Two Serpents Rise (33 page)

“I won’t sacrifice anyone,” Caleb said.

“Why not? No doubt one of the True Quechal will give his life for the city. Many would count it an honor to be asked. I will find one for us.”

“If your plan involves murder, walk out that door now.”

“You will not let one person die to save an entire city?”

“I won’t kill anyone. Teo and I covered this already.”

Temoc raised an eyebrow. “It is the only way. The Serpents wake when they are called, and will not sleep until their hunger is assuaged.”

Caleb searched the walls of Teo’s apartment, blank white, hung with paintings, but found no help. “There must be another option.”

“There is not.”

“Caleb,” Teo said, carefully. “Maybe you should listen.”

“No.”

“You are not being reasonable,” Temoc said.

“And you’re being disgusting.”

“Disgusting.” He laughed. “You are comfortable when violence is done by others on your behalf—when gods are imprisoned, when men are slain or reduced to slavery, you do not blink. But faced with the need to dirty your own hands, you shudder.”

“That’s not what bothers me.” He pointed to the battle-scape above Teo’s couch. Jewel drops of blood rained from an infernal sky. “People fought a war to keep us from doing this sort of thing. If we sacrifice someone to stop Mal, she’s won.”

“Sophistry. If we sacrifice someone to defeat her, she has lost. This city holds seventeen million people—surely one of them can assuage your wounded conscience in the aftermath.”

“You refuse to even try to think of a better way.”

“Do you not think that if a better way existed, we would have found it somewhere in three thousand years of history?”

“I could say the same about, oh, dentistry. Anasthesia.”

Teo leaned against the back of an empty chair. “Caleb, you’re not helping. Your father knows the Serpents better than we do. If he says this is our only choice, shouldn’t we believe him?”

Caleb’s bruised ribs and burned hand radiated pain.

“The Serpents,” Temoc said, “feed on the souls of our people. The human heart is a focus—the nobler, and more innocent the heart, the better, hence the preference for altar maids and altar men, who are pure in their own bodies. The ritual binds the soul into meat and blood. Death focuses the spirit, heightens its awareness.”

Caleb did not listen.

He stared at the painting of the battle.

Gods fought and died over the pyramid at 667 Sansilva. Temoc and Kopil wrestled in midair, figures wreathed in flame. The flayed body of Qet Sea-Lord sprawled upon a black glass altar stained red with blood.

“Dad,” he said.

“Without that moment of death, without the moment of transcendence, we cannot—”

“Dad.”

Temoc stopped.

“I have an idea.” He pointed to the pyramid at the painting’s center. “This is 667 Sansilva, right?”

“It is Quechaltan. Yes.”

“And this is the altar on top of it. Stained with blood. Three or four drops from every person who’s died there.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen it. The whole block’s red-black.”

“What is your point?”

“Thousands of people were sacrificed on that stone. They’ve left their blood behind—their souls, their deaths. Let’s feed them to the Serpents again. Let’s feed Aquel and Achal so much death they’ll sleep for five hundred years. Let’s feed them the altar.”

Teo straightened. “Would that work?”

“It is mad,” Temoc said, “this thing you suggest.”

“Thousands of sacrifices. There has to be some way we can use that. If the altar itself won’t work, pull the souls out and feed them to the Serpents directly.”

“Impossible.”

“Impossible,” Teo said, “or just difficult? Why don’t we try it and find out?”

Temoc shook his head. “Even if we were to attempt this madness, you would not accompany us.”

“I’m not staying behind.”

“You are not—”

“Don’t talk down to me!” She struck the table with the palm of her hand. Glasses rattled on glass. “My girlfriend’s out there, in danger. I won’t cower here if there’s a chance I can help her.”

“Girlfriend?” Temoc said.

“Do you have a problem with that?”

“No,” he replied. “You would risk your own death to save the city.”

“Of course.”

Temoc turned to Caleb. “But you will not permit me one sacrifice.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

He did not answer.

“Perhaps you think no one else would volunteer themselves?”

“I think,” Caleb said, “there’s a small chance we might survive.”

“There is.”

“So, death isn’t certain.”

