Two Serpents Rise

by Max Gladstone

  After ten minutes’ agonizing climb they reached Caleb’s squat two-story. A small gang gathered on his lawn, three men and two women bearing paints and brushes and knives. The tallest man had defaced Caleb’s front wall with a crude, violent cartoon of Aquel chasing demons from the earth.

  “Hey!”

  The painters turned. In darkness Caleb could not see their faces. They might have been his neighbors. Paint glistened like blood on the wall.

  “Get the hell away from my house,” Caleb said.

  The tall man set down his brush. His shoulders were broad, his steps heavy.

  Caleb twisted free of Mal to meet the man’s advance.

  “We have a right to be here,” the man said in High Quechal, his vowels round and broad, consonants knife-sharp. He spoke as if each word were a boulder he had to lift and let fall. He’d learned the tongue from books. “The dark is sacred. We glorify the Gods.”

  “The gods,” Caleb said, and the tall man recoiled, for Caleb also spoke in High Quechal, swiftly and without accent. “The gods spit on your offering. They don’t notice such small gifts. Count yourself lucky. If you met them face-to-face, your heart would burst and your brains boil.” The painters stood sharp and at bay, like surprised rats. Did they understand him? “Leave my house,” he added in Kathic. “Scuttle back to your holes.” He shook, and hoped they took his tremors for rage rather than exhaustion and injury.

  “Who are you?” the tall man asked.

  “My name is Caleb Altemoc.” For the first time in years, Caleb put the accent on his father’s name. “Leave me in peace.”

  One of the shorter men took a slow step back. The others followed. That first step taken, the second followed faster, and the third faster still. They retreated into the Vale.

  Caleb watched until they were no longer people or even rats but insects, ants, disappearing into the deepening dark. Night overcame him and he slumped against the side of his house. Bloody paint smeared across his cheek.

  Through the shifting world he saw Mal sheathe a knife.

  With her aid, he shuffled along the wall to his front door. He searched his pocket and after a brutal interval found his keys. “In the last blackout some kids, same ones maybe, painted half the houses two blocks over. Paint sinks into the adobe. You have to redo the whole wall to get it off. Public nuisance.”

  She watched him fumble with the lock and miss the keyhole twice. “Need help?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “What if they didn’t run? What if they wanted to fight?”

  “They believe in the old gods, or claimed to. Anyone who believed in the old gods, and liked to fight, died a long time ago.”

  The latch clicked open, and he stumbled into his living room. Mal followed him, and he closed the door behind her.

  Caleb lived alone in the Vale, no girlfriend to impress, no pets save a four-foot iguana he kept to chase the larger spiders away. What did such a life require? In the living room, a couch, two secondhand chairs, an unlit brazier, a shelf full of books on poker and bridge and a few cheap Iskari romances, the kind with dashing swordplay and dark Craft and men who raced to save the world from doom. A low table by the couch bore a five-story house of cards. Caleb was almost glad for the blackout: darkness made the room look like the chaotic abode of a dangerous mind, rather than a chamber cluttered with a young man’s junk.

  Mal waited by the door. Caleb searched the table for a match and lit the candles scattered on shelves and tabletop. “Sorry.” With a wave he indicated the mess. “I didn’t expect guests.”

  Mal turned a slow circle on the carpet. Fire painted the room orange and black, and her the same. “Why all the candles?”

  “I like candles more than ghostlight. They feel authentic. Besides, lights aren’t reliable in this part of the city, especially in summer.”

  “Is that so?”

  “You must live on the west side,” he said, meaning: you’re richer than I thought. She didn’t respond, not that he expected a response.

  “Do your lights die so often that you need to leave candles out?”

  “No.” He looked away from her, at the shadow she cast on the wall. “My father comes to visit sometimes. Craft tends to break when he’s around.”

  She leaned against the couch. “Your father.” Head lolled back, mouth open, she reminded him of a sacrifice in an old engraving, curled around the blade plunged into her stomach, crying out in pain or rage or ecstasy. She whispered: “Caleb Altemoc,” accenting his father’s name.

