Max Gladstone - Two Serpents Rise

“How would they use something like that?”

“We threw bodies down the shaft,” Temoc said, “after the sacrifice. There was a fire at the bottom, for the corpses.”

Teo looked as if she might reply, but did not. Caleb stood, and turned from Temoc to the steps.

They climbed the rest of the way without speaking.

Potted ferns lined the broad dark hallway on the twenty-ninth floor, like soldiers supervising an execution. Faint inhuman laughter hung on the still air.

“If we survive this,” Caleb whispered to Teo, “I am never coming in on a weekend again.”

They reached the conference room’s mahogany doors without incident. Caleb’s skin wanted to crawl away and leave his meat and bones to fend for themselves. Veins popped on Temoc’s thick forearms and the backs of his slab hands; he squared his shoulders and stood strong, but his eyes flicked restless about the passage. Teo waited by the doorframe, lips tight, silent.

Caleb opened the doors, and light flooded the hall.

“Hello,” said a voice like honey poured off a razor.

A many-legged horror filled the doorway: thorns and thin-spun glass, steel and barbs and blue lightning, clustered multifaceted eyes, and a mouth like a child’s, above a maw that brimmed with ichor-wet fangs.

“Hello,” the demon repeated with its child-mouth. Its maw shrieked torn metal.

Temoc punched the demon in the face.

It tumbled backward, arms flung out for balance. One of its eight hands slammed into the conference table; knife-claws gouged long streaks from the wood. The child-mouth wailed.

Temoc did not wait for the creature to recover. He became a silvered shadow and leapt on his adversary. The demon swatted him to the ground with a flailing paw, and followed with a kick. Falling, Temoc grabbed the demon’s knee and barbed ankle and wrenched the joints in opposite directions. Chitin cracked like crystal. Temoc struck the floor, and rolled between scrabbling claws to his feet.

Caleb pulled Teo into the room, and closed the door behind them.

“What are you doing?” she shouted.

“The fight might draw others. You think we can hold off more of those things?”

Caleb’s father danced with the demon. A talon slashed Temoc’s side, and he staggered but did not fall. He had grown large in shadow, scars shining. He wrenched one of the beast’s arms sideways, and tore it from the shoulder. Two mouths screamed, and scythe-claws swung, but Temoc was already moving.

Crystal limbs and teeth clashed. Liquid light dripped from the demon’s wounds, and smoked where it fell. Temoc was a dark blur, leaping from table to floor, taunting his opponent in High Quechal. The demon cursed him in its broken tongue, all pretense of human speech gone.

They circled each other around the table, slow enough at last for Caleb to comprehend the demon’s shape: a round scorpion-jointed back, six clawed legs gripping the floor, one of its eight arms gone and two more limp.

Between cries of pain, the demon laughed like thunder.

“I think it’s enjoying this,” Teo whispered.

Temoc was the first to slow, and the demon pressed him until it slowed in turn and Temoc fought back with maniacal ferocity. The silver scars on his face twisted, and by their light Caleb saw, for the first time in sixteen years, his father smile.

The demon leapt onto the conference table and landed with a heavy, hollow sound. Temoc circled, and it scuttled to face him. It hissed, and he was silent; roared, and he showed no fear.

The beast sprang, a storm of teeth and sharp edges. Temoc dove into and through the claws, and wrapped his arms around its body. Knives scraped the corded muscles of his back; jaws snapped inches from his face. His grip tightened, and cracks appeared in chitin. Temoc stepped under his opponent’s center of gravity, and swiveled his hip to the left.

The demon’s left legs gave way, but Temoc did not let go. As it fell, he twisted its torso back to the right.

The snap of the demon’s spine should have been too soft to hear. Somehow, it overcame all other sound.

Thorned legs went limp, but the upper body fought on. Temoc rolled with the demon on the floor. Soon, they lay still.

Temoc rose. Fading shadows hung from him in tatters. His skin was a mess of welts and bruises. Thin, shallow cuts crisscrossed his back and legs and arms, broken by the protective network of his scars.

He retreated from the demon’s corpse, and slumped against the pitted remains of the conference table.

Caleb ran to his father. Temoc held up one hand, motioning him back, but Caleb ignored him.

“You’re hurt.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Temoc said between breaths. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll worry about you if I want.”

“No time. Others have heard the fight. They will come soon. Find the door.”

Caleb wrapped one arm around his father, counted to three, and lifted him off the table. The old man swayed, but steadied on his feet, and spat blood to the floor. “Find it.”

“Fine.” Caleb stepped back, and examined the room. There was, of course, no door in the wall through which Kopil had led him on the night of the Seven Leaf crisis. No door, and nothing that could hide a door: no bookcase, no trophy stand, no glyphs Caleb could see. The room was blank and featureless, its walls an even grey.

He closed his eyes, but saw no trace of Craft. “I walked through this wall.”

Teo prodded the blank stone with her hands, and struck it with a broken chair leg. The wall did not sound hollow. “Nothing’s hidden here. You’re sure this is the right place? I can think of twenty rooms in the pyramid that look just like this.”

“Of course it’s the right place.”

“I’m not calling you a liar. Relax.” She paced around the demon’s corpse, over puddles of sizzling blood. “It must be here. Otherwise why set a demon to guard this room? To defend the table?”

“More demons are coming,” Temoc said. “Up the stairs.”

“They can use the stairs,” Caleb said, then checked himself. “Of course they can use the stairs. Do you see any controls anywhere?”

“Only the usual ones, for the lights. You say you walked through this wall? In this conference room?”

“Yes.” In the hall outside, he heard a sound like the world’s largest centipede crossing a tile floor.

“The door will hold them,” Temoc said. “But not for long.”

Could Kopil have opened a gate between two points in space, and closed it, just to disorient Caleb and save himself an elevator ride?

No. Kopil was a miser. He didn’t like to fly—too wasteful. He barely left the RKC pyramid. He wouldn’t go tearing holes in the world for his own amusement. Any passage he built for himself would be reusable.

“We should leave,” Temoc said. “There must be other ways to the altar.”

Something much larger than a dog scraped at the conference room door.

Caleb’s mind caught the end of a thread. “Teo, what did you just ask me?”

“I asked you if you were sure this was the right room. If that was the right wall.”

“I don’t think it is. I don’t think there was a wall there to walk through.”

“What?”

The scraping grew louder and insistent. Wood splintered beneath hooked claws and bladed fingers.

“You said this looked like any other room in the pyramid, but it doesn’t. Even my little office has carvings and decorations all over the place. These walls are blank stone.”

“So they redecorated.”

“They did more than that. When I was here, I never saw any walls. And no one but Mal entered or left by the door.”

Temoc’s eyebrows rose.

“Teo,” Caleb said. “Turn off the lights,”