Two Serpents Rise (29 page)

“A glorious gift.”

They drank.

“We are the last, you know,” the old man said. “The others have lost their minds, or died, or languish in prison.”

“Yes,” Temoc replied.

“Do you have a sacrifice planned?”

“I will spill my own blood.” Temoc’s voice soured with distaste.

“That is not enough.”

“Of course not. I would have kidnapped a Craftsman, made the ritual preparations, and drawn his heart, but since North Station I have not had the luxury of a permanent base from which to plan. The Wardens’ eyes are everywhere. I would not need a scheme of any kind if I had one of the great altars at my disposal, but few survive, and all those are watched.”

“So the old ways pass,” Alaxic said. “As they should. There are new times ahead.”

“The old ways will not pass while I live.”

“Nor while I live,” Alaxic said, and laughed a dry-leaf laugh, and tapped his teapot. “Fortunately, we are neither of us long for this world.”

Temoc regarded his empty cup, and swore.

“I apologize for the deception.” Alaxic drained his mug. “I thought it was better this way. You and I, the last two priests of the old Quechal, gone. Life belongs to those younger than ourselves.”

Temoc’s scars burned. He staggered back, and dropped the cup from fingers already numb. He turned to run, but his limbs would not obey him. The old man raised one finger. Craft crackled in the night air.

Alaxic’s grin widened. Breath rustled in the hollow chamber of his chest. Stars spun overhead. Temoc bared his teeth. Knives of moonlight pressed against his skin. Sweat beaded on Alaxic’s face, and on Temoc’s; their eyes met, and the world turned like a key in a lock between them.

The rattling leaves paused, and Alaxic slumped in his chair, still.

Temoc staggered for the balustrade and leapt into space, landing in a desperate roll that sent rocks and gravel scampering down the hillside scree. Behind him, an alarm sounded, as servants discovered Alaxic dead.

Temoc crawled to a bush, bent double, and was violently ill. He threw up four times, gasping in between for air. His nerves were brambles lodged inside his skin. With shaking fingers he clutched at his belt, found a roll of leather marked by holy symbols, and pulled from within a green jade disk that shimmered faintly in the moonlight.

The disk broke between his teeth like porcelain. He chewed it into sand and forced himself to swallow. The sand coated his throat and sat in his stomach like ice.

Some time later, his shivers subsided, and the brambles withdrew. Unsteady, he rose to a crouch.

Behind him, hunting dogs howled.

He ran.

Book Four

RISING

36

Caleb drowned in dreams of fire, death, and lust. He tumbled from the sky, stretched out to ribbons that floated in blissful agony on the air. He was a tower, falling to an unseen foe. Bodies struck stone and broke into disconnected limbs, like bundles of sticks dropped from a height. Skin bubbled from bones, and the bones too burned.

In a cave at the world’s heart, two sleeping serpents writhed with expectant hunger. Their mouths opened. Tongues long as thoroughfares whipped out to taste sulfurous air.

He lay prostrate and paralyzed under a descending knife. As the blade pierced his flesh he recognized the woman who held it.

“Mal,” he gasped, and woke coughing. He sat halfway up and collapsed onto the yielding ocean.

The ocean. Gods, devils, and everything in between. He had slept on the open ocean. He opened his eyes, slowly and with much protest from his tired body.

Midnight-and-milk sky hung overhead. Dawn threatened to the east. He sat up with a groan, and found himself alone and naked on the water. His clothes lay a few feet away, pants and shirt and jacket folded beside sock-stuffed shoes. Mal must have folded them before she left.

He didn’t wonder where she had gone, nor did he blame her for leaving: what would they have said to each other, waking on the Pax? The normal script, the “I had a good time last night”s and the “should I make some coffee”s and the “let’s do this again soon”s, seemed flimsy and insincere. Gods, did he remember a
shark
? What was real, and what was dream? His memories beggared reality, and ran together like mixed paint.

Bruises lined his ribs, legs, and arms in triple rank, sized and spaced correctly for the points of a shark’s teeth. The shark was real, then. Judging from the scratches on his back, and the half-moon marks of human teeth on his arm and shoulder, so was Mal.

Fumbling with laces, buttons, and buckles, he clothed himself and stood. Gorgeous day for an eclipse: blue skies without a shred of cloud. The first rays of sunrise gleamed off Dresediel Lex. No ships moved on the water. Only a thin column of smoke from the tower on Bay Station marred the morning.

