Two Serpents Rise

by Max Gladstone

  Silent, he stared into the dead woman’s eyes. But for the blood, she might have been lost in thought, or prayer.

  His hand hurt. Mal had gripped it, hard. After a while, when she stopped trembling, she looked up.

  “That was worse than I thought,” she said.

  A distant lake bird called.

  She tried to speak but choked, and stopped, and tried again. “Come on. Let’s get this place running.”

  27

  Caleb left Mal alone as she worked. He lacked enough Craft to help her, and she seemed happier without him. No. Not happier, exactly. She worked in a brittle silence that he feared to break.

  The Wardens cased the scene. Four and Six draped the corpses in evidence shrouds, capturing pictures of each victim for later analysis. Three’s thigh was broken in the battle, and he rested next to twitching, unquiet One, whom Allie had trapped in a recursive nightmare. Four said she would wake soon. “If not, we have people who can bring her to her mind again.”

  Seven walked around the station at a measured pace, forming detailed memories that specialists in Dresediel Lex would retrieve.

  Couatl flew above. Four’s green-crested mount swallowed an unwary lake bird in a single bite. Feathers drifted down on the breeze.

  Allesandre hung from her wire crèche.

  Caleb followed Seven, listening to his footsteps and the water. Broken glass glinted at his feet. Kneeling, he lifted a shard and threw it into the lake. It disappeared in reflected brilliance. Light pinned him down and made even his shadow feel small.

  He turned back to Mal, who was stripping cables from Allesandre’s skin. He approached her, but she didn’t look up. “Are you okay?”

  She stopped, mid-incision. Blood sizzled on her knife. “What do you think? Go kill a friend and tell me how you feel after.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She kept working as if she hadn’t heard him.

  “I’d like to help. But I don’t know how.”

  She didn’t respond, so he shrugged, grabbed one of the wires at her feet, and closed his eyes. A brilliant network charged the blackness, extending from the station in all directions: the system that pumped and treated Seven Leaf water, and sent it south to Dresediel Lex.

  The web was sick. Thick threads hung limp; slender strands knotted and tangled. The wire twisted in his grip like a living thing. He reached for a loose thread and pulled it tight.

  Seven Leaf Station convulsed. Mal swore, Couatl roared, and Caleb’s eyes snapped open. The Wardens had drawn their weapons and faced the lake, as if they expected a host of Scorpionkind to rise from its depths.

  Mal grabbed his wrist. “What are you doing?”

  “Helping, I thought.”

  “Allie almost destroyed this place. Pull the wrong thread and everything might unravel. We could sink. Or the spirits bound in the lake could break their chains.”

  He released the wire. Its falling tip scraped the deck.

  “Good. Thank you.”

  “Is there any way I can help?”

  “Well,” she said, softly, considering. “Pick up that wire again, and close your eyes.”

  The web hung in darkness. She touched his shoulder. “See the red lines?”

  Faint solar afterimages shadowed the blue and silver strands. “I do.”

  “Those threads tie the station to the Serpents back in DL. Without them, we’ll have to spend another week rebuilding the local generators. Using the Serpents, we’ll have water flowing in a few days at most. Help me link them to the system.”

  “How?”

  “Touch one of the red lines, first—only one.”

  With his free hand, Caleb clutched the nearest line. Fire shot up his arm, crisping nerves, singeing muscle.

  Mal caught him as he stumbled. “You’ll get the hang of it,” she said as he recovered his balance. “You’re not being damaged; your soul’s just reacting to the Craft. All you need to do is merge the red lines with the blue.”

  He grabbed another thread, and this time he was ready for the pain. When he touched the red line to the blue he felt a movement in his heart like shuffling cards as the two strands melded into one.

  He opened his eyes. The wire he held was the same color, the same weight, but something had changed about the way it gathered and reflected light.

  “That’s it,” Mal said. She examined the wire. “Do the same wherever you see a red and a blue line twinned. You’ll save me a day at least. I’ll focus on the hard stuff.”

