Two Serpents Rise

by Max Gladstone

  “If we’re not going to save RKC, what do you think we should do?”

  “Caleb.” She closed her eyes, and massaged them with her hand. When she opened them again, they looked soft, and red. “We have to wait.”

  “That’s it? That’s your plan? Wait?”

  “At first.”

  “The riots will get worse.”

  “They must. When the eclipse comes, we’ll use the Serpents to grant water to the city. They will rise, and we’ll chase the Tzimet from our land—and the skyspires, too. Craftsmen will flee rather than face the Serpents.” She said it as if reciting the bids in a round of bridge. “We can start fresh.”

  He leaned back from the table, and from her. “Mal. What are you saying?”

  “If the King in Red recovers, he won’t let Qet’s death go unpunished. He’ll destroy the old religion and everyone who follows it, snap the spines of the last gods and goddesses, break their bones and feast on their marrow. But only if he recovers. If he doesn’t, we have a chance to take a different path.”

  “You’re talking as if this is an opportunity.”

  “It is. You asked me for an answer, last night. This is it. RKC is dead. Let it rot. Build something new.”

  “No.”

  “When the cards are dealt, and the players go all-in, what do you do if you hold the winning hand?”

  “But you don’t hold the winning hand.”

  “We do,” she said.

  The world chilled. Caleb forced himself to speak. “Who’s ’we’?”

  “Me, and people like me. People who care about fixing our city, our world. You, too, if you’ll join us.”

  He licked his lips. To the south, fires spread. “Mal.” He didn’t, couldn’t, say anything more.

  “Caleb.” She leaned across the table, laid her hand on his, gripped tightly. Long hours of climbing had left her fingers smooth and hard. He thought her running, a goddess in flight.

  “You’re talking about rebellion. Regime change.” He exhaled. “I get it.” Gods writhing in the lake. Qet Sea-Lord dead in a sea of filth. Burning nets fell from the sky to snare her parents, his father, the thousands of the Skittersill Rising. The Rakesblight Center slaughtered twenty thousand pigs every day, turned animals to meat with hooked blades and spinning diamond wheels. “Not today. Please. Not now. Even if you chase the Craftsmen out of town, where would that leave you? In the middle of a desert, without any water. Qet is dead. Without the firms you won’t be able to bring him back to life. Let’s save the city first, then talk.”

  “I’ve taken care of that.” She released his hand, placed her leather bag on the table, and undid the brass buckle. Her shoulders slumped, and her hands trembled.

  She opened the bag and turned it toward him in the same motion.

  He fell.

  * * *

  Falling, forever, into a sky without stars. Silent colossi moved through limitless space, invisible presences whose immensity built the world. He was a speck of dust, a leaf drifting down a cave chimney.

  A misshapen planet of meat and rainbow blood hung below him. Severed arteries and limp veins the size of skyspires dripped ichor.

  He fell through nothingness toward the heart of a god.

  * * *

  Caleb caught the table’s edge and pulled himself upright. The bag gaped. The heart filled the space within, yet was somehow swallowed by that space, too, a single bright spot in blackness deeper than the deepest cave, longer than the longest tunnel.

  “What is this?” he said, though he knew already.

  “His heart,” she replied.

  “Where did you get it?”

  She closed the bag. “I cut it from his chest with a knife of lightning. I would have used obsidian, but I couldn’t lift a blade that large. Lightning is less traditional, but easier to handle. And the effect’s the same.”

  “You…”

  He trailed off, hoping she would finish for him, but she didn’t.

  “You attacked Bay Station. While I was asleep.”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw what happened there.”

  Pain flickered across her features. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what? Sorry for what you did, or sorry I saw it?”

  “Both. The attack had to be last night, because of the eclipse today. Bad luck. I tried to get you to turn back. I should have insisted. But. I didn’t want to be alone before it happened.”

  “You’re lying. You couldn’t have done all that. You’re not powerful enough. No one is.”

