Two Serpents Rise (19 page)

“Not someone,” he said after a while.

“Excuse me?”

“Our enemy isn’t faceless, is he? Pushing the station beyond its limits like that takes real Craft.”

“There are many trained Craftsmen in the world. They’re not all good people.”

“Sure.” The dark spot bled into the sky, growing as he watched. “But this one took over your station without raising a single alarm. This is an inside job. I’d wager a tenth of my soul you know who did it, or can guess.”

Her legs dangled over the edge of the stump. Her feet were bare, long and narrow, their bones slender. She looked back over her shoulder at him. “What if I do?”

“Tell me.” He sat down beside her. Tree frogs sang a senseless throbbing song.

“I tell you, and you tell the King in Red.”

“I won’t.”

“You will.”

“Fine,” Caleb said. “Trust me, or don’t. I’m going to bed.”

He was about to climb down and abandon her to the stars and sleeping serpents, but she put out a hand and stopped him.

“Her name is Allesandre Olim,” she said. “Allie. She was the strongest Craftswoman at Seven Leaf. She was eager for the assignment. I guess now we know why.”

That name floated back to him through time, from tunnels and caves and a lake of lava. “Allesandre. Alaxic’s aide?”

“Yes.”

“I met her once. She didn’t seem insane at the time. Precise, dangerous, yes. But this…”

“I know.” She pointed again to the corruption of the stars. “But there it is. She was the best Craftswoman at Seven Leaf by far. A genius. No one else in the station could have overcome her, or done this.”

“Can you reason with her? Talk her down?”

“I doubt it. She’s gone too far. That blot’s larger than a living Craftswoman could handle without going mad. If people want to use more, they have to die, like your boss.”

“Maybe she died.”

“Death takes time. There are classes, support groups, premortem exercises. Allie’s alive, but her mind is a splinter caught in a tornado. She’ll tear through anything in her way, but she has no control.”

“That doesn’t sound good for us.”

“We’ll be outmatched when we reach Seven Leaf, and overpowered.”

“So we call for backup. The King in Red’s forces can be here by morning.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You heard your boss, in that meeting. If I succeed, Heartstone’s safe. I’m safe. If I call your boss, I admit failure, and everything that goes with it. He already blames us for this mess. He’ll take his revenge, scour Heartstone from the foundations up. None of my friends and colleagues will survive.” She tore strips of moss from the trunk, and threw them over the side: centuries of decomposition undone by a fingernail scrape. “It’s better this way. I succeed, if I can. If not, the King in Red and his armies can be here in hours, and ride to the city’s rescue.”

“But you’ll die.”

“I don’t care,” she said in a monotone as striking as a scream.

“I do.”

In the dark her eyes deepened.

“Yes,” she said. “You do.”

“You’re not worried for yourself. You’re worried for me.”

“Worried,” she said, and laughed at the word’s poverty. “The Wardens knew what they were getting into when they took the job. You heard Four down there. I know why I’m here. But you didn’t ask for this.”

“I knew what I was getting into.”

“Whatever you thought chasing me would bring you, this is worse. I don’t know what weapons Allie will throw against us. The Wardens are scared. I’m scared. You’ve never been in a war of Craft before. You’ll die, if you’re lucky, and dying hurts.” She looked away from him. “I don’t want you to die, Caleb.”

“You don’t have to sound so surprised by that.”

The uncertainty left her voice. “If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have let you come.”

“I can handle myself.”

“Oh,” she said with a small laugh like bells. “Can you.”

Blue flames flashed from her eyes, and he froze. His hand refused to twitch, his chest to rise or fall. Sweat stung his eyes, but he could not blink.

“This is a taste of what she’ll use against us tomorrow,” she said. “You see why I’m worried. I want to protect you. If I must, I’ll knock you out and leave you here, warded and sleeping, until this is settled.”

His starved lungs spasmed. Time beat slow. Air pressed against his palms: air subtly ribbed like the surface of a plank of wood. Her Craft had bound him in strong cords woven spider-fine.

But he could feel the cords. What he could feel, he could touch, and what he could touch, he could seize.

A chill spread through his scars. He closed his fists, and the paralysis broke. He held two fistfuls of stinging nettle, but the relief of being able to blink and breathe was so strong he forgot the pain. Her Craft glimmered in his grip.

