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

by Max Gladstone

  * * *

  Raymet would have slept through the whole thing if not for the knock on the door.

  She blinked, found her eyes gummed shut, tried to wipe them with her wrist, found said wrist otherwise occupied beneath a weight, tried the other one. Sore all over, and not the good kind. Her lips stung when she licked them. The knock didn’t fucking stop, might as well have been hammering her skull as the door. She tried to tell whoever it was to lay off for a moment, but her voice was a growl—what had she been up to last night, anyway?

  Oh.

  She did not recognize the room, because it wasn’t hers. Of course not. She sacrificed to the squids, for all the good it did her. She had a mortgage, like a good girl. So they knew where she lived, which meant they couldn’t sneak off to her place. They’d gone to Gal’s instead. Gal barely existed so far as the official system was concerned—a foreign ghost, a rat in the walls.

  Raymet’s memories of the night before lay scattered like notescards on a scholar’s desk. There had been running, and fighting, and screaming, and more running, more than even Raymet was used to. And then.

  She turned to see what, exactly, kept her arm still.

  Gal stretched beside her, tall and strong and gold and naked. She glowed. She radiated heat.

  The door burst open, and Ley stumbled in and scanned the room. Her gaze hitched on the bed, and she turned right around to face the wall. “Sorry!”

  Raymet pulled her arm free, stood, and tossed the sheets over Gal, just waking. “What the hells are you doing here?”

  “They got Zeddig. We don’t have time to talk. I need your help.”

  “What? Who’s they? Where are we going?”

  “The tower,” Ley said.

  “Fuck!” Raymet punched the wall. She realized she was also naked, which didn’t help. Her skin was a mottle of bruises, but nothing felt broken. Another memory from the haze of the night before: Gal’s shining hands smoothing her skin closed, her bones straight. The glorious godsdamn pain of healing. “We just broke out of that place. They’ll have double the guards, triple the alert.”

  “We can delve in.”

  “Into the tower? We’d last maybe ten seconds, even if we had equipment, which, in case you didn’t notice, is a bit lacking at this point. Do you have the knife?”

  “Lost it.”

  “Great.”

  “In a few minutes, the dead city won’t matter.” Ley turned around. Raymet had seen her serious before. This looked different. “Zeddig is in the tower. I can’t get her out alone. Will you help me?”

  “Yes,” Gal said, before Raymet could reply.

  “Dammit!”

  “Did you intend to turn her down?”

  “No, but I wanted to work my way up to it.”

  “Get clothes,” Ley said. “Shoes. Weapons, if you have them.” She checked her watch. “We have ten minutes before the city goes weird.”

  * * *

  Kai rose.

  An invisible giant’s hand pressed her against the couch. She tried to lift her head, and could, but her stomach lurched. She settled back and dragged deep breaths, forcing her reluctant diaphragm to do its job. So far, so good. She wasn’t dead yet.

  Dials counted altitude and speed. Others angled her ascent. The glowworm screen writhed to convey messages from the ground: stage timing, operation progressions, all systems go. She could do nothing with this information, barely understood most of it, but she felt better knowing someone, somewhere, knew what all of this meant, and anyway all the lights were green.

  Aside from the air around the capsule, of course, which burned red and orange and gold and blue. As did the capsule itself—its exterior, thankfully. Kai wondered if the glass in the windows was really glass, and if so, whether it would melt. Probably not. Jax had far too many smart people working for him to slip up on something like that. Then again, she’d worked with smart people—hells, she was smart people—and she never ceased to be amazed by how smart people could fuck up, given opportunity and time.

  A crack echoed through the capsule. She glanced out the window, and saw the building-tall spear shaft fall away and drift, spinning, down.

  That was probably supposed to happen. At this point, if anything happened that wasn’t supposed to, she’d be too dead to care.

  The shaking stopped. The fire died. Outside her window shone stars, and the black between, and there, big and bright and clear, the moon.

