Two Serpents Rise

by Max Gladstone

  Their games proceeded in triangular fashion—Caleb lost to Teo, who loved chess though she did not study it, and Teo lost to Sam, who was too busy railing against the hierarchical relationships encoded in the rules to notice how blatantly Teo let her win. Sam lost to Caleb, and the cycle repeated.

  Teo’s bishop scythed across the board to complete Caleb’s most recent humiliation. He stood, swayed, and surrendered his seat to Sam, then excused himself to the kitchen.

  High and far back in Teo’s cabinet he found a clean mug, placed it in the sink, and touched a glyph on the dragon-headed faucet. The glyph glowed, ripping away a fragment of soul so small Caleb barely felt it, and the faucet vomited black water over his hand into the mug.

  He cursed, dropped the mug, and reached for a towel. The black sludge kept flowing, and a rancid, rotting odor filled the kitchen. When he slapped the faucet glyph, the flow stopped. He touched it again, testing. The dragon disgorged three more drops into Teo’s sink, retched, and died.

  “Teo?”

  “Did you break something?” Sam called back.

  “Teo, does your building have any trouble with RKC? Anything wrong with the water?”

  “No. Hells, if there was trouble I’d be the first one with a torch and pitchfork.” Noise from the living room: Teo pushing her chair back from the table. “What’s wrong?”

  “The water’s black.”

  “What do you mean?” Before he could answer, she reached the kitchen door and saw, smelled, for herself. She blanched. “Gods. What is that?”

  She sounded more shocked than a broken sink would warrant. Caleb began to turn, to see if he’d missed something.

  Several small, sharp knives struck him in the back at high speed. He fell, cursing. Hooked claws tore at his skin. Groping over his shoulder, he felt a shell of slick, curved chitin, cold as ice. Small legs scraped his hand. He ripped the creature from his back and threw it across the room. A black, sharp blur, it struck the wall and splashed into a hundred fat droplets. Caleb bent forward, and panted. He heard Teo swear, and looked up.

  The droplets had grown legs, pincers, snapping mandibles, multifaceted eyes. Sprouting from the wall, they skittered across the floor toward him.

  Tzimet.

  In the water.

  “Shit!” He staggered back, flailing for a weapon. From the sink he heard a clatter of claws and teeth. His clutching fingers found Teo’s knife block. He drew a cleaver and whirled to face the sink, from which reared an insect the size of a small dog, mandibles gnashing.

  The cleaver passed through the creature’s head, struck the sink, skidded and sparked. Caleb slipped and fell, still holding the knife. The creature hissed, and the droplet-bugs advanced. Teo grabbed a broom and struck the little bugs with its bristles. The sink-thing flopped onto the counter, and thudded to the floor a few inches from Caleb’s leg.

  “What’s going on in there?” Sam, approaching from the living room. “You two better—” She cut off, and drew a heavy breath.

  Caleb raised the knife as the sink-creature scuttled toward him, recovered from its fall. Not that the knife would do much good. He needed a broom of his own, or a stick, or—

  A frying pan slammed down onto the Tzimet, pulping shell, claw, leg, and staring eye, and shattering ceramic floor tiles. Sam raised the pan and brought it down again. The wet black smear stopped moving.

  Sam extended her hand to him. Blond hair frizzed into a halo about her head.

  “Thanks,” he said, his voice heavy with shock.

  “No problem,” she replied. “I can’t believe that worked.”

  Teo had given up sweeping the bugs away in favor of spearing them with her broom’s bristles. She struck, and the creatures popped into tiny, inert puddles. “What are these things?”

  “Tzimet,” Caleb said as Sam pulled him to his feet.

  “Like at Bright Mirror.”

  “But smaller.”

  Caleb heard a scream from the apartment next door.

  “What in all hells is going on?” Teo asked, but Caleb was no longer in the kitchen to answer her.

