Two Serpents Rise cs-2

by Max Gladstone

  41

  Mal stood at the edge of the world. Smoke and flame and cries of riot rose from Dresediel Lex. New life swelled within the urban shell, ready to break the ground, burst upward, fly.

  She tried not to think of Caleb. He didn’t understand, yet. He would, she hoped. He was a good man, and almost wise, even if this city had warped him into a mess of indecision.

  She could remedy that, given time.

  The wind shifted. She looked up from the streets, from the riots, and smiled.

  The skyspires were moving. They retreated from Sansilva and downtown, floating east toward the Drakspine and Fisherman’s Vale. Reflections of rising smoke slid over their crystal walls.

  The Deathless Kings that ruled those spires had caught her scent. Blind prophets trapped in silver cages, card-laying soothsayers and elder augurs, saw her face emerge from the dim confusion of probable futures, framed by fire, laughing. They saw death come to Sansilva, and decided they should leave.

  That was the problem with the Craft. A Craftswoman’s power derived from deals with great Concerns, with devils and demons from beyond the stars, with the secret powers of the world. These pitiless masters did not permit their servants the easy relief of death. A Craftswoman grew great in power, age, and wisdom, but she was bound to the systems that gave her strength: averse to risk, hesitant in action, a cog in a machine beyond her ken. A slave.

  Mal was no one’s slave.

  But watching the spires leave, she felt their loss. Until this moment, she could have stopped. Turned herself in. Claimed Alaxic had controlled her somehow, or the Serpents had. She could have returned to her job, her apartment, her life, her moonlit runs. To love.

  But the spires knew the future, and they were leaving. She had made her choice, even if she didn’t know it yet.

  She took her silver watch out of her pocket. The watch had five hands, and six concentric dials marked with letters, glyphs, numbers. A black hand swung from one letter to the next, and spelled out a message from Heartstone’s head cantors.

  Serpents restless. Please advise.

  No sense answering. They would understand soon enough.

  The moon climbed as a silver sickle toward the sun.

  She poured more water, drank, and set the empty glass on the table. Bending, she shouldered the bag that held Qet Sea-Lord’s heart. Power radiated through the leather, rhythmic as rolling waves.

  She walked toward the balcony’s edge. The railing exploded, and stone splinters rained onto the city.

  Mal stepped out into empty air. Fire quickened within her, and in the black spaces of her soul, she was no longer alone.

  * * *

  Caleb, Temoc, and Teo walked down Sansilva Boulevard, past upturned carriages and carts. Tzimet quivered and recoiled when Temoc turned his gaze upon them. They feared the Eagle Knights of old. Unfortunately, the Tzimet were not the only obstacle between the trio and their destination.

  Caleb heard the mob first—bellowing terror, voices cracked with thirst. Then he saw it. Heads and bodies pressed together, rippling and roiling like the sea at storm, overflowing the boulevard to spread out down side streets. The Cantor’s Shell curved above them all, bluer than the parched sky, taller than the tallest pyramids. Its reflection captured world and crowd.

  Approaching from the ground, Caleb found the protesters both more and less intimidating than they’d seemed from the sky: less, because the black mass of hair and clothes and noise resolved into individual men and women, and more, because those men and women were near enough to hurt him.

  Teo stopped on the sidewalk. “Can we go around?”

  “No,” Caleb said. “I flew by here earlier. The crowd surrounds the pyramid.”

  Temoc removed a pouch from his belt. Coils and claws pressed against the leather from the inside. “The Gods’ power will cow the masses.”

  Caleb thought he heard the pouch growl. He shook his head. “You’ll attract the Wardens. They’re almost as scared as the mob, only they’re armed. Give them something to shoot at, and they’ll shoot.”

  “We will fight them, and they will fall.”

  “If the Wardens open fire, they’ll hit the crowd, too, and we’ll be trampled in the panic—unless you plan to burn through all these people. We’re here to avoid killing, right?”

  Temoc did not reply, but he returned the pouch to his belt.

  “Okay,” Teo said. “Optera?”

  “The bugs are unclean. Their existence offends Gods and man.”

