Two Serpents Rise

by Max Gladstone

  “Are you still in contact with the cliff runner from whom you took this amulet?”

  He blinked. “I could try to track her down. I don’t know if she’ll talk to me.” Both statements were true.

  “The talisman is dead. Even the tracking signals have ceased. Only broken glyphs remain. My people copied the glyphs, studied the tooth down to its component atoms, and found nothing. This supposed link between your cliff runner and Alaxic’s aide is our only lead. Find the runner. Ask her if she recognizes a woman of Allesandre’s description. You may offer to return the talisman, if she requests it in exchange. Report back to me on your success.”

  Caleb slid the tooth into his jacket pocket. “I’ll try.” No need to say more than that.

  “Do.” Kopil clicked his teeth together three times, and rested his skull back against the pillow. “Weak, I feel something like fear again.”

  “I don’t understand,” Caleb said.

  “We’ve built a world in the last six decades, but it has not endured the test of time. We inhabit the gods’ abandoned buildings like spiders in an old house. Madmen flock to worship departed lords and dead ladies, to tear down all we have built. They seem to hate me. Perhaps they’re right to do so.”

  “No.”

  “Gods perished at my hand half a century ago. Was that for any purpose, beyond satisfying my vanity, my lust for vengeance?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  Caleb pointed to the altar stone. “It’s been sixty years since the last death on that altar.” He saw Mal again, blood black against her dusky skin. “Our city is cruel. It exploits its children. But it does not corral those it fears and hates, does not kill them to appease bogeymen. There’s a lot wrong with this world you’ve made, sir, but that much is right.”

  Kopil lay still beneath blood-colored sheets and blood-colored robes.

  “I take it your time with Ms. Kekapania did not go well,” said the King in Red, after a time.

  “No,” Caleb replied. “It did not.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You are right, of course. About the sacrifice, and the value of our creation. But do not underestimate the power of dreams.” The red sparks in his eye sockets blinked out. “I see the Serpents when I sleep, too.”

  Caleb said nothing.

  “You may leave.”

  A Warden flew him home over the Drakspine. Dry heat sucked his blood and spirit. Yet, standing for the first time in days outside his own house, in full sunlight, he could not shake the chill from his bones.

  30

  Zolin, the finest ullamal player in the world, tore down the narrow court. She dodged defenders, juggling the heavy rubber ball from knee to knee. It struck her flesh with a thick sound. Ten thousand onlookers watched from the stands, and did not breathe.

  For two hours Zolin’s squad had lagged behind, but in the last thirty minutes, through a haze of exhaustion, the Dresediel Lex Sea-Lords had closed the gap in score through luck and grim determination. In ordinary games, the audience laughed, cried, shouted obscenities at the stripe-robed, monstrously masked referees; tonight, they waited and hoped for a moment of magic.

  Zolin spun clear of the last blocker and struck the ball with the crown of her head. It flew over the opposing team toward the gaping mouth of the serpent statue at the arena’s far end. That serpent was Aquel, the Creeping Hunger; across the field coiled Achal, the Kindled Flame.

  For two thousand years, this game had been a cornerstone of Quechal religion. Play mimicked the Hero Sisters’ sacrifice to the Serpents, at the beginning of the world. Modern fans cared little for mythology. Neither did Zolin. But if there was an afterlife, and she met ancient players there, she would play circles around them all.

  The ball soared, a blur of black and bone, struck the inside of the serpent’s mouth, and disappeared down its gullet. A bell rang.

  Roars of triumph filled the arena. Beer and wine showered like rain onto the sand; torn programs and strips of cloth joined the deluge. Zolin raised her arms and leapt into the air. Sweat flew from her skin. Her teeth gleamed like pearls. She was immortal.

  “Dammit,” Caleb said from his seat far up in the stands. With vicious pulls he tore the bookie’s receipt to shreds. Swearing felt good, so he tried again. “Godsdammit.”

  “I warned you not to bet against the city,” said Teo as she tallied her winnings. The crowd thinned, making for the exits. Sam, in the aisle, cupped her hands around her mouth and hooted in triumph. “Especially when Zolin’s playing.”