  He ran out of Teo’s apartment toward the neighboring flat. The door was closed; he knocked, and wished he were sober. The woman inside cried out again, and he struck the door with his shoulder and all the strength his scars could give him. The door burst off its hinges, and he stumbled into a grim gray living room heavy with the stench of sulfur and burnt metal and old blood. A gray-haired woman in a bathrobe swung a thick pillow against a horde of animated shower-droplets, spiders carved from black ice. Caleb grabbed towels from the bathroom, and tossed them to Sam and Teo as they ran in through the front door after him. Together, they smothered the little evil things with the towels. The towels, at least, did not rise up against them.

  The neighbor stared dumbfounded at her stained rug and linens, at her traitor bathroom, at Caleb.

  “Water inspectors, Ma’am,” Caleb lied, and flashed his RKC identification. “Reports of hard water in this area. I have to take a sample; do you have a small bottle I could borrow?”

  The neighbor was an amateur chemist, and from her back room workbench (alchemical sigils shed dim light on glass retorts, phials of quicksilver and phosphorescent dye; a dead mouse, arms and legs pinned to the points of a triangle), she produced a small test tube with a rubber stopper, which he filled with water wrung from the towels.

  Placing the tube in a pocket of his blazer, he made a quick excuse—“more apartments to see, sorry for the inconvenience, please direct any questions or concerns to customer service”—and backed hastily through the front door, urging her not to open her taps until further notice.

  In the hall, he exchanged harried looks with Sam and Teo. Sam’s skin flushed red with action and anger; Teo tried three times to speak and at last stammered: “What the hell, Caleb?”

  “I don’t know. We locked the Tzimet in Bright Mirror. They couldn’t get out.” But his mind betrayed him with images of Mal’s necklace, of the white-winged woman burning in the sky over North Station, of his father. The Tzimet could not escape unaided, but there were forces more pernicious and persistent than demons working against the city. “We need to get to the office.”

  From down the hall came another cry, deeper, a man’s. Teo glanced from him, to Sam, then back in the direction of the scream.

  Before she could say anything, Sam interrupted. “I’ll take care of it. You two get to work. Fix this.” Before either of them could object, she sprinted down the hall, a towel clutched in each hand.

  “She’s a keeper,” Caleb said when Sam was out of earshot.

  “I’ll get my coat,” Teo replied.

  * * *

  Pedestrians shuddered on the sidewalk, wearing housecoats and trousers, crying or shouting, clutching cuts through clothes and skin. Wardens clogged the sky. One broke a high window in the Seven Stars, and jumped inside. Glass shards rained down, and Caleb took cover under his jacket.

  Caleb and Teo caught a driverless carriage across town. Skyspires drifted in the evening clouds. Crisscross ribbons of traffic coursed through the heavens along lanes marked by hovering lanterns: west to the suburbs, east or south toward the nighttime carnivals of Monicola Pier and the Skittersill. Buses of day laborers floated back to their tired camps in Stonewood amid the skeletons of trees. The sky was mostly empty of Wardens.

  “Looks like the Tzimet haven’t spread far,” Teo said.

  “Not yet.”

  The carriage turned onto an elevated road, and streets sank out of view as the horse surged to full gallop. They had the road to themselves. Few carts or wagons crossed the city’s center so late; the densest traffic was farther south, near the port, where trucks pulled by oxen and giant lizards bore freight from the oceangoing ships docked at Longsands to warehouses in Skittersill and Fisherman’s Vale.

  They descended from the elevated road to surface streets. A fight boiled outside a busy nightclub: girls in short spangled dresses and young men in wide-brimmed hats
flailed at one another. Water sellers hawked refreshment to the drunk and disorderly. Those carts would have long lines in front of them soon. For sixty years, the city’s need for water had been satisfied without fail by the taps, pipes, wells, and dams of Red King Consolidated. That chain was broken.

  At last the darkness of the 700 block closed around them. No streetlamps here, where they would wash out the starlight great Concerns needed for their Craft. The pregnant moon shone overhead. Pinprick stars winked in distant mockery.

  Caleb shivered. In Camlaan and Iskar and Alt Coulumb—across most of Kath, for that matter—poets wrote odes to the beauty of the stars. The Quechal knew better. Great demons lived between the stars, and in them, beings immense in power and size, who sucked the marrow from suns and sang songs that drove galaxies mad.

