Two Serpents Rise

by Max Gladstone

  “It took me a long time to figure out why I chased you. You’re beautiful, and compelling, but I’ve known beautiful and compelling women before, and none of them caught me like you did. I think, somehow, I decided you had the answer. Maybe you don’t. Maybe no one does.”

  She placed a hand on his shoulder, and he fell silent.

  She leaned back and lay on her side, body rolling softly with the sea. Her lips opened. Inside them he saw a waiting darkness.

  “I don’t know all the answers yet,” she said. “I think I will, though. Someday soon. I’m working on it.”

  “I can wait.”

  “Dangerous, to trust someone else’s answers more than your own.” Her fingers traced the curve of his collarbone, finding a nest for the heel of her hand. “You might not like what they have to say.”

  “I think I will.”

  From the ocean behind them came a dull pop as if a cork had been pulled from a giant wine bottle. A needle of sparks knit through the night, apexed, and burst into a brilliant blue sphere.

  The second explosion came faster, a red globe within the blue, and the third faster still, a mist of yellow-white stars that twisted and schooled like fish made from light. The fireworks, he thought, were as tall as the Serpents would be if they reared above the city.

  “Look,” she said.

  “I see them.” Her eyes mirrored the explosions, and the stars behind.

  She kissed him, and drew him toward her. He gave himself to the kiss, wrapped an arm around her curving back, and pulled her toward him in return.

  * * *

  The fireworks above Dresediel Lex that night cost thirty million thaums. A grown man earning a decent wage could work for four hundred years and still not earn that much. The Nightflower Collective, owners of the barges and their explosive cargo, conducted similar events every few weeks around the world: always there was a High Prince’s birthday to celebrate in the Shining Empire, some Iskari ritual that demanded dramatic accompaniment. Once, the Empire of Deathless Koschei ordered a solid month of festivities to celebrate the construction of the Dread Lord’s golem son. The Collective ordered its affairs with an army’s precision and an artist’s skill, each flood of light succeeded in rushing crescendo by the next.

  Caleb and Mal rolled together on the waves in grand confusion. His hands tangled in her shirt; she ripped a button from his cuff with a sharp pull and it flew through the air to sink. Her pants slid off easily. Explosions overhead battered hearts and lungs as he gripped the curve of her hips, the taut muscles of her legs. When they kissed, the sky erupted in reflection of their minds, and they kissed often, lips finding arms and shoulders, stomach and sides as often as each other’s mouths.

  A precisely timed sequence of blasts formed a pyramid in the sky, two serpents rising above with mouths flared. The ocean was smooth against Caleb’s skin, and it warmed beneath him as he scrambled among heaped clothes for the condom he had placed in his pocket before he left his house. She bit his neck, he clutched her, they fell together. The chill of Craft faded from her skin. Reflected flame burned in her eyes, and as they lay with each other, on each other, in each other, the flame built. She was a single purpose crafted into flesh, and as Caleb grappled with her, he forgot terror, forgot fear, forgot himself and became a single purpose too.

  A great wave rolled from below, and a shark’s maw enclosed them. The solid sea surface shielded them from the beast’s teeth, but for a moment they were wrapped in the cave of its mouth. Mal let out a laugh that was a scream, her teeth gleaming white, her mouth red, surrounded by many ranks of fangs. Her laugh shook the world.

  The shark released them and fled to safer depths. Caleb and Mal remained, set large upon the surface of the water. Mal panted, skin slick and bright as she crouched astride him. They breathed in unison, and clutched each other forever.

  Fireworks burst and burned, flared and retreated. The sky broke open time and again only to reclaim its darkness. All was subsumed in flames, which were themselves dancers, singers, beaters of drums, flowering on the infinite to die.

  The universe faded back into view, and found Caleb and Mal sleeping on the dark ocean.

  Hours passed. She shivered and pulled him closer. A slit of pink tongue wet her lips. She swallowed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, but only the ocean heard.

