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

by Max Gladstone

  “Where, then?”

  “We are in my garden, in a city with a name we rarely whisper—a city that threads itself around the world of iron words the Iskari forged. We are not angels anymore. We do not take on shapes of righteous truth. But we build, though the Wreckers think our building a subversion.”

  “Is my sister in this city, now? This place without a name?”

  “That,” said a new voice, “is not your business. Leave our house.”

  Kai stood and turned too fast to hold her balance. Her bad leg twisted under her. She leaned on the back of the chair. “Zeddig?”

  The woman was strong, her dark skin darkened further with sun, and she had short thick braids and wore a sleeveless shirt and loose trousers tucked into her boots and was not in a mood to talk to Kai. She marched across the courtyard. “I am,” she said, “and it’s time for you to leave.”

  “I’m Kai,” she said. “I was just here to ask questions.”

  “And you’ve asked them. Aman should have known better than to answer.”

  Aman sipped her tea, unconcerned. “I’ll answer what others ask, or what’s an archivist for?”

  “I’m trying to help her,” Kai said. “I’m not with the Rectifiers. I just want to know she’s safe.”

  “I’m asking you, politely, to leave my family’s house. If you don’t, I will ask you less politely.”

  “I let her down. This is all my fault. I want to help, if I can.”

  Zeddig’s eyes were fierce and dark and Kai wished she knew what coiled behind them.

  She turned to thank Aman for the tea, but Zeddig caught her arm and tugged her from the garden down the dark hall to the front door, which she opened with such force its slam echoed in the empty street. “You want to help? Then leave.”

  Kai put her hand on Zeddig’s wrist, and tried to push her off. The woman’s grip tightened, and for a heartbeat Kai wondered if they were about to fight. Then Zeddig let go, turned her back on Kai, and placed one hand against the wall. Hard lines stood out on the blade of her shoulders beneath the fabric of her shirt. She was a monument. Kai could not read her inscription. “You know where she is.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “I want to help.”

  “She told me about you—working with priesthoods, flying high. You stink of Agdel Lex. You bring their dryness and sand. The Wreckers are watching you.”

  “I lost them.”

  Her laugh was not so kind as her grandmother’s. “You think that. But they’ll just find you again, and pry what they need from your mind. If they don’t buy it outright.”

  “I’m not selling,” Kai said. “Look, I get it. You’re afraid. You put your family in danger by helping her.”

  Zeddig looked over her shoulder, and Kai stopped talking. A wagon rolled down the street. She smelled lamb close to burning.

  Zeddig’s next words, cool and level: “Who said I was helping her?”

  “You don’t know the trouble she’s in.”

  “I do.”

  “Really?” Kai dropped her voice to a whisper. “She killed someone—stole their soul, put it in a knife. A woman, her colleague, someone important to the Iskari. The Rectifiers want her back. Did she tell you any of this?”

  Zeddig’s body gave the answer she tried to keep from her face.

  “I can help,” she said, “if you tell me what’s going on.”

  “Stay away from us.” She didn’t clarify that “us.” Her voice was cold, and she was large, and Kai saw what drew Ley to this woman: the commitment, the sheer force of personality, a vector around which Ley could twine. She was a wall, she was a woman. This was going all wrong. “Go, now.”

  “The Iskari want that soul,” Kai said. “They would trade for it: her freedom, yours. Protection. Immunity. Think it over.”

  That was the wrong thing to say. The deal, proposed, made her a dealer. Zeddig’s whole body closed. She held the door open and ushered Kai out, grim and formal. “Leave.”

  So she did.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  ZEDDIG FOUGHT WITH AMAN in the courtyard after Kai left. Ley’s sister was unknown, suspect, tied to the Iskari, to the banks, and she didn’t know how far deep she was, how little control she could summon, how great was the danger. And knowing this, Aman still brought Kai into the courtyard, and told her secrets.

