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

by Max Gladstone

  And she fled.

  * * *

  Kai cursed and swore and screamed. So much pain, down there. She could fix it. She could fix everything, if they would all just listen to her. There would be no storms, and the sea would never take them. No pain. No death. No bodies, no mourning white, no pallbearers bringing fathers home. She’d fought so hard to make the world obey—to take her life into her hands, to force fate down proper courses. And here she held the reins of the world, but they were hooked through her hands, and other reins pierced her arms, other bits tore her mouth, and she and they were all just puppets moved by hooks that tore their flesh, but if she fought hard enough, if she bled long enough, she could save it—

  * * *

  Ley stared up into the sky. Somewhere, there was a war. Somehow, people fought. Around her the city twisted and coiled, an injured octopus, a gallowglass in tangles. She could barely move. Her shoulder and arm, her ribs, were masses of agony. Zeddig sprawled beside her, and Bescond beside her. Alikand and Agdel Lex were burning. Angels flashed, fought, died.

  The web spread in the sky.

  She stared up. The strands drew her in. The web listened to her, molded to her.

  She spoke her sister’s name.

  * * *

  Izza ran.

  The Blue Lady sprinted like a shadow through the trees, and she was the Lady’s prophet. There were no trees here, but Agdel Lex and Alikand and the dead city were forests, after a fashion—different layers of the same forest, and she sprang from canopy to trunk to root and back.

  The gray followed her. It wanted her. She tempted and tantalized. All that faith, all that meaning, all that soul, out of reach. The gray had no form—lacked believers save its need, lacked dogma save expedience. She ran? Fine. The gray would make itself run faster.

  She sprinted over rooftops in the Wings, darted down mazelike Alikand alleys, guided by the knowledge of the kids she’d left behind in the Temple of All Gods. No need to ask directions. She knew these streets as if born to them. Doubled back, ran loops, cut across the great Iskari boulevards, stitched the city to the city. The gray could not touch her. Could not keep pace.

  It wanted her, though. All the little godlings bled together as they tried to solve the problem of Izza. The gray saw the Lady, felt the shape of her story, and changed to match her. The snake of godlets became a cascade of footfalls, thousands of Izza echoes, running.

  She had left this city long ago, hungry, furious, sad, and never thought to return. She never expected to save it. Or to sacrifice herself in the process.

  She leapt over the walls of the train station, darting past cranes, over cargo containers, through warehouses, and the flood of Izzas scrambled after.

  * * *

  Gal was a poem. Lightning struck her, but she cast it aside with her burning sword. Space crumpled around her, but she was not there to crumple with it. She fought toward Gerhardt, singing.

  Raymet, on the other hand, lurched, dodged, tumbled, fell. The air around her thickened, and she could barely breathe. Time ran slow in the center of that bubble. Gerhardt, within, had aged ten seconds in a century and a half. “Stop it,” Raymet cried. Choked, as a tongue of thick air wriggled into her mouth, but she bit that tongue off and spit it out, then fell through a cloud of razors that cut her skin. “Stop, dammit.”

  She did not die. Vines of iron thorns sprouted to spear Gal, who danced past, grinning.

  “It’s over,” Raymet shouted against the torrent of time. “You won. You won a hundred godsdamn years ago. Stop fighting.”

  Gal cut through the thorns, but some had caught her. She bled. She slowed.

  Raymet lost all words for the battle between Gal and the Craftsman. The Craft sent against her were thorns, so she was a flower growing from the thorns; the Craft a hand to pluck the flower, and she a bird to fly from the hand, and the Craft a net to catch the bird, and she a seed to slip the net.

  Gerhardt’s lip, Raymet saw, twisted up just slightly. Cruel. Amused.

  “You think this is a fucking game?” She reached for him. Her fingers numbed. Chilled. She couldn’t feel them anymore.

  Gal fought on behind her, beautiful and doomed.

  Raymet caught Gerhardt’s lapel. Her fingers were ice. They would not close. She did not care.

  “You have the whole fucking world,” she said. “Just die, and leave me her.”

