Two Serpents Rise (8 page)

“I suppose you’ll call the whole thing off now,” she said as he tested his mended shoulder’s strength. “Hand her over to the authorities.”

“I can’t quit now.” He reached for his pants. “I’ve almost won our bet.”

10

Two days later, wounds healed and mind unsettled, he stalked Teo’s office.

“What do I have to do,” she said, looking up from a pile of paperwork, “to get you out of here so I can focus?”

“Thanks for your support. I’m in trouble.”

“What happened to the cocky attitude? I’ve almost won, all that stuff?”

“I have almost won.”

“But you’re pacing.”

“I’m so close. It’s this last little part that’s the problem.”

“The part where you have to beat a runner at her own race.”

“That’s the one.”

“You know what you should do. Tell Tollan, fall on your sword and”—she waved the quill tip of her pen at the door—“walk away.”

“Would you give up, if our situations were reversed?”

“Of course.”

“I think she’s innocent.”

“You’re infatuated.”

“I’m not. I want to help her.”

“Because she’s pretty.”

“Because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “And pretty is not even the right word. She burns. She’s a verb.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“You fall for people all the time.”

“Fall is certainly the operative word in this case.” Teo returned her pen to its copper stand with an exasperated click of quill on metal. “I’ve never dated a key suspect in an ongoing investigation. As far as I recall, and feel free to correct me, I’ve never come back from a date with anything worse than a hangover. How many bones did you break last week?”

“That’s beside the point,” he said, though it wasn’t. He studied one of the paintings on her office wall: a canvas awash with orange and brown and splashes of blue. A city rose, or fell, from the angry brushstrokes—a city suspended between two hells. “Would you rather I fold?”

She crossed her arms and reclined in her chair. Leather creaked to cradle her. “That isn’t fair.”

“I’m not blaming you. You’re right. I never would have let that hand pass four years ago. I got scared, got tight. I’m afraid of losing my job, my house, the shreds of soulstuff I’ve squirreled together. But this woman doesn’t deserve to be handed over to the Wardens just because she doesn’t listen when the world tells her where she can and can’t go.”

“She’s dangerous.”

“She’s amazing,” he agreed.

“I don’t think you get my point.”

“I don’t think I care.”

Teo leaned forward. Caleb steeled himself against whatever she was about to say.

A bell rang, interrupting them both. She grimaced and pressed a button on her desk. A tiny door opened in the baseboard behind her wastebasket. Two hesitant red eyes peered out from the shadows.

The white rat stepped cautiously into the room, nostrils flaring. Satisfied of its immediate safety, the rat darted up Teo’s desk and sat atop her paperwork. It wore black velvet barding blazoned with a silver spiderweb; a leather scroll case the size of a cigarette hung around its neck. Teo opened the case with a flick of her forefinger, and tapped a parchment scroll into her palm.

The rat accepted a few thaums of her soul in payment for the delivery, sketched a mechanical bow, and darted back through its hidden door, which snapped closed. Teo unrolled the scroll, read the message there, and swore.

“Heartstone?”

“Heartstone,” she confirmed. “This deal will kill me, or else I will kill every single person involved in it.”

“Please don’t. That would include me.”

“I might kill you anyway,” she said. “They want all our customer complaints for the last year, to prove some damn thing or other about our service. As if I didn’t have enough on my mind.”

“I have five days to figure out how to run faster than the best cliff runner in the city.”

“Practice.” Teo grabbed a pen and scrawled a list on a spare palimpsest.

“Their practice almost killed me.”

“Then cheat.”

He raised one finger and opened his mouth. Ten seconds passed, twenty, and no words came out. A sun rose in his mind.

“Teo, you’re a genius,” he said, and left.

*   *   *

Caleb couldn’t beat Mal if he played by her rules. He was neither Craftsman nor athlete. His skills lay at the card table.

But Mal had challenged him to catch her, not to win. If he cheated, she might not talk, but since he couldn’t win by playing fair, he would lose nothing by stretching the rules. Balam would not approve, but Caleb didn’t need his approval.

Cheating at a footrace was difficult. There were no cards he could hide in his sleeve, no tricks of shuffling or sleights-of-hand. Fortunately, Caleb had other alternatives.

