Two Serpents Rise (26 page)

Mal stopped shivering, but she did not remove his arm. “You don’t get to choose your parents. Why should your gods be any different?”

“What do you suggest? We should bring back the altar and the knife? People will fight you if that’s what you want, and I’ll lead them. We can’t do those things anymore.”

“Of course not,” she said. “That’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean, then?”

“Think about your father. You don’t live the way he lives.”

“No. I have a roof over my head, and I don’t have three quarters of the city out to kill me.”

Waves lapped the thick pylons of the pier. Caleb watched the barges and thought about sharks moving underwater.

“But you have something of him in you, anyway.”

“Scars.”

“Those, yes. But that’s not what I meant. You have his determination. You know a few things in your marrow, and you will never compromise on them. You took parts of your father into yourself and reinvented them. Your mother’s in there, too: contemplative, independent, solitary, strong. You made yourself out of what they gave you.”

“What does this have to do with sacrifice?”

“We used to know that everything ends, and it is better to give one’s death than accept it. The first corn sprang from a dead man’s body. Qet’s blood makes the rain. Beasts give themselves to the hunter; kings give themselves to their people. Sacrifice was the center of our world. We defended that world from Iskari invaders four hundred years ago, but then the Craftsmen came, and here we are.”

“Here we are: better fed, better protected, more justly policed than ever in history.”

“I don’t think the Wardens are just.”

“I know.”

“We’re better fed, I’ll grant, but so what? Cows on a farm are fed. As for ’protected,’ Dresediel Lex only ever fell to one adversary: the one who rules us now. My problem isn’t that we no longer sacrifice, it’s that we’re no longer conscious of the sacrifices we make. That’s what gods are for.”

“What do you suggest?”

“We should bring them back, on our terms. We form a society with sacrifice, but without death.”

“Sacrificing what? Shreds of cotton, clods of earth? A bit of wine, stale bread? Gods are hungry, thirsty creatures.”

“I don’t know what they would accept. But we need them.”

“People don’t miss the gods.”

“They do. You do.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’ve been chasing me for months. Half the things you’ve done should have killed you.”

He laid his hand over the back of hers, on the railing. A ridge of scar tissue ran below her knuckles.

She looked at him through the black sway of her hair. “You didn’t know me. You saw something in me you thought was worth your blood.” His expression must have changed, because she frowned, and shook her head. “You saw something you could chase, something for which you could bleed. You wanted to sacrifice yourself, and you’ve never been given the chance. I know the feeling. Desperate for duty. For purpose. Direction. It’s why I saved you, when North Station fell.” She handed the tooth back to him. “I’m sorry I can’t say more. Allie was a friend, and I think I understand her—but I can’t help you with this.”

He took the tooth from her, and slipped it back into his jacket. His grip on her hand was so tight that his forearm trembled. Mal raised an eyebrow. He released her hand, and chose his next words carefully. “We do sacrifice. We pay bits of soul every time we use a faucet.”

“It’s not the same. Those are payments, not sacraments. What, really, do we sacrifice to live the way we live?”

Children sprinted along the waterline. Rising tidewater dulled their footprints, filled them with eddies and sand. By the fourth wave, the footprints vanished as if they had never been.

The last child paused every few strides to lift a shell from the beach and throw it into the Pax. She mouthed a prayer with each throw, an offering to Qet Sea-Lord in payment for her passage along the shore. Caleb’s mother had taught him the words to that prayer, when he was young. After the Skittersill Rising she never mentioned it again.

Caleb followed the arc of a thrown shell, imagined it drawn out past the barges and their harnessed sea monsters, through the deep toward Bay Station.

“I know what we sacrifice,” he said. “But I don’t have the words to tell you.”

“What, then?”

“I can show you, if you’ll let me. Do you have plans for the night before the eclipse?”

Calculating eyes watched him. “I do. What do you have in mind?”

“Come with me to Bay Station.”

“I can’t.”

“It won’t take all night. We’ll be ashore in plenty of time for fireworks.”

Her weight shifted from left leg to right. One hand slid down her dress to rest against her thigh.

“Where should I meet you?” she asked.

