“Security guard. Night roster says the guy’s name was Halhuatl. The Wardens thought this was a homicide until the reservoir tried to eat them.”
Gravel growled on the road behind: the golem-carts arrived at last. Caleb turned. Exhaust puffed from joints in the golems’ legs. RKC workers in gray uniform jackets walked from cart to cart, checking the rowan logs piled within. Two junior analysts stood beside the foreman, taking notes. Good. The workers knew their business. They didn’t need his people interfering.
“Horrible way to die,” Teo said.
“Quick,” Caleb answered. “But, yes.”
“Poor bastard.”
“Yeah.”
“Now we know Tzimet are in there, we can keep them from getting out. Right?”
“They can’t get into the water system, but to keep them imprisoned we need better Craftsmen than we’ve been able to get out here so far. Those glowing glyphs hide the reservoir from animals that want a drink. We’ve inverted them to hide the outside world from the Tzimet. They can’t hear us or smell us, but they could kill us no problem if they knew we were here.”
“You sure know how to make a lady feel safe.”
“The Craft division’s woken Markoff, Billsman, and Telec; once they arrive, they’ll build a shield over the water. Feel safe then.”
“No way Telec’s sober enough for work at this time of night. And Markoff will be trying to impress the shorefront girls with his rich-and-sinister routine.”
“Dispatch found them all, and claims they’re up for it. Anyway, the Tzimet aren’t a big deal in the meantime, long as they don’t get into the pipes.”
“Glad to hear it.” She grimaced. “I think I’ll lay off tap water all the same.”
“Don’t let the boss catch you.”
“I said I’d stop drinking it, not selling it. Can this kind of infection happen any time?”
“Technically?” He nodded. “The odds of Tzimet infestation in a given year are a hundred thousand to one against or so. We didn’t expect anything like this for at least another century. Poison, bacterial blooms, Scorpionkind, yes. Not this.”
“So you don’t think it was natural?”
“Might have been. Or someone might have helped nature along. Good odds on the latter.”
“You live in a grim universe.”
“That’s risk management for you. Anything that can go wrong, will—with a set probability given certain assumptions. We tell you how to fix it, and what you should have done to keep it from happening in the first place. At times like these, I become a hindsight professional.” He pointed at the blood. “We ran the numbers when Bright Mirror was built, forty-four years ago, and thought the risks were acceptable. I wonder if the King in Red will break the news to Hal’s family. If he has a family.”
“The boss isn’t a comforting figure.”
“I suppose not.” A line of golem-carts rolled past behind them.
“Can you imagine it? A knock, and you answer the door to see a giant skeleton in red robes? With that flying lizard of his coiled on your lawn, eating your dog?”
“There would be heart attacks.” Caleb couldn’t resist a slim smile. “People dying with the door half open. Every personal injury Craftsman in the city would descend on us like sharks when blood’s in the water.”
Teo clapped him on the shoulder. “Look who’s got his sense of humor back.”
“I might as well laugh. I have another three hours or so of this.” He waved over his shoulder at the carts with their cargo. A bleary brigade of revenants in maintenance jumpsuits lurched by, bearing rowan. They stank of grave-musk. “I won’t leave until three, maybe four.”
“Should I be worried that it takes demons to break you out of your funk?”
“Everyone likes to be needed,” he said. “I might be late to work tomorrow.”
“I’ll tell Tollan and the boys you were out keeping the world safe for tyranny.” She fished her watch out of her pocket, and frowned.
“You late for something?”
“A little.” She closed the watch with a click. “It’s not important.”
“I’m fine. I’ll catch up with you tomorrow.”
“You’re sure? I can stay here if you need me.”
“Fate of the city on the line here. I have my hands full. No room for self-pity. Go meet your girl.”
“How did you know there was a girl?”
“Who else would be waiting for you at two in the morning? Go. Don’t get in trouble on my account.”
“You better not be lying.”
“You’d know if I was.”
She laughed, and retreated into the night.