  “Don’t the ends justify the means?”

  “A sacrifice demands purity of intent and form. If we use the bugs, we will have neither.”

  “You just suggested we fight our way to the pyramid.”

  “Battle is holy. Craft-twisted beasts are not.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  No response.

  “Caleb?”

  “Crowd’s thick. Dangerous to force our way through. Unless.” He groped in his jacket pockets until he felt something smooth and fiercely pointed, which he drew out into the light. The shark’s-tooth pendant lay dull in his palm, its surface broken and burned. “I took this off Mal months ago. It helped her sneak into Bay Station, and Seven Leaf. Hid her from anyone without a priest’s scars, including Wardens.”

  Temoc took the pendant from Caleb, turned it, lifted it to the sun. “Broken.”

  “I know, but the glyphwork is old Quechal style. Can you see what’s wrong?”

  “The bonds between the two symbols, here, the seeing and the not, were burned away. Overtaxed.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “I would require a week of fasting, preparation, meditation, to repair this link. In four days I could make a new talisman on the same model.”

  “We don’t have a week. Or four days.”

  “Or four minutes,” Teo said. “I don’t like the looks the crowd’s throwing our way.”

  “A glyph-combination like this consists of two pieces: the seeing-not and the not-seeing.” Temoc drew a line from each end of the negation glyph to each corner of the stylized eye. “The first link directs attention from the wearer. The second suggests to others that the area where we walk is occupied. Without the one, we will be seen. Without the other, we will be crushed by those ignorant of our presence. These links are severed now, but I can re-forge them in my mind, using the amulet as a focus.”

  “Great.”

  “But I cannot do so and extend this protection to all three of us at the same time.”

  “So much for that idea.” Teo tipped her hat brim down over her eyes. “Do we fight our way through?”

  “Dad,” Caleb said. “You can’t hold the links alone. Could we do it together?”

  Temoc looked from the amulet, to Caleb, and nodded.

  * * *

  They advanced, and the crowd parted before them.

  Caleb’s left hand, and Temoc’s right, wound through the amulet’s leather lace. Caleb’s right hand clasped Temoc’s left wrist, and Temoc’s left clasped Caleb’s right. Teo walked in the circle of their arms.

  Seeing not, Caleb repeated to himself. Look anywhere but here. A closed eye shone in his mind, surrounded by billowing clouds. No, not closed—stitched shut.

  “You must empty this space in their minds,” Temoc had said. “We become a moment of distraction, a daydream. I will fill the gap that remains.”

  Look elsewhere. Keep your head down. Nothing new about that. Kopil had been right, months ago. Caleb did not want the world to notice him. Everyone the world noticed, it burned.

  Poker worked this way. Bet aggressively, and others will respond in kind. Play as if you have nothing to loose, and you will lose everything. Play quiet, play calm, and win.

  Men and women stepped aside for them, and closed after they passed. In the heart of the crowd, someone struck up a chant, and a few hundred others joined: “Hear us! Hear us!”

  The shark’s tooth glowed blue. Caleb gripped a line of ice, of fire. His scars cr
acked and burned, casting shadows into the crowd, and onto Teo.

  Don’t look. Don’t see.

  They closed half the distance to the Canter’s Shell, and half that distance again.

  Hide. Live a good life, safe. Guard against disaster. Wrap yourself in cotton.

  Mal’s voice in his ears, flying north to Seven Leaf Lake.

  We cushion ourselves against death. We live in ignorance.

  The closed eye in his mind pulled against its stitching.

  Twenty feet.

  Ten.

  The crowd thinned as they neared the shell. Only the strongest protesters had reached this point: thick men and determined women, daring to approach eternity. On the other side of the blue shell lay piles of ash that had once been human.

  In the crowd near the shell’s edge Caleb saw a yellow smiling face tattooed onto the back of a shaved scalp. He looked again, and saw Balam, the old cliff runner scowling and shouting at the pyramid. “Cowards hide! Cowards run!” Of course. Where else would Balam be as the city fell apart? Sam was here somewhere, too, or else rioting in Skittersill. He did not mention this to Teo. She knew already. She had to know.