“There.” He pointed to the little girl, still throwing seashells. A battered lifeguard chair stood beside her, covered in peeling paint and weathered Quechal glyphs.

“Ominous.”

“We’ll be safe.”

“Fine,” she said. “It’s a date.”

She cupped his chin in one hand, guided him to her, and kissed him. Her mouth was cooler than the twilight. Her kiss danced like a spark down his neck and through his limbs. It quickened in his scars. He wrapped an arm around her waist, and pulled her closer. The vibration inside him built to shiver them both apart.

She slipped from him, and walked away.

Teo had once claimed that human history began with a storm: the interval between lightning and thunder, between the flash and the rumble felt in the body’s core, was primitive man’s first experience of time—the awakening of consciousness, the birth of the gods.

As Mal receded down the pier—quick strides, long for her body—Caleb believed Teo’s theory. Godhood began with watching her leave, and feeling her still present.

When she reached the road, she hailed a driverless carriage and disappeared into the evening traffic up the Pax Coast Carriageway toward the hills. Caleb bought a churro from a street vendor whose cart bore the brand of a winking skull, and walked down to the beach. He lifted a shell from the tidal sand, and poured out the water within. He tested the shell’s weight, and threw it into the advancing tide.

33

Dresediel Lex bled for the coming eclipse. Red banners draped skyspires. Streamers of crimson paper, ribbon, and rope hung from lampposts, and every storefront sported red splatters of decals and paint. Fake blood dripped down walls. Imitation entrails, veins, viscera dangled from fire escapes in the winding back streets of Skittersill. Even the migrants of the Stonewood slums added a splash of red to their tents and battered lean-tos.

Before Liberation, the red decorations had been bought from temples: nothing could match the cardinal dye brewed in holy vats beneath the pyramids, for no one possessed the sheer quantity of blood available to Quechal priests.

Times changed. Simple alchemy mimicked the many colors of blood, and Craftsmen sold their cloth more cheaply than priests.

Teo had tickets to the Eclipse Games, but Sam refused to come—the contest was part of the commercialization of a sacred holiday, she said, though she lacked a trace of Quechal blood. Caleb came instead, and said he was sorry Sam couldn’t make it.

“Yeah,” Teo said, with a tightening of her lips that warned Caleb to drop the subject. “It’s a shame.”

The Sea-Lords played Oxulhat, a rare match-up since the desert citadel was part of a different ullamal conference from Dresediel Lex and seldom made the play-offs. The Eclipse Games were an exception: a relic of centuries past, before the Twin Serpents destroyed the horn of land that once joined Northern and Southern Kath, before refugees fled north to transform the village of Dresediel Lex into a metropolis. Oxulhat had been a frontier outpost of the old Quechal empire, and survived its doom. The cities’ teams played at each eclipse, in memory of what was lost.

Oxulhat scored a string of goals at the top of the first quarter. Zolin replied with play brilliant in its ferocity but sloppy in its execution, and earned herself a penalty. Anticipation swelled. Moans of fear and joy accompanied the rubber ball’s impact on skull or limb or girded hip. The players’ cries rose like mountain peaks above gasps, curses, and threats from the audience.

Caleb followed the game with morbid fascination—not the players, but the game itself, the story upon which it was founded: the balls, the Hero Sisters’ hearts, the players, gods or demons or both. Thousands of feet below the city, Heartstone’s engineers and Craftsmen chanted to bind the Serpents in sleep, no hearts or deaths required. Yet still the people of Dresediel Lex gathered in this stadium and watched their players strive to save the world.

The teams grappled on the narrow, frieze-lined court. The Sea-Lords wrung points from Oxulhat like water from a sun-dried rag. Teo gripped Caleb’s arm through his jacket, hard enough to break skin. She shouted, she swore, she twisted her black small-brimmed hat in her hands as if to rip it into pieces.

A drift of fog with a familiar face hovered above the court, ragged and almost invisible. The goddess of games alone survived to consecrate the contest. All the other gods were gone.

Victory arrived at last, and with it hunger. Teo, who had spent the last quarter standing on her chair screaming at the players, dragged Caleb to a downtown bar where they met Sam, already drunk. For the festivities she’d twisted her golden hair into a bun and painted her face red and blue. Together they roamed the broken streets, staggering from trouble to trouble until they arrived at a battered nightclub packed with Sam’s artist friends. A swinging band welcomed one and all to the dance floor.