  The smile faded. Like a glacier receding, his eyes tracked left.

  The woman who had stabbed him held her arm across his neck. There was a ring on the finger of the hand that held the knife. Tears glittered, frozen to her cheeks.

  * * *

  “Kai,” her sister said.

  In the silence of space, in the maelstrom of her mind, she heard the voice. She felt a hand on her shoulders.

  “I can do this,” she growled. “I can fix it. I can—”

  “I know.” She felt her cheek against her cheek. “That’s how it gets you. You want to fix everything, so badly. You want to prove you can make it work. We both do. It’s okay. We can’t. The world’s not ours to fix. Things change. Dad’s gone. And I love you.”

  * * *

  Izza vaulted to the roof of the train, jumped onto the station, and dove off—landed, with a roll and a skid, in the plaza before Gavreaux Junction.

  Fitting. Agdel Lex ended here, for her, years ago, in fire. Might as well end here again, in ice. If the plan didn’t work.

  The gray landed behind her, skidded exactly like, and came, in perfect time, to their feet. An army of Izzas, they were, an army of Ladies optimized to sprint and chase and flee. Desperate in their hunger, the gray did good work. They made fantastic copies.

  And, with stories, a copy always flows back to the tale that gave it form.

  The gray realized what was happening, too late.

  They tried to scramble, scatter, flee. But as they ran, they blued, and changed, and the Lady closed Her hand and made them Hers.

  * * *

  Kai let go.

  The voices called to her, in their millions. They were not hers to shape, but she could not stop up the ears of her mind. So she let them speak.

  There were so many cities, below. How strange, to try to force them into one. A city was a prism. Hold it up and look one way, and you saw one image; hold it another way, and another formed. She listened to the tension; she heard the squid railing for its vision, and the other voices hungry, so hungry, for theirs.

  Looking down, she saw Agdel Lex and Alikand.

  Good.

  Let them be.

  Kai had a promise to keep.

  “Kai,” her sister said, at first. “What are you—”

  Her voice faded, with the others.

  Gyroscopes within the capsule shifted. The web tangled, realigned. The world wheeled beneath her, and set. The moon remained. Stars filled the porthole overhead.

  She kept silence, and listened.

  * * *

  On the roof of the Anaxmander Stacks, the wind stopped.

  Many things died at once.

  In the center of the space, on a raised platform, where once astronomers sought the stars for truth, crumbled two skeletons in suits of bloodstained wool. They both wore rings.

  As they fell, as they died at last, so too did the dead city’s war machines, its spiders and its revenant monsters and the Craft loosed on Alikand. The Wound slipped shut and, healing, left a scar in space.

  Raymet collapsed. Her hand struck stone, and shattered.

  She was too numb to scream. But she could breathe, and when warm arms wrapped her, she could speak the name of the woman to whom they belonged.

  Gal looked beautiful. And not entirely disappointed. “Your hand.”

  “It’s—” Her voice was hoarse with the cold. “I’ll get another one.” To distract herself from the pain, she caught the front of Gal’s shirt with her remaining hand, and pulled her down, and kissed her.

  * * *

  Angels gathered in the silence above the
city. Ragged, hurt, and shining, they watched the new world unfurl: broken glass and broken alleys, burned towers, palaces unseen in a hundred fifty years, bomb craters and broken windows filling with people as they explored the fresh and long-hidden damage. Prayer flags fluttered in market squares. The angels hovered above a city they did not understand, a city they recognized from maps and memory but had never known in life. They saw it clear and crisp as new type.

  They had not won. They had fought, expecting death, hoping for survival, but they did not know what to do when death failed to oblige them.

  A blue spark rose from the city below, and stood before them. A Talbeg girl, barefoot, proud, her clothes torn and dirty, no kind of Queen at all, her eyes were blue from lid to lid, and when she moved blue light trailed her limbs. She was larger than the limits of her skin. Before her, the angels fell back.

  “Do we know you?” asked the angel of House Hala.