  The giant uncurled her fingers and let Kai go. She raised her arm, experimentally. The movement felt too slow and too fast at once—buoyant as if in water, but without water’s weight.

  Lights blinked. Dials clicked. She heard a low grinding sound like surf, but not. Her weight shifted. The stars spun. Below her, above, dawned an enormous blue green sphere, scored with swirls of white cloud and lines of mountain gray. Categories she’d only ever applied to maps wrapped themselves around an object in space: an enormous object, yes, in a space all the more enormous, but an object nonetheless, a shape that held her, that she could hold. That oval down there was the Shield Sea, and that other smaller oval the Ebon, and there the forked prongs of Telomere, Isarki swells and Camlaan, and west across the ocean, lost among the blue, a green dot of home.

  I can see my house from here, she thought, and laughed, and realized when she laughed that she was crying.

  She flew, or fell, above the world.

  The glowworms writhed. Deploying Payload.

  Fixed on the world above, on the enormous smallness of sky and sea, of everything she’d ever loved, she almost missed it when the silver net began to spread.

  But she still screamed when its claws carved her mind.

  Chapter Seventy-six

  IN THE HEAVENS THERE was a seed, and from that seed grew a silver web.

  In the city, they saw it grow. The Altus Spire sapped blue from the sky and left stars and purpling black above. Men and women, demons and children, born abroad or with roots straight back to Telomere, they watched great lines unfold and birth smaller ones, each pattern echoing the whole.

  Watching, in awe and fear, they were many. Watching, in awe and fear, they became one. Gendarmes of Agdel Lex and grand dames of Alikand’s secret alleys, Craftsmen and bankers and grad students and refugees and thieves, they stood together. Even those who hid from the web in the sky existed in some relationship to it, defined themselves against it. For an instant, the whole city lay tangent to itself.

  An instant was all the web required.

  The world slid past itself and began to change.

  * * *

  Raymet, running between Gal and Ley, felt the change. She’d spent years studying the topology of belief upon which Agdel Lex was founded; she’d built her life around exploiting it. And now it changed. Uncertainties meshed with uncertainties, and grew certain.

  The ground quaked. Alleys stretched to give birth to city blocks. The skyline revolved on hidden axes, as the dead city’s broken spires twisted into daylight. Air spasmed: now blew the dry desert wind of Agdel Lex, now Alikand’s wet Shield Sea breeze, now the dead city’s razor chill. The clash kicked up dust devils and whirlwinds. Each streetcorner birthed a storm.

  When they reached the Rectification Authority Tower, the barricades were up. Someone, Bescond perhaps, had weighed the risk of uprising during broad-spectrum universal realignment, and didn’t like their odds. Wreckers waited there, and conventional troops, some wearing exoskeletons of glyph-glistening steel, others shouldering blast rods. A net cannon swiveled toward them, spoke.

  Ley shouted, “Delve!” and they did, and landed in the dead city, skidding through hoarfrost on broken pavement, in a university quadrangle studded with decapitated statuary. Before them, where that gross tower stood in Agdel Lex, rose a wave of stone and gold and mosaic and light: the Anaxmander Stacks.

  They sprawled before a gate that never knew a door. The ancient scholars and Queens who threw off the yoke of Telomere’s blood-mad legions had decreed the mother of the mother
of the mother of this palace would have no door, and their children honored their decree. Beyond that tall portal, beneath stained glass, rose shelves carved centuries ago from the wood of trees long gone, some killed in the wars when they fought Craftsmen, others harvested to extinction. The Anaxmander Stacks, the greatest library in the world.

  The architect Hala’Koseih, ten centuries before, and of fucking course Zeddig’s great - great - great - something - or - other, had built a masterpiece. Its lines drew the eye skyward to the summit, where life and world went wrong: the Wound in the dead city’s heart, where Gerhardt hovered always dying, never dead.

  They scrambled to their feet, and sprinted toward the gate.

  “We should be dead already,” Raymet said. “This close without gear—”

  “We don’t need gear,” Ley replied, “anymore.”

