Two Serpents Rise (6 page)

When he first heard the voices, he took them for wind through fissures in the rock. Deeper, deeper he followed Allesandre, and the whisper rush resolved to words in an obscure form of High Quechal, a jumble of nouns, adjectives, and verbs from which he caught snatches of meaning: Serpent. Flame. Lost. Burn. Make. Mold. Crush.

Stinging sweat ran down his cheeks, the line of his jaw. His shadow and Allesandre’s, melded, stretched long and thin behind them, a road into the darkness from which they had come.

The passage opened onto a broad, black stone ledge on the lip of a vast cavern. Light from the depths cast the world crimson. Stalactites hung jagged overhead, twined round by metal pipes. Chant braided with the rhythm of machines.

Men and women crowded the ledge. They wore loose white linen, and tool belts girded their waists. They worked at stone altars and plinths, adjusting bee-carved dials, pulling levers shaped like snake’s heads. Burning motes danced in the air before their faces. The technicians chanted as they worked, heads bobbing to keep time.

The words and carvings were High Quechal, but this place lacked the trappings of ceremony: no priest, no priestess with bone flute, no Mat-Keeper with blade upraised. Modern, angular Craftsman’s glyphs glowed from every surface.

An ancient man in a black suit stood by the railing at the platform’s edge. Hands behind his back, he stared down into the cavern. Scraps of thin white hair clung to his scalp. His body stooped, as if it could no longer bear his strength.

The white-robed crowd parted for Allesandre. Caleb followed in her wake. She stopped behind the old man, and said: “Sir, I’ve brought Caleb Altemoc, from RKC. Caleb, this is Mister Alaxic.”

Caleb swallowed, for reasons that had nothing to do with the heat.

“Altemoc,” said the old man, chewing the syllables of the name. His voice was high and spare. “Not Temoc’s boy by any chance?” There was no question which Temoc he meant.

“Yes, sir. My father and I aren’t close.”

“Hard to be close with a wanted felon.”

“I don’t approve of his life choices, and he doesn’t approve of mine. We have an equitable arrangement.”

Alaxic did not turn. “Strange that the most stalwart of the True Quechal would give his son a foreign name.”

“When I was born, he thought there was a chance for peace. He and my mother chose my name as a sign of that peace.”

“You were born before the Skittersill Rising.”

“Yes,” Caleb said.

“Dirty business.” Though Alaxic’s hands remained clasped behind his back, his fingers worked and twitched as if playing an invisible instrument. “Men standing to defend their rights. Killed by Wardens who should have protected them.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“And the other?”

“I’d be less generous.”

“Humor me. Speak freely.”

“I’d say the rioters were fanatics who wanted to sacrifice their neighbors to bloody-minded gods.”

“You don’t share your father’s faith.”

“I don’t respect murderers, as a rule. However they try to justify themselves.”

“Ah.” Alaxic turned from the ledge. He was not wrinkled, but worn, skin stretched thin and drum-tight. One eye stared white and sightless from his face, and a puckered, twisting scar bent the right side of his mouth into a smile. His remaining eye glittered, cold, black, and sharp. “A modernist.”

“I suppose.” Stop this conversation, he told himself. Don’t let yourself get dragged in. “I don’t imagine you asked me here to talk politics.”

“Politics and security,” Alaxic said, “are two sides of the same parchment.” He raised his hands, and tried to spread them. His fingers crooked in like claws, and quivered. “Dark writing on one side may be read from the other. Once, we sacrificed men and women on Quechaltan to beg rain from the gods. We do the same today, only we spread the one death out over millions. We no longer empathize with the victim, lie with him on the slab. We forget, and believe forgetfulness is humane. We fool ourselves. Your organization is founded on that foolishness.”

Don’t chase the bait. “Sir. The Bright Mirror infestation is an isolated incident. We’re studying what went wrong, so we can guard against it.”

Alaxic shook his head. “You don’t understand why you’ve been called here. You think your purpose is to soothe me to sleep. To convince me to sell my life’s work to your master.”

The engines of Caleb’s caution thrilled to motion. He felt as if a careful player had just glanced at his cards, then raised. “Why am I here?”

“Yesterday, Red King Consolidated sent me more documents about Bright Mirror Reservoir than I could read in a thousand years. But papers can lie. I want someone to stand with me face-to-face, and tell me I can trust your master.”