* * *
The maintenance crew poured ten tons of rowan logs into the reservoir. Revenants did most of the hands-on work, since they smelled less appetizing to the Tzimet. Soon, a smooth layer of wood covered the water. Caleb thanked the foreman as his people slunk back to their beds.
The rowan would block all light from stars and moon and sun. The wood’s virtue poisoned Tzimet, and deprived of the light that cast their shadows, the creatures would wither and die.
Overhead, Wardens circled on their Couatl mounts. Heavy feathered wings beat fear through the sky, and Caleb felt serpents’ eyes upon him.
By sunrise, every executive in Red King Consolidated would be knocking on Caleb’s door, demanding to know how Bright Mirror was corrupted. Craftsmen could bend lightning to their will, cross oceans without aid, break gods in single combat, but they remained human enough to hunt scapegoats in a crisis. Sixty years after Dresediel Lex cast off the gods’ yolk, its masters still demanded blood.
So Caleb searched for a cause. Bright Mirror had been built with safeguards upon safeguards. If a mistake was made, what mistake, and who made it? Or was there some force at work more sinister than accident? The True Quechal, or another group of god-worshipper terrorists? Rival Concerns, hoping to unseat Red King Consolidated as the city’s water source? Demons? (Unlikely—the demon lords made a hefty profit from their trade with Dresediel Lex, and had no reason to hurt the city.)
Who would suffer for Halhuatl’s death?
Rowan logs bobbed on the still reservoir. Caleb’s footsteps were the only breaches in the night’s silent shell. City lights glowed over the dam’s edge, as if the world beyond was burning.
He walked the shoreline, searching for a sacrifice.
3
By the time Caleb reached the far side of the reservoir, he was so exhausted he almost didn’t see the woman.
He had not found his cause. All the equipment and wards seemed to work. No barbed wire was severed, no holes cut into the fence. No drums of poison stood empty beside decaying chemical sheds. He spied no pitons or carved handholds on the cliffs above the water.
When he closed his eyes and examined Bright Mirror as a Craftsman would, he saw an enormous web spun in three dimensions by a drunken spider. He could make no sense of that weave, let alone tell if it was broken.
He opened his eyes again. The dam’s edge cut the world in half, water and rowan below and sky above. To his right stood a dormitory shack, windows dark, inhabitants lost in sleep and demon dreams. Caleb was alone.
He blinked.
Not alone.
A woman leaned against the shack, arms crossed, one knee bent, her heel resting on the wall.
She did not seem to have noticed him. He engraved her on his memory: slender, and tense as a bent blade. Short black flames of hair blazed from her head. Thin lips, with sharp edges. She wore calf-length pants the color of sand and rock, a white sleeveless shirt, and dark gray close-toed sandals with leather straps that wrapped around her ankles and calves. She looked as if she had no business anywhere near Bright Mirror Reservoir.
She rubbed her bare arms, and shivered from the cold.
Either the woman had not seen him, or didn’t think he could see her. If the former, she’d see him soon enough; if the latter, no sense demonstrating she was wrong. He surveyed gro
unds, sky, water, and shed, as if she did not exist. Step by nonchalant step, he drew closer. She glanced at him, and smiled a self-satisfied smile. She did not greet him, nor did she speak, which settled the matter to Caleb’s satisfaction. She thought she was invisible. Fair enough.
When he came within range, he sprang.
He pinned her arms to the wall. She did not curse or struggle, only stared at him with wide startled eyes of a brighter black than he’d known eyes could be.
He was lucky, he realized, that she didn’t try to fight him. Her arms felt strong, and his groin was exposed to her knee.
“Who,” she asked, “are you?”
“That’s my line.”
“You don’t look like a Warden. Is this your hobby, jumping unarmed women in the middle of the night?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m taking the air,” she said with a smile. “Waiting for a nice man to accost me. Only way to get a date in this town.”
“Give me a straight answer.”