  “The Serpents are with me. I am weak, but they are strong.” She opened her hand, and fire blossomed in her palm—not the cold fire of Craft, but a hungry inferno, a burst of heat that blew desert wind in his face. She closed her hand, and it stopped. “Nothing can stand against them.”

  “Gods. You’re serious.”

  “I am.”

  “But drawing power from the Serpents makes them hungrier.”

  “Which weakens RKC, and Kopil. Alaxic insisted on that condition. You remember? RKC has to keep the Serpents sleeping. When I attacked Bay Station, everything I threw against them weakened their defenses. The more RKC fights, the more it’s caught.”

  “And once Bay Station cut out, RKC tried to draw water from Seven Leaf, but…” He remembered his own work: melding red wires with blue, splicing the Serpents into the system. “Hells.”

  “Your people audited Seven Leaf with a magnifying glass and sharp calipers before you bought us; we couldn’t tie Seven Leaf to the Serpents until the deal was done.”

  “Oh,” he said. “No.”

  “So we broke the station, knowing we could rebuild it later. Allie started the work. You and I finished it. Now, when RKC tries to pump water out of Seven Leaf Lake, it draws power from the Serpents, and the King in Red fades further.”

  “The True Quechal didn’t poison Bright Mirror.”

  “Of course not. They can barely paint graffiti without misspellings. Their hearts are in the right place, but they’ve had nothing to guide them for eighty years. No sacrifice. No transcendence. They’re small, and petty, and mean.”

  “Your entire Concern was a sham.”

  She laughed bitterly. “Have you ever tried running a Concern? You need people to do the work. People to manage those people, and to manage those in turn. The Concern is a dumb god and human beings are its cells. After his defeat in the God Wars, Alaxic studied the Craft. He started Heartstone to beat Kopil at his own game. We made contact with the Serpents in their slumber. And when we were ready, Alaxic showed the King in Red what he had found. Kopil raced to acquire us—he couldn’t let Alaxic control the Serpents. Out of two thousand employees, only a handful knew the full plan. Alaxic. Allie. Me. A few engineers, a few Craftsmen. The True Quechal—even if they’re small and petty, they have their uses. When you need someone to take a suicide run into North Station, for example, why not use a premade band of zealots, any one of whom would gladly die at a Goddess’s side?”

  “That was you.”

  “Once Kopil knew we had the Serpents, we had to convince him he was under attack, which made him more desperate to acquire us, to control them. He wanted insurance. Security.”

  “You played me all along.”

  “No.” Mal pushed her chair back and rose. Her expression was earnest, desperate. “I didn’t plan for you to see me that night. At first I was scared. I wanted to get rid of you.” Her heels tapped on marble as she rounded the table toward him. He stood and retreated, not fast enough to escape. “But you chased me, through death and pain and fire. You chased me, devoted, suicidal, scared—and I saw you wanted more than me. You wanted to give your life to something. To change the world, only you’d forgotten how.”

  “Yes.” The word fell heavy from his lips.

  “Well, here we are. Let’s change. Let’s change the world. Together.”

  “You sound like my father.”

  “Your father wants the gods back on their pedestals. I want
us working as one: humans with Craft, gods with divine power, priests with Applied Theology. But we need space to build that society. We need the time and the power to change, and we’ll never have that time or power with Craftsmen crushing us. We need freedom, and I can win that freedom. Not in a decade or three. Today. In one stroke.”

  “You want a moderate revolution. You just need to kill a few people first.”

  “A few people. Yes. To free a city. To save a planet. Dresediel Lex will be a model for the world.”

  “I kind of like it the way it is.”

  She reached for his hand but he drew back. They circled the table, and each other.

  “This city bothers you as much as me. I’ve seen the way you look at the long streets, the empty-faced men and women. You hold back when you talk, when you think, because you know thinking too deeply will drive you mad. I’ve dragged the madness out into the open. There’s no need to hide anymore.”

  He slowed, despite himself, and she caught him in her orbit. She gripped his arm, and through his jacket he felt the feverish warmth of her fingers.

  She pressed against him. One hand slid up his arm to cup his chin, curve around the back of his neck, and pull his head to hers, his lips to her lips.