  “But we don’t have the knife, either, so—”

  “We all have the knife, now. Up there, in the sky.”

  The barricade remained in vaguest outline, like a fog bank. Gal ran through it without slowing, and up the stairs toward the gate. Police pointed; a blasting rod flashed, and a wave of mist passed through Raymet before she could flinch. If she’d been back in Agdel Lex, her guts would be splattered across the library stairs. “They can see me. In the dead city.”

  “It’s all coming together,” Ley said. “Like a deck of cards. This is the shuffle. The next part’s the bridge.”

  “Do I want to know what that means?”

  “You’d probably rather run.”

  In a better world there would have been time to mark the first entry to the Anaxmander Stacks in generations. A ceremony would serve. A prayer, perhaps. But this was not a better world, so a curse would have to do, and the sound of running feet.

  * * *

  Kai was ten thousand feet across and growing.

  This was the plan. Ride the system, don’t use it. It wants to give you power. It wants to let you decide what the world is. Resist.

  The web unfurled, she hovered weightless at its center, falling and staring down. Silver wire spun from the capsule, filament by filament built against the stars. And the web was part of her, as if some surgeon had stripped her skin, cut free her nerves, rolled them like a stick of glass above a flame until they glowed, then spun them to fine thread.

  She heard.

  How many voices, in Agdel Lex and Alikand? Ten million? Eleven? Present, wondering, tired, scared, eleven million of them to one of her, each staring up, seeking truth from this extravagance in the sky. Kai heard them all. Some of their languages she knew. (Iskari: never seen anything like that befo— Talbeg: please, just come here and look out the godsdamn windo— Schwazwalden: pondering in perpetual expanse— Kavekanese, to her horror: a children’s song.) The words were shards, signals, footprints. The voices mattered, the voices and the selves behind.

  What were they? Who were they? So many. They were not her people, they were not one another’s people, they were together and they tore apart. Hearing them, holding them all in her mind at once, broke her. Who was she? The fisherman’s daughter, the banker, the woman screaming pleasure, the sister, the artist, the wanderer, the priest, the thief, the lover, who? Who, to look out from so many eyes? Who, to hear with so many ears? What did her one body matter, when she could be both sides at once of a screaming orgasm in the Bite, when she could hold an infant to her breast and suck, when she threw burning bottles at cops and trampled herself underfoot and felt her own ribs break?

  They were scattered shards on a floor.

  She was one among so many, and she was coming to pieces.

  No.

  She fought to remain herself in the flood. A reflex, the oldest battle: she knew who she was, she knew her body, knew her past and her home and her family and her soul. She clung to them.

  And the web heard her, and began to change.

  * * *

  From her rooftop, Aman heard the screams. More worrying, she saw their source. The city tightened into focus in pieces, striations of Alikand forced to union with the Iskari city. Structures unfolded from the sky like cut paper models. Streets unzipped between buildings. Worlds that did not admit other worlds existed scraped sides.

  They were not one city yet, but many cities striped through one another. The clarity of Alikand, its colors and draped rugs and fluttering flags, pressed against the plaster and gray steel of Agdel Lex. Pressure built. The clarity gave way in places, held fast in others. And, on the borders, the dead city’s monsters boiled through.

  They were half things. Skeletal torsos webbed with metal crawled on their forearms, spitting spring-loaded poison tongues. Spider walkers scuttled up buildings, pierced onlookers, infected them with whirling bugs that made them turn, hungry, to devour. A shell long frozen in another world detonated in a market square, tossed shrapnel and wood splinters and bodies—but the explosion inverted, warped, twisted itself back, and shaped all that debris to a lumbering almost-human form of fire, triple-jawed, full of eyes and diamond teeth.

  The war kept clear, she noticed, of the Iskari sectors. They did not have such memories.