  “I told you when we met.”

  “There are names and then there are names. I didn’t think you meant that Temoc, of all the Temocs in Dresediel Lex.”

  “Temoc Godhaven. Temoc Last-Standing, Temoc who strikes as an eagle from the heights. Priest of All Gods. Tormentor of Dresediel Lex. Yes. That Temoc.”

  “He really is your father?”

  Caleb nodded.

  Her eyes were dark as the inside of her mouth. “Why did you chase me?”

  “That’s not the question you should ask.”

  “What is?”

  “Ask why I didn’t tell the Wardens you were at Bright Mirror.”

  She blinked. “Why?”

  “Because if I told them, they’d have thought you poisoned the reservoir. If I tell them what you did tonight, they’ll accuse you of blowing up North Station.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I believe you. But they wouldn’t. If you’d gone with me two weeks ago, they would have asked you questions—that’s all. Now, they’re eager, and desperate. They’ll tie you to a rack, pull your memory out through your eyes and slice it with silver knives until they find the truth.”

  “And they’ll learn I’m innocent. What do I have to fear?”

  “Pain.”

  “Pain doesn’t hurt.”

  “This kind does. It changes people. Bright Mirror wasn’t your fault—it was my father’s, or the fault of those who follow him. Dad’s hurt too many men and women, by his own hand and by proxy. I don’t want him to hurt you, too.”

  Candlelight soaked her hands in blood. “What do you want from me?”

  “Tell me what you saw at Bright Mirror. Give me something to go on, some angle to chase.”

  “Nothing. Moonlight on the reservoir. Your guards. The Tzimet.”

  “No sign of a poisoner? Nothing incriminating?”

  “No.”

  “I need more.”

  “I have no more to give.”

  He walked around the couch toward her. Flames danced in her eyes. The shark’s-tooth pendant hung from her neck. He touched the pendant, lifted it between thumb and forefinger. His hand grazed her chest, and she twitched as if he had shocked her.

  “How did you get this?” he asked softly.

  “I bought it.”

  “Old Quechal workmanship. You didn’t find it at a Craftsman’s boutique.”

  “I have sources.”

  “In the Skittersill.”

  “Yes.”

  “You must have paid a small fortune.” He turned the tooth over. Intricate carvings covered its back.

  “A lady never tells.”

  “I can help you,” he said. “If you give me the pendant.”

  “Why?”

  “You use it to sneak into places you shouldn’t be. That brought you to Bright Mirror two weeks ago, and to North Station tonight. Someone’s playing you for a patsy. If I take this, maybe I can find out who.”

  She didn’t respond. Slowly, he lifted the pendant over her head, and slid it into his pocket.

  When he looked up, she was watching him.

  “You ran after me,” she said, “even though you might have died, because you wanted to help. And you won the race.”

  “I didn’t win. I cheated. I fell.”

  The curves and planes of her face were red and yellow and black. “If you hadn’t won, I wouldn’t have caught you.”

  Like water she flowed toward him. Her small blunt nose touch
ed his, and her leather slacks pressed against the inside of his thighs. Her dried sweat smelled of salt and sea and flesh. She kissed him. Her lips were cool, the rest of her body warm.

  He tossed inside her kiss like a splinter in a flood. Too soon. Too strong. A crashing kiss, a kiss with death at the bottom. He thought of his dark room upstairs, where there were no candles to light their bodies turning on fine cotton sheets. Drowning, he breathed her in, and she filled his lungs instead of air.

  Their lips parted, and he saw himself reflected in her eyes.

  “Well?” she said after a moment.

  “No,” he replied. A knife lifted from his throat. The gates of heaven swung shut.

  Her right eyebrow crept up, and her head tilted to the side—puzzled, not disappointed. “Why not? Because I kissed you before you kissed me? Because you don’t want this?”

