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

by Max Gladstone

  Gal knelt by her bars, mottled from her own session with the Wreckers, but she didn’t look nearly so bad as Raymet felt.

  “You didn’t talk?”

  “Fuck ’em” turned out to be easier to say than “Alarms,” or “What’s happening,” which she tried next. She had a lot of practice cursing.

  “I’ve never been inside the tower during an alert,” Gal said, “but this sounds like delvers. Lots of delvers. Or just one, being very stupid.” She looked so calm, so godsdamn perfect. Maybe they taught you how to do that in Knight school—to seem glorious when bruised, battered, and behind bars. “You should have talked. They would have stopped.”

  “Not giving them satisfaction.” She had to choose between breathing and speaking a complete sentence; her lungs told her she chose right. With the aid of the bars she levered herself up into a sitting position, conscious of torn muscles, tension. “Maybe we can get out of here now. They’re all—” Distracted was a tall order, vocal-production-wise, but she tried anyway. “Distracted.” Almost. B-minus, even on a post-torture curve.

  “Escape,” Gal said, “is dishonorable. I was bested. I surrendered.”

  Raymet hit the bars with her balled fists. The bone, or teeth, or whatever, made a wooden sound when struck.

  “That won’t work.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and sounded it. “I didn’t mean to make this harder for you.”

  “You’re not worried—well, good for you.” Talking hurt, but there was too much she’d kept inside, and when she started she could not stop. “You trained for this. You’re not from here. On some level, whatever happens, if they start at you with pliers and a crowbar, it will all be just one more move in your honor game, part of the adventure you wanted when you were a girl. You’re still kneeling there, playing with dolls. And the squids will play along with you, because your game fits theirs. I don’t get to play. I’m the fucking field. I’m the dollhouse. I’m the board. I hate the people who make the rules, and I hate the people who made you so you’d want to play by the rules they set, so when they told you to find a hill to die on, you did. I just want to be out of this godsdamn cell. I just want us both to live.”

  “Why,” Gal asked, “did you come back for me?”

  * * *

  The sirens required a change of plan. Izza, prone between the drop ceiling and the rafters where she’d hidden after she gave the lidless eye the slip, had expected to escape under darkness, but Camlaanders had that weird saying about plans and mice and gley.

  Izza’s original plan had been sheer elegance in its simplicity: the Sisters wouldn’t check on her until lunchtime the next day. They’d expected to find a young woman weeping, contrite, broken by the eye. When they found an empty cell instead, there would be trouble. By that point, Izza and Isaak would be far away, toasting their success, and figuring out how to deal with Kai’s prophecies of doom.

  But the alarm changed everything. Once the sirens stopped the Sisters would check their charges, even the ones in solitary. Don’t want the poor dears terrified in a way we don’t intend. Terror is a resource, after all. And the Sisters had to be shown in control.

  So the sun was just setting when she removed a ceiling tile and dropped into the infirmary.

  Two beds were curtained off. Izza ignored the gurgling wet sounds within. Isaak lay propped on pillows near the back, sleeping, a mound of muscle and armored flesh under a thin white sheet. Splints held his arms and legs together.

  She would have sworn she made no sound when she approached, but he snapped awake anyway. He tried to focus on her face, couldn’t without his glasses, but he still knew her. “Izza.”

  A hero, in her place, would snap back something witty, make him laugh, get his arm over her shoulder so they could limp to escape. In a mystery play the whole complex would blow up behind them for no reason, without apparent concern for the kids still trapped inside. Another sort of hero would have said nothing, just got them both the hells out of here. She wasn’t any kind of hero, so she said, “Hey.”

  “Go,” he said. Drawing breath seemed to hurt. That would be the ribs. “I can’t. I’m beat up too bad.”

  “We’re leaving together.”

  “Take care of yourself.” He breathed slow. “Trust the Lady. She likes you. Stay smart, pray to Her, She’ll help you out.”

  That was when the other half of her plan failed.