“I fell from the sky.” She was beautiful, he thought, as weapons were beautiful. No. Focus.
“I work for RKC. This reservoir has been poisoned. The water’s infested with Tzimet. One of our workers is dead. I’m not here to joke.”
Her smile broke. “I’m sorry.”
“Who are you?”
“You first.”
“I’m Caleb Altemoc,” he said before it occurred to him not to answer.
“You can call me Mal,” she said. “I’m a cliff runner.” Caleb’s eyebrows rose. The rules of cliff running were as simple as the rules of murder: runners chose a starting rooftop and a destination, and met at moonrise to race, following any path they chose so long as their feet never touched ground. “I train in these mountains at night. I’ve come every evening for a couple months, but usually no one’s awake. Between the Wardens, the zombies, and the carts, I had to stop and watch.”
“Months. Why haven’t we caught you before now?”
Her eyes flicked down. A shark’s tooth pendant hung from a cord around her neck. The tooth was etched with the Quechal glyph for “eye,” capped by a double arc that signified denial or falsehood. Eye and arc both glowed with soft green light. A strong ward against detection. Expensive, but cliff running was a sport for idiots, madmen, and people who could afford good doctors.
“Why should I believe you?”
“If I’d poisoned this water, would I wait around for someone to discover me?”
“That’s for the Wardens to decide.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Trespassing is wrong. And they’ll want to talk to you even if you’re innocent. If you’ve been here every night for the past few months, you might have seen something that could help us.”
“I won’t go with the Wardens.” She pushed against his grip, to test him. He did not release her, and shifted to the side to bring his groin out of range. “You know how they feel about cliff runners. Ask me what you want, but keep them out of it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” she said, and hit him in the face with her forehead.
Caleb stumbled, and caught himself against brick. Blind, he turned, following her footfalls. His vision cleared in time to see her leap out over the reservoir. He cried a warning she did not seem to hear.
Claws of black water burst up to pierce and catch and rend. She fell between them all, landed on a thick rowan log, and sprang from it to the next. Talons sliced through the air behind her. Mal fled toward the dam, trailing a wake of hungry mouths.
Caleb had no time to call after her. Four thorn-tipped columns rose from the water, arched above him, and descended. He dodged right, hit the ground hard, lurched to his feet and sprinted along the water’s edge. The Tzimet could not see him, but they knew humans: where one was, others would be also.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mal run and leap, now an arc, now a vector.
He did not wonder at her, because he had no time. He ran with fear-born speed.
Iron stairs led down to catwalks crisscrossing the dam’s face. Caleb reached the stairs seconds ahead of the Tzimet, clattered down the first flight, and crouched low on the landing. The dam plummeted three hundred feet beneath him to a broad valley of orange groves. Miles away, Dresediel Lex burned like an offering to angry, absent gods. He pushed all thoughts of height and falling from his mind. The iron landing, the dam, these were his world.
Wards at the dam’s crest stopped floods during the winter rains. They should hold the Tzimet.
Emphasis on “should.”
He swore. Mal (if that was her real name) was his best lead, and she’d be dead soon, if she wasn’t already. One misstep, a log rolling wrong underfoot, and she would fall into a demon’s mouth.
He waited for her screams.
A scream did come—but a scream of frustration, not pain, and issued from no human throat.
Mal dove off the dam into empty space.
Once, twice, she somersaulted, falling ten feet, fifteen. Caleb’s stomach sank. She fell, or flew, without sound.
Twenty feet down, she snapped to a midair stop and dangled, nose inches from the dam’s pebbled concrete face. A harness girded her hips, and a long thin cord ran from that harness to the crest of the dam.
Blue light flared above as Tzimet strained against the wards. Iron groaned and tore. A claw raked over the dam’s edge. Lightning crackled at its tip.
Mal pushed off the concrete and began to sway like a pendulum, reaching for the nearest catwalk—one level down from Caleb. He ran to the stairs. Another talon pressed through the dam wards, scraping, seeking.