  There were demons on earth, now, too.

  He watched the skies, and thought about death, riots, and Tzimet. To full-grown, healthy men and women, creatures like the ones he and Sam had fought presented little danger, but not everyone was full-grown and healthy. Many would fall, and die, tonight. The stars would watch, and hunger.

  The usual protesters chanted outside 667 Sansilva. Teo and Caleb left the cab and shouldered past the crowd toward the pyramid. A squad of RKC employees had erected complaint booths in the parking lot, in front of trucks stacked high with pipes and wire. Good. They already knew. Some emergency policy, gathering dust in the archives beside deals with dead gods and distant autarchs, must have been wiped clean and consulted. He hoped the customer service scripts were not decades out of date.

  The lobby stank of cigarettes, despite the no-smoking signs. Stress drove men and women to long-unopened packs stored in the backs of drawers or at the desks of trusted friends. They congregated beneath bas-reliefs of the Red King’s triumph, and smoked and whispered in tight clutches. Caleb and Teo crossed the lobby and listened, taut as antennas. They did not speak until they reached a blissfully empty lift.

  “Sounds like the attack is limited to downtown,” Caleb said when the doors rolled shut. “And pieces of Sansilva.”

  “No gods anymore,” Teo commented as the lift began to rise.

  “No.”

  “Then who do we thank for small favors?”

  He closed his eyes and melted into the lift wall. “Shit. This is all my fault somehow.”

  “We don’t know if it’s anybody’s fault, yet.”

  “Can’t be an accident. Tzimet before, Tzimet now. We have an enemy.”

  “If so,” Teo said, “we’ll find them.”

  The elevator rose through their silence.

  “You’ll be up all night,” she said.

  “You, too. Your office will be flooded with messenger rats.”

  “Don’t remind me. Thousands of notes of desperation, and nothing I can do but pass them along to the service department, who will be even worse off than either of us. Do you think people are okay, out there?”

  “I hope so.” A bell chimed, doors rolled back, and Caleb stepped out. “Good luck with the rats,” he called to Teo as the elevator resumed its ascent behind him.

  Most of the offices and cubicles in risk management were dark. Even workaholic Tollan was gone: visiting her mother in the farthest recesses of Fisherman’s Vale, where bungalows bordered on orange groves.

  She would be back, as would the others, but in the meantime that left Caleb in charge. And the King in Red would want answers, soon.

  Light streamed under the door of a conference room down the hall, the department’s only sign of life.

  He thrust the door open, and it struck the wall with a mighty noise. Mick and the few other actuaries that constituted his army looked up from the documents sprawled on the conference table. Paper fluttered in the draft; ghostlight shone from Craft circles scrawled onto slate walls. A young woman hunched over a gutted chicken on a silver tray. The room stank of fear and auspices.

  He saw himself through their eyes: hair wild, eyes wide, clothes shredded. Blood seeped from the wound in his shoulder.

  “Ladies,” he said. “Gentlemen. Tell me what you know. And someone, please find me a bandage.”

  21

  Forty-five minutes later, Caleb stood in a dark and spacious room, addressing figures wrapped in shadow. “The black sludge is basically water.” He removed the test tube from his pocket and placed it on the long mahogany table. “Laden with muck, heavy metals, and particulate refuse, obviously unsafe to drink, but water nonetheless. Water, infested with Tzimet.”

  “We are fortunate it appeared so unappetizing,” said Ostrakov, the Chief of Operations, from a seat to Caleb’s left. “Imagine if someone drank Tzimet water. We are doubly fortunate that only the wealthiest districts were affected. The Skittersill would have rioted by now.”

  “Do not underestimate the number of disturbances we have put down tonight,” said gray-faced Chihuac of the Security Bureau. She wore a Warden’s badge and number, but no mask: the public, human face of Dresediel Lex’s police. “Seventy-three arrests in the last two hours, for public brawling, disturbing the peace, arson, assault, and second-degree sedition. That’s aside from the injuries caused directly by Tzimet.”

