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

by Max Gladstone

  “You told me you could save Ley,” Kai had said in the courtyard, in the morning, projecting earnestness and desperation. She was saleswoman enough for that. “How?”

  Abernathy responded at once. Kai felt almost guilty for leading the woman like this, but then, she hadn’t yet lied. “Bescond’s not interested in compromise,” Tara said. “She’s out for blood. But if we get Vane back, I can talk Bescond down.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “She’ll listen to me. Bescond’s bosses value their relationship with Alt Coulumb—which gives me leverage. Get me Vane, and your sister goes free. There’s only one hitch.”

  “Just one?” Hitches seemed to grow by threes in this city.

  “Bescond thinks you’re dangerous now. Before we move any further, you have to eat crow.”

  “I never liked that expression,” Kai said. “Crows have long memories.”

  “So does Bescond.”

  The lift’s convulsive rhythm stopped, and with a chirp—not a golemetric recording or a phonograph, but an actual bird chirp produced by vocal cords somewhere—the doors rolled back to reveal a hall that reminded Kai of the hall down which she’d been marched the night of the not-quite-murder, a hall of white rooms whose doors did not exist when closed.

  The tower’s flesh and blood and bowels spoke to Kai’s in a tongue of dread, of vibrations too large and deep to be heard. She walked inside a living being. She felt the change in the air, the change in space, the weight of body heat masked by air conditioning. The softness of Hala’s Fell back streets was gone. The Iskari city was hard and smooth as an eggshell.

  Less brittle, though, she hoped.

  Abernathy opened a door around which the wall blushed violet.

  The room beyond had dropped all pretense of normality. The pill-like calcium shell was gone, leaving a pocket of pale rubbery flesh, a floor firm as a tensed thigh. Kai smelled salt and inhuman blood. A man hung from the far wall, limbs wrapped in octopoid arms, mouth and neck covered with a creature like a slick gray hand. His one visible eye darted to Kai, away, around the room, chasing phantoms. He breathed high in his chest, and fast as a mouse.

  Bescond paced in front of him, crooked finger on her chin, considering. She hadn’t looked up when the door opened, but she turned when Abernathy said, “Evangeline.”

  Bescond started and turned to them, as if there were no man panting and shaking on the wall. “Tara. And—” She smiled with what Kai hoped were the usual number of teeth. “A guest! Ms. Pohala, I confess I didn’t expect to see you here under your own power.” Kai did her best to ignore the implications. “What changed your mind? Are you under compulsion? Not, of course, that you could tell me if you were.”

  The man moaned. Kai would have felt more comfortable if she had been certain that was a moan of pain. “I want to cooperate. I just had to think things through first.”

  “Good,” she said. “Good. One of my patrols reported that a woman fitting your description was almost mugged in the Wings last night. I hoped it wasn’t you. This is a grotesque city, in places. The Iskari sectors are wholesome—we guard our people. But the warrens, the back streets, well. People come from struggles down south, rebels and disaffected mercenaries and the poor, and while we do our best to enter them on the city rolls, we rarely know who they are, what they want, how to control them. So they make mischief, and some fall into the dead city, which weakens our hold on reality further, brings us all closer to chaos. The fear of freezing terrifies those who remain—and they will to do anything to appease the unscrupulous souls who shelter them. I love my city, but anything can happen in its alleys. I’m glad to see you safe.”

  “Yes,” Kai said. “I wouldn’t want to end up chained to a wall and tortured, or anything.”

  The corner of Abernathy’s mouth twitched up—though she covered well and instantly. Kai might have to work with Bescond, but she would do it on her terms. She knew the Lieutenant’s type. She ran into them often enough back home.

  Bescond let the room’s heart pulse twice before she made herself laugh. “Ms. Pohala! This must look so odd, given your cultural baggage—I investigated your Penitents, of course, and if you don’t mind a foreigner’s confusion: couldn’t you have found a better way?”