  The girl seemed to find that funny, but the angels did not laugh. She said, when she recovered: “You should. I’m the people who don’t fit. I’m refugees and migrants and street kids who’ve never been anything like legal, caught between the lines of your long slow war. I saved you. So now let’s build a future that leaves no one out.”

  “There have been no gods in Alikand for two thousand years,” said the angel of House Lai.

  “Then we have a lot of catching up to do,” said Izza.

  * * *

  Bescond woke to find herself on some godsdamn rooftop, blinking into sunlight. No way she had been out that long. She could not breathe through her nose. Her ribs hurt like hell. Several knuckles broken on the other hand. Something fucked with her ankle?

  She sat up. The world swam.

  She stood.

  This was not her tower. This was not her city.

  Beyond the building’s edge—she could not make it all sit side by side in her mind. War zone, she thought first, and there was that: craters and corpses, shattered markets, ruins she’d only ever glimpsed before through the little breaches her Rectifiers sealed. She could not be seeing it now: she would be dead. And yet it lay beneath her, and living people stood among the craters, tiny at this distance, but wondering, and scared, prisoners with their blindfolds removed. Prayer flags fluttered on the wind. Talbeg calligraphy climbed crumbling proud walls, and made them poems.

  But not all the city was dead. Dense winding alleys ran like webs, like cracks in ceramic glaze, between plaster buildings, up and down the Wings, along the Bite. The shore was bare of factories and hotels, the port of container ships, the jetty where High Sisters should have stood was wind-washed rock again, but the fishing wharf remained, small boats bobbing at anchor. She recognized these places, though she’d never thought to know them: small corners not worth her notice. And they were woven through the dead city now, and no one was dying.

  Impossible.

  And, since impossible, she had no need to understand.

  She looked down.

  Zeddig and Ley sprawled on the ground at her feet, side by side, breathing slow. Exhausted. Hand in fucking hand.

  Lords.

  She reached into her jacket for her knife.

  An enormous shadow blocked out the sun, and the wind of wings blew her hat from her head.

  The angels landed in a semicircle around her. They were too big to be human, and their wings glimmered deep gold.

  The one at the circle’s apex said, “This is not your place anymore. It never was. You have built your own. Go back to it.”

  And then she fell.

  * * *

  Kai hung above the world.

  She did not know what was supposed to happen now.

  She felt light, in more ways than one.

  There were systems, Jax had said, to bring her back. Would they still work? Maybe. She hoped.

  She listened.

  After a long time, the capsule woke with silver.

  There was a woman outside, framed by the moon, though the moon had set long since.

  “Tara?”

  The woman smiled. Not exactly. She looked behind her, at the sky. It’s nice out here, isn’t it?

  “Yes.”

  I don’t think about space this way, She admitted, a bit embarrassed. This is not how they told the story of the world when I was young. That may sound odd, I guess.

  “Not really,” Kai said. “I’ve met You before.”

  Once or twice. Seril sighed. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to stay. It’s peaceful out here. There are so many places to go.

  “Someday, maybe. For now, I have work.”

  The Goddess smiled halfway. You need a vacation. But She reached out, through the window and the capsule’s skin.

  Kai took Her hand.

  Epilogue

  LEY WAITED ON THE beach as the sun sank and the sea grew dark.

  Behind her, cities sorted themselves out. Her shoes sank into the sand. Shooting stars fell above, and the moon claimed the sky.

  A shadow marred—or perfected, depending on one’s point of view—the silver disk. Was it a face? A woman reclined beneath a tree? A rabbit? If Ley had a lover in another country, she would see what she was raised to see, and so would Ley, yet they both watched the same moon.

  The air rippled, and Kai stepped out as through a curtain. She looked . . . like Kai. There was more to say, but there were no words. She landed gently, but sagged when gravity took hold. Ley caught her before she fell, with the arm she had to spare. Kai’s weight hurt, but she did not let on.

  “I would have thought,” Ley said, “the Goddess could have found you a tailor.”

  “I’m trendsetting,” she replied. “Rags are in this season.” Laughing seemed to hurt. “Zeddig? Abernathy?”