  “If she’s sober.”

  On the court, each team saluted the other’s serpent-goal. Zolin’s teammates lifted her onto their shoulders and ran a slow circuit around the court. A band struck up a bassy triumphant tune, and Sam thrashed to the music. She waved to Teo, who waved back but did not leave her seat.

  “She has a face full of powder off the court, but it’s never hurt her play. This is religion to her.”

  Caleb winced, and Teo noticed.

  “What is it with you?”

  “I just lost a decent chunk of soul. Give me some space.”

  “Whenever I mention religion, you get this look like you’re about to stalk off and beat your head against a wall somewhere.”

  “I told you what happened with me and Mal.”

  “You told me what happened. You haven’t told me what you’re going to do next.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Again Sam waved, and this time Teo smiled, and stood. “Fine.” She slid her receipt into a pocket of her white linen jacket, and joined Sam in the aisle. They danced as the band played, hands on each other’s hips.

  Fans filtered out into the dark, hot night. Caleb sat alone in the empty row, save for a small Quechal man, silver-haired and slump-shouldered, who rocked in his seat, muttering a half-remembered prayer.

  Sam whispered in Teo’s ear. They drew apart, glanced around at the empty stands, laughed. “You want to grab a drink with us?” Sam asked.

  “Sure,” he said.

  They extricated themselves from the labyrinth of halls and shops and parking structures that adjoined the stadium, and found a bar with a crudely painted, misspelled sign and a muscular young woman guarding the door. Teo gave the bouncer a wink as they ducked inside, and the woman shifted, unsure whether to smile back. Teo and Sam joked about her confusion as they found a booth. Inside the bar, Caleb drank gin and listened to them argue about art, faith, sports, and alcohol. Sam picked up the tab; her Urban Grotesquerie had sold at auction, and while she was still an artist, she was no longer starving.

  After an hour, the bar’s air grew stagnant and they staggered out onto cool streets. Teo hailed a driverless carriage and the horse pulled them across town through traffic toward Andrej’s. As they rolled through the night together, Caleb remembered their last carriage ride, the rush and terror of the evening when the water ran black.

  Sam didn’t like Andrej’s. She sat uncomfortable in their corner booth, eying the brokers in the dark elegant suits, who drank expensive cocktails and laughed moneyed laughs. “How can you relax in this place? You think anyone here’s ever seen anything real?”

  “What’s real?” Teo asked, swirling her drink.

  “Don’t you know?” she replied with a smirk, and touched the side of Teo’s face. A small scar ran next to Sam’s eye, new since the riots. Caleb had not asked how she was wounded. He did not want to hear the answer.

  After an hour he excused himself and climbed the spiral staircase to the roof. He looked out over the city to the sea, and to Bay Station barely visible on the horizon. The city gleamed below and above, skyspire lights reflected on the belly of the clouds and on the harbor’s black surface. Salt spray mixed with the bitter quinine taste of his gin and tonic.

  “You should go to her,” Teo said when she found him.

  “Are you sure you should leave Sam in there alone? She might burn the whole plac
e down.”

  “She’ll be fine. And you should apologize to Mal.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You haven’t talked about anything else all night.”

  “I haven’t talked about anything all night.”

  “Exactly.”

  He leaned against the balcony railing, and hung his head over the drop: four stories to the next step of the pyramid, then another four stories, and so on down. Windows glowed from the sandstone blocks: other bars, or people late at work, lost in paper mazes.

  “She should apologize to me,” he said, though he knew it wasn’t true. “I didn’t do anything wrong.” That, also, sounded like a lie. The air up here, fresh and cool and open, would not admit falsehood. He drank. “What would I say to her, anyway?”

  “Say you’re sorry for being an idiot, to start. Maybe you add: I was under a lot of stress. We’d just saved the city from a mad necromancer, and I have issues with religion, but those don’t give me the right to pass judgment on you. You could plea the fact that your father’s a lunatic, which makes you sensitive about the subject.”