  Aman scoffed at Zeddig’s fury. Secrets? What secrets did I tell her? She learned no hidden knowledge from me. The Authority will not let us speak of certain things in public—so we speak in private. This woman wants to help her sister. She should know the dangers. And, daughter of my daughter, she was right: your helping Ley endangers us. You do what you must—but don’t blame Kai Pohala for that.

  Aman drank tea, and consulted her book, and moved her chess piece, and was right, so Zeddig let the conversation drop.

  She slept in Raymet’s house that night. Ley had set up glassware and burners in the living room, and was titrating a solution of dragonheart powder. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “Everything’s dangerous in sufficient quantities, or with prolonged exposure. Life itself is invariably fatal. Though I’d advise against inhaling in the next ten seconds.”

  Those ten seconds, as the smoke cleared, gave Zeddig time to think. “I saw your sister today.”

  Ley’s hand twitched as she poured the titrated solution into a test tube. A drop of burgundy liquid struck the table and started eating through the wood. “What did you tell her?”

  “Nothing. She barely knows her way around the city, but she’s ready to jump into the hells for you. I tried to warn her off.”

  Ley frowned. “Let me tell you about my sister.”

  “Shouldn’t you deal with the acid?” The solution hissed into the table, leaving a worm-smooth hole in the rich dark wood.

  “I’m getting to that.” She finished pouring. “Once, because Kai said something I thought was mean, I waited for a day we didn’t have school, set her alarm clock for the time we usually woke up, and changed her bedside calendar to a school day. She woke with the alarm, saw the clock and calendar, and went about her business. She woke our mother up, insisting it was a school day. She woke me up, saying I’d slept through my alarm. She marched me halfway to school before she saw the date on the newspapers.” Ley took white leather gloves from her purse, donned them, and held the test tube with the dragonheart titration under the table. The spilled mixture hissed through the tabletop at last, and dripped into the tube, which she capped at once. “Kai’s a freight train in human form. Once you get her on a track, she’ll remake the world to fit that track. The hardest thing she’s ever had to do in life is admit she’s wrong.”

  “Reminds me of someone I know.”

  “You do have a stubborn streak.”

  Zeddig boggled. “Me?”

  Ley replaced the test tube next to the other vials in her caustic rainbow. “I rarely mention it, because you work so hard resist that tendency. But determination can be a handicap.”

  “Have you ever looked in a mirror?”

  “I try not to. Things stare back at me.” Ley returned the gloves to her purse, dusted off her hands, and stood. “Well. You saw my infuriating sister, she professed her good intentions, and you decided, wisely, not to trust her. Was that all?”

  “She said you stole something when you . . . left.”

  “I stole many things, or nothing at all, depending on what definitions of ‘stole’ and ‘thing’ you employ.”

  “Apparently there’s one in particular they want back. A mind.”

  Ley grabbed a beaker that contained an amber liquid. “The Iskari Rectification Authority admits its mindlessness. Well, that’s a first. Here’s to honesty, however belated.” She toasted with the beaker.

  “Ley, don’t—”

  “It’s whiskey,” she said.

  “That’s a dumb place to put whiskey.”

  “Near to hand?” When Zeddig didn’t answer at once: “The day I forget which be
aker contains the poison and which whiskey, I’ll deserve my fate.”

  “Fine,” Zeddig said. “Have it your way. But I think you’re taking the wrong lesson from that story.”

  “Oh?”

  “Seems to me your sister’s not a woman we want on the wrong track.”

  Zeddig went out for drinks with Raymet and Gal that night—Raymet radiant after an afternoon’s isolation, and eager to discuss, in hushed voices in the corner of a smoke-filled room while a mustachioed kid played syrinx, the potential upside of their arrangement. “There’s nothing of interest, I mean, real interest, in Altus, though I imagine we could move some high-priced equipment if we trek it out. But Anaxmander—we only have incomplete catalog data, and just look at this stuff.” Her voice got louder when she was excited. She pinned the scroll open with two beer glasses, and stabbed the list with her forefinger. “First edition. First edition. Ananke of Oreskos, only fragments survived the Occupation—this looks like extensive contemporary scholarship, on parchment, Zeddig. Parchment!” When the waitress came by with the next round, Raymet covered the scroll with her arms, and craned her neck up like a tiny small dragon to smile, too broadly to seem nonchalant, at the waitress, who smiled back.