At the apex of Mal’s next swing, he strained for her. She clasped a calloused hand around his wrist, pulled herself to him, wrapped a leg around the catwalk’s railing, and unhooked her tether.
“Thanks,” she said. Sparks showered upon them. Fire and Craft-light lanced in her eyes.
“You’re insane.”
“So I’ve heard,” she said, and smiled, and let go of his arm.
He grabbed for her, too slowly. She fell—ten feet back and down, to roll and land on a lower catwalk, stand, run, and leap again. She accelerated, jumping from ledge to ledge until she reached the two-hundred-yard ladder to the valley floor.
Caleb climbed over the railing to follow her, but the chasm clenched his stomach. His legs quaked. He retreated from the edge.
Above, demons clawed at the emptiness that bound them.
The Wardens would catch her in the valley, he told himself, knowing they would not. She was already gone.
4
An hour and a half later, a driverless carriage deposited Caleb on the corner of Sansilva Boulevard and Bloodletter’s Street, beside a jewelry shop and a closed coffee house. He hurt. Adrenaline’s tide receded to reveal pits of exhaustion, pain, and shock. He’d told the Wardens he was fine, he’d make it home on his own, thanks for the concern, but these were lies. He was a good liar.
Broad streets stretched vacant on all sides. The carriage rattled off down the empty road. Night wind brushed his hair, tried and failed to wrap him in a comforting embrace.
He remembered lightning-lit eyes, and a tan body falling.
He’d given the carriage the wrong address, and stumbled a block and a half to his destination, a ten-story metal pyramid built by an Iskari architect mimicking Quechal designs. Over the door, a plaque bore the building’s name in an art deco perversion of High Quechal script: the House of Seven Stars.
He exhaled. It was this, or home.
“You’ve come up in the world,” said a voice behind him, deep as the foundations of the earth.
Caleb closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and counted in his head to ten and back in Low Quechal, High Quechal, and common Kathic. By the time he finished (four, three, two, one), the flare of anger dulled to a familiar, smoldering rage. His nails bit into his palms. Perfect ending to a perfect day.
“Hi, Dad,�
� he said.
“Either that, or you’ve abandoned that rat-trap house in the Vale to live off your friends until they kick you out.”
“It’s a long way home. I’ve been working.”
“You shouldn’t work so late.”
“Yeah,” Caleb said. “I shouldn’t. I wouldn’t have to, either, if you’d stop trying to kill people.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Caleb turned around.
Temoc towered in the darkness beyond the streetlamps. He was a man built on a different scale from other men: torso like an inverted pyramid, arms as thick as his legs, a neck that sloped out to meld with his shoulders. His skin was a black cutout illuminated by glowing silver scars. The same shadows that clouded his body obscured his features, but Caleb would have known him anywhere: last of the Eagle Knights, High Priest of the Sun, Chosen of the Old Gods. Scourge of the Craftsmen and right-thinking folk of Dresediel Lex. Fugitive. Terrorist. Father.
“You’re telling me you don’t know anything about Bright Mirror.”
“I know the place,” Temoc said. “What has happened there?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, Dad.”
“I play at nothing.”
“Tzimet got into the reservoir. We’re lucky they killed a security guard before the water cycled into the mains this morning. Otherwise we’d have thousands out already, crawling in people’s mouths, spearing them from the inside.”
Temoc frowned. “Do you think I would do that? Consort with demons, endanger the city?”
“Maybe not. But your people might.”
“We stand up for our religious rights. We resist oppression. We do not murder innocents.”
“Bullshit.”
Temoc lowered his head. “I do not like your tone.”
“What about when you ambushed the King in Red five months back?”
“Your … boss … broke Qet Sea-Lord on His own altar. He impaled Gods on a tree of lightning, and laughed as They twitched in pain. He deserves seventeen-fold vengeance. I am the last priest of the old ways. If I do not avenge, who will?”
Two Serpents Rise Page 2