  To Kai’s surprise, the first three replies her brain supplied were all nativist defenses: the Penitents worked, they were effective deterrents, island nations don’t have enough people or space to stick human beings in cages until they get better, and the Penitents, for all their horror, have a near-perfect rehabilitation record. Her stomach would not let any of those answers escape her mouth. Gods and demons. Her own old teacher had stuck her inside one of those fucking things. She’d felt it break her, she had heard the crystal voices whisper in her ears, she shook and wept and bled and ground in its grip, and some nights she woke in terror thinking everything since the rock snapped shut was just a dream and she still stood on the seashore, on the verge of her final surrender. But she’d grown up with stories of the Penitents’ virtue, and, caught unawares, her reflex answer was a Kavekana schoolkid’s catechism.

  The Penitents had warped her, in her way, before she was ever stuck inside.

  “We should have found a better way,” she said, honestly.

  “What you see here,” Bescond said, “is entirely consensual.”

  The man thrashed against the tentacles that held him. His arms strained. A vein in his pale forehead pulsed. His nails dragged troughs in the room’s flesh, but the room did not seem to mind.

  “Really.”

  “Pain,” Bescond said, “and compulsion, don’t work. Not for long. That’s, and you’ll excuse me, Ms. Abernathy, the problem with the Craft—you don’t care for the long game. Your Deathless Kings profess immortality, but their oldest member is barely a century and a half; we have yet to see how that experiment will turn out.”

  “Seems to be going strong so far,” Tara said, “but don’t let that interrupt your monologue.”

  Bescond smiled to Tara, then to Kai. “She’s right, you know. I’m theory trash—I think about all this nonsense far too much. Pain works on individuals, but as the foundation of a society? Please. Break one woman and her children will grow up hating you. And no God or King or army, no sorcery, no wall however thick, is proof against a generation of children who grow up hating. You may defeat them, kill or cow them, but the hatred will only grow. Far better to offer joy: elevate behavior you prefer, celebrate actions and service that leads to the results you desire. Gretancourt,” she approached the man on the wall and placed a gentle hand on his chest, “is a Sergeant in Rectification, of excellent record and high standing. Union with God is affirmation, pleasure, glory. It supports us in an uncertain world—especially uncertain in this uncertain city. I see you’re skeptical. Fine. Let me show you.” She peeled the gray hand back from Gretancourt’s mouth.

  Kai heard him whisper: “don’t stop don’t stop not yet put it back put it back put it back”

  Bescond replaced the creature, and Gretancourt thrashed once more against his bonds. Bescond wiped her hand with a handkerchief. “I’m sorry for the digression. I am glad you’ve seen this. I didn’t realize the depth of your misapprehension. No wonder you felt anxious for your sister’s safety! I’m so glad that’s cleared up, so we can work together. Let’s compare notes.”

  “Yes,” Kai said. “Let’s.” She didn’t throw up until later.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  IZZA HIT THE STREET.

  She stole an orange from a fruit stand, by reflex and for old time’s sake, skinned it with a thumbnail twist, and prayed to her Lady as she climbed a drainpipe to the rooftops. The pipe creaked under her weight. That was new. She’d grown since she met Kai, grown more since she left Agdel Lex.

  Or else someone had shrunk the city.

  Keep it simple. She crouched on the rooftop edge to scan the writhing alleys and geometric boulevards. Note how streets shifted, where they didn’t. Once you learned to tell apa
rt the desert blue Iskari thought should sky the city from the deeper, wetter indigo over old Alikand, you could read the skyline like sailors read wind from ripples on a sea. And by shadows on that the surface, you could tell where sharks gathered.

  There were forty Wreckers on patrol, thickest in Hala’s Fell and around the Junction. In the old days they didn’t need so many.

  Izza burned the orange peel on the rooftop, and prayed to the Lady, breathing thick bitter smoke.

  Mission: simple. Reclaim the city. Make it dance. You’re both in danger now.

  Dockside gambling rats had warned her doubling down was bad for business. You doubled down because you thought your lucky number due, because you drank too much, because you wanted to impress that monte dealer who knew his patter and had that slight shy smile the good ones know how to look like they can’t quite hide. You doubled down when you had no choice.

  So why had Izza leaned on her customs converts to sneak her on a fast ship to a city where she’d sworn never to return?

