The Ruin of Angels--A Novel of the Craft Sequence

by Max Gladstone

  A hissing pillow full of knives hit Kai in the side of the face, and she fell, screaming. The cat landed on the floor, skidded, bundled for another leap.

  Ley regained her feet. Kai lunged for her again, and caught her sister’s arm. Their gazes met, and she saw Ley afraid—but distant, as if a cloud had passed between them. She held tighter.

  Cold wind struck her like a fist. She couldn’t breathe. Frost stung her wet eyes. Razors carved bright tracks in a sky from which starlight bled. Great screaming bodies of ice towered over a pitted city. Angels writhed, impaled on aurora thorns. The streets crawled with armies of spiders made from corpses and metal. The squid tower was gone: in its place sprawled palaces torn in half, exploded gardens, and a summit of crystal and marble breaking, always breaking, as it pulled the dead city toward itself, as it pulled Kai toward itself, and the world grayed and she staggered and her hand

  slipped

  and Ley drew back, supple still, strong, as if the cold could not touch her, and said, I’m sorry,

  as Kai clutched, freezing, for her passport, flipped it to the squid page, and let those words drag her back to

  Agdel Lex. Where she knelt, shivered, wept, on a balcony in a desert city, steaming with sublimed ice, pulling breath and heat into her, while a cat hissed and, nearby, the woman her sister stabbed stopped bleeding.

  Chapter Ten

  AFTER SURVIVING THREE REBELLIONS and one revolution, the emigration of two sons, rest them in text, and the birth of seven children, Hala’Aman had long since satisfied whatever responsibility she might once have felt she had to take shit from anyone. Her children and grandchildren still had time for that sort of thing, and since they were where most shit came from in the first place (especially the grandchildren), the least they could do was sort out the sewage on their own. Aman was old and dark as the powdered star onyx she added to her tea to aid her digestion and to her tobacco to give her prophetic dreams, and when she was a girl, she’d lifted a fallen freight cart off a young man so neatly and easily he hadn’t even had to lose the leg.

  So when she helped Zeddig down the front hall, Zeddig didn’t even consider excusing herself, even though she was exhausted as well as drunk.

  Aman made an anise tisane in the shoebox kitchen with the mosaic tilework, and added star onyx from a bottle she kept in her belt pouch. Aman didn’t look at much of anything straight on. She saw in spots and splotches and memories now: there was too much world inside her head to see the one in front of her eyes clear. It happened to every Archivist sooner or later. You lived for Alikand, and slowly you lost sight of Agdel Lex, until you had no more to give, and passed the city on to a daughter who could give more.

  When Aman passed Zeddig a mug, she took it, and drank, and Aman drank her own. The anise soothed and the onyx sparked in her mouth—it wasn’t onyx at all, really, but the hardened sap of some Southern Glebland tree, but when the first Iskari explorers found it they thought it looked like onyx, so that was the name markets sold it by these days. “Heard Vogel was looking for you.”

  How Aman heard, Zeddig didn’t bother asking. She played cards with friends who played cards with friends who played cards with friends, and everyone was someone’s aunt or uncle or grandmother or cousin. Even a rat like Vogel couldn’t dig through the underworld without Aman feeling the vibrations. “It’s not a problem. One good job and my debt’s clear.”

  “You should have come to us before you went to him. We would help you.”

  How, exactly? Yes, there were old alliances to call, old debts to cash, but this wasn’t a favors for favors situation. Raymet needed soulstuff to pay off the Rectification Authority sources from whom she pulled her leads, and to delay Wreckers long enough for Zeddig to escape. And Tell’s tuition cost too much to settle by passing a hat. But those were Zeddig’s problems. Aman had saved the family enough for one life. “Of course, Aman.”

  Aman sipped her tea in silent satisfaction.

  “I saw the Ko library today,” Zeddig said. “We found a book with their mark, so I brought it back.” She breathed anise steam and saw again the shelves lined with books waiting to be read: jokes and histories (they were the same, if you had a dark sense of humor), maps and tragedies, diaries and diagrams, passed down, waiting. “A treasury of spices, a fragrant flood and flow, untold riches, deepest warmth.”