  His next sip of gin lingered too long in his mouth, and when he swallowed he shivered as it slithered into him. “Yeah.” Turning from the world he leaned back against the railing and followed Teo’s gaze to the altar in the center of the roof. “Apologize,” he said, testing the idea. “Even if I’m right.”

  “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be with her?”

  “Can’t it be both?”

  “Later, maybe. From her point of view, you’ve insulted her, insulted her dead parents, and left her in the Drakspine Mountains with no one to keep her company but a bunch of the same Wardens who killed her family. This is throw-yourself-at-her-feet-and-beg-forgiveness time.”

  “I do sound like a jerk when you put it that way.”

  “Yes.”

  They watched the stone.

  “Hey,” he said at last.

  “Yes?”

  “You’ve been a real friend to me about this, for the last few months.”

  She shrugged, and sipped her single malt.

  “I’m glad it’s working out, with you and Sam.”

  “Is it? I mean.” She examined the constellations reflected in her whiskey, in the ice. “She’s wonderful. Wild. Too wild for me, I think. She went out in the riots, when you were gone. I couldn’t get her to stay. She said she had to be where the people were fighting.”

  “Artists.”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Do you love her?”

  “I think. I don’t know. Shit. Maybe I’m just giving you all this advice because I’m desperate, and I can help you, even if I can’t help myself.”

  “To desperation,” he said, and raised his glass. She raised hers as well, toward the altar.

  “And to bleeding hearts,” she added, and they drank.

  31

  An apology was easier to conceive than to compose. He tried writing the words he would say. He tried all the sales tactics—delivering his speech to a mirror, to an empty room, to a picture of her drawn with charcoal and tacked to his wall. Nothing worked.

  At the office, instead of processing claims or helping prepare for the eclipse, he began and abandoned countless variations on an apologetic theme. Drafts formed a crumpled mountain in his wastebasket. In the end he settled on a paragraph cribbed from a classic play. “The problems of two people don’t amount to much in this crazy world,” it began. He felt foolish reciting another man’s words, but he couldn’t think of anything better.

  Once he abandoned his search for the perfect words, he realized he didn’t know where to deliver the imperfect ones. Mal had never brought him to her home. He could find her office without trouble, but the conversation he wanted to have with her was not fit for a place of business, and dangerous besides. Walls could hear, and Red King Consolidated was not a religion-tolerant workplace as such. Finding her home address from payroll would attract too much attention.

  Better to meet her on neutral ground, he thought, and returned to the border between Stonewood and the Skittersill. Seeking runners, he found an indigent circle of them sharing a pipe with Balam in a shattered statuary court. The tattooed trainer sported a new scar over his brow, and his right arm hung in a sling. Caleb did not ask what he had done in the riots. Balam took the pipe from a girl to his left, breathed in deep, held smoke in his lungs, and exhaled; as a dragon it rose, circling through ruined statues. Balam’s eyes fixed on a point beyond the sky. “Haven’t learned enough to let her alone.”

  “I owe her something. I want to pay her back.”

  Balam examined Caleb, passed the pipe, set his free hand on top of his cast. “Maybe you do. Been weeks since she last ran with us. She’s keeping herself to herself. You’ll find her when she wants to be found.”

  The runners did not offer Caleb their pipe, and he left alone. No wonder they were suspicious. Their circle was reduced. Many must have died at North Station, or been wounded in the riots.

  He set those thoughts aside.

  Mal was back in the city—a team of technicians had relieved her at Seven Leaf a week before—but where?

  How much did he know about her, really? A few chance encounters. Chemistry. They had saved each other’s lives. They were both wounded. Was that enough to build on?

  The public address books were useless: eighty M. Kekapanias to choose from, assuming she was listed at all. With his other options exhausted, he bought a box of pastries at Muerte Coffee and went upstairs to beg Anne, the King in Red’s secretary, for help.