  INTERLUDE: TEA

  Alaxic sat on the balcony of his villa in the Drakspine, and watched the sleeping city. His skin was thin as parchment, his bones twig-slender and brittle. An autumn leaf of a man, a cicada husk, he waited in his chair. He raised a steaming mug of tea to his thin lips, sucked hot liquid into his mouth, forced himself to swallow.

  “You have not aged well,” said a shadow from the balustrade.

  The old man fixed his gaze on the tea, and the reflections within: reflections of starlight, of the candle flame beside his chair, of the ghost he did not recognize as himself.

  “The Craft,” he croaked, “does not reward one with a long and healthy life, if one wishes that life to end someday. I will not permit myself to be trapped within a skeleton for all time.”

  “You will not find true death pleasant.” The shadow advanced. Candle flame chiseled out rocky muscles, massive fists, black eyes, scars that glowed on the dark skin. “You are a traitor to gods and man. Demons wait hungrily for your soul.”

  “Nice to see you again as well, Temoc.” His voice wavered and cracked. “I’m glad you received my letter.”

  “Such as it was. What did you want with me?”

  “To pass the night before the eclipse with another priest. Is that too much to ask?”

  Temoc hesitated at the light’s edge. “Perhaps.”

  “And perhaps I am not so afraid of the world to come as you believe I should be,” Alaxic said, and drank another sip of foul tea. His face contorted, and he set the cup on the small table. “An annular eclipse tomorrow. The first in more than a century. Occlusion for fifteen minutes. What a celebration this would have been in the old days.”

  “Much work for the priests. The gods would have feasted well. The Serpents, too.”

  “Yes.” Alaxic motioned to the teapot, and the empty cup beside it. “Share a drink with me, in memory of what was.”

  Temoc regarded the tea, and the cup from which Alaxic drank. At last he shrugged, poured himself a cup, raised it to the moon, and shed three drops with the tip of his finger. “Water in the desert,” he said.

  “A glorious gift.”

  They drank.

  “We are the last, you know,” the old man said. “The others have lost their minds, or died, or languish in prison.”

  “Yes,” Temoc replied.

  “Do you have a sacrifice planned?”

  “I will spill my own blood.” Temoc’s voice soured with distaste.

  “That is not enough.”

  “Of course not. I would have kidnapped a Craftsman, made the ritual preparations, and drawn his heart, but since North Station I have not had the luxury of a permanent base from which to plan. The Wardens’ eyes are everywhere. I would not need a scheme of any kind if I had one of the great altars at my disposal, but few survive, and all those are watched.”

  “So the old ways pass,” Alaxic said. “As they should. There are new times ahead.”

  “The old ways will not pass while I live.”

  “Nor while I live,” Alaxic said, and laughed a dry-leaf laugh, and tapped his teapot. “Fortunately, we are neither of us long for this world.”

  Temoc regarded his empty cup, and swore.

  “I apologize for the deception.” Alaxic drained his mug. “I thought it was better this way. You and I, the last two priests of the old Quechal, gone. Life belongs to those younger than ourselves.”

  Temoc’s scars burned. He staggered back, and dropped the cup from fingers already numb. He turned to run, but his limbs would not obey him. The old man raised one finger. Craft crackled in the night air.

  Alaxic’s grin widened. Breath
rustled in the hollow chamber of his chest. Stars spun overhead. Temoc bared his teeth. Knives of moonlight pressed against his skin. Sweat beaded on Alaxic’s face, and on Temoc’s; their eyes met, and the world turned like a key in a lock between them.

  The rattling leaves paused, and Alaxic slumped in his chair, still.

  Temoc staggered for the balustrade and leapt into space, landing in a desperate roll that sent rocks and gravel scampering down the hillside scree. Behind him, an alarm sounded, as servants discovered Alaxic dead.

  Temoc crawled to a bush, bent double, and was violently ill. He threw up four times, gasping in between for air. His nerves were brambles lodged inside his skin. With shaking fingers he clutched at his belt, found a roll of leather marked by holy symbols, and pulled from within a green jade disk that shimmered faintly in the moonlight.

  The disk broke between his teeth like porcelain. He chewed it into sand and forced himself to swallow. The sand coated his throat and sat in his stomach like ice.

