Two Serpents Rise

by Max Gladstone

  A second Couatl, no doubt belonging to the Warden at his door, coiled and preened on Caleb’s front lawn.

  “Please come with us,” the Warden said. “We have questions.”

  “Are you arresting me?”

  Smooth silver darkened where the Warden’s brow should have been. “You’re not in any trouble, sir. You will answer our questions, and be free to go.”

  “I have a right to know why I’m being taken,” Caleb said, though he knew, or at least suspected, the answer, “and where,” which he did not know and about which he knew better than to guess.

  “I can’t tell you.” Perhaps the Warden did not know, yet. That quicksilver mask was a means of communication as well as a disguise. Orders passed through it, and commands. “Will you come?”

  Caleb had little say in the matter: Craft augmented Wardens’ speed and strength, and their mounts were swift and hungry. Even if he could escape, he had nowhere to run.

  He closed the door behind him, locked it, and tugged on the lapels of his jacket. “Well. Can we travel by carriage, at least? I hurt my ribs in the blackout last night.”

  “You’ll ride with me,” the Warden said. “My mount flies steady.”

  Caleb was not reassured, but he followed anyway.

  This was not his first interview with the Wardens. They sought him out after Temoc’s attacks—the ambush in the 700 block, the attempted sabotage of Bay Station a few years back, all the rest. So accustomed were the Wardens to debriefing Caleb that they’d questioned him after the zombie revolt two years ago, though Temoc played no part in that.

  They only came for him once the action was over. Temoc must have eluded his pursuers.

  How long had this Warden waited outside Caleb’s door? How long had his partner’s mount coiled on the roof? Had they seen Mal leave? Did they let her go?

  No sense worrying. She could take care of herself. Nothing incriminating about a woman spending the night at a single man’s house. He hoped.

  The serpent’s emerald neck was as tall as Caleb’s waist. The Warden mounted his saddle and motioned for Caleb to climb on behind.

  As he settled against the warm scales, invisible cords lashed his arms to his sides and his legs to the beast’s back. He relaxed into the spectral bonds. The more he struggled, the tighter they would grow.

  “I thought I wasn’t under arrest?”

  “Not arrest,” the Warden said. “Protection.”

  “Feels similar.”

  The Couatl’s muscles surged, and in a thrashing, horrible instant the creature rose into the air. Two massive wingbeats bore them past the housetops. The Warden on Caleb’s roof goaded her own mount to flight, and together they wheeled south, toward the bustling cancer of downtown Dresediel Lex.

  * * *

  When they crested the mountains, Caleb saw the damage from above. Skittersill had born the brunt of the riots. Shattered windows, burnt-out shops, and broken bricks marred the streets—as if giant children had played there, careless of the lives they crushed.

  Set beside the Skittersill, the wealthier districts’ scars seemed affectations. Repairman teemed Sansilva, replacing windows in boutiques and jewelry shops. Even the finest looted gems would not be lost for long: Sansilva stores cursed their wares pre-sale. Over the next week the thieves and fences of Dresediel Lex would suffer insanity, depression, catatonia, and violent disfigurement until the stolen merchandise returned to its owners. Grocery stores lost more from riots and looting than did fashion houses: few grocers could afford curses or insurance, and their stock was perishable.

  Couatl circled the crater where North Station used to be, keeping watch, a funeral guard over a goddess’s corpse. Couatl had once been sacred birds, before Craftsmen claimed and changed them. Caleb wondered if the Wardens’ mounts remembered their old masters.

  The Couatl that bore Caleb turned from the crater and flew west, toward the black pyramid at 667 Sansilva.

  Caleb swallowed. Powers lurked inside that pyramid, powers that could turn a man inside out, or trap a woman in agony until the sun burnt to a cinder and the planet fell to dust—powers ancient and implacable. He knew those powers. They paid his salary.

  The Couatl descended toward the pyramid’s peak, a black glass slab carved in concentric spirals: ancient Quechal versions of the circles modern Craftsmen used. Here, in ages past, high priests worked miracles. The priests were gone, but their patterns and tools remained.

