Two Serpents Rise (14 page)

“Who are you?” was the best he could manage.

“What do you mean?”

“When I met you, you said you were a cliff runner. You said you broke into Bright Mirror Reservoir because it was good exercise.”

“It was good exercise.”

“And your being a senior Heartstone executive had nothing to do with it.”

“I’m hardly senior,” she said.

“I put myself at risk for you, and I don’t mean just chasing you over rooftops. I didn’t tell the King in Red about you, or the Wardens. I could be fired for that—hells, I could be tried and convicted. I trusted you.”

“Not smart, trusting someone you’ve only met once.”

“I never claimed I was smart. I don’t know if you owe me an explanation, but I want one. And I think you’ll give it to me.”

She walked from the railing to the balcony door. It was locked.

“They don’t open for another twenty minutes.”

“You planned this, I see.”

“Didn’t you?”

She frowned, turned from him, and paced the balcony, weaving between tables and chairs. He did not move, but followed her with his eyes.

At last, she wheeled on him, feet wide-planted, hands on her hips. “Alaxic told me he didn’t trust your security. Not with the Serpents at stake. He knew I ran, and he asked me to run a penetration test. Not to break anything, just get in if I could, and out again.”

“He wanted leverage against the King in Red.”

“Of course. He had to send someone he could trust. But he couldn’t give me anything to help, in case I was caught. So I found a Quechal glyph-artist in the Skittersill who made that pendant. Claimed it would hide me from anything.”

“It did more than hide you.”

She crossed her arms and turned away. Caleb waited.

“I know,” she said at last. “I didn’t realize until after you took it from me. I’ve never dealt with Quechal glyphwork. If the tooth was made with modern Craft, I would have seen right away. I was blind, and I guess I deserve to suffer for it. The blackout, the Tzimet, your dead guard, my dead friends—the cliff runners who died at North Station—those are my fault. So you’re safe. I can’t turn you in, because you’d do the same to me. For all I know, you’ll do that anyway.”

“I won’t,” he said.

“Why not?”

He sought the dry blue sky for an answer, finding none. “I need a drink,” he said at last.

“I’ll buy.”

He walked to the balcony door and rapped his knuckle against the glass until the bartender heard, and opened the door to ask their business. “Drinking,” Caleb said, and Mal added, “Dancing.” The bartender regarded them both skeptically, but she recognized Caleb and, after a few thaums changed hands, she let them inside.

Chairs stood on tables. The marble tiles were clean-swept. A quartet tuned on the stage by the dance floor—drums, bass, piano, and trombone, dinner jackets immaculate white. Caleb ordered a gin and tonic, Mal single malt on the rocks; the bartender set the glasses in front of them and busied herself stocking the icebox for the evening.

“To you,” he said. “Whoever you are.”

“That’s hardly a fair toast.” She pulled her glass away from his.

“You know me—my job, my family, or at least my father. I only learned your full name today.”

“Well.” Her whiskey cast golden light on the bar. “My name doesn’t get you much. My parents died when I was a kid. My aunt and uncle couldn’t support me, but a scholarship sent me to a good school, and after that to the Floating Collegium.” Caleb recognized the name: an academy of Craft a hundred miles farther up the coast and inland. Classy place, good sports teams. “Once I graduated, I drifted back to the city. Heartstone was new then, and growing. Alaxic was one of the sponsors of my scholarship, and he offered me a position. How’s that?”

“It’s a start.”

“A start, he says. It’s not as though I know much more about you.”

“You know more than most of the people who work with me.”

“You mean, they don’t know who your father is.”

“I don’t exactly spread it around. Like you say—Temoc’s a pretty common name.”

“I don’t care about your father,” she said with another sip of whiskey. “He’s no mystery. Unlike you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Mal left her drink at the bar, and walked to the band’s dais. She spoke briefly to their leader, passed him a sliver of silver. Half-formed melodies and scales cohered: the bass the spine, the drums ribs, the piano and horn meat and sinews of music.

Her hips rolled to the beat as she returned. She held out a hand, and said, “Let’s dance.”

He let her lead him onto the floor.

Caleb was not a good dancer, but Mal was. She matched his steps, and by her body’s alchemy transformed his unfinished movements into gold. His hand fit below her shoulder blades as if sculpted for that purpose, and her fingers rested warm against his palm.

The walking bass line quickened, and with it Caleb’s steps and Mal’s. Caleb could not tell who led whom. He lifted his arm, perhaps in answer to a suggestion from her wrist, and she spun, white skirt flaring with the force of her revolution. Stepping through, he turned, too, her arm falling to his waist and his to hers.

Drums beat in syncopation with Caleb’s heart, one two quick-step. Their turns swelled and sharpened as cymbals clashed and the drums took their solo.

Mal’s fingers slipped from Caleb’s hand. He lurched, too slow, to catch her, but as she started to fall, invisible cords caught his arm. Her Craft lines snapped taut and Mal stopped in midair, rigid as a plank, her left arm extended toward Caleb. Beneath the skin of her arms and fingers, glyphs glowed silver. With a snap of arm and shoulder, she pulled herself back up, and spun toward him once more.