Wait.

The smoke rose from a broken tower. And the island looked no different from any other island, bereft of the Craft that should have sheltered it.

Bay Station sat squarely in front of him, undefended, ordinary. He slipped into a rolling, pitching jog, each step rippling the ocean. He tripped on his own waves, floundered. After a few minutes the pain in his ankle subsided and he could stand again. He limped the last half mile to the island.

Disaster unfolded in the gloaming. The black tower was cleft from pinnacle to foundation. Piles of rubble jutted from sand and grass, fallen masonry amid turned earth and broken trees. Ruined walls laid bare the tower’s inner chambers: office chairs splintered, conference tables overturned, a chalkboard shattered, its diagrams in pieces.

Black-clad guards lay in a semicircle around the beach where Caleb made landfall. Some bled from wounds in chest or arms or legs, some were crushed or tangled horribly around themselves, others burned until their skin was a charred cracked crust. One scarred, burly man had vanished from the waist down. Ropes of his guts coiled on the sand.

Further up the beach, Caleb found what remained of the marksmen: piles of dust nested in the shreds of uniforms. There had been archers and spearmen, bullet-throwers and lightning-callers, in the tower. They must have died when the building fell.

The odor of burnt meat filled his lungs. He should have cried out, torn his hair, thrown up in a nearby bush, but his stomach refused to turn. He staggered toward the tower with a revenant’s uncertain gait.

Caleb found them next, the revenants, the zombie cleaning force marshaled as a last line of defense. In pieces, they still moved. A hand clutched the stub of a wrist. A head tried to roll upright by clenching its jaw.

The tower’s double doors, fifteen feet tall, nearly as broad, and half as thick, were crumpled on the broken lobby floor. Dawn shone sharp through holes in the wall. Caleb picked past rubble and potted ferns and the empty reception desk, to the winding stair that led down to the caverns.

He descended.

Char blackened once-white walls. A spiderweb made from acid had bored into, or out of, the stone. He slid down steps melted to slag. The doors at the foot of the stairs were torn to metal splinters.

A man lay impaled on those splinters. His white coat marked him as a Bay Station Craftsman, a researcher studying the comatose god. The skin of his face had melted away. Eyeballs, somehow intact, stared unblinking from the skull. Metal spikes poked through his chest to dimple his bloodstained jacket.

Caleb would have closed the dead man’s eyes, but there were no eyelids left to close. He stepped over the corpse and into the labyrinth.

There was less damage here, probably because there had been less to destroy. The station used little Craft around the divine body: even unconscious, gods bent structures and systems around them, like taproots growing through cracks in concrete.

He ran down the long hall. Cave-paintings watched him go.

He soon reached the island’s heart. The walkway around the vast pit was empty. Caleb stood alone in the dull amber silence of dying ghostlights.

The silence told him everything he feared, but he walked to the edge of the pit anyway, and forced himself to look.

Qet Sea-Lord floated still upon the water. His eyes stared at the ceiling, open and blind and so large Caleb would have been a mote had he stood upon them. Pain had twisted the god’s features into a grimace; emergency lights painted his teeth orange.

Qet did not breathe. The silver bonds that sustained him were gone, sunk beneath black water. His chest had been sliced open from the continental shelf of his ribs to the mountain range of his collarbone: folds of crystal skin peeled away, ropes of glassy muscle slick with rainbow blood, the rocky breastbone split, ribs pulled back. Tumulose lungs swelled in the god’s open chest cavity.

His heart was gone.

On the cave’s far wall, someone had painted the hundred-foot-tall silhouette of an eagle, wings spread, in blood: the sigil of the Eagle Knights. His father’s sign.

Caleb staggered to the cave wall and threw up, bowed and shivering. The sight of the dead god let him collapse. Arms the size of hills, limp. Vast eyes stared, open, black. You could swim in those eyes, or drown.

He sobbed sour breath.

The pumps did not pump. The pipes were still.

He backed away from his refuse.

The god was dead. Bay Station could no longer strip salt from the ocean. Someone must have noticed. Where were the Wardens? The King in Red should be here. What was going on?

Leaning on the passage wall, he climbed back to the surface.