The air pressed close, heavy with chant and heat. “What do you mean?”

Alaxic beckoned him to the railing. “Look down, son of Temoc.”

Caleb almost refused on principle, but principle had no place on company time. He stepped to the platform’s edge, leaned out, and looked down.

Liquid fire filled the pit, rolling, burning, boiling, red and yellow, orange and white and blue. A tremor traveled from one side of the fire to the other, like a twitch on a horse’s flank.

Following that tremor, Caleb saw the eye.

What he had mistaken for an island in the molten rock was in fact an enormous eye ringed by scales of lava—an eye bubble-lidded like a snake’s, if a snake were large enough to swallow worlds.

A serpent lay coiled beneath them, a serpent larger than the cave, larger than the pyramids of Sansilva. Its immensity shattered all concepts of size. Uncoiled and rearing to strike, this creature would cast a long shadow over Dresediel Lex.

Sweat chilled on the back of Caleb’s neck.

That serpent had a sister. Caleb knew their names.

“That’s Achal,” Alaxic said. “Aquel’s in the depths now. They turn and move in their slumber, as we do. They’re bigger than we are, though.”

“Guard and shield us from the fire,” Caleb whispered in High Quechal. The words came unbidden to his lips.

“Well.” Alaxic smiled. “I see you have some religious sentiment after all.”

“That.” He tried again to speak. “Do you have any idea what that is?”

“We know exactly what she is. Better than anyone in history.” Alaxic stared down into the pit. “At the beginning of time, the earth trembled and split, and many men and gods died. The twin daughters of the Sun descended into the depths, seeking the cause of the tremors, and found two massive serpents, larger than mountains, older than the earth. Once, they had slithered between the stars.

“Demons danced around the serpents, inciting them to tremble, to riot. The sun’s first daughter tore her heart from her chest, and threw it into the first serpent’s mouth; the serpent gained her wisdom, and her name—Aquel. The demons tried to prevent the sun’s second daughter from doing the same, but she threw her heart over them into the second serpent’s mouth, and the serpent gained her wisdom, and her name—Achal. Aquel and Achal took pity on gods and men, and chased the demons from their fiery domain into the cold of space. They slept, then, but sleeping they forget. When the sun dies, the demons return, and the Serpents wake, and we give hearts and souls to remind them we are their children.”

“Not anymore, we don’t.”

“As you say.”

“And I wasn’t talking about myths.”

“Neither was I,” Alaxic said.

“We fed those things on our flesh for three thousand years. They’re not gods. They’re animals, if that. Congealed power. We used them as weapons once, and broke this continent in half. Destroyed a dozen cities. Millions died.”

“Millions died because, in the darkness of our ignorance, we dared try to control the Serpents. We have learned, in the centuries since the Cataclysm. For thousands of years the Serpents fed on us. Now it’s our turn to feed on them.”

Technicians chanting. Quechal carvings marked with Craft. Steam pipes in the heat. “You’re drawing their power.”

“The hungrier the Sisters grow, the hotter they burn. We use their soulstuff to power our Craft, and they burn more fiercely. We harness that heat to drive thaumaturgical engines. At this moment, we can only pull a few hundred thousand thaums a day before they start to toss in their sleep. Their dreams are the seeds of earthquakes.”

“The King in Red isn’t buying you because of your waterworks,” Caleb said. “He wants the Serpents.”

“RKC needs our water, but the lakes and rivers we have harnessed will not sustain Dresediel Lex for long. Your master believes he can use the Serpents’ heat to purify the ocean, like your system at Bay Station. Pull saltwater into these caverns, let it evaporate, collect and cool the steam. The prospect of nearly unlimited power also intrigues him, of course.”

“Gods.”

“No.” Alaxic smiled, slightly. “But close. And your master wants them. I do not care for him. When he conquered our city, I strove against him in the air, and fought him on the earth. I learned his dark arts after the War, hoping to cast him down with his own power. But I am tired now, and I refuse to let the Craft carry me on to skeletal immortality. Do you understand?”

Caleb did not understand, but he could not think of anything to say.