  Some time later, his shivers subsided, and the brambles withdrew. Unsteady, he rose to a crouch.

  Behind him, hunting dogs howled.

  He ran.

  Book Four

  RISING

  36

  Caleb drowned in dreams of fire, death, and lust. He tumbled from the sky, stretched out to ribbons that floated in blissful agony on the air. He was a tower, falling to an unseen foe. Bodies struck stone and broke into disconnected limbs, like bundles of sticks dropped from a height. Skin bubbled from bones, and the bones too burned.

  In a cave at the world’s heart, two sleeping serpents writhed with expectant hunger. Their mouths opened. Tongues long as thoroughfares whipped out to taste sulfurous air.

  He lay prostrate and paralyzed under a descending knife. As the blade pierced his flesh he recognized the woman who held it.

  “Mal,” he gasped, and woke coughing. He sat halfway up and collapsed onto the yielding ocean.

  The ocean. Gods, devils, and everything in between. He had slept on the open ocean. He opened his eyes, slowly and with much protest from his tired body.

  Midnight-and-milk sky hung overhead. Dawn threatened to the east. He sat up with a groan, and found himself alone and naked on the water. His clothes lay a few feet away, pants and shirt and jacket folded beside sock-stuffed shoes. Mal must have folded them before she left.

  He didn’t wonder where she had gone, nor did he blame her for leaving: what would they have said to each other, waking on the Pax? The normal script, the “I had a good time last night”s and the “should I make some coffee”s and the “let’s do this again soon”s, seemed flimsy and insincere. Gods, did he remember a shark? What was real, and what was dream? His memories beggared reality, and ran together like mixed paint.

  Bruises lined his ribs, legs, and arms in triple rank, sized and spaced correctly for the points of a shark’s teeth. The shark was real, then. Judging from the scratches on his back, and the half-moon marks of human teeth on his arm and shoulder, so was Mal.

  Fumbling with laces, buttons, and buckles, he clothed himself and stood. Gorgeous day for an eclipse: blue skies without a shred of cloud. The first rays of sunrise gleamed off Dresediel Lex. No ships moved on the water. Only a thin column of smoke from the tower on Bay Station marred the morning.

  Wait.

  The smoke rose from a broken tower. And the island looked no different from any other island, bereft of the Craft that should have sheltered it.

  Bay Station sat squarely in front of him, undefended, ordinary. He slipped into a rolling, pitching jog, each step rippling the ocean. He tripped on his own waves, floundered. After a few minutes the pain in his ankle subsided and he could stand again. He limped the last half mile to the island.

  Disaster unfolded in the gloaming. The black tower was cleft from pinnacle to foundation. Piles of rubble jutted from sand and grass, fallen masonry amid turned earth and broken trees. Ruined walls laid bare the tower’s inner chambers: office chairs splintered, conference tables overturned, a chalkboard shattered, its diagrams in pieces.

  Black-clad guards lay in a semicircle around the beach where Caleb made landfall. Some bled from wounds in chest or arms or legs, some were crushed or tangled horribly around themselves, others burned until their skin was a charred cracked crust. One scarred, burly man had vanished from the waist down. Ropes of his guts coiled on the sand.

  Further up the beach, Caleb found what remained of the marksmen: piles of dust nested in the shreds of uniforms. There had been archers and spearmen, bullet-throwers and lightning-callers, in the tower. They must have died when the building fell.

  The odor of burnt meat filled his lungs. He should have cried out, torn his hair, thrown up in a nearby bush, but his stomach refused to turn. He staggered toward the tower with a revenant’s uncertain gait.

  Caleb found them next, the revenants, the zombie cleaning force marshaled as a last line of defense. In pieces, they still moved. A hand clutched the stub of a wrist. A head tried to roll upright by clenching its jaw.

  The tower’s double doors, fifteen feet tall, nearly as broad, and half as thick, were crumpled on the broken lobby floor. Dawn shone sharp through holes in the wall. Caleb picked past rubble and potted ferns and the empty reception desk, to the winding stair that led down to the caverns.

  He descended.

