawled in the loam between sculpted trees, sheers and clippers fallen in the shadow of shrubbery globes and pentagrams. When Mal attacked, the undead workers would have been near the night shift’s end.

He touched Teo’s hand. “Hey.” His voice sounded small.

“Hey,” she answered. Their footsteps were the only sound in the garden, beneath the Canter’s Shell.

“Are you all right?”

“All right?” She laughed. “No. What do you think?”

“I’m sorry. I was an idiot back there, in the crowd.”

“Usually you only hurt yourself. I don’t like being part of your collateral damage.”

“Hells.”

“Relax. I was kidding.”

“I deserve it,” he said. “This is my fault. All of it. If I hadn’t got mad at Temoc, I wouldn’t have let go of his arm. We wouldn’t even be here if I’d put the pieces together about Mal. If I’d pressed her about that pendant, about Allesandre. I think she was trying to tell me, but I didn’t listen. I spend my life evaluating angles, but as soon as my feelings get involved, it all goes to hell.”

“Don’t think like that. Blaming yourself for everything.”

“Why not?”

“Because Mal’s crazy. And your father, he’s helping us, but he’s crazy, too. We all are. You can’t hold yourself responsible for people’s actions. Even if Mal made you a bit stupid, you aren’t the one who came up with her plan. You aren’t the one who set her on this road. She’s her own woman, and she did this for her own reasons. It wasn’t your fault.”

He put a hand on her shoulder. “Sam will be okay.”

She didn’t answer.

They reached the wide, flat front steps of the pyramid. Caleb’s gaze swung to Temoc, and kept swinging. “Where’s my dad?”