He descended winding stairs into RKC’s basement library, a labyrinth of twisting paths built centuries before as a ritual maze for the priests of Aquel and Achal. After the God Wars, the King in Red used the paths and dead-end chambers to store the millions of contracts by which the city maintained itself in the absence of divine grace.

This library held no Iskari romances, no histories of the Atavasin Empire or treatises on gardening or the cultivation of dreamweed. Shelves strained to support ledgers, pacts, scrolls, codices of souls collected and paid. These documents, and the Craft they anchored, were RKC’s meat and blood.

No windows opened onto the library. No candles burned. Ghostlamps offered the only light. Attendants wandered branching paths between high walls lined with forbidden tomes.

After a half hour’s search Caleb found the Sub-Basement of Honorable Confusion and Folly, which held the industrial contracts. From the third oversized shelf in the fourth bookcase he removed a hand-bound sheaf of documents, spine embossed with “Rakesblight” and illuminated in gold leaf. He recognized this book, its prim, stiff binding and the green marble cover paper: he had written most of the reports inside. Rakesblight had been one of his first projects.

He flipped through pages of contracts and graphs and sigils until he reached the glossy pictures at the book’s heart: plans of the Rakesblight Center, with lines of Craft drawn in blue. He sketched a copy of the diagram in a small notebook he carried, and stared at his sketch as if to drink its lines off the page into his mind. He made a small correction, and retrieved a larger book, labeled North Station in heavy letters, from the oversized shelf.

North Station surrounded Rakesblight and its neighboring properties on three sides. The people of Dresediel Lex paid RKC and other Concerns for their lights, water, and food in slivers of soul. In North Station, Craft engines smelted this soulstuff into power free of memory, affection, or moral content. That power in turn set the city’s lamps ablaze and pumped its water down miles of pipe.

Caleb laid the book open on a wooden table that creaked with its weight. North Station’s physical schematics were almost illegible below the blue lines drawn above and around them. Near North Station, the Craft twisted into thick ropes of obligation and interest and torment. Those ropes moved like belts in a machine.

Perfect.

Closing the book, he stood alone in the sub-basement. It was lunchtime, and the architects and students and junior Craftsmen who usually worked here would not return for an hour at least.

The library dripped with Craft. Mystic bindings and filaments clogged the narrow avenues between bookcases. Craft lines tangled and knotted until only scholars could tell a consignment order from a service contract, a statement of work from a record of accounts receivable.

Not so different from the air around North Station.

Caleb pulled his chair into the center of the room, and stepped onto its seat. The legs wobbled, but did not give. He slid a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, unfolded the cloth and held it before him at arm’s length. The fabric hung limp in the dry basement air. He spread the fingers of his free hand beside the handkerchief, but felt nothing. He raised both handkerchief and hand above his head. No change. Carefully, slowly, he searched the air. At last he found the right spot: the handkerchief did not move, but a cool breeze blew against his hand. No. Not a breeze. More like a stream of water, if water were invisible, and not precisely wet.

Caleb traced the invisible flow for a few feet in either direction. He closed his eyes, and at first saw only the black behind his eyelids. A world emerged: the library outlined in lightning and blue flame. His body was a tangle of wires, his hand a skeleton’s hand. A silver line passed through his palm. Light flowed along its length. The scars that spiderwebbed his forearm tingled and awoke. The Craft-line became solid to his touch.

He opened his eyes, framed his mind in an attitude he would not have recognized as prayer, and jumped.

11

The sun died, devoured by the rolling ocean. Dresediel Lex bloomed from its death, like a flower on a grave. Pyramids and skyspires cast light into darkness. The arteries of commerce glowed. In an office atop the obsidian pyramid where he once broke the gods, the King in Red sipped coffee and watched the city his power made possible, the city his radiance illuminated.

The lords of the earth and the bums in rags and tatters hid from that light, under ratty blankets or in the perfumed caves of nightclubs and dance halls. Across town by the shore, five students doffed their clothes and ran naked into cold dark water. Dresediel Lex by night was a brilliant menagerie. The animals trapped inside scraped at the bars of their cages.