Rising, he let his mind race. He would be blamed for this somehow. No. Even the King in Red would not leap to that conclusion. The night before, Caleb would have laid his soul that no army could break Bay Station—not Deathless Kings or gods, certainly not a kid with no Craft to his name. Kopil would see that.

Was this Temoc’s doing? Other groups used the sign of the Eagle Knights these days, True Quechal terrorists mostly. Caleb’s father was on the run. An attack so brutal, so destructive, so successful, took time to plan and resources to execute. Temoc might have found a hole in the island’s defenses, though, and passed word to others.

But this wasn’t his style. Liberate Qet, yes. Free him from bondage, deliver him to his few remaining worshippers. Return him to health, and power. Temoc would never kill a god.

Bodies sprawled on the beach amid rubble and surf-tossed debris. Searching the sky, Caleb saw no Wardens flying westward from the city. He heard no wingbeats.

Where was everyone?

Where was Mal?

Safe. She had folded his clothes, a sign of care: she hadn’t left in a hurry. What if she was about to leave when the attack began? She would have gone to fight. Woken him, surely. Unless not: unless she’d seen the attack, and decided to let him sleep.

I don’t want you to die, Caleb.
Frozen atop the magisterium stump, eyes burning with starlight.
I’ll knock you out and leave you here, warded and sleeping, until this is settled.

She wouldn’t have done it. Couldn’t have left him. And anyway he hadn’t seen her corpse.

Not that there were many corpses left.

No. She was alive. Back in the city, sleeping, safe. If safe had any meaning, now.

At the eastern edge of the ocean path, he held out his hand and called for an opteran. None came.

Some fliers always waited over Bay Station, kept by contract with RKC. If they were gone, something must have so shaken the firm that its routine contracts failed. Even Qet’s death should not have done that much damage.

Or else the god’s murderer had killed the fliers, too.

He walked back to the island, and paced along the coast. Gulls cried and waves spent themselves on sand. In a small artificial bay, he found a pier. A few coracles and a supply barge rocked in the water. Had the attackers been so shortsighted as to leave the boats seaworthy? Then again, why torch them if no survivors remained to sail home?

Caleb had never felt comfortable on the water. The ocean was a terrible thing, domain of creatures greater than man. Brave souls plied its surface, geniuses and madmen driven by the promise of foreign wealth. There were few Quechal fishermen anymore—with Qet gone, the ocean grew restless, and not even the King in Red could tame all the creatures of the deep.

Caleb stepped into a coracle, untied it from the dock, and dipped the oar into the water.

Glyphs on the coracle’s hull glowed silver, and the oar grew heavy in his hand. When he paddled, a swell rose behind the tiny boat to bear it up and forward.

Caleb’s first stroke carried him ten feet from the dock, his second ten feet farther. Paddle by paddle, spray on his face and fear in his heart, he guided his craft into the open harbor and rowed toward the city, leaving island and ruined tower behind.

He rowed east, on the breast of the tide, and tried not to think about Mal.

37

When he neared the docks, he heard nothing. Eclipse or no, by six in the morning the city should have twitched into grudging motion: horses neighing, optera buzzing, airbuses wallowing through the sky. Seventeen million inhabitants of the urban sprawl should be murmuring, cursing, muttering good morning over coffee.

Waves broke against the beach.

Smoke rose from the Skittersill, and Wardens swarmed in the smoke, more than Caleb remembered ever seeing in flight at once. The sky belonged to them. No optera, or airbuses, or commuter drakes flew this morning. Skyspires glimmered silent, and watched.

Caleb quickened his stroke, and soon approached the shore north of the shops and Ferris wheels of Monicola Pier. Revelers littered the beach, unconscious mostly, wrapped in surf and their own hangovers. Couples slept tangled under blankets, arms and legs and ropes of black hair trailing out from under cloth. Kegs of corn beer squatted on the sand beside smoldering barbecue pits.

Not everyone was asleep. A few dark heads peeked up to stare at the smoke rising from Bay Station and the city.

His coracle stuck in wet sand ten feet from shore. No flailing with the oar would drive the vessel nearer to solid ground. Caleb untied his shoes, removed his pants, folded the one around the other, and barefoot, clad in boxers, shirt, and jacket, stepped into the knee-deep water. On one shoulder he held his bundled clothes, and over the other shoulder he carried the oar. A weapon might be useful. Or not.