  A crystal dome forty feet across stood in the center of those spirals. The Warden landed them beside the dome. Couatl claws clicked on obsidian.

  The beast lowered its head. Caleb’s bonds disappeared, but he did not move.

  “Go on,” the Warden said.

  Caleb dismounted and almost fell. When the world ceased to pitch and yaw, he walked toward the dome, and through.

  Crystal pricked his skin like a million needles. Upside-down the world was, and back to front, inverted in eyes and mind. Gasping, he breathed infinity. Panic seized him, but when he next inhaled, cool air filled his lungs. He coughed, shivered, swore, and stumbled forward onto a glass floor.

  The dome was transparent from within. Morning light streamed from the cloudless sky onto a red Iskari carpet. An unoccupied and richly furnished room lay beneath the crystal: two plush leather couches, six unoccupied chairs, three freestanding bookcases packed with arcane tomes, and a tall desk of the same black glass as the pyramid, but stained a faint crimson.

  “Hello?” he asked, and received no answer.

  Warily, Caleb approached the desk. It was seven feet long, four feet wide, and cluttered with papers, pens, small clockwork toys, thick volumes of Craft, scrolls that murmured in tongues dead or yet to be invented. A sepia painting the size of a playing card rested in a heavy silver frame at one corner of the desk, beside a fist-sized depression in the glass.

  Each corner of the desk bore a similar depression, and from them deep channels ran to gargoyle-mouth spouts in the desk’s sides. Quechal priests killed by removing the heart, but they drained blood before each sacrifice: blood loss induced euphoria, and brought victims closer to the divine.

  “It would have been a waste to throw the thing out.”

  Caleb turned from the altar.

  A skeleton in a crimson bathrobe stood behind him. It held a steaming mug of coffee in one hand, and a folded newspaper in the other. A circlet of red gold adorned its skull, and two ruby sparks glittered from the pits where its eyes would have been.

  Caleb snapped to attention, hands at his sides, chin up. “Sir.”

  Lord Kopil, the King in Red, Deathless King of Dresediel Lex and Chief Executive of Red King Consolidated, did not acknowledge Caleb’s salute. “Obsidian isn’t porous, you know. It’s not physically possible for sacrificial blood to have colored that altar. Your gods—our gods, I suppose I should say, or the Quechal gods—made this possible: their hunger pulled blood into the glass, stained it like coffee stains teeth.”

  With a bony index finger he indicated his own pale yellow cuspids.

  “They were no gods of mine,” Caleb said.

  “Your father’s gods, then,” Kopil allowed. He released his newspaper, which floated across the room to the cluttered desk. “Two drops, three, entered the stone for each sacrifice. Think about the millennia of full moons and midsummer’s days and eclipses that stone represents, thousands of deaths offered to the Hungry Serpents and Qet Sea-Lord and the rest. They have gone before—and none will come after.” The bones of his feet clicked like a crab’s claws against the floor. “You’ve worked for me for three years, six months, and two days, Caleb, yet we’ve only spoken a handful of times. Why do you suppose that is?”

  Because you’re the most powerful Craftsman in Dresediel Lex, Caleb thought, and I’m a peon. “We don’t have much in common,” he said at last.

  “The professors who recommended you to my service claimed you were intelligent and ambitious. I would like to think those are traits I share.” The skull possess
ed no lips to smile, nor did his tone convey any trace of humor.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Tollan says you’re talented. Yet you’ve remained content with a mid-level position in risk management.”

  “I’ve done well there.” He paused, expecting his boss to interrupt, but the King in Red only sipped his coffee. “It’s exciting work.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I wouldn’t expect a soldier to call a guard shift at our front desk ’exciting,’ and I don’t expect you to say the same about your current role in risk management. It’s good work, not exciting.”

  “I like control: bets I can win, situations I can manage.”

  “If you like control so much,” the King in Red asked, “why are your ribs broken?”

  Caleb’s mouth went dry. “I fell.”