  They kissed, atop the pyramid, as the world crumbled.

  The kiss was a collision. Hunger shot through them both, and need. They kissed violently, and violently they broke apart, each stumbling from the other.

  Caleb looked at her, and imagined years beside her, leaping from rooftop to rooftop above blood-soaked streets as two serpents reared in the sky.

  He grabbed the bag off the table, and cradling it in his arms ran from her toward the door.

  “Caleb!” she cried behind him, which was all the warning he received before a curtain of flame blocked his path. Glass and metal melted. Recoiling from the bloom of heat he skidded on marble, nearly fell, and ran again, this time toward the banister.

  “Caleb, please!” The air thickened to slush and ice, but he opened his scars and the ice thawed. The world inverted, directions twisted, but his scars bore him forward. The marble balcony became an ocean of clashing stone waves and he pressed through. Blind, staggering, he struck the railing, and threw himself over the edge.

  He fell ten feet, and stopped, arms jerked nearly out of their sockets. His scars protected him from Mal, but did not guard her bag and the heart it held. Closing his eyes, he saw the silver cords of Mal’s Craft binding the leather. He flailed at those cords, but they rewove themselves faster than he severed them.

  The strap warmed in his hand. He gripped it tighter, teeth bared. Heat seared his skin. He held a length of molten metal.

  With a cry, he released the bag, and fell again.

  After five feet he struck the side of the pyramid, bounced off stone, and slid, accelerating down the incline. Rock tore his pants and jacket. His fingers scraped for handholds, found none. The bag floated back to the balcony and Mal’s waiting hand.

  He reached the step of the pyramid and tumbled into emptiness. Out of reflex his eyes closed. Silver-blue cobwebs whipped past his face. Desperate, he clutched at them.

  The Craft lines slowed his fall; unlike the cords around North Station, though, these were too thin to support him. They ripped free of the wards that cocooned the pyramid, and those in turn unraveled; an avalanche of Craft followed Caleb down, sparking off pyramid stones.

  He shattered the skylight of the pyramid’s next step. Impact rainbowed his world in pain.

  He stood, slowly, favoring his left leg. His ribs hurt: bruised, he hoped, not broken. He was alive. He brushed glass splinters from his face and clothes with his jacket sleeve.

  Opening his eyes, he found himself in a gray office beside a desk glittering with skylight glass. Thick books filled shelves on the office walls; a three-ring binder lay open on the desk.

  Caleb waited for Mal to follow him. She did not.

  She would not. He’d made his choice.

  But what had he chosen?

  When he trusted his legs to carry him, he limped out of the office toward the stairs.

  39

  Caleb walked, bleeding, down Sansilva Boulevard. He needed a drink. He needed rest. He needed to scream. The first two options were unavailable, and the third would be no help, so he pressed on, limping. Retreating floodwaters of adrenaline revealed new vistas of pain to his battered body.

  The distant mob cried rage. A group of ragged young Quechal ran past him down the sidewalk, laden with loot: jade amulets, hammers to drive any nail through any surface, speakers with demonic symphonies trapped inside. A long-haired girl turned cartwheels in the road.

  Lighthearted looters, glorying in brief anarchy. No danger.

  Tzimet swarmed behind the broken windows of restaurants, jaws clattering. They crawled over a chewed corpse in a busboy’s uniform, who grinned with bloody teeth. Sentient spikes jutted from sewer grates. Demons scuttled down desolate alleys.

  Caleb walked south, and east. Blood dripped from his cut face onto his torn shirt. Blood seeped from the slice on his right thigh into his shredded pants. Blood was his point of contact with the world.

  He found the building without trouble—could have found it blind. He had walked this path many times before, drunk and nearly dead. Caleb walked through the front door; it flowed away from his scars. The lift rattled him up seven floors. He lurched through opened doors and down the bare hall, to apartment C.

  He tried to knock, but collapsed instead. His cheek pressed into the pale wood’s grain. A heartbeat rhythm pulsed in his ear.

  Halting footsteps from within: slippered feet approached.

  “I have little water, less food, and a blast rod pointed at the door.”

