Two Serpents Rise

by Max Gladstone

  “You attacked him in broad daylight, with thunder and shadow and incendiary grenades. People died. He survived. You knew he would. No one who can kill gods would go down that easily. All you did was hurt the innocent.”

  “No one who works for Red King Consolidated is wholly innocent.”

  “I work for RKC, Dad.”

  An airbus passed overhead. Light from its windows cast the pavement in alternating strips of brilliance and shade. The light revealed Temoc’s face in slivers: jutting cliff of jaw, heavy brow, dark, deep eyes, Caleb’s own broad nose. A dusting of white at his temples, and the firm lines chiseled into cheeks and forehead, were his only signs of age. No man in Dresediel Lex could say how old Temoc was, not even his son—he had been a hale young knight when the gods fell, which made him eighty at least. He nurtured the surviving gods, and they kept him young, and strong. He was all they had left—and for twenty years, they had been his only companions.

  Caleb looked away. His eyes burned, and his mouth felt dry. He massaged his forehead. “Look, I’m sorry. It’s been a long night. I’m not at my, I mean, neither of us is at his best. You say you don’t have anything to do with the Bright Mirror thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you’re lying, we’ll find out.”

  “I do not lie.”

  Tell that to Mom, he could have said, but didn’t. “Why are you here?”

  Caleb’s father might have been a statue for how little he moved—a bas relief in one of the temples where he had prayed before the God Wars, where he prayed and cut his arms and legs and dreamed that one day he would tear a man’s heart from his chest and feed it to the Serpents. “I worry about you,” he said. “You have been staying out late. Not sleeping enough. Gambling.”

  Caleb stared at Temoc. He wanted to laugh, or to cry, but neither impulse won out, so he did nothing.

  “You should take better care of yourself.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” he said.

  “I worry about you.”

  Yes, Caleb thought. You worry about me in those last raw hours before nightfall, before you try to tear down everything we who work in this city build during the day. You worry about me, because there’s no more priesthood, and what are kids to do these days when there are no more reliable careers involving knives, altars, and bleeding victims? “That makes two of us,” he said, and: “Look, I have to go. I have work in four hours. Can we talk about this later?”

  No response.

  He turned back to his father, to apologize or to curse, but Temoc was gone. Wind blew down Bloodletter’s Street from the ocean and sent a small flock of discarded newspapers flapping into the night: gray beasts old the moment they were made.

  “I hate it when he does that,” Caleb said to nobody in particular, and limped across the street to the House of Seven Stars.

  * * *

  Teo had an apartment on the seventh floor, a corner room she’d bought with her own soulstuff. The day she signed the contract she’d drunk a half-gallon of gin with Caleb in celebration. “Mine. Not my father’s, not my mother’s, not my family’s. My soul, my house.” When he observed that she was technically part of her family, she’d thrown a napkin at him and called him a bastard.

  “You know what I mean. My cousins are all tied to the purse strings. Not one of them has even the poorest excuse for a career. They live in those damn beach houses up the coast, or circle the globe on Pop’s ticket, three weeks doing coke off the naked back of an eighteen-year-old boy in one of those nameless ports south of the Shining Empire, a month ogling sentient ice sculptures in Koschei’s kingdom. Lunch in Iskar, dinner in Camlaan, a romp in the Pleasure Quarters of Alt Coulumb, and none of it earned. This place, this is mine.” She put a fierce edge on that word.

  “And what’s yours,” Caleb replied, drink-slurred, “is mine.”

  “I’ll hang the most absurd pictures on the wall, and keep a shelf of single malts, and polish the counters so they reflect themselves a hundred million times. Never will there be a single book out of place or a single picture crooked.”

  She was drunk, too.

  “Can I visit?”

  “You may call on me for the occasional bacchanal and revel.” She glared down her nose at him like an empress from her throne. “In exchange, if I am out of town on business, you must feed Compton,” meaning her cat, a treacherous calico.

  “Sure,” he said, and took the key she offered.

  He leaned against the lift wall and watched the floor numbers tick up to seven. Phantoms filled his skull: Temoc, father, rebel, murderer, saint. The goddess whispered in his ear. Blood. Stars reflected in dark water. They all faded into vacant, expansive night, the night after the death of the world.