He looked up. Mal had recoiled into a fighting crouch, her eyes wide.

“What” was all she could manage.

“Well,” he said, “did you expect me to let you strangle me for my own good?”

“You,” she said when she tried to speak again.

“I’m coming with you. I might die. I’m okay with that.” As he spoke he realized he was not lying. “I like the thought of standing beside you. Whatever happens.”

“You,” she repeated.

“I have your Craft, yes.” The scars on his fingers bent the blue light of her power like lenses. “I didn’t think you would be surprised. I’ve done it before. Remember the bar? Dancing?”

“You’re glowing.”

He looked down. Cerulean lines twisted about his torso. They shone through his shirt like moonlight. “That’s a hell of a lot of power to use just to knock someone out.”

“Those aren’t Craftsmen’s glyphs.”

“They aren’t glyphs at all. Like I said at Andrej’s. They’re scars.”

“High Quechal.”

“Yes.”

“You’re an Eagle Knight.” He heard awe in her voice, and it sickened him. “Your father—”

“My father’s an Eagle Knight, and a priest, and a terrorist, and a bunch of other things I’m not.” He unbuttoned his shirt. Scars glowed from his skin, curving and intricate: Qet Sea-Lord bleeding the oceans, Exchitli the Sun falling into the Serpents’ fangs to seal the bargain that made the world. The Hero Twins blazed above his heart.

He released her Craft.

Darkness bloomed purple. He closed his eyes, and waited alone in the dark for a slow count of ten. A warm pressure settled against his chest. He recognized her calloused fingers, and the hiss of her breath when she touched his scars.

“Eagle Knights,” he said with eyes still closed, “used the gods’ power in battle. My father’s the last. When he was ten, he knelt at the peak of the pyramid where I work today, and carved the symbols of their order into his skin. Last step of the initiation. Some of his blood’s still in the altar stone there.”

“Gods, Caleb. What did he do to you?”

“When I was ten.” He opened his eyes. Her face was inches from his, but distant as the moon’s. “Well—” He tried again, and again stopped. Words laced with acid formed in his stomach. They hurt rising to his tongue. “When I was ten, he left my mother and me. But he didn’t want me unprotected.” He grimaced. “So he gave me the most powerful gift he knew. He drugged me at our last dinner, and came for me in the night with a black glass knife. Mom found us as he was finishing. Blood everywhere.”

One of her hands clutched his shoulder; the other cupped his ribs. She did not draw him to her, but her strength creaked his bones.

“He thinks he did right by me. I think he’s a fanatic. But the scars give me strength. They let me touch Craft, grab it, bend it. I’ve never liked to use them in my work, because I didn’t want to owe him anything. Until now. Until you. My father’s madness has never brought me anything, but at least it’ll let me stand at your side.”

The river rolled south. Sentinel stars stared down.

“Say something,” he whispered.

She could have walked away, as she had done so many times before, as he might have himself under the same circumstances. He wouldn’t have blamed her. Worse was for her to stand, hands on his shoulders, watching him with that wasteland expression between concern and fascination and terror, as if he were a traffic accident or a shark-gnawed carcass on a beach.

But terror receded, and fascination. Her mouth closed, her shoulders sagged, the corners of her eyes and her grip on his body grew soft. He saw himself in her eyes; she saw herself in his.

A shell closed over that silence, sealing it away. She stepped back, cupped her chin in her hand, and said, “I have an idea.”

26

Morning was cold and overcast, the trees mist-haunted. A caul of fog covered river and earth, transforming the black magisterium stump into a dour promontory. Couatl woke and stretched their wings.

The Wardens moved in simple, straight lines, breaking camp, packing tents and bedrolls. They hung weapons near their saddles: wicked hooks on long chain, barbed javelins, automatic crossbows, razor-edged silver discs of many sizes. The weapons whispered sharp words when Caleb drew near:
flay
,
flense, shatter, twist
.

Even Mal was grim this morning. “Are you ready?” he asked her as they settled into the gondola. She shook herself back from a distant lonely place to answer: “As ever.” She gripped his arm through his jacket. He set his hand on hers; at an unseen signal from Four, the Couatl surged skyward.