  She turned to a tangle of bent metal, closed her eyes and furrowed her brow.

  He left her to her work, and went about his own.

  They paused for a brief lunch around three. Sweat soaked Caleb’s shirt. Mal had discarded her jacket and rolled up her sleeves; her arms quivered as she lifted the canteen to her lips. She tore her meat with her teeth. They ate without speaking. When Caleb was only half-finished with his lunch, she stalked back to work.

  Later he remembered that afternoon as a series of images, mostly of Mal: she knelt atop a Craft circle cut into the steel platform with the blade of her knife. She stripped Allesandre’s body from the web, cleaned the wires of blood and meat, and replaced the dead woman with a cold iron ring. She leaned against a console, shaking. A handkerchief tied over her hair kept sweat from her eyes.

  Sunburnt, exhausted, five hours later, they stepped back to examine their handiwork. The station was clear of human refuse, and Allesandre’s web re-strung. Smashed crystal screens stared from control kiosks. Gears and levers, frayed wires and mystic diagrams protruded from broken panels. But when Mal said, “That’s it,” Caleb did not challenge her.

  The setting sun cast the station’s shadow long upon the water, and their shadows with it: the Wardens, Caleb, and Mal.

  “It’s working?” Caleb asked—the first words he had spoken since lunch.

  “No.” She moved her hand in a swift circle. “Now it’s working.”

  At first, nothing seemed to change: a stretching, still span in which he wondered if Mal had fixed the station at all, or if she had snapped when Allesandre died, and spent the afternoon drawing ineffectual lines in metal. He waited in silence. Four’s feet scuffed the deck as she shifted. Caleb slid his hands into his pockets, and the sound of fabric on skin was louder than the waves.

  Louder, because there were no waves.

  The waters of Seven Leaf Lake lay flat and even as a pane of glass from horizon to horizon, reflecting the universe aflame with sunset. Caleb’s breath stopped. The slightest exhalation might shatter this perfect mirror of the world, and with that mirror the world itself.

  Then the screams began.

  At first he felt them in his stomach, but they rose in volume and pitch to fill his ears, the insensate fury of a Skittersill mob, rage so strong it broke into despair. The screams came from nowhere and everywhere at once, rising to crescendo as the sun fell.

  Mal’s arms remained outstretched. The Wardens did not move. They stood sentinel.

  The setting sun spilled its blood on the water. Night crept in from the edges of the world. The first stars appeared, puncture wounds in the sky from which darkness spread. Glyphs burned at Mal’s wrists, around her fingers, beneath her collar.

  Caleb felt the screams in his teeth.

  When the sky deepened to the rich purple of a king’s robe, he saw light in the lake.

  Phosphorescent fish, he thought, or invisible creatures too tiny to be seen. In deep caves, as a child, one of his mother’s native guides had shown him underground eels, skin slick with green radiance.

  He was wrong.

  Gods writhed in the water.

  Starlight sank into Seven Leaf Lake and branched into rippling, multicolored thorns. Figures thrashed, impaled upon the light: humans, deer, wolves, snakes, mice, great-winged birds, Scorpionkind, all wriggling like caught fish. The smallest was three times the size of Seven Leaf Station.

  The screams came from their open mouths.

  He remembered,
back in Dresediel Lex, telling the King in Red that the local spirits of Seven Leaf Lake had been subdued. He said this without emotion, because that was how it was written in the report.

  Caleb’s knees struck the metal deck. His hands rose to block his ears, but he forced them down, and forced his eyes open. He had been to Bay Station, had seen gods entombed and tortured. These were nowhere near so grand: remnant spirits, that was all, lesser deities that grew with the tribes that once roamed these mountains. When the tribes died or moved on, their gods remained, living off scraps of wonder and remembrance, barely conscious.

  Conscious enough, though, to realize when someone came to take their land, their water. Conscious enough to fight. Conscious enough to be a threat—and Dresediel Lex would tolerate no threats.