  They passed within feet of Balam; his drill sergeant voice boomed in their ears. Caleb shivered as the man raged at him, and through him, unseeing. He did not break stride. “Cowards!” Fair enough.

  Temoc stopped beside the dome, and released Caleb’s wrist. Caleb did not let go of Temoc’s arm. His father took a leather ribbon from his belt and draped it around Teo’s shoulders like a stole. The leather stank of herbal unguents.

  “Dad,” Caleb whispered, as Temoc produced a second ribbon. “What is that?”

  “God-bearer,” Temoc replied, and reached for him. Caleb pulled back.

  Gods lived beyond the mortal world, beside, above, below, permeating it with their presence. Yet deities had anchors: statues, idols, prayers, and god-bearers, relic holders made from cured human skin.

  He tried to find a better way to phrase the question, but settled for: “Who was it?”

  “One of the lesser corn gods.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the god.”

  “Caleb, put it on. We don’t have time to argue.”

  Seeing. Not. Seeing.

  “Cowards!”

  “Caleb,” Teo said. “Do it.”

  Stitches strained, burst. The shark’s tooth burned blue.

  “He died centuries ago. A sacrifice. This is the only way to pass through that shell. You must carry a god within you.”

  “You could have told me before.”

  “I hoped to avoid this conversation.”

  “Excellent job you’ve done.”

  “I have set this city and all our souls at risk out of respect for your reluctance to shed blood,” Temoc said. “Do not balk at a millennia-old death.”

  “My reluctance?”

  “Caleb,” Teo whispered. “Can we have this conversation when we’re on the other side?”

  “Put it on.”

  “Fine,” Caleb said, and grabbed the stole.

  Temoc stiffened. Teo swore.

  Caleb froze with his hand on the leather. He had let go of Temoc’s wrist.

  The amulet’s glow guttered and died.

  Silence fell over the crowd. A hundred thousand eyes fixed at once on Caleb, Teo, and Temoc. Caleb’s half of the link had failed, but Temoc’s had not—and so the crowd looked upon them, and saw something greater. An immense impossible presence filled the space where they stood.

  Couatl screamed overhead, and their wings beat closer. Green light flickered about the serpents’ claws: weapons of Craft, building, burning.

  Caleb grabbed Temoc’s wrist, but panic gripped his mind, and he could not blur them to insignificance again.

  The burly men and broad women nearby had stopped shouting. Balam curled his massive hands into fists. He saw, they all saw, a target for their rage. He took a step toward them, and another.

  The Wardens dove to attack. The green light in their Couatls’ claws sharpened to barbed spears.

  Caleb grabbed the god-bearer, wrapped it around his neck, and dove into the blue. Teo and Temoc followed.

  42

  Imagine a cerulean field that stretches to the farthest star. Plummet through that field. Close your eyes. Forget them. Forget the body that falls, and leave only the sense of falling.

  He could not see Teo, or Temoc. Were they near? What did that term mean? Between any two points stretched infinity. Could one infinity be larger than another?

  He fell, but he was not alone. Another mind woke within his, powerful and still. Caleb gibbered at empty time, endless space. The stranger did not.

  Let me in, the stranger whispered.

  At first Caleb shrank from the voice, fleeing across forever. The stranger did not need to pursue. All space and time were equal before it.

  You will fall, screaming, through ten thousand ages until your mind breaks and body crumbles, and nothing will endure but a scream. Listen and you can hear them, cries that outlast the throats that gave them voice.

  Listen, and let me in.

  Caleb heard: high-pitched and low, screams of women and men and children, unending.

  He opened his mind.

  Sensation pierced him, charring synapses, wiring his body to an engine of pain. He remembered he had lungs, for they spasmed in agony; his flesh shriveled and his mind burst and he was—

  Was golden sunlight on the tip of a blade descending, a knife’s edge drawn over flesh, a spurt of blood and a relieved sigh from upturned faces. Red droplets fell in rain, as a dragon vomited up the sun. The people wept and prayed and interned his corpse in soil to decay and be reborn in wriggling worm and fruitful seed, in the first brave green spear that pressed through the hard earth and swelled into corn.

