Two Serpents Rise (24 page)

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 place 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 roared 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.

Midway through his fourth fortune, he heard a sound like a champagne flute crushed to sand: an inhuman approximation of the clearing of a throat. He paused, hands hovering above the cards, and looked up. Two demons—he thought there were two, invisible save as impressions in the air, glass scythes and scissor mouths, spiked fangs of crystal and eyes upon eyes—stared down at him.

He started to gather his cards, but they seized him before he could finish.

*   *   *

Either the demons could not talk, or they chose not to. They twisted Caleb’s arms behind his back and thrust his head down. He staggered through white-walled halls, until they arrived at a dark, small room with a table and two chairs. The demons threw him inside, and closed the door.

He sat under a punishing spotlight, and wondered if the Wardens would come, if there was any law against lingering outside a woman’s door and waiting for her to return.

Probably.

He would have played more solitaire, but half his cards remained on the floor outside Mal’s apartment, with the flowers. Instead he practiced palming the cards that remained, sleeving them, sliding them into and out of his pockets. He did not cheat, but even an honest player should know how. When sleights of hand grew dull, he placed his feet up on the table and tipped his hat down over his eyes.

He woke to the click of an opening latch.

He blinked, blinded by light. Exploding galaxies faded into a dim mess of purple and red.

Demons stood in the door.

He did not struggle when they took his arms in their scissor-grip and marched him out.

“Where to now, gentlemen?”

No answer. He hadn’t expected one.

When they did not steer him down the stairs toward the exit, he started to worry. Not handing him over to the Wardens, then—unless the Wardens used a different landing structure than the spire’s residents. But he had seen no such structure from the air. If they didn’t plan to hand him over or let him go, why move him from the cell?

Unless they had other uses for him. What powers ruled in a skyspire? The city’s law, or the law of the Craft, or no law at all? And what if the demon guards had not in fact reported his capture, and were only waiting until the rest of the spire would be too fast asleep to hear his screams?

Demons, he recalled, kept peculiar diets.

As they marched him up a winding stair, he searched for opportunities of escape. None suggested themselves.

When they turned onto the third floor, he began to look more intently. They brought him to Mal’s door, opened it, and thrust him in.

He stumbled, and caught his balance on a hardwood floor.

Shadow soaked the small bare room. Moonlight filtered through the large rear windows, illuminating gray carpet, a leather chair, a small coffee table, and a machine designed for either torture or home exercise.

The city burned below.

Something moved to Caleb’s right, and he turned, expecting to see Mal.

Instead, he saw snakes: a wall of them, writhing.

He swore, jumped back, and after a panting, panicked moment, he recognized
Urban Grotesquerie
. Sam’s piece. Sold at auction. “Seven hells.”