  Mal clapped her hands twice. Machines clanked and Craft hummed its sphere-music. A curtain of water, reflective as mercury, curved over Caleb and Mal, the Wardens and Seven Leaf Station, blocking their view of the lake and the tortured beings within. Above, the water closed the sky in a shrinking circle, a hundred feet in diameter, fifty, twenty-five. A red star gleamed in the circle’s center.

  The circle closed, and cut off the cries like a guillotine blade. The water blocked out moonlight, stars, sky, and lake, and cast the station in a bloodless light. The air smelled of rain and burnt metal.

  Caleb realized he was still kneeling. He stood, using a nearby chair as a prop. Beside him, Mal sagged.

  “Those are gods,” Caleb said. “They’re in pain.”

  “They’re not gods. Not exactly. And when someone comes to salve the world’s pain, those things can take a number like the rest of us. Meanwhile, Skittersill and Sansilva and Stonewood and North Ridge and Central and the Vale will have water to drink.” She turned a wheel on a nearby altar, and a hatch telescoped open in the floor, revealing a flight of stairs down into the station. “I’m going to bed.” She took the first and second steps slow, but on the third her strength failed her and she steadied herself against the wall. “You should get some rest.”

  She descended out of sight. A closing door cut off the tap of her footsteps. Caleb remained, alone, on deck with the Wardens. For a while, he watched his own reflection distorted in the water, and listened. He heard nothing. He was used to that.

  He followed Mal into darkness.

  28

  Seven Leaf Station was not designed for comfort. Below the surface, between banks of slowly revolving Craft circles and humming soul catchers, Heartstone architects had added as an afterthought a few bare rooms for the station’s staff. The Wardens split four chambers among themselves. Caleb chose a cold bed in a room with a writing desk, a few pictures of a dead man’s family, and a chessboard set with a problem involving knight moves. He glanced at the board but didn’t mull over the problem. He had enough of his own.

  Troubled by the thought of sleeping in a corpse’s sweat, Caleb stripped the bed and remade it with fresh linens. He lay down to rest, but sleep evaded him. He saw blood and water flow from a cut throat, surging in time to the beat of the machines that drained the lake.

  He stood at last, slipped on his shoes and jacket, and left the room with the chess problem still unsolved. Turning through a maze of corridors he found the Wardens’ larder; he poured a cold glass of water, assembled a plate of rice and meat and tortillas, and bore them back into the twisting halls.

  There was no mystery as to where Mal slept. When Caleb and the Wardens followed her into the under-station, they found all the doors open save one, marked “Manager’s Quarters” in thick block letters.

  The door was still closed. He knocked, waited, and heard her muted by steel: “Go away.”

  “I brought you food. You didn’t come to dinner.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “It’s not for your sake. What if we hit bad weather on the way back and I’m thrown out of the basket? I want you strong enough to catch me.”

  “Who says I would catch you?”

  He opened the door and stepped inside.

  The manager’s suite was larger than the other rooms, but still small. It smelled faintly of incense, and contained an overstuffed bookcase, a desk, a nightstand, and a large bed.

  The far wall was transparent. Beyond it writhed the gods impaled on thorn-tree contracts, larger underwater than they had seemed from the surface. Currents and passing fish distorted their features. Their cries did not penetrate the walls.

  Mal sat in silhouette, cross-legged on the bed with her back to Caleb. She was naked from the waist up, the curves of her neck and ribs and the swell of her hip lit blue and green and red by light from the window. As he entered, she lifted her shirt from the bed and slid it on, one arm at a time, without hurry. She fastened one button at her breast, but did not look back at him. “I thought I told you to stay out.”

  “You didn’t. You told me to go away.”

  “And you listened so well.” She set a slender object down on the nightstand. In the dim light he could not tell what it was.

  “I’m a good listener.” He set the plate of food on the desk, turned the desk chair to face her, and sat, watching her back.

  She seemed so still, a statue in contrast with the fluid pain beyond the window. He focused on her outline.

  “Allie was a colleague,” she said. “She left for Seven Leaf soon after the Bright Mirror thing. This would be her big break into management. She wrote me, at first. Her letters stopped coming a month ago, but I was too busy to check.”