  “Busy. There’s been something like a revolution.”

  “I heard.”

  “You saved my life. I saved yours.”

  “Cancelled the debt.”

  “I’d rather not think of it like that,” Ley said.

  “How would you rather think of it?”

  She helped her up the beach. “Miracles. Not only is Sauga’s still open, but I got a reservation. I’m loopy on painkillers, but I can’t think of a better way to spend the next few hours than to hallucinate while you drink wine, and talk about anything but business.”

  “I’m not dressed for Sauga’s.”

  “I thought you were trendsetting. Just be yourself. It’ll be fine.”

  Kai laughed. “I think I can manage.”

  Arm in arm, they made their way.

  “Do you know,” Kai said, “I still have your cat?”

  * * *

  Women waited on the water. Some stood upon its surface, as if on a marble floor. Some hovered over it, wings spread. Zeddig sat in a boat, and wondered why she was here.

  The water went glassy at first, then bubbled and surged. An immense eye breached, star-pupiled and red and ringed in rubbery flesh. A robed man took shape over the pupil’s center—his form and figure clear, but the sea visible through him, as if he were a trick of the light. “You betrayed us,” he said.

  “No,” an angel answered. “We defended our city. We did not harm yours.” Which is more, she did not continue, than you can say in return.

  “Ms. Abernathy,” the man continued, as if the angel had not spoken. “You are in breach of our agreement.”

  “Let’s set aside,” Tara Abernathy said, “the force majeure question. Neither I, nor Alt Coulumb, has harmed Agdel Lex, or Iskar generally. We even protected your territory, when we were under no obligation to do so.” Her skin glistened a mottled metallic gray beneath her shirt collar. “We have, however, formed a separate agreement with the interim clericy of the sovereign state of Alikand.”

  “Leaving us a city of roads and temples, and no people.”

  “Now you’re exaggerating,” Tara said. “The cities split. The split is stable. Alikand has its territory. You have yours. Many stayed on your side of the line. Others will come.”
/>   “You will starve Agdel Lex of trade.”

  “That is not our intent,” the angel said. “But if the cities of the South would rather trade with Alikand than Agdel Lex, they’re free to decide. Competition and free trade are your bywords, not ours—but we will hew to them.”

  The great eye blinked. The man disappeared, and reappeared when the eyelid opened. “Those you have seduced to your banner will find your yoke as harsh as ours. We will pry them from you.” The calm sea boiled with great limbs.

  “I don’t think so,” said a new voice, younger. A girl stepped forth from among the angels. She glowed from within, and swirls of blue light rose where she set her feet. “This isn’t just the old guard talking. The city stands, or falls, through its people. All of them. And the Fifty Families will listen.” Izza looked uncomfortable in the center of so much attention, uncomfortable with the way space warped around her. But she stood anyway. “I don’t know what we’ll build. We’ll sit down: the old families, my people, the folks at the Temple of All Gods, the guilds and the gangs and the folk who don’t belong. But whatever we make, it won’t be about you.”

  “Who are you?” asked the man who wasn’t there.

  “I’m the woman who ate the Wastes,” Izza said. “Now get lost, before we spit in your eye.”

  * * *

  Three days later, Tara met Kai on the top floor of Iskari First Imperial. “I love this,” Kai said, looking down at the city: at its towers, and the gaps between them. “It looks so weird.”

  Agdel Lex lay massive, and in pieces. The great boulevards remained, and the waterfront, and much of the Bite. But the territory beyond—

  “I’ve seen worse,” Tara said. “There’s room for development now.”

  “Thank gods.” Kai pointed at the papers on the conference table. “If I have to commit a few million thaums of Kavekanese capital into the local economy, construction seems like a good bet.”

  “Better in Alikand.”

  “Well, yes. But this way Fontaine gets her chunk, and I get mine. And Jax, through me, gets privileged access to Alikand’s new capital markets, which was a cheap enough price, considering he let me interfere with a twenty-million-soul project.”

  “The capsule landed.”

  “It was on fire.”