The morning pall did not retreat before the rising sun. The shadow dome, their destination, grew larger on the horizon with each wingbeat.

All morning they traveled up a narrow ravine between snow-edged ridges. Two plates of the earth’s crust jutted against each other here, buckling and crushing down slow generations. A river ran along the cleft, fed by the falls from Seven Leaf Lake, and their flight traced the river to its source.

The shadow-dome was miles across and just as high. It curved immense ahead, surface mottled like different oils mixed. Dark currents twitched within as they approached. “Why does it look different colors?” Caleb asked.

“Allie can’t watch everywhere at once,” Mal said. “She sees her world in pieces. When she peers at a section of the dome, it darkens.”

“You still think she’s the one we’re fighting?”

“Yes.”

After a pause, he asked: “Why do they move randomly? It’d be safer for her to have a system.”

“She probably thinks she does. Her mind’s warped, trying to contain all that power.”

“So we’re fighting a mad, almost omnipotent sorceress.”

“Yes.”

“Great.”

“For what it’s worth, madness tends to be a disadvantage in this sort of thing.”

“Glad to hear it.”

She sat in fierce profile, watching.

Caleb pondered his current predicament. A beast sacred and profane bore him north, with a beautiful, terrifying woman, to defend a city wonderful in its horrors. He lived in contradiction, and in fear.

His father would not approve.

The night before, Mal had knelt beside him in her tent and painted figures on his skin with silver ink that burned when wet, but cooled as it dried. Even now he could trace the outline of her sigils on his chest and arms and shoulders and back, the ink cold as Craft, a pattern to complement his scars. His war paint, his mark as her protector.

He laughed.

“What?”

“I’ve gone from manager to knight in two days. I think I deserve a bump in salary.”

“I’ll recommend you if we pull this off.”

“I don’t think you’re allowed to write your boyfriend a recommendation.”

“You’re my boyfriend now?”

“This is our second date.”

“Some date. Fighting for our lives.”

“We’ll be fine,” he said, without conviction.

“Yes.” She sounded no more certain. “Next time, we’ll go someplace nice.”

“Sure,” he said as they passed into darkness.

The world changed, like walking on a tidal beach: one step dry and warm and yielding, the next wet, cold, firm. The pleasant sunlit world faded. Mountains surrounded them, crags old as the frame of the earth. Trees shivered in the wind of their passing, restless shades rising from hungry sleep. This was the world immortal. It would endure man’s scrabbling on its surface, and rejoice when the last city crumbled.

Was this how Craftsmen saw the universe? So pitiless, and dark?

Shadowy cords throttled the air overhead as the Couatl dove for the tree line. Where the cords passed, they left silence solemn as the halls of an ancient tomb.

The Couatl threaded through magisterium trees toward the falls: water rushing in torrents down an indomitable cliff. Up the bare rock they flew, until with a final surge of tired wings they crested the ridge and reached the lake.

Seven Leaf stretched before them, twenty miles at least from western to eastern shore and mountain-ringed.

Caleb had never seen so much fresh water in one place. Dresediel Lex was a desert city, no matter how it pretended to temperate ease. In his childhood he had played among cactus spines, and the forest he knew the best was the Stonewood, eons dead. An embarrassment of wealth lay below him, fresh water from horizon to horizon, salvation to his thirsty city.

The black lightning of Allie’s mind flickered and lanced above the waters. The sun was a pale ghost. Sickly blue-green luminescence shone from everywhere and nowhere at once, casting no shadows—undigested remnants of light, vomited up by their adversary.

Shade-wrapped Seven Leaf Station shimmered atop the water: a silver dome in the lake’s center, surrounded by a metal superstructure in the shape of a six-pointed star. Three rings of Craft circled the entire station, crackling with flame. Domes and towers blurred and flexed, sprouting annexes, buttresses, and arches that crumbled in moments, shining upside-down through time.

The Couatl sped toward the station. Their pinions carved vicious arcs in the gloom. When they crossed the outermost of the three Craft circles the world flashed white, and before the light faded they crossed the second and third in quick succession, a flare of black, a strain of music calling Caleb down a deep tunnel beyond which unfamiliar stars glared into a desolate abyss. Wards on the Couatl’s scales popped and hissed and sparked, and gouted smoke that stank of ozone and burning flesh.