  In the crawlspace, she’d imagined faking another miraculous episode: pretending to be overcome by inspiration, blue eyes and burning hands, to save him and escape High Sisters without any confessions or hard conversations, with this friend she did not want to be her worshipper.

  Her friend, to whom she’d lied, and kept lying.

  Gods, she prayed. Maybe someday You’ll stop getting me into trouble.

  Sirens wailed. Did they have ten minutes? Less?

  Not enough for this. She might as well get over with it now.

  She held his hand, and said, “No.”

  * * *

  Zeddig did everything wrong.

  And the wrongs felt glorious.

  When you delved, you honored simple rules: only when nobody’s watching. Only in places you know intimately, in the living cities and the dead. Exit where you entered. Proceed with plausible deniability. Everyone knows the dead city exists, everyone knows it waits behind the curtain of Agdel Lex, hungry to drag us all down into its maw—we just ignore it when we can.

  The rules were for everyone’s protection. The city would crumble if people remembered where they really lived. The delver was at risk, too: she carried the dead city’s stench, an aura of blood and gunmetal and wrong names.

  You played safe, you did not offend the sensibilities of the mass, because if you didn’t, the Wreckers would smell you. The Wreckers stood guard against incursions from the dead city—so all Zeddig had to do was cause an incursion.

  She ran down the Boulevard Pragmatique in Agdel Lex, and fell onto the road that in the dead city was called La’at, half as broad and bounded with structures twice as high, their façades tile mosaics twined with burnt vines. A library tower stood here, caved in by a fallen angel. Running, she stitched between worlds. Half-dead once-human beings, limbs contorted by phage-curses, metal bugs writhing in their minds, light leaking from their eyes, leapt out of the wreckage, and Zeddig danced back into Agdel Lex, running once more down the Boulevard Pragmatique, against traffic. She dove from street to sidewalk. Phages chased her, clawing against the world-skin. Behind Zeddig, a man almost saw them, and screamed, remembering for one instant the pit beneath his feet.

  Good. She ran.

  She stitched across the boundary in plain sight. The more witnesses the better. Sirens followed her. She sprinted down side alleys, uphill into the Bite, and fell into the dead city for the few seconds she could bear so close to the Wound. Frost crystallized on goggles as a golem made from buildings wrestled an angel whose wings cut pavement. When she emerged, the frost on her goggles burst into steam, and she heard more sirens.

  The Wreckers closed in, sniffing the night. They swung from building to building, wriggling along walls to fight the incursion she, Zeddig, faked—and ignored, in the commotion, Ley’s sprint across the frozen ocean to the Altus Spire.

  That was the idea. Distract and outrun. Spread chaos and trail a city’s worth of salarymen and tourists, artists and husbands, mothers and daughters who remembered, in the moment of her passing, what lay beneath them. So, when she cut across a trolley track into the Bite’s orgiastic thrumming bar streets, and saw the Wrecker perched atop an ancient observatory tower converted forty years back to a beer garden—actually saw it—she felt relieved.

  But the Wrecker didn’t see her yet.

  So she waded into a fountain, climbed the naked Iskari cherub in the center, and, straddling its shoulders, waved her hands in the air, and shouted, “Hey! Ugly!”

  The hood turned her way.

  She raised both middle
fingers, and dove into the dead city again.

  * * *

  Raymet forced herself to her feet. “Why the hells do you keep asking me that question?”

  Gal waited.

  “I would have answered it already, you know, if I wanted. I would have said something before.”

  The sirens wailed outside, but the running feet had passed. Most of the assholes must have run off to wherever they were running to.

  “I’m not scared of answering. I just—”

  The cuts on her face pulled.

  Gal waited. She looked so calm Raymet wanted to smash her, and wanted to weep.

  “It’s not like I wanted to. It’s not like I thought to myself, oh, you know what’s a good idea, I should throw myself against Wreckers I can’t possibly fight, to save someone who doesn’t need saving, that’s an excellent idea, let’s try it.”

  One more passing set of boots. Late.

  Blue eyes. Breath, in that body.

  “It’s not love, dammit.”

  She did not move.