  “It must have been hard for her,” he said, “so far away, no friends.”

  “Nothing but the work, and what work.” Mal waved at the water and the things inside it. “Subdue these spirits, torment them. Even if they aren’t conscious the way we are, they feel.”

  “It’s worth the price,” he said, though he was not certain.

  “For how long?” Her voice was hollow. “Ten years from now, or twenty, this lake will be a dry and cracked bowl in the mountains and we will turn to the next, and the next after that. One day it won’t be mindless gods who suffer for our thirst, but other cities, other people. How long until we decide Regis doesn’t need its wealth of water? The cities of the frozen north, surely they don’t thirst like we do. Shikaw, next. We could drink this continent dry, from the Pax to the World Sea. Water is life, and life is worth any price, even life itself.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  She sighed. In the depths of Seven Leaf Lake, the trapped gods screamed. “This is the world we live in.”

  “Why not try to fix things?” Even as he said the words they felt small. A broken window or a broken promise you could fix. The scene in the lake was beyond fixing.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She laughed, a sour, sad sound that hung on the station’s dead air like a corpse on a rack. “Everybody needs to make a sacrifice sooner or later, to survive. I guess this was my first—or the first one to hit me so close. I prepared for this moment years ago. I told myself I had.”

  He didn’t ask what “this moment” was. In the flickering light, he could barely recognize Mal. Maybe she couldn’t recognize herself. He moved to the bed, which gave slightly under his weight. The mattress was a firm lie: the world beneath was only water. He slid next to her and touched her shoulders. Her muscles were knotted steel cables. He pressed into those knots with his thumbs and the heels of his hands. Mal stifled a cry as he began. He tried again, with a lighter touch. “Thank you,” she said this time.

  The cropped fringe of her hair feathered against his fingers. Small, downy hairs trailed down the nape of her neck, an arrow pointing to her back and shoulders. He had expected her skin to be cool to the touch. Everything down here was. She was warm though, feverish.

  So close, he studied her: smooth skin a shade lighter than his own, shoulders and neck dark and freckled by sun. He could not feel her glyph-marks—the Craft left no scars, unless you knew how to look for them.

  He studied her
to capture her, to capture the moment, but also to distract himself from the tortures outside the window. Why would she choose to face that? Maybe she felt it was a part of her sacrifice, or Allesandre’s. He pressed against her skin, and thoughts of sacrifice faded. He worked her shoulders until the steel melted and became almost human.

  Sitting on Mal’s bed, massaging her back, Caleb felt time stretch and transform. This moment was a door ajar.

  He leaned into her, silent, and she leaned into him. His arms drifted around her. Mal’s breath fluttered like wings. The tips of his fingers explored her jaw and throat, the slim even lines of muscle and the gently pulsing vein. She clutched his arms. He felt the line of her collarbone, the skin above the swell of her breasts.

  It was wet. In surprise he lifted his hand from her and held it up to the light of tortured gods. His fingertips glistened dark and red.

  Later he could not recall whether he recoiled from her, or she from him. One of them moved, or both, and seconds later she sat a foot away from him on the bed, in profile like a temple statue. Beneath the open collar of her shirt ran two long cuts, one on the left side and one on the right. Other cuts, long healed, lay below them, parallel to her collarbone: a necklace of scars. Her eyes glittered.

  “Mal. What the hells, Mal.” The object she had placed on the nightstand was a knife—not the Craftwork blade that killed Allesandre, but a length of black glass with a handle of beaten gold and silver wire.

  The half of her that faced him was in shadow. The half that faced the gods reflected the bitter green glow of their pain.

  Behind her, on the windowsill, sat a stone carving, three inches tall and no broader than a woman’s arm: a hollow cylinder formed by the bodies of two serpents intertwined. Twin trails of thin gray smoke wisped from a coil of incense at the idol’s center. Rising, the wisps wound around each other and faded into air.

  “It’s called—” she began.