  “And why is our water no longer safe to drink?” Lord Kopil leaned forward from his throne at the far end of the table. Darkness rippled around him like a cloak, and the fires of his eyes flared.

  Caleb’s throat was too dry for him to swallow. Tollan sat at the table beside Chihuac, but there had been no time to bring her up to speed before the meeting. This was his play.

  He tapped a Craft circle on the table. On the wall behind him, a wriggling colony of glowworms flared to display a map of the west coast of Northern Kath. Dresediel Lex strangled a giant bay in the continent’s southwest corner. Blue lines wound from the city across the blasted desert, north and east into mountain ranges and south into the jungles of the Fangs. “Most of our water comes from Bay Station.” He gestured to a glowing dot at the harbor’s mouth. “But we haven’t been able to expand its production since the mid-eighties, while the population of Dresediel Lex has grown three percent a year. More people means we need more water—for manufacture and agriculture as well as drinking and bathing. The native water table is already too depleted to support the city. We’ve contracted with other Concerns to pump water from springs, lakes, and rivers in the wilderness. Heartstone was one of the most productive of these contracts; that’s why we subsumed them.” It was not precise to say devour, though that was the word Caleb used in private to describe the process: Heartstone lived on within the hideous, many-limbed organism of RKC.

  “One of their main projects was Seven Leaf Lake, a natural reservoir in the northern Drakspine. Eighty square miles of surface area, and deep—a hundred twenty eight million acre-feet, fed by snowmelt and mountain springs, with a refresh time of about two hundred years. Seven Leaf has enough water to sustain our growth for another decade at least. Over the last two years, Heartstone has bound the local spirits and opened an aqueduct between Dresediel Lex and Seven Leaf. Three days ago we began mixing Seven Leaf water with the DL system, specifically in Sansilva and downtown. We chose those districts to limit unrest in the event of any, ah, problems.”

  When he said “we,” he spoke figuratively. No one had asked his advice about these decisions. But he was a part of something larger than himself—one limb of a reeling beast.

  “The Seven Leaf water is tainted.” Caleb removed a second phial of black water from his pocket. “Maintenance tapped this direct from the Seven Leaf aqueduct half an hour ago.” He removed the phial’s cap and poured foul black liquid onto the table.

  It landed on the lacquered wood with eight legs sharp as scythes, an exoskeleton lacking guts or soft tissue. Mandibles clashed in the air. The tiny Tzimet screeched with organs that were not quite vocal chords, and pounced at Ostrakov, who vaporized it with a backhand wave.

  Kopil’s red gaze turned to Alana Mazetchul, head of the Pipeline group—draped in robes, her fac
e fallow and lined as if she had not slept in months. “Were there any signs of contamination in Seven Leaf Lake before tonight?”

  “No,” Mazetchul replied. “None of Heartstone’s water came to us tainted, nor do their projects have a history of Craft trouble. We performed extensive tests on Seven Leaf Station before Heartstone was subsumed.”

  She left that sentence hanging, and Caleb recognized his cue. “The corruption could have two sources: either the aqueducts and pipes are faulty—unlikely considering the number of wards that would have to malfunction—or the problem lies at the source, with Seven Leaf Station or the lake itself. Seven Leaf Lake contains about a hundred and a quarter million acre-feet of water. It could not have become this corrupted in a few weeks. Trouble at the station is the likely cause: accident, assault, act of gods. We can’t raise the station by nightmare telegraph, which supports this theory.”

  “An attack using Tzimet,” Tollan added, “would fit the pattern established by Bright Mirror Reservoir.”

  Caleb waited for someone else to speak. When no questions or objections rose, he continued.

  “Until we fix the problem at Seven Leaf, we’ll have to meet the city’s water needs somehow. Conjuring water out of thin air, or purifying the ocean with evaporation, is expensive. To subsume Heartstone, we issued private bonds, and borrowed funds from other Concerns including First Soul of Alt Coulumb, the Collective of Iskari Faith, and Kyrie Thaumaturgics. If we borrow more, other Deathless Kings will doubt our creditworthiness, which leaves us open to attack. Unless we find a major source of soulstuff, our only other option will be to adopt rolling droughts within the city.”