He let momentum carry her past him. His hand moved in a swift half circle, and he grabbed at empty air. He caught her Craft line, solid, invisible, and cold, and Mal stopped.

Pale light streamed from the scars on Caleb’s arms. He pulled her back to him.

Sweat beaded on her forehead and her lip. “I didn’t know you had glyphwork.”

“I don’t.”

She didn’t ask him to explain. They danced, touching and not touching, bound by invisible cord, each in accelerating orbit of the other. Her glyphs left tracks of shadow in the air, and his scars trailed light.

The band played three songs, a small set, before breaking to prepare in earnest for the evening. Neither Caleb nor Mal objected. Leaning against each other, they staggered to the nearest table and called for the bartender. Waiting, Caleb watched Mal. She hugged her shoulders and shivered. The Craft devoured heat, life force, soulstuff. Combining Craftwork and physical exertion—no wonder she was cold.

“You’re a great dancer,” he said.

“You’re not bad yourself.” Her hands traced a cat’s cradle in the air before her. “What are those scars?”

He turned away from her, to the empty dance floor.

“Tell me.”

“It’s personal.”

“Okay,” she said. “Fine.”

Caleb ordered soda water and Mal a mug of hot tea when the waiter drifted past. After she left, Mal said: “It was an excellent dance. I’m sorry if I was too curious. All the Lords and Ladies know there are parts of my life I don’t like to talk about.”

“Okay.” Caleb rolled down his shirt cuffs, and buttoned them. “It’s a sensitive subject. I’m sorry.”

“I can live with that.” Their drinks arrived. Greedily, Mal drank her tea, both the liquid and the heat inside it: she touched the mug, the glyphs on her hands sparked, and frost spread from her touch. By the time the mug reached her lips, dew clung to its sides. Color returned to her cheeks.

She set her empty mug down. Ice crystals encased the tea leaves within. Strange future, for someone. “Where do we go from here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I told your boss we were dating, to keep you from saying something stupid and ruining our careers. I don’t find the idea of dating you repellant, of course.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“My point is, we have a choice. We don’t need to keep up the illusion. I can walk out of here now, never look back. Our paths probably won’t cross again. Your boss never needs to know I spied on him, or that you hid information. Either that, or we could try to make this work.”

“What do you mean?”

She leaned across the table toward him. “Are you … interested in me?”

He remembered her eyes, black and endless, in his living room, in the dark, after the explosion.

He tried to speak, but could not. Across the room, the bass played a slow, deep scale. “Yes,” he said, at last.

“Good. Me too.” She stood and placed a silver coin on the table to cover her drinks.

“You’re leaving?”

She smiled with one side of her mouth, like a crack in a stained-glass window. “Last time we were together, I gave you an invitation, and you declined. I can’t just come to you because you want me now.”

“I’m serious.” He stood, so she could not look down on him.

“So am I. But I don’t want to rush this.” She revolved around the table to him, eclipsing the world as she approached. “Do you trust me?”

“You saved my life.”

“Say it.”

“I trust you.”

“I’ll come for you in my own time. Find someone else, if you’re not comfortable waiting; plenty of girls out there wouldn’t mind you. If you’d rather have someone who wants you, someone you want in turn, then wait, and let me claim you when I claim you.”

“You enjoy this.”

“Making you suffer? Maybe a little.” She held her hand up next to her eye, thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “You can handle it. You’re a strong young man. Loyal. Brave.” She slapped him on the shoulder, hard. “And a good dancer.”

“I’ll wait. Not forever, but I’ll wait.”

“I know.”

She turned from him and left. Doors opened without her touching them, and drifted closed behind. Her afterimage burned in the dark behind his eyes, dimming from gold to red to purple to colors deeper than black, an invisible brand on his brain.

He lifted her coin from the table, felt the piece of her soul worked into it, and walked her down his knuckles and up again.

If he could have seen through the bartender’s eyes when she came to refill his drink, he would have recognized his grin—though he had only seen it on Mal’s face before.

He ordered his dinner and sat alone while lovers, dancers, and gamesmen drifted in to Andrej’s bar. Deep in thought. Laying plans.

20

Two weeks later, the water ran black.

Caleb and Teo were sharing dinner in her apartment over a game of chess. Sam lay supine on the couch. A glass of cold white wine dangled from her fingers.

Every year, when spring evaporated into the punishing heat of desert summer, Teo stole a few bottles of old wine from her family’s cellar and held a private bacchanal. Caleb was a usual guest on these occasions, but this year he had not expected to attend—Sam harbored sharp, serrated feelings toward him after his interruption the night of the Bright Mirror disaster. She caved to Teo’s pressure at the last moment, though, and Caleb received an invitation the day before the event. Sam was friendlier in person than Caleb expected—which was to say, cold and gratingly radical, but she had not yet opened outright hostilities.

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.