  Aman did not remember the God Wars. Her grandmother had been a girl when the city broke. Adda never spoke of it, and Aman, who spent long hours with her in the courtyard learning backgammon and chess, learning about Adda’s childhood, about the school where she taught and the girls and boys who studied there, about everything but the war, found her silence carried more than speech could bear.

  These monsters were echoes of a blast Aman felt happy she never heard. How horrible it would be to watch all this from a rooftop, unable to help.

  “It’s time,” she said, and each finished what each had already begun. Adal set her hand upon her book, and glared into its paper and the labyrinth printed there. Hojah turned a page, grinned, chuckled, and began to change. Basbeg ran a finger down a margin as she read, and her skin shimmered. Haskei’s thin lips twitched as she scanned her text—she made no sound, but loved the shape of words in her mouth—and wings slipped from her back, and she was tall and dark and lustrous as a statue three thousand years old. Homain touched her with a hand deep black as the night, and her hair was a nebula, and she was huge and strong, and sacred words glistened on her skin. Aman read her acrostic, and spread her wings.

  They were not themselves anymore. Adal was Ko, and Hojah was Zel, and Basbeg Lai. They were the angels of their families, last links of a chain passed back and back. The libraries fed them, gave them light and life and strength: volume after volume, gathered, cared for, shelved and shared, loved, read, stained by coffee and by ink, wrinkled with tears and rain.

  They looked at one another, and at the world.

  And for the first time in a hundred fifty years, the angels of Alikand took flight.

  * * *

  Tara, on the wall, saw the Wastes flicker. The twisted self-devouring mess of almost-gods writhed as the web spread in the sky, and then they were gone, and desert, blasted here and there to glass, spread to the horizon. Then the Wastes flickered back, only to vanish again.

  The web was working—for now.

  Tara wished she knew how long Kai needed her to last. She wished she knew the other woman had made it—that this would be anything more than a last stand.

  But then, nothing was ever easy.

  The Wastes could not be part of Agdel Lex, Iskari city. There was no room for dead half gods and war damage in the Demesne. Before the web, the Iskari could only wall out the Wastes—now, with ten million citizens’ negotiated faith, they could seal them over entirely. Of course, the Wastes’ half gods would not go without a fight. But as consensus pressed down against them, they found another realm lay free: Alikand.

  Wet gray beasts made from braided snakes roused themselves from the divine slush. Great skulls rolled toward the wall; a hundred enormous hands, claws, paws, assembled into a centipede with fingers and talons for legs. They advanced in strobe-light flicker as the Wastes faded in and out: barely prese
nt, trickling forth, and now a wave, a flood.

  She could stand aside, and let them pass over her, through her. She belonged to Agdel Lex. The visa in her pocket, with its tentacled seal, said as much. She stood under the squids’ protection.

  She raised the visa before the godflood, and tore it down the middle.

  The seal flared. She let the two halves of parchment fall, burning. A pair of winged fangs bubbled up from the flood to eat them.

  She fell into the dead city, into Alikand. She stood on a wall. Then the wall was gone, and she stood on air. The flood came for her.

  Fucking finally.

  Tara Abernathy drew her knife.

  Ready? she prayed.

  Across the city, Hasim and Umar answered, Ready, and another voice, too, a girl’s.

  Good. The more the merrier.

  Far away, Tara felt the moon smile.

  They had that in common. This, at least, at last, felt right.

  The flood reared, cobra-like and vast, slavering mouths and crooked claws and burning eyes, and struck.

  And Tara cast it back.

  * * *

  Izza stood, hand in hand in hand, with Hasim and Umar, in a ring in the salt circle, facing out. They prayed. Izza felt the Lady inside her, lending strength from the congregation back across the waves in Kavekana, and she listened to Hasim’s chant in a Talbeg dialect she barely understood, felt him do things with faith that she had not known possible. He found tangent points of belief, he bridged the gap between his weird bird-headed knowledge god, Umar’s massive sharp white river, and the Lady—did not combine them so much as braid them, and pass that cord of faith to Tara on the wall, to the Craftswoman who was a priestess, for use as a lash.