  “Your soul is frailer than it was when you left this building two days ago.” Red sparks shone in the black holes of Kopil’s eyes. “You have used, or borrowed, much power in the last twelve hours. You may have fallen, but you flew first, I think. Nor is this your only recent injury: last week, you drew on the Company’s medical policy to heal a dislocated shoulder, and a hairline fracture of the collarbone.” Shadows shifted on the skeleton’s face. “For three years you’ve worked for me, confident, competent, unassuming, a perfect, invisible employee. On the night of the gravest assault against our company in three years, you suffer severe and mysterious injuries. How did you come by those injuries, I wonder.”

  The King in Red’s voice was conversational and cold. Its chill seeped into the air, and stung Caleb’s skin.

  “To what end have you bent your intelligence and ambition, Caleb? Not to glorify yourself in my service, I’m sure. Have you plotted with your father to destroy me? To destroy everything I have built?”

  Caleb did not blink, did not show his fear. A pit yawned at his back, and the slightest misstep might send him tumbling without Mal to catch him. “No, sir.”

  Kopil laughed, a chattering, unsettled sound of bare branches blown by wind. The sun faded and the sky bruised to gray. Silver glyphs glowed about his eye sockets.

  An invisible serpent circled Caleb and lifted him from the floor. Scales pressed his arms to his sides. Cold carrion breath hissed against his neck.

  “No?” Kopil said. “You were at North Station last night. Tell me why.”

  Words skittered from Caleb’s grasping mind. “I was chasing a lead. A woman who snuck into Bright Mirror. A cliff runner.”

  “Your report,” the King in Red noted absently, “made no mention of a woman. Only an intruder, of indeterminate gender and appearance.”

  “If the Wardens tried to hunt for her, she would have disappeared. The cliff runners look after their own. She was innocent—a catspaw. She needed help, not an arrest party.”

  Ruby eyes burned into his soul. “That was not your decision.” The invisible serpent tightened its grip. He gasped at the pain in his ribs.

  “She had a pendant. It’s in my pocket. Take it out.”

  The shark’s-tooth pendant twitched, wormed free of his pocket, and floated to eye level, revolving in the half light. Kopil regarded it. The closed-eye glyph glowed dull silver on the tooth’s surface.

  “She thought the pendant kept her hidden. But that’s not all it does, I think.”

  The King in Red snapped his fingers, and Caleb fell silent. No sound trespassed on the darkness.

  At last, Kopil spoke. “A charm to track and observe the wearer. Well-hidden by the obfuscating ward. Clever, in a base fashion. Quechal Applied Theology—a modern Craftsman wouldn’t see it unless he knew how to look.”

  “Someone found a cliff runner who likes to go where she doesn’t belong, gave her that pendant, and followed her until she led them to a place where they could hurt us. They tricked her into showing them how to sneak in, and sneak out again. They used her to poison Bright Mirror and blow up North Station.”

  “The Wardens will find the person who made this, and the truth of your story.” Kopil slid the tooth into the pocket of his robe. “But your situation has not changed. You show me a talisman and claim a woman you will not identify wore it when she broke into our facilities—a fact you hid from Tollan, and from me. I find your testimony less than compelling.”

  “I’m telling the truth.”

  “We know your father was in your house last night. We traced him there, and lost his trail after.”

  The serpent’s coils compressed his broken ribs. He gasped. “Temoc was in my house when I came home last night. He told me he didn’t plan the North Station raid. After that, he left.”

  “A strange claim.”

  “It’s not a claim. It’s a message.”

  Kopil cocked his head to one side. “What do you mean?”

  “The Wardens attacked Temoc last night. How did they find his hideout?”

  “An anonymous tip.”

  “An anonymous tip. Which they needed, because they haven’t been able to find him for twenty years. But they traced him to my house. Do you think he got sloppy while running for his life? He wanted you to talk to me, because I would tell you I think he’s innocent of the attack.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m the last person who would believe his innocence.”

  Kopil did not respond.