  They meandered home, Raymet leaning on Gal’s shoulder; she was in such a good, or at least tipsy, mood that when they found Ley working a chess problem at the kitchen table, Raymet challenged her to drunken guillotine blitz. “Five minutes time control each, winner takes a shot and a minute off the clock.” Gal cautioned—“You’ve drunk quite a bit already”—but Raymet waved her off, and sat down to play. She won the first four games before the first shots metabolized, lost the next four, won the last one, and spent the rest of the night protesting how fine she was through the closed bathroom door, in between vomiting sessions, while Gal fetched her water. When Zeddig and Gal helped her into bed—she hadn’t removed the manacles from the bed frame—Raymet sat bolt upright, caught Gal’s shoulder said, “Zzzgood,” laughed, fell back, and started to snore.

  Gal remained half bent over the bed; she watched Raymet sleep with the same expression Ley had when pondering her chess problem. “I should stay,” she said. “You’re both drunk, and Ms. Pohala’s bed is far from this room. She might not hear if Raymet has trouble. I can keep vigil as easily here as anywhere.” Keeping vigil was what Gal did when others would sleep.

  “She’ll be fine.” Zeddig lurched to the door. “Raymet’s been here before.”

  “That,” Gal said, “is what worries me. She pushes herself hard—to keep pace with you, I think.” Soft reproach in that voice. “I worry about her.”

  “You really think I’m the one she wants to keep pace with?”

  Gal blinked. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Come on.” She breathed out. “Let’s go. She’ll be fine.”

  Zeddig escorted Gal to the street and watched her go, hands in pockets, head back, staring up into the stars that lingered behind the clouds: Gal, pale gold and alien and at full ease, as if the night held no terrors, which of course it did not, for her. Morons, Zeddig thought, as she closed the door. Both of them. Beautiful morons.

  Her fingers slipped twice on the lock before she managed to close it. She leaned against the closed door and closed her eyes and leaned into the post-intoxicated fuzz she liked more than drunkenness itself, that time when colors unclenched and nobody expected much of anything. She thought about Gal, and Raymet. After everything she’d put them through, with a chain of others before, at last, with Ley, she’d long since given up any high ground. She deprived herself of the sturdy front door and proceeded through the kitchen, testing the steadiness of the wall with her right hand in case of secret passages, to the living room, to check on Ley.

  Ley slept on the cracked leather couch. Hot with drink, she’d unbuttoned her shirt and tossed it onto the jacket already heaped on the chair beside the couch, and sprawled in tank top and trousers with one arm over her face and the other hugging her stomach. Little bumps stood up on her arm, and she grumbled when Zeddig passed between her and the light, but didn’t wake up. Zeddig had averted her eyes that morning, but Ley asleep felt less dangerous. She looked like a person.

  Zeddig took a blanket from the closet and draped it over Ley, and breathed in, not intentionally, just breathed like people breathe, but when she did she smelled her, and that hurt, so she turned away.

  The knife glowed on the bedside table.

  She shouldn’t. Absolutely not. There were dumb ideas and dumb ideas, and this would be the latter. She’d told Ley she wouldn’t pry, even if she hadn’t exactly promised. Her silence at least suggested she respected Ley’s judgment as to what she could say and what not, her attempt to protect Zeddig from whatever she’d gotten herself into. Whatever absurdity she’d gotten herself into. Whatever godsforsaken madness. Whatever.

  And yet.

  The knife glowed on the bedside table. Its blue outlines cast weird shadows from glassware.

  She hadn’t exactly promised. And if Ley wanted to protect Zeddig, shouldn’t Zeddig want to protect Ley? There was a mutual obligation at work, an if - you - love - something - let - it - go sort of thing. Protecting Ley meant understanding what sort of trouble she was in. Was Kai right? Would the Iskari and their servants get off Ley’s back, and by principle of extension off Zeddig’s, if Ley returned what she’d stolen?