  The night of his mind shone black. Mal curved before him like a blade.

  The lift’s bell called Caleb back from the ocean of her eyes to a white-carpeted hallway hung with dull oil paintings. Vases of silk flowers stood on teak tables heavy with ornamental bronze. He shuffled down the hall, and searched his jacket pockets for Teo’s key.

  His thoughts were chaos and blood and fire as he slid the key into the lock. Chaos, blood, and fire; flood, poison, riot, ruin. Mal didn’t seem the poisoning type, but what was the poisoning type? Why linger at Bright Mirror if she wasn’t involved? She should have snuck away the moment she saw Wardens. Perhaps she trusted her shark’s tooth to keep her safe. Flimsy defense, since Caleb could see her. Then again, the Wardens lacked Caleb’s scars.

  He needed a bed, or a comfortable couch. He’d catch hell from Teo in the morning for stumbling in unannounced, but her apartment was closer to the office than his, and he had stashed clothes in her closet—clubbing clothes, yes, but he could salvage an outfit from them for work.

  He pushed the key home, turned the knob.

  Light stung his eyes, and for a confused moment he thought, good, Teo’s still awake. He stepped into the living room.

  Thirty seconds and a shriek later he staggered, eyes closed, out into the hallway. The door slammed behind him. His cheeks burned. From within, he heard two women’s voices raised in argument. He waited, eyes still shut, until Teo’s words assumed the weight of finality, and the other woman retreated toward the bedroom, cursing.

  The latch turned and the door opened.

  “You can look now,” Teo said.

  She’d wrapped herself in a plush white bathrobe, hair a tangled mass on her forehead. Compton wound sinuously between her bare feet, and licked sweat from her ankles. Over Teo’s left shoulder, Caleb saw a blonde wearing white cotton briefs and nothing else stagger into the apartment’s one bedroom and slam the door. “She seems nice,” he said, lamely. Teo didn’t respond. He tried again: “Sorry. I’ll go.”

  She assessed him with a glance: clothes in disarray, hair standing up, tie crooked and loose. “What happened?”

  “The Bright Mirror thing went south. There was a girl there, and she woke the Tzimet up. I have to be in the office early, but I need sleep. Hoped I could use your couch.” I didn’t realize you were using it, he thought but didn’t say. “Sorry. Dumb idea.” He didn’t want to go home. “I hope I didn’t screw up anything for you.”

  She sighed. “You didn’t screw anything up. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Sam’s emotional. An artist. She’ll be fine in the morning. The couch is yours, if you want it.”

  “I shouldn’t.”

  “I can’t let you stumble back out into the night looking like a half-strangled puppy. I’ll tell her you’re one of my idiot cousins or something. Don’t make me regret it.”

  “Too late,” he said, but she had already turned her back on him.

  Lights off, he lay on Teo’s couch in the dark, staring up at the terrifying cubist landscapes that adorned her living room. A panorama of the Battle of Dresediel Lex hung over the couch, burning pyramids and torn sky, spears of flame and ice, bodies impaled on moonlight sickles, warring god
s and Craftsmen rendered in vivid scrolls of paint. One corner of the painting showed Temoc locked in single combat with the King in Red, before he fell.

  Caleb’s eyes drifted shut. Tzimet towered above him, reaching toward the cold stars. Compton dug claws into his leg. He rolled onto his side. Leather creaked.

  He drifted to sleep, drowning in a black sea.

  5

  Dreams of knives and blood on stone woke Caleb to the hard harsh morning, to the light beyond Teo’s windows and to the crick in his neck. He pulled himself off the white leather couch like a man pulling himself out of hell, and staggered for her bathroom, rubbing one hand over the scars that webbed his torso.

  A long shower later, he dripped across Teo’s living-room carpet to the hall closet. His nightclub suit would do, a sharp pressed gray with a white shirt, so long as he left the vermilion vest and spats and cravat behind. Yesterday’s shoes were scuffed, but serviceable. He’d have them polished on the way, and find a toothbrush, too.

  From Teo’s spare pantry he scrounged a bowl of polenta, and two eggs, which he scrambled. On the table as he sat down to eat, he found a note written in her sharp hand.