  “People died on that altar,” Caleb said. “My father killed them, and his father, our whole line as far back as memory. Temoc took his first life when he was seven years old. If Craftsmen hadn’t freed Dresediel Lex, I would have done the same. I’d fight him until the sun burned black. So he came to me, and told me he was innocent, knowing I was the least friendly witness he could find.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “I don’t know. He seemed sincere.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m no Craftsman, but I’m no terrorist, either.”

  “Where do you stand, then?” asked Kopil.

  “On my own side.”

  “Your side hurts.”

  “Yes,” Caleb said when he realized what the King in Red meant. “It does.”

  Kopil crossed the red rug and stood before Caleb, six feet tall and slender in his crimson robe. He radiated cold power. His skin had rotted decades past, sinews and muscles crumbled, heart shriveled into dust. He endured. A cold wind blew between them.

  “Let’s fix that,” Kopil said. Darkness rolled out from him to drown the world.

  Caleb could not flinch or flee. Five arrows struck him in the chest—no, five fingers, and they did not pierce his skin but passed through it as if dipping into a pool of water, water that could feel, and think, and scream. He opened his mouth, and shadow crawled past his lips, over his teeth, wriggled down his throat to nest in his lungs. He could not breathe, but he did not die, and the King in Red began to work.

  A second skeletal hand joined the first in Caleb’s chest, hot as hatred and cold as love. If not for the shadow filling his mouth, he would have ground his teeth to powder, bit through his tongue. His broken ribs were two arches of jagged glass. Kopil’s hands moved over that glass, smoothing and joining. Pain rose in a fugue, variations on a theme of agony.

  The music stopped. Light returned. Kopil drew his hands from Caleb’s chest. Bits of tissue and spare red drops clung to his skeleton fingers. The mortal refuse smoked, boiled, and burned from the King’s pale bones.

  Caleb could move again. He touched his side, and found it whole.

  The King in Red shook his hands as if to dry them. “Lift your arm. Do you feel any pain?” Caleb did, and felt none. “Inhale.” Sweet air filled his lungs. His muscles trembled, and laughing he breathed again.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Like I just ran here all the way from Fisherman’s Vale. Tired in the bones. My stomach’s cold.”

  “Eat well tonight. You almost killed yourself yesterday; I took as little power from you as I could for the healing, but you’re weak
as if you haven’t eaten in days. Go to a restaurant tonight. Order enough for three men. Drink plenty of fluids.”

  A wrenching, horrid screech erupted from the floor behind the King in Red. Black glass warped open to reveal a staircase that spiraled down into the pyramid.

  “Go,” the skeleton said. Caleb attempted to walk, staggered, and caught the edge of the altar-desk. He steadied himself, tried another step, and made it halfway to the stairs before Kopil’s voice stopped him.

  “I know what it’s like to be on no one’s side but your own.”

  The King in Red had lifted the picture in the silver frame.

  “Sir?”

  Kopil opened his palm as if setting a bird free. The picture slid through the air. Caleb caught it, and looked for the first time at the image: an old-fashioned sepia miniature. Two men embraced at the foot of a black pyramid. They were young and smiling and obviously in love, both dark as magisterium wood, one shorter than Caleb, the other tall for a Quechal man, six feet at least and thin, with narrow sloping shoulders. His eyes were black, and his smile looked familiar.

  Thin, Caleb thought, so thin he could almost see the bones of the tall man’s skull.

  Kopil stood beside the desk, beside the altar, his finger bones spread on bloodstained glass. His shoulders were narrow and sloping, and his smile had not changed.

  “Eighty years,” Caleb guessed.

  “More than that.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Timas.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “They took him for the sacrifice to the Hungry Serpents.” Kopil tapped the surface of the altar. “He’s still here. A piece of him, at least. Two or three drops.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “We all think we’re on our own side, until the time comes to declare war.”

  Caleb released the picture. It flew back and settled on the desk beside the King in Red.

  “Go,” Kopil said, and Caleb descended into the office building that was once a temple.

  INTERLUDE: FLAME

  The lake of fire coruscated red and blue and orange. Alaxic, lost in thought, traced the patterns and colors of heat.