  His mouth was dry. Words formed slowly, heavy with regret. “Because I do. But if we go upstairs now, it will be over tonight. We’ll lie together, and you’ll disappear.”

  He lived in her scent. He struggled to master himself, and at last stepped back.

  He recognized her expression from countless card tables, from Craftsmen and snakelings and demons and human beings judging their cards and judging him.

  “Do you want me to leave?” she asked at last.

  “It won’t be safe outside until morning. You can use my bed. I’ll sleep down here, on the couch.” He sidled toward the stairs, but did not take his eyes from her, so he tripped over the coffee table and scattered the house of cards. “I just need to go upstairs and get a few things, first.”

  Cresting the stairs he found his bedroom door closed. He stepped inside, and pulled the door shut after him, blocking out the candlelight from below. The bedroom was not dark: a dim blue radiance shone within, the color of the Sansilva sky at night.

  “Dad,” he said in High Quechal. “You need to leave.”

  14

  “You knew I was here.” His father’s voice rumbled like an avalanche. “How?”

  “I don’t make card towers, Dad. My hands shake.”

  Temoc lay on Caleb’s bed, reading a book on contract bridge. The bed was made, corners tucked in military fashion, though Caleb had left the sheets in disarray that morning. Temoc must have made it before lying down.

  Caleb’s father was girded for battle, his skin black as empty space. Jagged patterns of moonlight gleamed from his forehead, his cheeks, his chest and arms and stomach.

  “Don’t you ever wear a shirt?” Caleb asked as he approached the bed.

  Temoc dog-eared his page in the book, closed it, and sat up. “I was waiting for you.”

  “Whatever you have to say, I don’t want to hear it.”

  “I can see you’re angry.”

  “I’m not angry,” he snapped. His father shrugged. “I’m not. Do you have any idea how many people you killed tonight? I was almost one of them.”

  Temoc stood. Shadows melted into his skin. Mazes of silver light dimmed and died, leaving a network of scars across his body and face.

  Caleb’s father had fought for sixty years. Stone and lightning and time could not defeat him. His was a losing war, against knowledge and truth and undead hordes, but he refused to die or surrender. Songs were sung of his exploits in the God Wars and down the decades since, bloody violent odes chanted by drunken hoodlums in the Skittersill.

  “I didn’t do it,” Temoc said.

  “Someone tried to break the city tonight, using a god for a weapon. Who might that have been, do you think? Mom? The Wardens? The godsdamn King in Red?”

  “Believe what you will. Speak to me in whatever tone you think yourself entitled to use. I did not cause this blackout. I would swear this to you on the gods, if you believed in them.”

  Caleb shook his head.

  “I do not lie.”

  “Who else could have convinced a god to do something like that?”

  “Goddess,” Temoc said, and stopped, and closed his eyes. Caleb waited, and soon his father found words again: “The figure burning in the sky was Ili of the White Sails. She is no more.”

  Caleb wanted to put a hand on his father’s shoulder, and throw him out the window. “Fine. Feel sorry for a goddess, not for any of the people killed tonight in the blackout, in the hospitals. In the riots. Every True Quechal dope who throws a beer bottle at a Warden this evening and has his arms broken for the privilege is on your conscience, whether you admit it or not. Either way, find somewhere else to hide. I need this room.”

  Glass broke two streets away, shattering the bedroom silence. “I did nothing,” Temoc said. “My people did nothing. The Wardens attacked my hiding place soon after the blackout. I fought my way free, lost my pursuers, came here. Call me murderer, terrorist, call me whatever they’ve taught you to call those of us who keep the faith, but I had no part in tonight’s attack. I am innocent of this attack, and of the death of Ili of the White Sails.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “I’m your father.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  “I have to go. The Wardens will be here soon.”

  Caleb scanned the sky outside his window for Couatl, and listened for the beat of their wings. He saw nothing, and heard only the distant riot.

  “We have a few minutes left before they catch my trail.”

  Was that patch of darkness a cloud, or a Warden’s mount? “The blackout won’t last.”