  Kai, was the one-word answer. The priestess was brave enough to fight for her sister, smart enough to get into trouble, and strong enough to break herself trying to get free. Losing Kai, the Blue Lady would lose Her link to the Kavekanese priesthood. And, losing Kai, Izza would lose a friend. She’d once thought she didn’t need friends—and few friendships started with one party holding a knife to the other’s throat. With faithful coming to her constantly for advice, for blessing, it didn’t seem right that she should feel lonely. But then, even the Lady’s oldest faithful back home—how weird was that, to call Kavekana “home”—the kids she’d grown up alongside and fought to keep safe, watched her with awe and expectation.

  Kai didn’t.

  So she crossed rooftops down into the city.

  She knew Agdel Lex once, like a tick knew the dog it fed on. She crawled through its hair, bit its flesh, wriggled, sucked. As a refugee fresh from the Gleb, emerging from a smuggler’s container after days’ sweaty stinking ride through the Wastes with no light save the ghostlamps the kids pitched in to kindle, after days spent learning songs sung by kids from other villages that no longer existed either, after coughing up dust and crying in her sleep, she collapsed on the beach in Agdel Lex.

  She looked upon the jeweled skyline, the spreading streets, more people than she had ever thought to see, and gasped. Izza had snuck into a palace.

  And, like any palace, this one was trapped. Wreckers wanted to catch you, and cops, and the men with nets (visible and in-, Craftwork and mundane) who dropped the kids too slow to run in the High Sisters’ care. You crept, you learned the way, and you learned the people. You found out where to get small jobs and who to ask for help. The locals had their Alikand, the city whose name they’d never speak, the secret architecture that kept them safe. Izza found hers.

  Now she sought it again.

  But cities changed over time.

  She combed East Ridge first. The old roulette cafes must have closed years ago. That kid lingering on the corner had the marks of a dreamdust dealer’s spotter, but she wasn’t looking for dreamdust. She wanted delvers. She wanted the big time.

  She rode a trolley downslope to the Iron Shore and found the old warehouse district choked with artists and people who wanted to look like artists; she wandered the docks, but cops kept streets here cleaner than in her day.

  Come noon she felt down, and lost. Seven years was a long time to leave a place. Good crooks kept moving. The landscape, hell, even the slang must have changed by now.

  She ate chicken and preserved lemon and pickled veggies in a pita on the boardwalk overlooking the port. Off-duty construction workers, shirtless, drank stiff tea from ceramic thermoses. One spread his arms on the bench back and let his head loll, and moaned about his hangover. Two Iskari tourists passing arm in arm glared at the man; the one in the dark dress guided her partner away, and the one in the white dress hid her smile behind her hand. The construction worker’s arms lay behind the two men who sat to his either side. Kavekanese would read that as a forward, courting gesture, playful; in Iskar, it was one step from an ownership claim. In Agdel Lex, not so much.

  More tourists lingered on the boardwalk than Izza remembered, and fewer street kids: one boy tried to sell flowers to the Iskari women, while two more sat kicking their legs over the boardwalk’s edge, bouquets abandoned by their side. The boy selling had a half-moon scar on his cheek. Izza’s hand rose to her own cheek, where the scar would have been. He must have jumped too slow to dodge the men with nets.

  That brought her up short.

  Of course the men with nets still existed. Of course kids still sold flowers on the boardwalk to pay down laughably enormous debt. The city changed—buildings changed, streets changed, languages changed—but people adapted, and endured. She just had to find them.

  She finished her pita, tossed the wax paper wrapping into the trash, and walked toward the stairs.

  The boy with the flowers blocked her path. His eyes were big and wet and needy, and that need ran deeper than the sale. The scar on his cheek drank sunlight. He offered her a flower.

  Izza produced a flat disk of blue stone from thin air, but actually from her sleeve. There was a hole at one end; she’d drilled it special, with a stolen augur, telling herself stories to pass time as she worked.

  The kid stiffened, as if he recognized the token, which made no sense. Izza’d handed out the first one on Kavekana, a year ago and an ocean away. But he took the disk anyway, from that grabby reflex Izza still couldn’t shake, the skepticism of the prey animal: doubt gifts first, then clutch them fast in case they’re taken back.