  “Unending warmth,” Aman said, correcting the vowel. When Mother corrected her, no matter how gently, Zeddig bristled, but Aman had a different art: each slip a stroke along her granddaughter’s jaw. Or maybe that was not Aman’s art of guiding, but Zeddig’s of accepting—easier to take her grandmother’s guidance than her mom’s. “I thought of Tabar too, when I first saw the Ko library. Stones that anchor time / Opening to space / musk and scratch between the world’s thighs. Tabar at her most hyperbolic. I’m jealous of how much of Adal’s collection survives, though I wish she’d get out more.” She drank her tea. “This is a long fight, Zeddig. Your family needs you. You take too many risks.”

  You don’t see it, Zeddig did not say. You don’t feel it like I do. We’re losing. The dead city grows colder every day, and the Authority more certain. Most delvers don’t care who owned what back when. They sift history for gold. Back in your day, you could delve into Alikand for a half hour at a time; I lasted three minutes today, rescued one book, and almost died. We need to take risks while we can—before the past slides out of reach.

  She sat still as a fixed star. She finished her tea, and while it sparked inside her mouth she said, “Of course, Aman,” stood, and kissed her on the forehead, which Aman liked. Aman’s arm circled her waist, thick and heavy, and clinched, but let her go.

  Zeddig climbed the stairs past Tell’s empty room; Father and Mother were long since asleep, and her sisters and brothers, only Aman awake now. The walls spun, and vines in the paintings writhed as star onyx introduced itself to the sorghum whiskey still buzzing in Zeddig’s blood, and made friends.

  Zeddig stumbled into her dark bedchamber, tiny and cramped with bookcases and a desk; she lit a candle with a match, opened the window, and sat on her bed facing the door, elbows on her thighs, head sloping over piled books.

  She needed a job, faster than Raymet could pull one together. Vogel’s train theft? No. She didn’t want to give that creep any more hold over her, and besides, people had a nasty tendency to come back from his jobs dead. Maybe dead wasn’t a big deal for Vogel, but Zeddig liked living, and she had so little saved that if she passed she’d be lucky to end up a dockside revenant, hauling freight ’til her limbs gave out. So. Something else. Something, sorry Aman, risky.

  Now she just had to decide what.

  Night wind cooled the bare skin of her arms.

  She heard a footstep on her windowsill.

  Her jaw tightened. Wreckers would not bother sneaking up on her. Not Vogel, either. The sharkskin zombie had made his threat—he wouldn’t move on her before she had time to sit and stew, and miss another payment. A rival? Maybe the Agravaines finally figured out who screwed them, wanted revenge. Death came cheap in Agdel Lex, if you knew the market and weren’t afraid to comparison shop.

  Zeddig pictured water in a clear glass cup, then poured that water out in a slow smooth motion. She turned.

  The lurker on her windowsill wasn’t fast enough. Zeddig caught them by their belt, hauled them through the window, and with a twist of hip dropped them on her bed. Springs creaked and her stalker’s skull thunked against the headboard, and she swore, and as Zeddig’s hand found the attacker’s throat, she recognized the voice.

  Time runs at its own pace, and always in the same direction, mostly to give philosophers and thaumaturgists something to argue about. Sometimes, it stands still.

  “Moving a little fast, aren’t we?” Ley said, one eyebrow raised, as if she didn’t notice Zeddig’s hand around her throat. “Though I admit, I missed this.” She twisted her lips in a way that wasn’t quite smiling. She placed her hand over Zeddig’s on her throat, not to fig
ht her, just to squeeze. Her hand was caked with dried blood.

  Zeddig recoiled, as if she’d touched a stove, and let her go. “What the hells are you doing here?” She looked down at her hand, too shocked to feel anything yet. Ice crystals glittered on her palm, steaming off in the dry heat of Agdel Lex. “You came from the dead city.”

  “It’s far too lively for my taste. One of those corpse-spiders clawed through my jacket.” She stuck her hand through the tear to demonstrate.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “I’m not—” She looked down at the hole in her shirt beneath the jacket. “Sorry. Didn’t notice. Most of this belongs to someone else, though. I’ll explain later.”

  “Not a godsdamn word from you in months, and you show up on my window and— Fuck that. Explain now.”