  “Teo,” he said. “Glad to see you’re … hospitable as ever.”

  “Caleb?”

  He grunted.

  Chains rattled. Locks unlocked. When the door opened he stood straight for three seconds before slumping into her arms. She shouldered the door closed and latched it with one hand.

  “Caleb, gods. What happened to you?”

  “Gods happened.”

  She sat him in the chair beside her coffee table. The cubist war scene taunted them both from her wall.

  “You look like you went ten rounds with the bastards.”

  “Only one. That was enough.”

  “I didn’t take you for such a pushover.” She disappeared into the kitchen, and returned with water. “Drink it slow. There’s not much left. Three quarters of a pitcher, and the ice in the icebox.”

  “Water in the desert,” he said wryly, dipped his finger and flicked a drop onto the floor.

  “What’s happened?” she asked as he drank.

  He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, then sucked the moisture from his skin. “What do you know?”

  “I woke up and saw the shell from my bedroom window. I thought it was a joke before I heard Sam scream from the bathroom. She’d turned on the shower, and they were all over her.”

  “Is she—”

  “I got them off. The tap shut down pretty quick. She was cut, bruised, one bad tear in her shoulder where they dug in.” Teo exhaled. “We went door to door, telling people not to use the water. They understood pretty quick. Nobody here’s forgotten when the demons came from the taps, during the Seven Leaf crisis. Most of the building’s trying to wait the trouble out, for now. Some went to Sansilva to complain. I stayed here, lucky for you.”

  “Good idea.” He savored the water. “The city’s dangerous.” Doomed, he almost said. “Where’s Sam?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh. Seven hells.”

  “She said we had to do something. I said, yes, hide, and wait. She called me all the things you call someone who says a thing like that at a time like this. Coward, and the rest.” She laughed like a razor scraped over piano wire. “My girl loves a riot. She’ll be in the thick of the mob, next to all the other fools.”

  “You’ve
been drinking.”

  “Screw you. There’s a woman out there killing herself for no reason, in the middle of a city killing itself for no reason.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “So I repeat: what in the hells is going on?”

  “The water’s bad.”

  “I noticed, thanks. And if that’s all you knew, you’d say so, rather than trying to dodge the question.”

  “Qet Sea-Lord is dead.”

  She sat down. Her face went blank. “Oh.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t, I mean.” She ran her hand through her hair, gripping strands that slipped between her fingers. “What happened?”

  “Mal happened.”

  “Mal? Your Mal?”

  “Not my Mal. Nobody’s Mal but her own. She’s been behind it from the beginning. Her, Alaxic, her friends and coconspirators.”

  “Behind what?”

  “Everything. From Bright Mirror to North Station to Seven Leaf, to this. They poisoned Bright Mirror and blew up North Station to speed RKC’s merger with Heartstone. They turned Seven Leaf against us. And this morning, Mal attacked Bay Station, broke in, and killed Qet Sea-Lord.”

  “She would have been slaughtered. She’s, what, mid-thirties? No way she could have taken Bay Station on her own. Armies couldn’t do it.”

  “She’s using the Serpents somehow. They feed her power.”

  “No.”

  “She shattered Bay Station, Teo. I’ve never seen anything like it. Killed the guards, broke the tower, ripped Qet’s heart out of his chest.”

  “Caleb.” She shifted her chair back from the table, back from him. “How do you know all this?”

  Meaning: you’re crazy. Or worse: are you on their side? Is that terror or eagerness I hear in your voice?

  He told the tale from the beginning, as far as he knew it, from the Skittersill Rising when Mal’s parents died to Alaxic’s discovery of her, his tutelage, and her decision, on that naked swim in the Fangs, to strangle life rather than be overcome. He outlined her plot.

  Teo interrupted when he mentioned Seven Leaf Lake, Mal cutting Allesandre’s throat—“Because she would have talked. If she survived I mean. The King in Red would have pulled the truth from her somehow.” Caleb did not answer. He finished with his fall from Andrej’s pyramid, and turned to her for solace, for comfort.