Two Serpents Rise (30 page)

Wardens turned in the sky. Was Four up there, with her squad?

The water chilled his legs. A jagged shell—he hoped it was a shell—scraped the bottom of his left foot. The few inebriates and revelers awake gaped at him as he walked out of the water. He wondered why they stared, then realized that the scars on his legs were glowing. Why, he didn’t know.

The onlookers kept their distance as Caleb dried his legs on a discarded towel and donned slacks, belt, socks, shoes again. He slung the oar over his shoulder, and waded through sleepers to the road.

“What’s going on?” asked a woman covering herself with a red blanket.

“I have no idea,” he said, and walked past her into the city.

*   *   *

Empty streets greeted him. Down alleys and narrow footpaths he heard cries of pain. Staved-in restaurant windows gaped with jagged glass teeth: their shadowy mouths held broken furniture, shattered plates, plants and statues overturned. He saw a man in a ripped coat stagger down an alley, and called to him, but he recoiled and fled.

Some stores were destroyed, others untouched. No graffiti anywhere, nor any fire he could see, and riots bred flame, especially in the absence of water.

Chaos was not due for hours yet—not until the eclipse, around noon. But chaos seldom stood on ceremony.

None of the people he saw responded to his approach, to his questions. They shrank from him, eyes wide. Nervous clutches of men and women clustered at the intersection of empty roads, but they fell silent when he neared. Clanking steel golems staggered drunkenly down alleys. Golems did not require water as such, but they loved coffee, and without water, coffee was hard to find.

He reached the Monicola Hotel after thirty minutes’ walk: an ornate tower that would not have been out of place on a fancy boulevard in Alt Coulumb. Caleb hadn’t come to see the hotel, but rather the perpetual waterfall that formed its facade.

The water no longer fell. He had not expected it to.

Men, women, children, stood at the plaza’s edge, clad haphazardly in bathrobes, pajamas, suits. They watched the dead waterfall, the silent fountain, and did not speak. “Hey,” Caleb called to a nearby woman. “What’s going on?”

She shook her head. He shrugged, and walked toward the hotel.

Someone ran at him from behind, and he swung around, raising the oar. The woman and two men stopped moving. Their eyes flicked from Caleb to the oar and back. He retreated slowly, holding the oar between them. “Watch it.”

“You’re not safe,” the woman said. “Come away from there.”

“First, tell me what’s going on.”

She reached for him.

He took a step back, and another, toward the gurgling fountain. The fountain, which moments before had been still.

He dove to one side, and the instinct saved his life. Black ice scythed overhead, and water roared in frustration. He turned, scrambled back, fell. A black plume towered above him, lit from within by scintillating starlight. Claws curved like spray. Fanged whitecaps gnashed.

The Tzimet struck again, four ice-pick claws in a blurred swift arc that tore trenches in the pavement where Caleb had lain moments before. He rolled away, feet scrambling on stone. The creature screamed. Barbed claws descended, and he raised his hands in a vain effort to defend himself.

He did not feel the claws enter his body. At first he thought he was dying, that his mind had numbed him to the pain, but he was not numb. Blood sang in his veins.

The Tzimet staggered back, flailing, a beast of shadow and sharp edges. A wet black puddle lay on the ground at Caleb’s feet.

He held the oar between himself and the Tzimet. Its glyphs glowed. Panicked, he had raised the oar to defend himself: a length of wood worked with Craft to move water at high speed. And the Tzimet was, on some level, a pattern imposed on water.

The creature struck again, and Caleb parried with the oar. His second frantic sweep connected. Six of the creature’s arms ripped from its body and dissolved to spray.

The Tzimet recoiled, reared, and roared. Caleb stepped back, holding the oar at ready. A tendril of water tethered the Tzimet to the pool in front of the Monicola Hotel. The creature was bound to the fountain; having lost so much of its bulk, it could not reach him.

The Tzimet’s next attack slashed empty air, raked bare stone. Frustrated, furious, lessened, it slunk back to the pool, and sank into its shelter.

The crowd around the plaza did not meet Caleb’s gaze—except the woman who had tried to stop him.

“Thank you,” Caleb said.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Stay away from the water.”

“All the pipes?”