“Nothing is ever certain.” Temoc cracked his knuckles, and his neck. “It may be possible to do what you say—the altar atop Quechaltan, 667 Sansilva, whatever name you give the building, is old, and well-seasoned with death. There are ways, rituals, to extract spirits bound to a place. But I cannot guarantee this method will succeed. Do you understand?”

Caleb blinked. “You’re serious? You think this might work?”

“If we fail, there will be no time to try again. The city will be destroyed. The danger will be great.”

“Never mind the danger,” Caleb said, though he minded it plenty.

“Can we even get to the altar, though?” Teo asked. “There’s a Canter’s Shell in the way. The grounds are crawling with security demons. The altar’s in Kopil’s private office, and gods alone know what kind of wards he has.”

Temoc glanced out the window. “Canter’s Shell. That is what you call the Curtain of Endless Span?”

“I think so.” Her hands described a sphere in the air. “Translucent blue ball, lots of reflections. Looks wrong in space. Walk through it and you turn to dust.”

“It poses no obstacle.”

“Since when is turning to dust not an obstacle?”

“The gods will shroud us.”

“I thought a shell was supposed to keep gods’ servants out.”

“There are servants,” said Temoc, “and then there are servants. A priest ridden by a god is immortal in most senses of the word.”

“I’m not a priest. I’m not even related to one.”

“A god may ride you nonetheless.”

“I don’t like that image.”

“It is the only way through the shell. The feeling is of ecstasy, not violation.”

“That depends on how you feel about gods.”

Temoc shrugged.

“Well,” she said, “if we can get past the demons, I can take us up, as far as the thirty-second story. I have clearance to reach my office, even during a lockdown.”

“If I bring us through the curtain, and you grant us access to the building, can we then reach the altar?”

Silence.

“Teo can take us to the conference room on the twenty-ninth floor.” Caleb spoke slowly, uncertain what he was about to say until the words left his mouth. “I think there’s a back door, a sort of tunnel, into Kopil’s apartment. He brought me there during the Seven Leaf thing—he was on his way to meet an aide in his office. So there’s probably another path from his apartment to the top of the pyramid.”

Temoc bowed his head, and raised it again. Some religious sign, Caleb thought at first, before he realized his father was nodding.

“We can do this.” Caleb heard the wonder in his own voice. He had almost believed Temoc, almost given in.

“We can.” Teo smoothed the front of her shirt. She walked to the coat rack beside the door, and donned a short-brimmed hat and a leather jacket. “Let’s go. We’ll figure out the rest on the way.”

41

Mal stood at the edge of the world. Smoke and flame and cries of riot rose from Dresediel Lex. New life swelled within the urban shell, ready to break the ground, burst upward, fly.

She tried not to think of Caleb. He didn’t understand, yet. He would, she hoped. He was a good man, and almost wise, even if this city had warped him into a mess of indecision.

She could remedy that, given time.

The wind shifted. She looked up from the streets, from the riots, and smiled.

The skyspires were moving. They retreated from Sansilva and downtown, floating east toward the Drakspine and Fisherman’s Vale. Reflections of rising smoke slid over their crystal walls.

The Deathless Kings that ruled those spires had caught her scent. Blind prophets trapped in silver cages, card-laying soothsayers and elder augurs, saw her face emerge from the dim confusion of probable futures, framed by fire, laughing. They saw death come to Sansilva, and decided they should leave.

That was the problem with the Craft. A Craftswoman’s power derived from deals with great Concerns, with devils and demons from beyond the stars, with the secret powers of the world. These pitiless masters did not permit their servants the easy relief of death. A Craftswoman grew great in power, age, and wisdom, but she was bound to the systems that gave her strength: averse to risk, hesitant in action, a cog in a machine beyond her ken. A slave.

Mal was no one’s slave.

But watching the spires leave, she felt their loss. Until this moment, she could have stopped. Turned herself in. Claimed Alaxic had controlled her somehow, or the Serpents had. She could have returned to her job, her apartment, her life, her moonlit runs. To love.

But the spires knew the future, and they were leaving. She had made her choice, even if she didn’t know it yet.

She took her silver watch out of her pocket. The watch had five hands, and six concentric dials marked with letters, glyphs, numbers. A black hand swung from one letter to the next, and spelled out a message from Heartstone’s head cantors.