  As the kid grabbed the token, Izza looked into him with eyes of faith. There was a hook in his heart, a loan of soulstuff at interest no bank would dare offer, taken from an old orphan master to pay for flowers and clothes and gruel—debt that would grow and grow. He might always be two months’ good luck from paying it off, but two months’ good luck never came at once. Need was the trap and debt its teeth.

  She let the Lady pass into him and slide the hook free. He staggered, half-kneeling, and cursed in Talbeg with a high clear voice and an eastern accent. “What was that?”

  On his face, she saw that old edge of awe.

  “I didn’t do anything,” she said. “She did.” Gods, but she missed speaking Talbeg. Kathic, and even Kavekanese, you had to signify the capital letter with your accent. Talbeg had a proper, what did you call it, case, for gods.

  “What’s the catch?”

  “No catch.”

  He looked down at the flowers, and up at her.

  “I do have questions, though. Names. Friends I haven’t seen in years. I don’t want to get anyone in any trouble.” When he stepped back, wary: “Kid, do I look like a cop?”

  He shook his head.

  “I haven’t been here in a while. I’m just looking for old friends.”

  He hadn’t left, yet. She had been that young—still hardening, still learning to survive, sussing who was kind and who would hit you if you crossed them, or for no reason at all. She would have left. But that awe lingered behind his eyes, in his back; he did not know whether to throw himself at her or run away or kneel. The Lady’s touch had that effect. Izza hated it.

  “I’ll say some names. Tell me if you know them.”

  No answer.

  “Fatine Dubreque? Used to dance at the Netted Maid?” Nothing. “Slapback Dietrich?” Nothing. “Zhang Three-eyes?”

  “He’s dead.”

  That hit her in the stomach. “No shit.”

  “They say he killed a Wrecker and fell through into the dead city and then he died but I didn’t see it myself but Ahn says . . .” The kid stopped himself from talking.

  Zhang had been a hard old bastard, a first-story man, a bonebreaker. She would have bet on him against the world, every time. But then, she knew as well as anyone that people who fought didn’t always last. It hurt to imagine him going out—even in a blaze of glory, with a Wreck
er’s blood on his hands. Her other absent friends she could imagine escaped, gone on to better lives. But so few got out. That was why she left. That was one of many reasons why she left.

  It all hurt.

  “Ous Hana?”

  This time when the kid shook his head, she could not lie to herself—saw Hana bleeding out in a back alley, alone, reaching for the friends who might have stood by her side, who might have stopped the blow before it came—Hana, too kind to be that sharp, too sharp to be that kind.

  This was a bad idea. She should never have come. But she’d risk one more name, the hardest to speak. “Isaak Bonventure?”

  The kid’s eyes widened in shock. He’d given up almost as much hope as she. “He plays chess?”

  “Yes.” Relief felt almost as good as the Lady’s hand. “He plays chess. Do you know where?”

  The kid gave her directions, and she thanked him, and rose to go, but he still blocked her path. “I can’t take this.” Holding out the blue stone. “This is special.”

  “You keep it,” she said. “If you have extra, send Her a share of what you steal. Help people out of jams when you can. She’ll be there when you need Her.”

  She hoped, as she walked away, she hadn’t traded his old hook for a new one.

  Even with the distraction of the kid and the flowers, she made it across town in half an hour. The bus schedules hadn’t changed, and the public transit stink symphony called her straight back to childhood. People sweat and smelled on Kavekana, of course, but new spices changed the savor. The bus dropped her off in the Bite, and she climbed three blocks to a dusty park where old men played chess on public tables.

  The tables were full, but only half hosted games, the other half featuring a more-or-less usual assortment of Agdel Lex urbanites on lunch hour. A fragrant bum slept on one, head down, drooling into his folded arms. At another, a gaunt woman in gray university robes read a book of poetry, its title rendered in calligraphy Izza couldn’t read. Two overmuscled gents and a woman who looked to have been made from those thigh-thick ropes dockhands used to tie off fishing boats traded pull-up sets on multicolored parallel bars. A couple drank tea far from the snoring bum; the woman wore a red gold ring, pledged but available for flings, and the man wore no ring at all, and Izza wondered if they were courting or friends.