  Char blackened once-white walls. A spiderweb made from acid had bored into, or out of, the stone. He slid down steps melted to slag. The doors at the foot of the stairs were torn to metal splinters.

  A man lay impaled on those splinters. His white coat marked him as a Bay Station Craftsman, a researcher studying the comatose god. The skin of his face had melted away. Eyeballs, somehow intact, stared unblinking from the skull. Metal spikes poked through his chest to dimple his bloodstained jacket.

  Caleb would have closed the dead man’s eyes, but there were no eyelids left to close. He stepped over the corpse and into the labyrinth.

  There was less damage here, probably because there had been less to destroy. The station used little Craft around the divine body: even unconscious, gods bent structures and systems around them, like taproots growing through cracks in concrete.

  He ran down the long hall. Cave-paintings watched him go.

  He soon reached the island’s heart. The walkway around the vast pit was empty. Caleb stood alone in the dull amber silence of dying ghostlights.

  The silence told him everything he feared, but he walked to the edge of the pit anyway, and forced himself to look.

  Qet Sea-Lord floated still upon the water. His eyes stared at the ceiling, open and blind and so large Caleb would have been a mote had he stood upon them. Pain had twisted the god’s features into a grimace; emergency lights painted his teeth orange.

  Qet did not breathe. The silver bonds that sustained him were gone, sunk beneath black water. His chest had been sliced open from the continental shelf of his ribs to the mountain range of his collarbone: folds of crystal skin peeled away, ropes of glassy muscle slick with rainbow blood, the rocky breastbone split, ribs pulled back. Tumulose lungs swelled in the god’s open chest cavity.

  His heart was gone.

  On the cave’s far wall, someone had painted the hundred-foot-tall silhouette of an eagle, wings spread, in blood: the sigil of the Eagle Knights. His father’s sign.

  Caleb staggered to the cave wall and threw up, bowed and shivering. The sight of the dead god let him collapse. Arms the size of hills, limp. Vast eyes stared, open, black. You could swim in those eyes, or drown.

  He sobbed sour breath.

  The pumps did not pump. The pipes were still.

  He backed away from his refuse.

  The god was dead. Bay Station could no longer strip salt from the ocean. Someone must have noticed. Where were the Wardens? The King in Red should be here. What was going on?

  Leaning on the passage wall, he climbed back to the surface.

  Rising, he let his mind race. He would be blame
d for this somehow. No. Even the King in Red would not leap to that conclusion. The night before, Caleb would have laid his soul that no army could break Bay Station—not Deathless Kings or gods, certainly not a kid with no Craft to his name. Kopil would see that.

  Was this Temoc’s doing? Other groups used the sign of the Eagle Knights these days, True Quechal terrorists mostly. Caleb’s father was on the run. An attack so brutal, so destructive, so successful, took time to plan and resources to execute. Temoc might have found a hole in the island’s defenses, though, and passed word to others.

  But this wasn’t his style. Liberate Qet, yes. Free him from bondage, deliver him to his few remaining worshippers. Return him to health, and power. Temoc would never kill a god.

  Bodies sprawled on the beach amid rubble and surf-tossed debris. Searching the sky, Caleb saw no Wardens flying westward from the city. He heard no wingbeats.

  Where was everyone?

  Where was Mal?

  Safe. She had folded his clothes, a sign of care: she hadn’t left in a hurry. What if she was about to leave when the attack began? She would have gone to fight. Woken him, surely. Unless not: unless she’d seen the attack, and decided to let him sleep.

  I don’t want you to die, Caleb. Frozen atop the magisterium stump, eyes burning with starlight. I’ll knock you out and leave you here, warded and sleeping, until this is settled.

  She wouldn’t have done it. Couldn’t have left him. And anyway he hadn’t seen her corpse.

  Not that there were many corpses left.

  No. She was alive. Back in the city, sleeping, safe. If safe had any meaning, now.

  At the eastern edge of the ocean path, he held out his hand and called for an opteran. None came.

  Some fliers always waited over Bay Station, kept by contract with RKC. If they were gone, something must have so shaken the firm that its routine contracts failed. Even Qet’s death should not have done that much damage.