  “I have a proposition.” She sat up on the bed, adjusted the lapels of her charred and lacerated jacket, and slicked hair back from her forehead with her bloody right hand. “If you want to hear it, we’ll have to move quickly.”

  “What do you mean?” Zeddig felt the Wreckers, then: a wave of nausea, the queasy pressure of inhuman minds, a cello bow rasped across her spinal column. “Tell me you surfaced a district over. Tell me you’ve been reciting street signs for the last mile to clear your scent. Tell me you didn’t just lead Wreckers to my house.”

  Ley shrugged as if removing a coat. “I promised never to lie to you. Remember?” She stretched out her legs and, deliberately, crossed them, staring straight through Zeddig’s eyes into her brain.

  The Wreckers closed in, and Zeddig glowered. “Gods. What kind of trouble are you in?”

  With a laugh, Ley’s stillness became motion; she was up and around in a second, one foot on the windowsill, one hand on the wall outside. “I need a partner for the biggest delve in history. I need a team. You’re the best. And you’ve never screwed me over.”

  “You did more than enough of that for both of us.”

  “Cast me as a devil if you like. I can dig up a blue dress if you want me to look the part. But I don’t have the time. As you so perspicaciously observed, the Wreckers are after me. If you’re curious, follow. If not, have a nice life.”

  And she was gone.

  Godsdammit.

  Zeddig stood slack-jawed and alone in her room. Time started again. How long had Ley been here? Seconds? Ley was the shortest distance between any two points in Zeddig’s heart. She had never bothered waiting, not from the first moment they met in that burning library, nor on the docks two years past when Zeddig asked her the final question.

  The Wrecker-call echoed up the alley.

  Blood and ink.

  Zeddig climbed the windowsill, turned, jumped, caught the trellis overhead one-handed, swung her leg around a drainpipe, pulled with the leg, swept her left hand up to the roof’s edge, found a toehold in the lattice, strained for a good grip—

  Ley grabbed her, fingers sticky with blood, and pulled Zeddig up. If Zeddig trusted Ley with her full weight, they would have both fallen—the other woman was wiry as ever, made of skin-wrapped snakes—but Zeddig knew how much she could bear, and used her for balance as she scrambled to the rooftop. Ley grinned as Zeddig found her feet. “Glad to have you on board.”

  Zeddig ignored her, and searched for their enemy.

  Moonlit rooftops spread for miles, cascading downslope toward the Wrecker Tower and the bay. Stillness, cabs, waves—and there, to the south, movement. Dark figures leapt from roof to roof. Their robes fluttered like wings at the apex of every leap; one lashed out with a tentacle to catch a water tower spar. By night the city could be an overgrown ruin, a human jungle, a labyrinth replete with minotaurs, a haven and a hell at once, but the Wreckers left a trail of certainty where they passed: the streets beneath them met at right angles, and never could have been other than they were.

  “Three of them,” she counted. “What the hells did you do?”

  “You know,” Ley said. “The usual.” And she ran.

  They didn’t have to discuss strategy. You never ran from Wreckers unless you had to, but if you did, you kept to rooftops first, following Authority streets, steeping yourself in approved visions of the world, until the taint of other, different cities faded. So they ran, and Zeddig locked herself into Agdel Lex.

  To escape, she recited the official narrative she’d learned in school: After the God Wars, the Iskari revitalized commercial districts by rationalizing the street plan and inflicting—sorry, clarifying—zoning. (Leap after Ley across an alley, follow her onto a balcony ledge, jump to the next ledge, lungs working hard, Zeddig never had patience for this cliff running bullshit.) Once a clear trade structure was in place, thaumaturgical ties to the Iskari Demesne and to the Deathless Kings of the Northern Gleb soon followed, based primarily (clatter down a fire escape) on raw material exports. During the midcentury post-wars period Agdelic textiles enjoyed brief popularity in Telomeri fashion, but thaumaturgy still depends on necromantic earths (glance back—no distortion surrounds the Wreckers, congratulations, you’ve matched their vision of the world), along with the dreamdust trade. Local industrial development lags global standards (see Ley snatch a sand-colored overcoat from a laundry line and don it over her suit), but a burgeoning dreamcraft community, drawn by depressed local rents and the Rectification Authority’s extensive infrastructure developments (don’t call them Wreckers even in your own mind, not until you know you’ve lost them) may finally shift the city to from a resource hub to knowledge and service industries.