“Everything that ran. If you open a tap, they’re waiting for you. Like it was a few months back, but everywhere.”

“When did this start?” he asked, though he bet he knew.

“In the night, I think. After the fireworks.”

“Has Red King Consolidated said anything?”

“No.”

Paralyzed. Or worse.

The woman pointed to the oar he held. “Is that a weapon?”

“No,” he said, and laughed bitterly. “I should go. I need to find someone.”

She did not protest as he turned to leave.

*   *   *

After the Monicola Hotel, he noticed Tzimet in the shadows, hiding from light. That explained the broken restaurants, and the untouched bookshops and hardware stores: the first busboy arrives to brew a pot of coffee, and demons spew from the tap.

He walked on, as the city’s stolen water rebelled against it. Serpents of ice wavered over fountains. Jellyfish tendrils spread from sprinklers. Soon he heard his first Warden pass overhead, augmented voice rattling from windows and walls: “Stay away from running water. Do not attempt to shower, or bathe. Drink bottled liquids only.”

Caleb imagined spiders falling from showerheads, and shuddered.

He walked by scared men and women, golems and snakelings and skeletons. He kept to himself. They all did.

Caleb traveled surface streets. He passed grocery and convenience stores with shattered windows and ransacked stock. Refrigerators gaped, empty of water, juices, beer, even bottled chocolate. Fresh bread rested untouched on racks.

Vibrant lawns hid barbed networks of wriggling Tzimet. The sun hung warm in the sky. He was thirsty. So was everyone else.

The oar weighed on his shoulder. Sansilva was several hours’ walk away. No airbuses overhead.

The panic would grow worse over time. The city was quiet still, nursing its festival hangover. Those citizens who were awake had barricaded themselves in their houses, or started looting already. Riots in the Skittersill, though. That would account for the smoke.

More people would wake in the next hour. The Tzimet would feed, and the riots grow.

He called for an opteran, but none descended from the sky.

Of course. The fliers came when they smelled need, and the city was need-drenched this morning. Caleb closed his eyes and focused. Dresediel Lex was falling apart, and only he knew why. He imagined the madness of crowds, children crying for water, clashing fangs. Mal, and Teo. He needed to find her. Find them. He had to reach RKC, and help.

A black buzz grew on the edge of hearing.

Like a fisher-bird the opteran plucked him from the ground and swept aloft. Broken shops and quiet houses cohered into streets, lanes, and blocks. He felt a demonic pull on his soul; the creature’s touch chilled his skin, and color drained away, as if the world were a sun-blanched painting. The opteran was hungry.

They followed Monicola east and inland; shopping centers and row houses gave way to modern buildings, which bowed in turn before the pyramids of Sansilva. People crowded the streets here, ant-sized and boiling in their masses.

Even from such a height, at such a speed, Caleb heard the crowd’s cries—a relief after the unnatural quiet of the morning city. Couatl soared above the mob, but did not strike. The Wardens had not yet declared war.

Black heads bobbed below. Upturned faces showed as small tan circles; someone pointed at Caleb and shouted something he could not hear. A few angry protesters threw rocks. The first volley fell back to earth well short of him. The second whipped past his head with the force of a crossbow bolt, and he veered to evade. There were angry Craftsmen down there, or else toughs with rock throwers or black powder guns. Swearing, he shifted course to fly over buildings rather than the street.

When he turned, he saw the Canter’s Shell.

A smooth blue sphere enclosed the pyramid at 667 Sansilva. A bubble, Caleb would have called it, if bubbles could curve out as well as in. Buildings reflected back on buildings on the blue surface, leering over the crowd like distortions in a magician’s mirror.

A Canter’s Shell was a weapon from the God Wars: infinite space compressed to finite dimension. Passing through the shell consumed an eternity of subjective time. Enter the shell, and you emerged as a haze of subatomic particles, if at all. Craftsmen used Canter’s Shells in the Wars to fend off priests and mortal followers while they wrestled with gods.

Caleb had never seen a Canter’s Shell used. It was a lethal defense, overkill against any force less than gods or armies. RKC was more scared than he had thought possible.

Optera darted among the Wardens near the shell; several swarmed one Warden’s mount, only to be batted aside by mighty wings. Protestors taking flight—their attacks angry and erratic.

