Max Gladstone - Two Serpents Rise

She spoke through his mind, through all their minds. Voices in forgotten tongues cried out at her touch.

“The murderers, the Craftsmen, the rulers of this world, they tempt you with death, satiety and sleep. They will destroy this planet, and all life with it, unless we stand against them.”

She called to him, and he ached to follow her. He burned for her, with her, through her. His heat radiated from her skin, his lightning arced between her teeth.

Three thousand years of Quechal sacrifice lived in the Serpents. Dead generations woke to burn, to melt and mold and reforge. They were the world’s last defense, its guardians. Death bowed to their fangs.

“Fight,” she said. “Do not give in. Do not sleep. Victory is near. See our triumph.”

The Serpents’ rage flowered as she called, and flowed along channels she prepared. They would not sleep. She was too strong.

But Caleb could use her strength.

Months ago, drawing pictures on his skin in her tent, she had told him: battles of Craft are fought on many fronts. The world is an argument, and there are many ways to win or lose.

He could not fight Mal with her hooks caught in his mind. When she pulled, he would follow.

But he could follow in the manner he chose.

See, he echoed her, a whisper in the Serpents’ minds.

Towering over Dresediel Lex, they saw.

The city lay broken around them.

Glass ran like water down Sansilva Boulevard, and blood melted into steam.

There were old souls within the fire, so ancient they spoke in song and rhyme. They did not recognize Dresediel Lex. To them it was a shadow on a cave wall, an echo, a story, a dream.

But the new souls, the ones Caleb brought, they knew. Sun-baked streets wavering with summer heat. Surf rolling against a cold beach at dawn. Dark corners in well-lit bars where a man could drink in peace. Summer nights when skyspires shone with echoed starlight.

Tollan, surly and pacing with her whiskey at midday. Mick, his desk hung with mementos of faded glory. Shannon, biding time with cards in the Skittersill and dreaming of the day when she could dive again off rooftops. Kopil, who broke gods to avenge his dead love. Teo, laughing and drinking, dancing in aisles and toasting with champagne.

Below, on the broken boulevard, he saw Balam, and Sam, staring up, waiting, scared, and hopeful.

All of these, and more. Millions more.

“Make it new,” Mal said. “Burn it clean.”

The city has never been clean, answered voices old and young. Nor has the world. The people were never clean. But they are worth defending.

Mal pulled at the Serpents’ minds with ropes of Craft, and the Serpents pulled back. Her Craft strained, and snapped.

She flared like a star in the sky, and went out.

The ground gaped beneath him.

Caleb fell.

Caleb woke in a cold hospital room, under cotton sheets and an unfamiliar ceiling.

The world was flat monochrome. Bandages swaddled the right side of his body. A bell and a parchment envelope rested on the bedside table. He ignored the bell, and reached for the envelope. Pain called to him from the bottom of a deep narcotic well.

The envelope bore his name in an italic hand. It held a folded note and a shark’s tooth pendant.

The note read:

If you wake, you will be recovered enough for the healing to begin. Ring the bell.

The rest of your clothing burned. The tooth remained. Perhaps it will remind you.

No signature except a death’s head drawn in crimson ink. Of what the tooth was meant to remind him, the note did not say.

He rang the bell.

Three weeks later, Caleb stood at the end of Monicola Pier, looking west. He wore a black suit and a white shirt, and walked with crutches.

The merry-go-round wheeled. Children played ullamal by the seashore. A pall hung over the city, the nurses had said. A palpable fear. He couldn’t feel it.

He couldn’t feel much.

Soul fatigue, they called his condition in Kathic; among themselves the doctors used a longer Telomiri name. When the soul’s been too often emptied and expanded, it recovers slowly. He was near dead when they found him, empty of soulstuff, apperception broken. He didn’t know what that meant, and no one had given him a decent answer. Not quite asleep, not quite dead. A little of both. Soulstuff from his savings had revived him, and he woke with vague memories of fire, of Mal, of a battle within the Serpents. Perhaps a part of him survived inside them, inside the world, slumbering and waiting to wake again. This was his afterlife—this, or else the flame.

Behind him the city’s masses scrambled in the shadow of broken buildings. Cranes rose. Construction crews shouted from scaffolding. Airbuses slid by silent overhead.

He removed the shark’s tooth from around his neck, and held it out over the water.

Mal was gone. The Wardens found no trace of her body. Of course not. The Serpents’ heat had burned her to vapor.

The tooth pointed down into green-black ocean. Waves rippled his reflection, and the burn scar on his cheek seemed to disappear. He stared off the end of the pier toward the horizon, but saw no light there, not even sunset.

Bay Station crouched still at the harbor’s mouth. He could almost hear the beating of Qet Sea-Lord’s restored heart.

“Good-bye, Mal” he said.

The amulet twitched in his hand, and spun, pointing inland, south and west.

He dropped it into the ocean, and left.

Two days later, Caleb visited Andrej’s in the afternoon. The bar had long since recovered. The stone railing and the doors Mal melted were easily replaced. Less so the white and black marble tiles, which the heat of her flame had fused and swirled to mottled gray.

The band played, and he tried not to think about the last time he had visited Andrej’s around sunset.

He walked with the aid of crutches to a table by the mended bannister. From Four he’d learned the story of his survival—she’d swooped in on Couatl-back to catch him, but broke his bones in the rescue. His plaster cast scraped the floor. He leaned his crutches against the railing, and lowered himself into a chair.

The sun declined toward ocean. Rooftops and skyspires reflected and refracted tawny light. Tendrils trailed from the spires to the city: pulleys, block and tackle, raising steel girders and glass plates to repair crews in the buildings’ upper floors. Craning his neck over the rail, Caleb could see road workers repaving Sansilva Boulevard.

A waitress came by, and he ordered a whiskey and water, and savored it, lost in thought.

Teo arrived a little before five, and sat beside him with her drink.

“Hey.”

He sipped whiskey, felt it burn in his throat, and turned to her with a weary smile. “Hey. You got my letter.”

“I was waiting for it.”

“And you came.”

“Of course I did. You look.” He wondered what she would say next. Wan? Bruised? Shrunken? “Better than you did in the hospital. How are you feeling?”

“Used up.” He tapped his cast, propped on a chair. Then he touched his ribs, and his gloved right hand, and the side of his temple. “Hollowed out. The soul doesn’t fit the flesh.”

“You should have saved more. Your account with RKC barely held enough to keep you alive. Couldn’t you have kept some of that soulstuff back?”

“The Serpents needed a whole person, a real sacrifice to give the rest of the soulstuff shape.”

“That was you. The whole person, sacrificed.”

“Yes.”

“So who am I talking with now?”

“Still me. At least, that’s my opinion. Same body, same brain, a transfusion of my own stored soul to replace what I lost. Philosophers might argue. I don’t know.”