  She drank the coffee and ate two bear claws, and when Caleb told her a bowdlerized version of his fight with Mal, she clicked her tongue and smiled. Conversation turned to mystery plays and sports—Anne was an ullamal fanatic—and when Caleb left the Red King’s foyer, he had the address. A calculated risk: if Anne believed his story of a lover’s quarrel, she would protect his privacy. Not that he was lying. This was a quarrel, even if he and Mal were not precisely lovers.

  Apology written, address in hand, he should have gone to her at once, but for three days he did not.

  He walked at night. Aimless steps wound him to Skittersill. He kept to the light, walked well-traveled streets, and soon reached a patch of red earth between two brick buildings, bare of rubble, weeds, or insects. Twenty years ago, Temoc’s temple stood on this barren plot.

  Caleb remembered waiting in the pews, aged seven or eight, knees drawn to his chin, as Temoc stretched out his arms and chanted the story of the Hero Twins to solemn men with faces made from wood and stone. He made mock sacrifice, brought his knife down handle-first on the chest of a prostrate disciple. Half-formed godlings crawled from the altar and licked the living sacrifice’s skin for drops of unshed blood.

  The Wardens burned Temoc’s temple after the Skittersill Rising. They draped it in a silver net with lines as fine as dream, and the net burned down through brick and metal, plaster and rock and concrete. In thirty minutes the temple fell. The silver net sunk into the earth, leaving a crosshatched scar on bare red dust. Nothing grew there to this day.

  Caleb threw a pebble into the empty lot. Green light flashed where the pebble landed. When Caleb’s vision cleared, a fine white dust lay against the red.

  * * *

  Mal lived in a skyspire on the west side. Caleb took the airbus over, transferring three times. Most of the people who lived in Mal’s spire, in any spire for that matter, flew on their own rather than take the bus.

  Leather-winged drakes roosted in an iron aerie beneath the skyspire. Their wings twitched as the airbus approached, and they followed the passenger gondola with hungry yellow eyes. Caleb was the only one to dismount at the stop. He staggered along the catwalk, hands clasped to guardrails, not looking down. The drakes watched him.

  The catwalk ended at the skyspire’s crystal wall, without any sign of a door or entrance. He waited outside at first. The sun set over the Pax and the roosting lizards roar
ed their dusk roars. Night fell, and he felt ridiculous standing on the doorstep with flowers tucked under his arm.

  Reluctantly, he pressed against the crystal wall with his scars, and bent its Craft to let him pass. A familiar tingle washed over him, and he entered the arctic chill of Mal’s spire.

  Craftsmen and Craftswomen preferred the cold. Dancing elementals of air and ice cooled their buildings to the edge of sanity. Shivering in his thin jacket, Caleb climbed three flights of stairs. Mal’s room was one of four on the spire’s third floor. A mailbox on the wall bore her name engraved on a silver plate.

  He knocked on the door, but received no answer. Waited, knocked again—still nothing. He set his ear against the door, but heard no movement. Working late, most likely. She was a busy woman.

  Fine, he thought, and turned to go. He forced himself to stop. The next bus wouldn’t come for another hour. If he left and returned, he’d arrive at midnight; his apology would not go over well if he had to wake Mal to deliver it. Better return the next night—but what if the same thing happened? And the night after that?

  A bead of sweat trickled down the back of his neck. His hands shook for reasons unconnected to the cold. He touched the doorknob, turned, found it locked. A deadbolt, no Craft for him to pry apart or bend. Of course. In a flying tower full of wizards, who would trust an enchanted lock?

  He paced, and counted slowly to a hundred. She did not appear. He cursed, and she did not answer that summons, either.

  Caleb sat beside her door, and laid the flowers on the carpet. He drew a deck of cards from his pocket and dealt a hand of solitaire.

  The denizens of Mal’s tower all worked late, or else came and went without recourse to the hall. Minutes ticked by to hours. Caleb played every variant of solitaire he knew, four times, then won and lost three fortunes to himself at poker. No human presence relieved his isolation. Every quarter hour, regular as clockwork, an elemental eddy whisked by, trailing frost, and he clutched his jacket tight across his chest.