  They emerged onto broad, brilliant Regency Boulevard, a street that might have been cut from Chartegnon and grafted here, ringing trolleys and spacious sidewalks lined with cafe tables, continental fashions in the windows. Save for a slight edge of garlic and lemon wafting from the restaurants, they might not have been in Agdel Lex at all.

  Ley jogged to a trolley stop, stuck her right hand into her pocket, and raised her left, which was not bloody so far as Zeddig could see. Trolley doors rolled back, and she tossed a two-thaum coin into the bin, then waved Zeddig up the steps. “My treat.”

  A mustachioed man with a newspaper gave up his seat so they could sit together. Zeddig leaned against the window, and thought about sacrifice and registry forms. Ley slumped against her, both hands in the pockets of her stolen coat, smiling softly. She’d slowed her breathing, but could not control her heartbeat. Zeddig felt a pulse like hummingbird wings beneath Ley’s skin.

  The trolley pulled away.

  The Wreckers—sorry, Rectification Authority agents— reached the Regency rooftops. One spread her cloak and fell. Tentacles slithered out from the fluttering hem to spring-cushion her landing. The Rectifier searched the street, and Zeddig felt the pressure of her sight. But she and Ley were nothing special, on this trolley—just two tired women, not even women, citizens merely, bound for home and bed.

  They could have been anyone.

  They weren’t.

  “Wasn’t that fun?” Ley asked—her half smile a perfect mask, as if she had not been afraid, as if they had not almost died four times on that run, desperate, as always, that Zeddig think she was the woman she dreamed of being: inviolate, strong, secure. “I’ve missed that.”

  Zeddig wanted to kiss her, and didn’t. “What do you want to steal?”

  “Everything.”

  Chapter Eleven

  THE COPS COMFORTED KAI.

  Not, to be clear, that the cops were actively comforting, that they offered even the trappings of compassion, nor that they displayed any consideration that might be due someone who had just seen her sister, basically, so far as Kai could tell, though she was no expert on such matters, kill someone. No, the cops were cops, and Kai had dated enough of those (sample size one) to understand the breed.

  But there was a murder, so of course there would be cops. This was a thing that happened. And since Kai’s evening so far had involved her sister killing someone, which was emphatically not a thing that happened, being surrounded by things that did ha
ppen offered her some comfort.

  She’d spent the fifteen minutes as she waited for the cops trying to keep Ley’s cat from eating the woman on the floor. After triggering the household summoning circle, she’d collapsed against the kitchen island, staring at the body but seeing nothing. That was good, she told herself, as she breathed in wet little gasps. Get through the messy stuff before the cops get here. Not the blood, of course. Don’t disturb the evidence. Just. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. Just the stuff about her that was messy.

  She laughed, and looked up, which was when she saw the cat nibbling at the body’s fingertips.

  “Kitty!” Don’t shout at cats, Maya had told her once—makes them nervous, and when they get nervous they get defensive. But, fuck, how were you supposed to respond when a cat started eating a dead woman’s fingers—“Kitty?” The cat looked over at her, lowered its head, and tried another nibble.

  The cat didn’t seem perturbed when Kai scooped it—him—up. After the attack on the balcony, she’d expected more fight—but bygones seemed to be bygones. When Kai didn’t pet the cat at once, though, it yawned, flicked its tongue between its teeth, poured itself from her arms, and approached the corpse again.

  She grabbed it before it could take another bite, and tried to pet it this time. The beast’s collar read “Behemoth” in Kathic and old Archipelagic script. Ley must have had a hard time finding someone to engrave those letters here. Maybe she did it herself.

  Kai slumped to the ground. Behemoth settled, and let her pet him, though he didn’t start to purr. He was angry. Maybe he remembered her wrestling with Ley on the balcony, before Ley slipped into the dying city.

  Kai realized she was bleeding. Must have scraped a rock or something on the balcony. She let the blood drip onto the floor. She watched it, and prayed.

  Izza.

  The Lady spread through her veins, cold as an injection. Far away, she felt a young woman tear herself from something violent—or sex. What?