  And yet.

  The knife glowed on the bedside table. Its blue outlines cast weird shadows from glassware. A red sphere revolved at its heart.

  Zeddig lifted the knife. It weighed nothing in her hand, which did not surprise her. This was not a blade. It was an idea.

  “Aren’t you a puzzle,” the knife said.

  Zeddig did not drop it. She’d expected—not this exactly, but something. The knife had no voice, but the blood inside it pulsed, and she heard a voice in her head.

  “I can’t read your mind, just so you know. I can’t even see you—not the you you think of when you hear the word ‘see.’ It’s dark in here, and lonely. Good for meditation. I’ve developed an ingenious method of prime factorization, but there’s not enough space in this marginal existence to write it down. But I can see so many versions of you: a self in shards, different women for different worlds, different names. Tell me which one I should use. Speak, and I’ll hear.”

  Zeddig retreated to the kitchen, with the knife, but didn’t answer.

  “Come, now. If you want to be rude—I’ll bet it’s Hala’Zeddig, right? Ley’s ex. The delver. Naturally she’d run to you. You’d help her hide, even from the Wreckers, and she knows just how to make you dance. She’ll keep you in the dark, because telling you doesn’t suit her. Am I warm? Burning up, I imagine, though I doubt this form’s flammable.”

  “I don’t have to tell you my name,” Zeddig said. “You haven’t told me yours.”

  “Vane,” the knife replied. “Alethea Vane. The woman you’re trying to protect stabbed me, stole my life’s work.”

  “Why?”

  “I had something she wanted.” When she spoke, the surface of the blood-sphere within the knife dimpled and pitted, sprouted mountains that collapsed to valleys. When she was silent, the sphere might have been a large, oddly colored pearl. “You know what that feels like, I imagine. She betrayed you for the same reason.”

  “You don’t know anything about that,” Zeddig said.

  “Of course I do. She told me. We were partners, after all. I know her, inside and out. I’ve shaped her work and made it . . . perfect.” A gross pause ensued. The wind elemental trapped in Raymet’s air-conditioning system groaned behind the ducts. “She took your methods and ideas, and used them, and she took my methods and ideas, and she’s using them. She has her own goals, as always. She’ll step on anyone in her path to reach them. And she won’t tell you what she wants, or why, because that would give you leverage over her. It’s a familiar story. She says she’s protecting you, but she’s only protecting herself.”

  “Wh
y should I listen to a pissy knife?”

  “Because she’s used us both,” Vane said. “In her own way, and for her own reasons, and the only difference between us is, you still have a body to do something about it. You know she’s using you, and you’re ignoring it. Please do let me know how that works out. For me, it ended with my body on ice at the tower.”

  “If you know so much,” Zeddig said.

  “I do.”

  “What isn’t she telling me?”

  “Let’s trade.”

  The knife felt warm in her hand. “What do you want? What can you want? Sharpening?”

  “Tell me everything she’s asked you to do for her.”

  “No deal.”

  “I can’t tell you her plan if I don’t have details.”

  Zeddig did not like the hunger in the knife’s voice. The surface of the blood sharpened. “Ask something else.”

  “What could I want but knowledge? A bath? Bourbon? A massage, for fuck’s sake?”

  “We’re done here.”

  “This is your last chance.”

  “I can find you again.”

  “I’m surprised she let you find me once, sweetie. Don’t count on a repeat engagement.”

  “I don’t need you.”

  “Not now,” the knife said. “But soon she’ll leave again, and you’ll wish you’d listened. Or you’ll turn your back at the wrong moment and end up in here with—”

  Zeddig dropped the knife before Vane could say “me.” It stuck in Raymet’s kitchen table, point down beside the chess board, and quivered. She picked the knife up with a kitchen towel, and returned it to the living room. The whites of Ley’s eyes showed in the gap through her slitted lids. She did not snore, but she breathed heavily.