One dove toward the shell, and through. Caleb winced. Creature and rider stretched out and compressed in the reflection, and were gone.

Caleb turned from the pyramid.

Breath came shallow in his chest. The world retreated down a long, dark tunnel as the opteran drained his soul to the lees. He had to find somewhere safe, somewhere with water. He had to find Mal.

He remembered a golden afternoon months before, when they stood on a balcony and looked over the city toward the ocean.

“You could watch the world end from here,” she had said, “and be happy for it.”

Stupid idea, latest in a string of stupid ideas, but at least he would have a place to sit and think. There might even be water.

Shivering, unsure, he flew south to Andrej’s bar.

38

Mal waited on the balcony. She shone with the risen sun.

She looked up as Caleb neared, and waved as he landed—or collapsed, rather, in a gasping heap on the balcony tiles. The opteran took a final sip of his soul, released him, and retreated to the sky.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said as he struggled to his knees. The universe was a lovely indigo. Demons tangoed between his temples. He groaned, swooned, and fell. She pulled him to his feet. Her touch burned like hot metal.

She tried to help him toward a chair, but he shook his head and pointed into Andrej’s. Someone, presumably Mal, had melted the balcony doors. They stepped over a glass puddle into the empty bar.

With Mal’s aid, he stumbled to a circular silver glyph inlaid in the wall by the card tables. Caleb produced a pin from his pocket, stuck his finger, and smeared a drop of blood on the glyph’s center. Behind the wall, counterweighted machines swung into motion, and the glyph began to glow.

“It won’t work,” Mal said. “The bank’s dead. RKC’s frozen, and everyone else in this city is sitting on their funds. You won’t be able to withdraw anything.”

And so the crisis would spread through the world. In the Skeld Archipelago young fishermen begging Deathless Kings to back their latest venture would receive no aid; a soup seller who heated his soups on morning credit would find none to hand.

Dull milky light seeped into Caleb from the glyph. “Andrej,” he tried, and found his voice steady. “Andrej keeps his own credit, for the tables.” His blood flowed, his heart beat. Color charged the world. His legs straightened and steadied.

“Better?”

“A bit.” He glanced at the glass puddle near the entrance. “Better than the door, at least.”

“I was thirsty. It was in the way.”

“Thirsty.” His head swam. “Gods, do you have water?”

Mal held him up, and together they returned to the balcony, to the breeze and open air.

A blue pitcher stood on a table near the banister. Mal fetched him a glass from the bar with a tine of levitation Craft. Hands shaking, he poured himself a cup of water, wet his finger, flicked three drops to the ground—“water in the desert”—and swallowed the rest so fast he choked and spent an undignified minute coughing into his arm. He poured a second cup, which he sipped like wine.

“You never appreciate things so much as in their absence.”

“Hells. Mal. Do you know what’s happened?”

She sat across the table, black leather bag in her lap. She clutched it as she watched him. “Tell me.”

“Qet.” He had to stop for breath. Saying one word felt like running a mile. He took the rest at a sprint. “He’s dead.”

Mal pressed her lips together into a pale line, and bowed her head.

“There’s no water.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Tzimet loose in the streets. Riots in Skittersill, I think, and near RKC. True Quechal, probably.”

“Or else normal people, scared and angry.”

“The King in Red’s closed himself behind a Canter’s Shell. I don’t know if he’s even still, ah—” He stopped before he said, “alive,” and considered. “Awake.”

“I expect he’s collapsed,” Mal said. “His contracts to provide water bind deep. Every faucet in Dresediel Lex, every toilet flushed or factory trying to fill its boilers, is a claim he can’t ignore. Not to mention the strain of keeping the Serpents asleep. He might as well be dead. The rest of the board, too. The more they were tied to RKC, the weaker they’ll be.”

“It doesn’t work like that. I know those contracts. There’s an escape clause, for emergencies. You don’t want the person most qualified to fix the water to collapse if it breaks.”

She shrugged, which he thought was odd. Then again, the entire situation was mad. How did he expect her to act?

He continued: “But the boss wouldn’t have raised that Canter’s Shell unless something was wrong inside the pyramid, as well as outside. We can’t count on his help.”

She nodded, and waited for him to speak.