Caleb, drunk, danced with two women whose names he promptly forgot, then settled at the bar with a gin and tonic and watched Teo and Sam dance closer, closer as horns cried golden in the smoke. Teo led, and Sam spun a series of turns so sharp her flowing skirt wrapped tight around the muscles of her legs. The heat of their proximity burned the air around them white. Caleb watched until Teo kissed her, hard and full. He took his drink to a game being dealt at a corner table, bought in and played loose, not caring how much he lost. The goddess fled him, and he pursued; embraced him, and he tumbled through space wrapped in a net of jewels.

He woke the next morning swollen with the stolen souls of other men, a dull ache where his head should have been. Rolling to his feet he found himself in a dark hotel room, blackout curtains pulled. He left the curtains alone, not wanting to see what time it was, knowing he had risen early. His body never let him sleep off a hangover. He identified the hotel by its faded harlequin wallpaper: he was three blocks south of Teo’s apartment.

Confronting the wreckage of his face in the bathroom mirror, he decided against going to work. He sent a rat to Tollan, apologizing and claiming one of his many unused vacation days. Little point visiting the office at any rate. No business would be discussed. Half the staff was on vacation. RKC could mind itself.

In the shower, he thought of Mal.

He remembered Temoc’s stories of the old days, of priests bleeding themselves to the edge of death before a full eclipse. Their howls must have echoed through the pyramid, down to the pens where sacrifices trembled in their chains. The Red King’s lover had been one of those wretches. Caleb remembered his smile in the sepia picture.

Screw it. Had he been sober, he would have lain awake all night tormented by ratiocination and self-doubt, like one of those Iskari novelists who could unpack world history from the taste of a cookie. He had plenty of time to recover from his hangover before sunset.

Clean, he slid one finger down the showerhead glyphs. Angular symbols ripped pieces from his over-full soul, and the stream of hot water ceased. Wrapped in steam and thought, he stepped from the stall, groped for a towel, and prepared his mind against the day.

34

Caleb waited on the beach at the turning of the tide. Families and couples crowded the sand; toddlers built pyramids and older children played catch or tag, or ullamal with buckets for goals. Wave by wave the water advanced, bearing ropes of seaweed and sticks, trash and dead fish: the ocean threw the city’s refuse back to shore. Edged against sunset on the bay, barges waited to unleash the fireworks that slept within their hulls.

People gathered at the shore and in the city’s parks and fields, watching a night sky their myths said festered with bogeymen and many-armed devils. Tonight, DL’s citizens faced those demons, armed with ritual, comradeship, and explosives. They drank, danced, cheered. On the beach, a wandering chorus sang the Death Hymn:

Dreaming, dying, counting time

We wait upon the days sublime

Living edge of dooméd earth

We wait for joy of bloody birth.

They skipped the second verse, which named the Twin Serpents, and the fourth, which described the sacrifice: the flick of blade that parted skin, the strike that broke the breastbone. Rather than chanting god-names for the chorus, they sang nonsense syllables,
la ne she la te la ta
. Caleb realized he was mouthing the original words, and stopped.

“Couldn’t you have picked a less crowded place to meet?”

Mal’s voice at his side. He whirled on her, and almost lost his balance. “You startled me.”

“At least one of us is discrete.” She was dressed sensibly: gray slacks, flats, a loose white high-necked blouse belted at the waist, a leather bag slung over her shoulder. Sunset caught her skin in burnished bronze. “Shall we go?”

A black sliver detached from the sky, plummeted, and stopped above Caleb’s outstretched hand, hovering on long dragonfly wings. The opteran’s proboscis brushed his skin, tasting his soul.

She called another flier to her. Multifaceted eyes glinted sunset red. Caleb guided his own insect to his shoulders. Its legs wrapped beneath his arms, around his stomach, about his thighs. He fell forward, gave himself to gravity and the surge of lifting wings. Mal followed.

He flew up and out, over the gunmetal gray Pax, high enough that neither spray nor leaping sharks nor the springy tendrils of gallowglasses underwater could catch him.