  I’d say help yourself to breakfast, but I know you already have.

  See you at work. The door will lock behind you.

  Sam’s pissed, by the way. No surprise. I’ll work my way back into her good graces, but you owe me coffee, at least.

  The signature was an uppercase T in pen strokes so deep they dimpled the thick parchment.

  The wall clock read 9:47 A.M. Caleb ate a hurried breakfast under the baleful stares of bloodthirsty paintings, washed his plate and the frying pan, and left in a rush, realizing only after Teo’s door clicked shut behind him that he had left his hat on her coffee table.

  * * *

  Dresediel Lex crushed him in a cacophonous embrace. Carts and carriages and wagons clogged the street outside Teo’s building. Drivers shouted at pedestrians, horses, and other drivers as if they could break gridlock by inventive language and the threat of violence. Couatl, buzzing optera, airbuses and simple balloons tangled in the flat blue sky.

  Heat ruled the city, dry dominant heat like a god’s gaze or the breath of a forge. All bowed before the heat; buildings prostrated themselves, and people slouched nearly naked beneath the beating sun. By this hour Craftsmen, bankers, brokers, and all others who dressed for work were safely ensconced in air-conditioned offices. Actors and students and night-shift workers walked the streets in shorts, light shirts, miniskirts, tunics, sleeveless ponchos. Caleb caught himself following the long bare legs of three young women down the sidewalk, and closed his eyes. A sharp smile surfaced from the confusion of his memory: the woman, Mal.

  He bought a newspaper from a corner stand for two thaums—cheap enough, but his head ached from spending even a little soulstuff. Hangover, had to be. He’d won a good chunk of soul the night before, shouldn’t need to visit the bank for a week or so. The newspaper held no news about Bright Mirror Reservoir, a good sign. The King in Red did not control the press directly, but news of a crisis like Bright Mirror had to be managed.

  Caleb walked two blocks to the airbus station and caught the next dirigible downtown. The bus moved west and north, threading around and beneath skyspires toward the 700 block of Sansilva, where eighty-story pyramids rose to worship the sun.

  No real worship had taken place there since Liberation, of course. Still, the pyramids impressed.

  The air lost its haze, and the sky retreated from the earth. Craftsmen and Craftswomen drew power from starlight and moonlight, though they could also drink from the sun, or from candles, fires, living beings. Smoke and exhaust from the city’s wagons, factories, and cooking stoves would not disturb simple, day-to-day Craft, but the Concerns of the 700 block brooked no interference with their dark and delicate work. They burned their sky clean.

  In the depths of winter, when rain washed sweat from the city’s brow and flash-flood rivers coursed down alleys, the sun still beat down on the 700 block. At night, sorcerous clouds covered the poorer districts, Skittersill and Stonewood, Monicola and Central and Fisherman’s Vale, reflecting light back to earth so that, in dark Sansilva, even the faintest stars would hang exposed to hungry Craftsmen.

  Caleb got off the bus a half-block from RKC’s headquarters, the obsidian pyramid at 667 Sansilva. True Quechal protesters stood outside, chanting and waving clapboard signs: NO DEMONS IN OUR WATER. THE GODS DEFEND. NO WATER WITHOUT BLOOD. Half wore modern clothes, slacks and shirts and skirts, and half garments even Caleb’s father would have thought clownishly traditional: white dresses hemmed in silver cord for the women, and cotton kilts for the men, their bare and unscarred torsos covered with Quechal glyphs in red paint. Four black-uniformed Wardens watched the crowd, arms crossed. Sunlight glinted off their badges, and off the silver planes of their faces.

  As Caleb approached, a soapbox preacher pointed to him with one gnarled finger and cried, “Flee this place! Traitors walk here, traitors to blood, traitors to Gods and their own kind!”

  Caleb ignored the man and edged around the crowd. No sense wondering how the True Quechal had learned about Bright Mirror. Their noses were better than vultures’ for smelling rotten meat.

  “If you will not flee,” the old man called, “then join us. It is not too late. Stand against the blood-betrayers, the worse-than-dead! Take up the cause!”

  “Get lost,” Caleb shouted in High Quechal as he walked past.