  “I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just sex, the old monkey-brain fucking with me again. Maybe it’s the godsdamn seasons. I don’t understand you. I don’t understand this. Your head’s full of all this worthless godsdamn honor and duty that’s done more to break our world than save it. And you’re so certain, and so steady, and so—so—Gods!”

  The way Gal did everything made it seem like the most natural and beautiful thing in the world. Now, she stood.

  “It can’t be love. Love is something two people do when they know each other, and trust each other. Love’s what Ley and Zeddig had. Damn if I grew up around any of it. This is, I don’t know, whatever it is people have in those dumb dragon-killing stories you must have mainlined back when you were a kid, two people get their wires crossed in a crowded room and turn dumb. It’s madness. As if I have anything to offer you—I’m just some colony punk who’s never put on a damn ball gown, let alone, what, courted a Knight? Neither of us makes the slightest bit of sense.”

  She didn’t speak. She panted, furious, raw, in her cell.

  “I dream about you. I know what I’d do if you were any other girl. But you’re not. You’re so damn sure. I wish I could be that. I wish I could be as honest about this, about anything, as you are just standing there.”

  She felt empty.

  “Call it love. If you want. I came back for you because I couldn’t leave.”

  * * *

  “Hold still,” Izza said, “and shut up.” She set her hands on Isaak’s scaled and armored skin, and prayed.

  I know we don’t usually do the laying-on-hands thing. But he’s a friend, and I’d say you owe me at least a double handful of favors, for all the trouble I’ve pulled you out of. A sickbed is a kind of prison—and healing’s an escape.

  The Lady was a streetlit smile.

  Izza felt her hands warm.

  “Izza,” he said, “what are you—”

  Then he could not speak. The sirens wailed. Five minutes, Izza bet, before anyone looked in on them. You didn’t worry about escape from the infirmary, or even theft. They didn’t keep the good drugs here.

  She should open her eyes. She owed him this much at least. The Lady worked him from head to toe, meticulous: wounds knit shut, bones wriggled into proper alignment, the body a lock the Lady learned to pick. However imprecisely.

  Are there really supposed to be two bones in the arm beneath the elbow?

  Yes.

  And one above?

  Yes!

  I can think of better ways to do it.

  Just put him back like he was, okay?

  Before or after the augments?

  After!

  The process did not look pleasant. Isaak moaned through grit jagged teeth and screamed once. But it did end, eventually, and left him whole and gasping on the sheets. Tears looked different on his armored scales than they had on the skin she remembered.

  And for my next trick, the Lady said, and the manacles fell from Isaak’s arms and legs.

  Isaak stared at her with awe and wonder, and when he said, “Izza,” it did not sound like her name at all, but a title.

  Might as well get this over with. “I didn’t tell you the truth. The Lady comes from Kavekana, where I live these days. I told Her stories when She was young. People tried to kill Her, and I saved Her life. And now, we’re . . . close.” Faster, because she couldn’t bear it if he tried to get a word in edgewise here: “We work together. I didn’t tell you, because—you were devoted, loyal, faithful, and I just wanted to see my friend again. So I lied. That was wrong. I’m sorry. But we need to get out of here, so maybe if you’re going to be mad at me could we deal with that later?”

  “You’re the Prophet Thief,” Isaak said.

  Yes—and no. That was one name the kids whispered, one of many she asked them to stop calling her, so they said it behind her back, this name like a Penitent itself, armor and chain at once. But it meant something to him, and to deny it would be to let him down, to break the hope in his eyes.

  “I—this is my life now. I love it, but it’s a lot to swallow at once, so can we please stick to Izza? Friend Izza, who wants to break out of jail while everyone’s still distracted?”

  Two minutes, maybe.

  One.

  And Isaak, however uncertain, nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Friend Izza.” He cradled one fist in the other. A salute? A bow?

  No. He cracked his knuckles.

  “What took you so long?”

  She had a retort ready, but then a Sister entered the infirmary, and they had important screaming and running to attend to. The witty comeback could wait.