“Craftsmen hedge risks, gird themselves against worst-case scenarios. But the worst case here far outstrips any hedge you can secure. If your master mismanages Aquel and Achal, there will be no second chance, no insurance, no recovery. If the Sisters wake, the city will burn. If the King in Red wants my Concern, he must guarantee that RKC will preserve the Sisters’ slumber before all other priorities, even his own life. I want a contract written and signed in blood, or the deal is off.”

“We can’t give you a blanket guarantee.”

“You can. And you will. Your master needs my Concern more than I need to sell.”

Caleb remembered Tollan pacing her office, and the black anger of the King in Red. He looked over the platform’s edge, and envisioned the Serpents towering above Dresediel Lex with diamond fangs bared.

“I don’t have the authority to agree to those terms.”

“Pass them along. Or do not, and let the deal fall through. I leave this in your hands: do you trust your master to put our people’s safety before his own?”

The sleeping serpent twitched. A groan of tormented rock rose from world’s root.

“I do,” Caleb said after the echoes died.

Alaxic nodded, once. Caleb could not tell if he was satisfied. “Allesandre will show you out.”

8

When Caleb delivered the message to Tollan, she cursed for three straight minutes. Contract revisions so late in a deal were expensive, and precarious. For two days, a trio of senior Craftsmen corralled Caleb in his office, asking question after repetitive question about his conversation with Alaxic. They forced him to complete forms in triplicate, in cuneiform, in blood.

He emerged from those days in a wandering fog. He drank to soothe himself to sleep, but talons of black ice haunted his dreams. Visions slunk out of darkness into day. Once, he looked up from his paperwork and thought he saw Mal walking past his office door.

On the wager’s third day, Caleb left the office before eight for the first time since Bright Mirror. Rather than hopping an airbus home over the mountains, he ate a quick dinner at an expensive Sansilva bistro and headed downtown to the glowing neon strips of the Skittersill.

As he traveled east from the pyramids, streets narrowed and buildings hunched low to the earth. Lamplight flickered in the mouths of painted demons in shop windows. A pair of eyes sculpted from glowing transparent tubes glared down from an optician’s billboard. Sour smoke wafted from an open club door. A blind man played Quechal airs badly on a three-string fiddle. Far above, Wardens circled. Their mounts’ wingbeats thudded in Caleb’s breast.

Drunks crowded the sidewalk. An airbus landed on a nearby platform and unleashed a deluge of students: sharp young men with slick hair, eager women in halter tops and short leather skirts, their smiles all printed by machine.

Dresediel Lex had been one of the first cities liberated in the God Wars, but not all the city’s rulers perished with their gods. Priests poured out their blood on battlefields, true, but some noble Quechal families laid down arms. They were neither rewarded nor punished for their surrender. They sunk into the earth—and into the Skittersill, where they thrived, feeding off the city’s sin.

Teo’s family came from that stock. These days they owned manufacturing and shipping Concerns, but her grandfather had been a slumlord, and worse. And when his children went straight, others took their place.

Caleb came here to play cards, when he wanted easy money and didn’t mind extra risk. A careless winner in the Skittersill was as likely to leave his table dead as wealthy.

Tonight, he had a purpose. Mal claimed to be a cliff runner, and her skills bore out her boast. Running was a select hobby. Even in a city the size of Dresediel Lex, most runners would know one another. So he had to find a runner.

Caleb knew little about the cliff-running community, but runners were addicted to risk. That addiction should carry into other arenas.

His usual tables were too rich for players who jumped off rooftops in their spare time. Cliff runners needed every thaum they could scrounge to buy charms of speed, strength, and balance from booze-tinged back alley Craftsmen—and to buy doctors when those charms failed. A cliff runner who gambled would look for cheap, vigorous action.

He tried six bars before he found the right game: four angry children in spiked leathers, and a woman with a long white scar running from the crown of her skull down past her ear. The skin around the scar looked slick from recent regrowth. She played with contempt for her companions; she did not smile, or laugh, or even speak. She wanted to be anywhere but here.

She wasn’t the only one. The goddess above their table listed from player to player, a staggering, tired jade.

Caleb bought in. The players suspected him at first—he handled the cards well—but he drank more than they did, and played with careful abandon. His soulstuff flowed freely, and the others relaxed. Over an hour he dared his companions into riskier play, and the goddess quickened in the table’s center. She touched each player with a chill like cold water on skin; she demanded worship, and they knelt.