Max Gladstone - Two Serpents Rise

“Too late. He’s dead. I think.”

“In which case I will content myself with his disciple.”

“Who has Aquel and Achal at her back. Can you defeat them?”

Kopil shook his head. “Our plan was to preserve their slumber.”

“You’ve killed gods.”

“You,” he said coldly, “do not understand the Serpents. The more they hunger, the more they burn. Any Craft I use against them will take from them, and increase their hunger. Only sacrifice can assuage them, but I will not give them sacrifice.”

Kopil’s eyes blazed. The dome overhead wavered and grew transparent. Angry orange cracks split the blue curve of the Canter’s Shell above and around the pyramid; to the south and east, along Sansilva Boulevard, rose two distorted columns of light taller than skyspires.

A ring of sun burned around the moon’s shadow. Beneath, the city lay broken. Small human shapes ran for cover.

Kopil drew on his pipe.

Nothing could stop the Serpents except a sacrifice. Caleb could have let Temoc do it: feign unconsciousness until the blade descended.

Teo gripped his hand, and he felt sick.

The cracks in the Canter’s Shell widened, and the surface of the sun leaked through.

“So that’s it?” Teo asked. “She wins?”

“No,” Kopil said. Wind rose atop the pyramid, bearing the dry scent of a thousand years of dead sand. The King in Red reared to his full height. The surface of his skull shone. One hand held a curving knife of lightning, and the other crackled with black flame. “Ms. Kekapania holds the Twin Serpents in thrall. If she dies, they will lack direction, and perhaps they can be contained.”

“She’ll kill you.”

“I died a long time ago. I have the might of RKC at my disposal—my own Craft, that of the Board, and beyond them the millions who live in this city. She has weakened us, but we remain strong.”

“The last time someone used the Serpents as a weapon, they broke this continent in half.”

“In the God Wars, I tore space and time asunder. I made a crack in the world.” The King in Red walked toward the pyramid’s edge. Air rippled as he moved. His power pressed against the skin of reality. “We shall see which of us is the more fearsome.”

Caleb caught Kopil’s sleeve. He did not turn or seem to notice. “If you fight her, no matter who wins, the city will lose. I know you’re angry. But this isn’t the way.”

“Do you have an alternative?”

Sacrifice, Temoc said.

“I do.”

The shell shattered into mathematical shards. Each spinning splinter reflected the broken, burning city. An eclipse chill blew through the cracks, ruffling Caleb’s hair and Teo’s shirt. Kopil’s robes flared like wings.

Balam felt rather than heard the shell break, as if every joint in his body had popped at once. He pressed on, pounding through the pain, eyes blind to all but their path—until Sam, behind him, shouted: “Stop!”

He looked back, looked up, looked everywhere at once, and saw a spinning blue curve, three hundred feet on a side, slice through the pyramid ahead as if hundreds of years of stone and steel had never existed. The blue boiled away in an instant, but falling, it scooped out a ten-story section of pyramid, and the floors above strained, creaked, collapsed in a rain of steel and spark and tortured metal.

Sam grabbed his arm again, and pulled, and following her he fled back toward the fire.

Mal laughed when the Canter’s Shell shattered, and the Serpents laughed with her. She understood Allesandre’s madness now. Sanity was the gap between perception and desire, and that gap had closed. The Serpents’ power belonged to her: millennia of sacrifice congealed into will and flame. What could she imagine that she could not create? What could she hate that she could not destroy?

Atop the pyramid stood a figure in red.

She remembered the taste of Kopil’s teeth, when they exchanged the traitor’s kiss.

How to break him? Slowly or swiftly? A simple rush of plasma, or dismemberment—or should she split his body atom from atom?

As she pondered, a weight struck her from behind.

“Give me souls. All the souls you can spare.”

“In exchange for what?”

“For nothing. I need you to give them freely. No strings attached, no contract, no consideration.”

“The Craft doesn’t work that way. I can’t give you something without taking.”

“Look.” He removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. The scars on his arms glowed. “This is how I helped Teo. I don’t have any Craft of my own, but I can use others’ power, and pay the price myself. The old priests bore the gods’ power with these scars, worked miracles with them. My father still does. Maybe I can do the same: give the Serpents power without taking anything in return.”

“You’ll kill yourself.”

“Maybe.”

“I’m no god.”

“And I’m no priest. But we’re the closest we have.”

Mal spun, searching for her adversary, but the skies seemed empty. Again she heard leathery wingbeats, and claws tore into her back; she responded with a wild jet of fire. A colorless blur crossed the corner of her eye. She spun after it, but saw nothing.

She summoned a whirlwind that swept several hundred pounds of sand from a nearby construction site into the air around her.

A shape flew through the dust: a Couatl, with a woman crouched on its back, medium height, with broad shoulders and thick arms and a Warden’s smooth visage.

Mal recognized her, in the instant before the woman’s cloak adjusted to the dust in the air and she disappeared again.

“Hello, Four.”

The lights in Kopil’s eye sockets dimmed. “So, how is this done? I’ve never had a priest before.”

“Give me your blessing, and your power. I’ll take it from there.”

The King in Red raised one skeletal hand, and placed his palm on Caleb’s forehead. The bones of his fingers shook.

Caleb dissolved in light.

Mal sent waves of lava in all directions, roped the sky with lightning; Four and her Couatl rode the waves, and circled to safety. The Serpents struck, but their fanged mouths closed on air.

Four pressed her assault with spear and talon and arrow, with discus and net of despair. The attacks did not wound Mal, but they broke her focus.

Mal swept the sky above her with fire, and heard the Couatl turn sharply and beat away toward the ocean. Not dead, but wounded at least. She returned her gaze to the pyramid. A fountain of light danced on its summit.

She did not notice the whistle of air overhead, but she did notice when a pair of hands closed around her neck.

Balam and Sam ran around the burning corpse of a fallen Couatl, down the few remaining ribbons of intact road. The broken Canter’s Shell had scored trenches several hundred feet deep into Sansilva and the pyramid parking lot. They searched for a path through the maze. Steel fell around them, and glass and molten wires and chips of stone.

Sam skidded to a halt: the asphalt ahead had buckled up in the shell-shard’s wake. What had seemed a straight road was actually the lip of a deep trench.

Behind them towered the Serpents.

“We can go back,” Balam shouted.

Sam didn’t hear him. She had turned to the pyramid’s peak.

Souls flooded Caleb, a wash of experience and broken memory: a lover’s kiss ringside in the swell of victory, a dockhand’s sweat after a hard night on the pier, the glint of a butcher’s knife in motion, and the shine in a glass of whiskey as a bartender drew off a shot.