  The old man’s face twisted in confusion. He probably didn’t know High Quechal, beyond a handful of half-remembered words from some underground religious service. Few spoke the priests’ tongue these days. Caleb only knew it because his father had taught him.

  He walked through the protest. Behind, the chants and slogans swelled again to crescendo.

  * * *

  Caleb stepped off the lift at the pyramid’s twenty-third floor, into the silence of men and women working.

  He wound through cubicles toward the Director’s corner suite. Tollan would want to see him before he drowned in the sea of paperwork no doubt already covering his desk. Much as it pained Caleb’s boss to admit, some truths could not be conveyed in the blanks of official forms.

  He saw her office door, and slowed.

  Tollan’s door was a pane of frosted glass—a source of comfort to the whole department, because from her general position in the office they could tell her mood. If she was at her desk, the world was at peace; if pacing, at war; if tending her peace lily, best hide and wait for the axe to fall.

  Caleb could not see Tollan, or her desk, or her peace lily. A black blade had cut her office from the universe. Terrible things moved in that blackness, and few of them were human.

  The door crept open.

  Caleb ducked into the nearest cubicle, startling its blocky, middle-aged occupant from his work.

  “Sorry, Mick.”

  “Caleb? Where have you been? The boss is looking for you.”

  “I’ll talk to Tollan when she’s done with—”

  “Not the boss,” Mikatec whispered. “The boss.”

  Caleb knelt behind the cubicle wall. Mick had papered his workspace with pictures of his younger, sleeker self, playing ullamal, holding athletic trophies, screaming triumph. Caleb crouched beside his coworker’s memories, and listened.

  Quills scratched paper. Chair wheels squeaked. Fingers drummed on a desk. An actuary the next row over coughed.

  From the darkness beyond Tollan’s door came a voice like the end of the world: “I hope our trust in you is not misplaced.”

  Color faded from the pictures of Mick’s glory. Ghostlights overhead flickered and died. Someone—a new hire, had to be—cursed, and someone else shushed her. The noise of pens and chairs and drumming fingers stopped. The risk management department grew still.

  Tollan’s door swung shut.

  Three distinct, sharp taps trespassed on the hush, then three more, then the thud of a bronze-shod staff on stone. Th
e noises repeated. A heavy robe swept over the stone floor.

  Caleb held his breath.

  The King in Red moved among the cubicles, wreathed in power. The taps were his triple footsteps: the bones of his heel, the ball of his foot, the twiglike toes striking in sequence. “As you were,” he said. No one stirred. Sixty years ago, the King in Red had shattered the sky over Dresediel Lex, and impaled gods on thorns of starlight. The last of his flesh had melted away decades past, leaving smooth bone and a constant grin.

  He was a good boss. But who could forget what he had been, and what remained?

  The footsteps receded, and light seeped back into the world. An elevator bell rang. When the doors rolled shut, Caleb exhaled, and heard others do the same. A thin layer of sweat slicked his brow.

  He patted Mick on the shoulder, loosened his collar, and walked to Tollan’s office.

  * * *

  Tollan paced behind her desk, cradling a glass of mescal. She took a sip, and shook herself. Her long black hair was up in a tightly coiled braid, which left her face severe and thin.

  “Where have you been?” she asked when he closed the door.

  “Sleeping.”

  “Sleeping.” She laughed without humor, and looked down as if surprised to find herself holding a drink. “Once in a while I convince myself I’m used to him, I can handle him. Then I see him angry.” She squeezed the glass as if to crush it, reconsidered, and set it on her desk.

  There was no need for her to say whom she meant.

  Caleb waited. At last, he said: “I was at Bright Mirror until half-past four. If I arrived earlier, I would have been too tired to help you or anybody.”

  Tollan kept pacing. He had expected her to shout at him. Her silence was worse.

  “Bright Mirror is under control,” he continued. “Nobody was hurt. The Tzimet are contained. They’ll die slowly, but they will die. We can keep the water flowing. He shouldn’t blame this on you.”

  “That’s your professional opinion?” Her shoes ground against the floor when she turned.

  “Isn’t it yours?”

  “We took every precaution,” she said in a tone contemptuous of precautions.