  He was gathered, he was burned, he was beaten and pounded into thin flat bread. Teeth tore him and he became flesh once more, breathing, sighing, loving in a million bodies until the dragon swallowed the sky, the raven stole the sun, and he lay again upon the altar. He writhed in drugged futile struggle against his chains; in his eyes he gathered the world, concentrated its wasted pieces into a perfect image of the universe—and in his death that world grew again from corn.

  Death and rebirth became him, a cycle of time stretching back past Dresediel Lex to the Quechal homeland sunk below the sea, and further still, to men and women weeping over a grave in a trackless wilderness, bedraggled creatures with bedraggled gods, haunted by ghosts of language and ceremony.

  Time was a ring, the cosmos a cycle. Space itself was curved, the Craftsmen claimed.

  Spinning in emptiness, he gave his blood to the world, and the world cracked open to receive him.

  * * *

  Caleb struck the gravel hard and skidded. Rocks tore his shirt and the skin of his back. The impact jarred, the gravel stung, but the pressure and pain were gloriously real. He laughed in relief. The shark’s-tooth pendant fell beside him. He slid it into his pocket, patted the pocket, and stood, turning back toward the Canter’s Shell.

  Teo fell into him out of the blue.

  She was limp, and heavy, and made no sound. He staggered beneath her weight.

  He set her back on her heels. She trembled, eyes closed, and did not move. Her chest rose and fell. Quechal symbols glowed from the god-bearer draped across her shoulders. Her lips moved, and she whispered in High Quechal: praise the mother who bears the twins, praise the father risen in the corn, praise the twins who die and rise again, on and on.

  “Teo,” he said. She did not respond. He touched her cheek.

  Her eyes flew open, and they burned. No trace remained of her pupils and iris. To stare into her was to stare into the sun. She chanted, louder. “Praise the mother and the father. Praise the mother who bears the twins. Praise the father risen in corn.”

  He tore the god-bearer from her neck, but she did not wake. The leather coiled on the ground, and twitched as if alive.

  Temoc steppe
d out of the Canter’s Shell, and approached Caleb. Walking over gravel, he made no sound. He regarded Teo as if appraising her for purchase. “She was not ready to host a god. Without scars, without training, the experience can overwhelm.”

  “Wasn’t ready? You knew this wasn’t safe for her. You knew, and let her come anyway.”

  “She insisted on accompanying us, though she knew the dangers. She claimed she could open the pyramid. She may still serve that purpose.”

  Caleb looked back at Teo, and closed his eyes. A twitching ruby spider spirit hunched in her heart, preening with each repeated syllable of her prayer. A small god, feeding.

  Caleb opened his scars. The spider in Teo’s body twitched as if it could smell him.

  He bent to her ear and whispered in High Quechal: “I cast you out.”

  The spider twitched. Teo spoke, and he heard another voice, like brushing cobwebs, paired with hers: “By whose authority?”

  “My own.” His words were ragged with rage. “Leave her, or I will break your legs. I will blunt your fangs and blind all your eyes and you will die.”

  The spider wavered, as if about to fight, then faded into darkness.

  Teo stopped her prayers. Her eyes closed.

  Caleb waited.

  When she opened her eyes again, they were dark, and human.

  “Hi,” she said.

  He hugged her, and she embraced him weakly in return. “I appreciate the sentiment,” she said, “but I don’t swing that way.”

  “You’re back.”

  “Did I leave?” She stepped forward, swayed, and almost fell. He grabbed her by the arm, and she recovered her balance.

  She shot her cuffs and straightened the shoulders of her jacket. Her hat had rolled to the ground, and she knelt to retrieve it. “I’ve never felt anything like that. The King in Red has been inside my soul once or twice, but … I lived a thousand years. I could hear time.”

  “If you lived a century ago, you would have been prepared for the experience,” Temoc said. “Gods are not so common today as once they were.”

  “Fine by me,” she replied.