Serpents restless. Please advise.

No sense answering. They would understand soon enough.

The moon climbed as a silver sickle toward the sun.

She poured more water, drank, and set the empty glass on the table. Bending, she shouldered the bag that held Qet Sea-Lord’s heart. Power radiated through the leather, rhythmic as rolling waves.

She walked toward the balcony’s edge. The railing exploded, and stone splinters rained onto the city.

Mal stepped out into empty air. Fire quickened within her, and in the black spaces of her soul, she was no longer alone.

*   *   *

Caleb, Temoc, and Teo walked down Sansilva Boulevard, past upturned carriages and carts. Tzimet quivered and recoiled when Temoc turned his gaze upon them. They feared the Eagle Knights of old. Unfortunately, the Tzimet were not the only obstacle between the trio and their destination.

Caleb heard the mob first—bellowing terror, voices cracked with thirst. Then he saw it. Heads and bodies pressed together, rippling and roiling like the sea at storm, overflowing the boulevard to spread out down side streets. The Cantor’s Shell curved above them all, bluer than the parched sky, taller than the tallest pyramids. Its reflection captured world and crowd.

Approaching from the ground, Caleb found the protesters both more and less intimidating than they’d seemed from the sky: less, because the black mass of hair and clothes and noise resolved into individual men and women, and more, because those men and women were near enough to hurt him.

Teo stopped on the sidewalk. “Can we go around?”

“No,” Caleb said. “I flew by here earlier. The crowd surrounds the pyramid.”

Temoc removed a pouch from his belt. Coils and claws pressed against the leather from the inside. “The Gods’ power will cow the masses.”

Caleb thought he heard the pouch growl. He shook his head. “You’ll attract the Wardens. They’re almost as scared as the mob, only they’re armed. Give them something to shoot at, and they’ll shoot.”

“We will fight them, and they will fall.”

“If the Wardens open fire, they’ll hit the crowd, too, and we’ll be trampled in the panic—unless you plan to burn through all these people. We’re here to avoid killing, right?”

Temoc did not reply, but he returned the pouch to his belt.

“Okay,” Teo said. “Optera?”

“The bugs are unclean. Their existence offends Gods and man.”

“Don’t the ends justify the means?”

“A sacrifice demands purity of intent and form. If we use the bugs, we will have neither.”

“You just suggested we fight our way to the pyramid.”

“Battle is holy. Craft-twisted beasts are not.”

“You can’t be serious.”

No response.

“Caleb?”

“Crowd’s thick. Dangerous to force our way through. Unless.” He groped in his jacket pockets until he felt something smooth and fiercely pointed, which he drew out into the light. The shark’s-tooth pendant lay dull in his palm, its surface broken and burned. “I took this off Mal months ago. It helped her sneak into Bay Station, and Seven Leaf. Hid her from anyone without a priest’s scars, including Wardens.”

Temoc took the pendant from Caleb, turned it, lifted it to the sun. “Broken.”

“I know, but the glyphwork is old Quechal style. Can you see what’s wrong?”

“The bonds between the two symbols, here, the seeing and the not, were burned away. Overtaxed.”

“Can you fix it?”

“I would require a week of fasting, preparation, meditation, to repair this link. In four days I could make a new talisman on the same model.”

“We don’t have a week. Or four days.”

“Or four minutes,” Teo said. “I don’t like the looks the crowd’s throwing our way.”

“A glyph-combination like this consists of two pieces: the seeing-not and the not-seeing.” Temoc drew a line from each end of the negation glyph to each corner of the stylized eye. “The first link directs attention from the wearer. The second suggests to others that the area where we walk is occupied. Without the one, we will be seen. Without the other, we will be crushed by those ignorant of our presence. These links are severed now, but I can re-forge them in my mind, using the amulet as a focus.”

“Great.”

“But I cannot do so and extend this protection to all three of us at the same time.”

“So much for that idea.” Teo tipped her hat brim down over her eyes. “Do we fight our way through?”

“Dad,” Caleb said. “You can’t hold the links alone. Could we do it together?”

Temoc looked from the amulet, to Caleb, and nodded.

*   *   *

They advanced, and the crowd parted before them.