Max Gladstone - Two Serpents Rise

He smiled.

“Temoc,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

As Mal advanced, the sky turned against her.

Wardens swarmed her on Couatl-back, black serpentine streaks striking with arcs of lightning, with silver spears and nets of green thread. Wingbeats and thunder thickened the air. A golden lasso caught Aquel’s neck; the Serpent hissed in frustration.

Of course the Wardens had come. Lapdogs of the King in Red and his brothers, murderers, servants who did not ask why they served, who let themselves be shaped into weapons against their own people. The Wardens had burned her parents in the Rising, had unleashed fire on screaming crowds. They had missed Mal in their cull, and now they realized their mistake.

She smiled, and her teeth were pointed as the Serpents’ fangs. Let them come.

Aquel pulsed sun-brilliant and threw a wave of plasma against the Warden who had caught her. The golden line snapped, and the Warden who threw it fell in smoking pieces to the ground.

Mal laughed, but in her joy an emerald net snagged her limbs, her mind. The world collapsed to a projection inside a nutshell where she hung suspended, bounded empress of space. She lived and died in the net, lived and died again, infant with every indrawn breath, growing, swelling to maturity with the filling of lungs, dwindling as she exhaled to a fragile age, arms and legs thin as mast-cord, skin taut and dry, dying to inhale and be born again.

No. She was more than this. She was rage, dying, and born again she was vengeance. The Wardens would not bind her.

Fire burst from Mal, and she was free. Spears of flame lanced in all directions, burning holes through pyramids, reducing Wardens to ash. She felt each death. She was Dresediel Lex. She was Quechal. They were her children, though twisted and deformed. She wept and moved on.

More Wardens rose against her. She broke the wings of their mounts and they fell. Some swooped low above the crowd, catching refugees and winging them to safety; these she did not strike down. Their kindness pleased her.

She approached the Canter’s Shell, and pointed toward it. Thin ropes of flame snaked from Aquel and Achal, surrounded the blue bourn and pressed in. The shell’s logic, its Craft, its mechanisms strained against the Serpents’ power, the weight of history and wrath older than gods.

At first she thought the shell might hold.

Then it began to crack.

Caleb closed his eyes to the billowing dark, and saw. The King in Red wore midnight like a halo. Temoc’s skin bled light. Around them, between them, space twisted and gave birth to fever dreams, knives and hooks, grasping claws, chains and webs of iron, barbed tentacles and hideous geometries.

“You will not stop me,” Temoc said. “The Gods lived before you, and when you die they will endure.”

“I died eighty years ago.” Kopil’s voice held no trace of humor. “Your gods and I have that much in common.”

A blade swung out of darkness toward Temoc’s throat, but blunted and burst to steam.

Wings spread from Temoc’s back. The hooks and chains glowed with his faith. White light spiraled through space between them.

“Interesting.” The King in Red cocked his head to one side. “You are not dead.”

“This pyramid was ours for a thousand years.” Chains wrapped Kopil’s robes. “You have perverted it, but it still answers to me.” Spears swung down to pierce the Craftsman, claws to tear and teeth to rend.

The King in Red snapped his fingers.

Spears and claws and teeth stopped. Time’s depths hummed.

Kopil stepped forward, feet tapping triple time on glass. Fire burned in his eye sockets. The hum deepened in volume and pitch.

Sweat shone alabaster on Temoc’s brow.

“This pyramid was yours,” Kopil said. “Now it’s mine.”

White spirals flickered, flared, and burned red in the night.

Darkness opened three thousand eyes. A fanged mouth gaped beneath their feet. The mouth had always been there, gnawing the world’s marrow, unseen. They were standing on its teeth.

Caleb’s eyes snapped open, and he fell, blind, shivering.

A cry of frustration split the shadows, and a cold corpse-wind rushed past his face.

Light returned, and the dome was empty save for Caleb, the King in Red, and Teo collapsed on the altar.

Caleb ran to her. Her chest rose and fell, rapid, shallow. Eyes darted behind closed lids. He tore off his jacket, pressed it against the cut in her arm. Blood everywhere. Blood on the altar, blood on the ground where she had reached for the contract.

If he hadn’t cut her free, the cuff would have kept pressure on the vein. If he hadn’t cut her free, she would have died at his father’s hand.

“Caleb.”

The King in Red’s voice.

He whirled. “Fix her.”

Red stars stared from a blank skull. “I can’t.”

“You can. She saved you. Do something.”

“She’s too weak. She has lost much blood. If I touch her with Craft, it will drain her.”

“Then heal me.”

“What?”

“Try to fix me. Do to me what you’d do to her.”

“You are not injured.”

“No time to explain. Do it.”

Shadows flowed from the King in Red, and plunged through Caleb’s skin. His heart slowed, his hands froze. Kopil’s Craft worked within him. His cuts and bruises and broken bones ached for healing, but he denied them. Pressure built, until his scars felt ready to burst from flesh.

He lifted his jacket from Teo’s arm, and touched her wound.

His light flowed into her, and her pain into him. Her wounds closed, faded, and vanished. Her breath deepened, her eyes fluttered, and she woke.

“Hi,” he said, and sagged against the stone.

“Hi,” she replied. “We have to stop seeing each other like this.”

Oven heat pressed Balam down. The road around him hovered silver as a mirage. The Serpents were so close now, rearing less than a stadium’s length behind the statue. Their coils slagged asphalt and concrete.

Sansilva was not yet empty. Much of the crowd had escaped, but those that remained were frantic and impassable. Knots of men and women clogged the sidewalks and open spaces, tumbling and brawling in their terror. Still, he saw the beginnings of a path through them, a road over broken glass to the safety of a bank pyramid. Uncertain, and shifting, but a path nonetheless. If they waited, another might present itself. Then again, maybe not.

Sam waited in a sprinter’s crouch. She remained, he thought, due more to concern for him than to belief he could actually judge the proper time to leave.

No sense straining her patience. Balam stood, and as one they ran.

Caleb could not stand on his own, but Teo and the King in Red helped him.

“What,” Kopil said, “is going on? Why has Heartstone turned against us? Why is Bay Station broken? Why is the city in tumult?” He produced a pipe from the pocket of his robe and lit it with the tip of his forefinger.

“Is my father—”

“Fled. He used some trick, some hidden means of escape built here when this place was still a temple.” Kopil took a long drag of tobacco and exhaled smoke. “He has spent the last thirty years running and hiding. He is skilled in that regard. Now. No delays. Tell me what has happened.”

“You remember Malina Kekapania?”

“From Heartstone. Your girlfriend.”

“Yes.” Of all the things to remember. “She attacked Bay Station, killed Qet, and she has awoken Aquel and Achal. She wants to chase Craftsmen out of Dresediel Lex. Alaxic planned it from the beginning.”

Kopil took a drag on his pipe and exhaled smoke. The red lights in his eye sockets blinked off, and on again. “I will tear satisfaction from his soul.”