  * * *

  Zeddig, running, thought of Ley, running.

  She’d been afoot for twenty minutes by the watch. Ley ought to be halfway across the frozen sea by now, guiding herself to the Altus Spire. Ley had never liked running, especially not in Agdel Lex. She took to the road, laced up her sneakers, because she hated her body and herself, and running was a fit punishment for existing. Back in the early days, broke and in love, she and Zeddig had run by the beach until stitches in their sides doubled them on the sand, and Zeddig would be happy for the run, and Ley would be happy the damn run was over.

  Zeddig loved running, loved feeling muscles coil as her feet met pavement; it pleased her, as she ran her alarms across town, to imagine Ley unfurling into the solitude of the ice. There was packed snow on the frozen waves, good traction; she could make decent time, maybe even better than Zeddig’s run through the Bite and Wings. Maybe, in these last moments as Ley fought toward the spire, in that expanse of razor wind and dead sky, she would find peace.

  She might as well. There would be no peace left in Agdel Lex once Zeddig was done.

  She mapped the city in her mind’s hot core. There were forty Wreckers on duty at once, spread across the city and standing guard at the wall. They patrolled territory: some the Bite, others the Wings, a few the Iron Coast, though everyone Zeddig knew laughed at the notion any of those foreign hipsters might delve. Zeddig had laughed too, before Ley managed.

  Delving attracted local Wreckers. To seize the collective’s attention, to get everyone so focused on you they wouldn’t notice your—call her girlfriend, she can’t hear inside your head—your girlfriend sprinting north, you had to run between the districts, dance across them and back, you had to be everyone’s problem, had to use back alley shortcuts to stay uncaught for another—glance at the watch—say, twenty minutes.

  Tick, tock.

  Zeddig ran down an alley; two Wreckers fell from the sky to cut off her escape, while two more pursued behind, swinging from lampposts and scuttling over walls. (That’s good: figure twenty percent of total available squidpower, minus the ones they won’t pull off the wall.) She dove into the same alley, a hundred fifty years and a heartbeat ago—shattered timbers towered above, a door hung off its hinges to her left. Her breath cut her throat.

  At least it was a dry cold.


  Bad joke. No laugh.

  She ran through the broken door, past the table where a family of burned-out skeletons sat at breakfast, through the wreckage of the library. Zeddig remained professional, even after running so fast, so far: her gut twisted to see the books destroyed. Burnt scraps of vellum and cream paper tossed like flower petals in the breeze of her passing. The South Bite had never been rich; the family whose tomb this house became must have accumulated these over generations, volumes added to volumes at marriage, duplicates bartered for new texts or copied by hand, first editions set down against the dowries of children. All lost, now, that wealth of ink and paper broken forever into carbon.

  Angels writhed impaled in the thorn tree sky.

  Shamblers woke in the ashes, drawn by her heat, the demon bugs in their brains writhing. They sprang for her, and she was slow, too slow. One caught her leg.

  She kicked, fell. Claws tore her boot, snapped heating filaments. Cold entered through the wound. She struck the shambler’s hand with her other boot, broke off its thumb, pushed herself to her feet and out, through the ash heap of the cloakroom into the narrow street, and surfaced.

  Light, heat, pain, noise smothered her. Carriages rolled and water-sellers cried and she heard a busker playing sax, and before she could recover a Wrecker landed in her path.

  No, this was wrong—the Wreckers of the South Bite shouldn’t be here yet, she’d just verged on their territory—she spun away, running by the wall, tripping over a trash can. Rotten garbage spewed into the street.

  Wet limbs snared her and set the world right.

  She could not pull away. Why would she? This was her place, her moment. She was a limb out of joint, guided by sure hands back to its socket.

  She remembered that wrecked library, remembered the world she’d lost, and dove.

  It hurt. The Wrecker told her where she was, where she belonged. Denying that, with its arms around her, felt like sawing off her own arm.

  This is good. Trust us, because we made the word, and we’re the ones who should know.

  Zeddig ground her teeth, focused on the pain, and dove.