  “Of course not. One power station was destroyed, a single link in the chains that bind our city. Lights will return within the hour. Breaking your master’s grip would require more than a single explosion.”

  “Which of course you know, because you’ve spent seventeen years planning this kind of attack.”

  Temoc did not answer.

  “You claim you’re innocent of the whole thing?”

  “I do.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “I wanted to see you.”

  Caleb closed the drapes, but did not turn around. “Liar.”

  “They’ll be hunting me now, more hungrily than they have for years. I won’t be able to visit as often. They might come for you.”

  “I won’t tell them you were here.”

  “No. Tell them. They’ll know if you lie, and you’ll be in more trouble than I’ve made for you already.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Who’s the girl?”

  “She’s, you know.” Caleb laughed bitterly. “I never told you there was a girl.”

  “I heard the two of you downstairs.”

  “She’s … wild.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. You need more wildness in your life.”

  Staring into the drapes, Caleb thought back seventeen years to the Skittersill Rising. Poor men and women had clutched their charnel gods like beggars wrapping themselves in threadbare cloaks. The protest revolved around Temoc. He was the movement’s sun, its shining center. Ten years old, Caleb had watched his father in awe: the last true priest, the paladin of fallen temples.

  Temoc swelled with his people’s need, and his family crumbled around him.

  At last, the great man made his choice. Caleb woke to screams and blood. His mother cradled him and cried hot, fierce tears. His father was gone.

  “Thanks, Dad,” Caleb said.

  A gust of wind answered him.

  When Caleb turned, he saw an empty room. His bedroom’s second window stood ajar. Night breeze brushed the curtains.

  Temoc could have closed the window behind him, and vanished without leaving any sign. This was his form of courtesy, the nearest he could come to saying good-bye.

  Caleb placed the book about contract bridge on his nightstand, and left the page dog-eared. He straightened the comforter, patted the mattress to remove all trace of Temoc, and went downstairs to guide Mal up to bed.

  15

  Caleb woke to an empty house. The bed upstairs where Mal had slept was carefully made. A bowl and mug r
ested drying beside the kitchen sink. When he returned to the living room he saw a cream-hued envelope atop the piled books and playing cards on the coffee table. The envelope bore his name in a sharp, angular hand. Within, he found a note:

  Caleb—

  Thank you for the race. You’re an intriguing man.

  We will see more of one another.

  —M

  He showered briefly, keeping his tender left side away from the pounding water. He dressed in loose slacks, and winced when he raised his arms to don a thick cotton shirt. He’d visit a doctor in the afternoon. Clinics would be crowded all morning with every hypochondriac working stiff who bumped his head in the blackout.

  For now, he needed a meal and twenty or so cups of coffee.

  He shrugged into a tan corduroy jacket, slumped downstairs, opened his front door, and collided with a silver statue wearing a black uniform.

  “Caleb Altemoc,” the Warden said in a voice with its serial numbers filed off.

  Like all Wardens, the man before Caleb was literally expressionless. A quicksilver pall encased his head and neck. Dark blots on the metal suggested a brow, two eyes, nose, mouth, features that blurred when Caleb tried to focus on them. An enamel badge glinted from the left breast of the Warden’s jacket: an ebon skull with the number “5723” in crimson on its forehead. “What?”

  “You are Caleb Altemoc,” the Warden repeated.

  Caleb memorized the number. It was the only name he would ever know for this Warden. Upon joining the force, each recruit had a number etched into her bones, scored into her soul. A Warden’s mask could not be worn without a badge, and each badge reported its wearer’s number; a Warden who abused her power could be identified by that number and cast out.

  At least, in theory.

  “That’s me,” he said.

  A scalloped shadow passed over them both. Caleb looked up. A beast half serpent and half bird crouched on his roof, wings flared. The Couatl had a snake’s face, a crest of red and yellow and green feathers, and a vulture’s all-encompassing black eyes. Another Warden sat in a saddle on the creature’s sinewy neck.