Caleb arrived early at the Rakesblight Center, a black square box a thousand feet on each side and four stories tall. Animals were bought here, butchered, and sold—unsuspecting pigs herded a hundred at a time into rooms that smelled nothing at all like death, so well did the center’s Craft scrub away the stench and spiritual taint of slaughter. From those rooms the pigs’ corpses moved to wheels and metal jaws and conveyor belts. By the time their meat reached the sale floor, it had become cold flesh in a small box, nothing left to suggest it once squealed or rooted in muck.

Two years before, the King in Red had bought the place from Illyana Rakesblight, the Deathless Queen who designed the center to replace the fallen Goddess of Plenty. After the purchase, Illyana retired to an island she raised from a distant ocean, and the King in Red assumed her role. Each knife and abattoir became an extension of his power. Caleb’s job had been to review the plant and ensure RKC would profit enough to offset operating costs. The center was a good investment, he decided after weeks of waking up shivering from nightmares of nothing-wrong, of smiling as he was flayed alive by sharp, spinning wire; the King in Red agreed. Caleb earned a promotion from his nightmares, never entered the Rakesblight Center again, and renounced all meat for seven months after the deal cleared.

He skirted the edge of the center’s parking lot. No true night ever fell in Dresediel Lex, but there were shadows enough to hide. Soon he reached the alley between the center and the warehouse next door, which belonged to a demon-summoning Concern. He found a fire escape set into the center’s wall and began to climb.

Cliff runners flitted across the gap between the buildings above, silent as falcons falling, so swift he might have missed them between blinks.

He climbed faster, and tried to calm his heart. Reaching the top of the ladder, he clamored to the roof and stopped, amazed.

The runners waited, arrayed for war.

Some stood and some crouched on the flat black roof, uniform in their lack of similarity. Short hair and long, thick and thin, skin tattooed or clean or pierced, dressed in basic black or strips of multicolored cloth, armored with chain or girded by soft leather. Caleb felt underdressed in his denim pants and cotton shirt.

The runners did not speak to him or to each other. Noise might attract Wardens and other undesirables. They communicated through gesture and glance.

Fifty curious gazes turned to him. He ignored all but one.

Someone had chalked a white line on the roof from north to south. Beyond that line the city rolled over buildings and below skyspires, to the black ocean and the cold sand.

Mal stood on the line, arms crossed, waiting.

As he approached her, the air grew warm. She’d slicked her hair back against her scalp, and bound it with a leather strap.

“I’m glad you made it,” she said.

Rooftop gravel ground beneath his feet as he approached her.

“Why are you chasing me?”

“I’m trying to protect the city.” He took another step. “And you.”

The cliff runners watched.

Ten feet. Five.

“You’re the one who needs protection,” she said.

Three. Two. One. He smelled sweat, sandalwood, and leather. “I’ll take my chances.” He reached for her.

He blinked.

When his eyes opened, Mal was halfway across the roof already and gaining speed. Caleb had no time to drop into a crouch: he fell forward, caught himself with his leg, and pressing off the ground he fell and caught himself again, tumbling more than sprinting after her.

Mal reached the roof’s edge first, and leapt to an outbuilding a story lower than the warehouse. She landed with a roll as Caleb launched himself into the yawning gulf.

12

The world opened beneath Caleb, six stories’ drop onto solid gray asphalt. Emptiness and wind tore at his mind, but he landed on the neighboring roof, and rolled. His knee throbbed. Adrenaline dulled the pain, and he staggered to his feet and ran again.

Mal had already reached the outbuilding’s edge and leapt, this time across a twelve-foot chasm toward a stockhouse that supplied the Rakesblight Center with victims. Caleb gaped in disbelief. The distance was too great. Not even Mal could make such a jump—nor did she.

She struck the wall feet-first, caught the ledge overhead by her fingertips, and pulled herself onto the roof. How had she learned that? If her first try had not been perfect, she would not have survived for a second.

No time to speculate. Caleb jumped, and closed his eyes.

Dresediel Lex was built of stone, glass, and contracts—promises stronger than steel, tying the city together by pledge and payment. Bonds of contract were invisible, unless you looked at the world as Craftsmen learned to look, with eyes closed and mind open.