The next day’s dawn clawed at Caleb’s eyes. He tugged his hat brim low, and climbed the gravel path that wound up the sandy hill toward Heartstone’s headquarters. The driverless carriage that had brought him rolled away into heat and haze.
Caleb felt about sunrise the way he felt about RKC’s accounting department: necessary, and best kept at a distance. But Alaxic, Heartstone’s chief executive, was a busy man, and when he set the meeting early, Caleb hadn’t argued—he needed this talk to end well. If Alaxic took pressure off the King in Red, the King should relax his grip on Tollan and the Wardens, leaving Caleb free to search for Mal. If not, Caleb’s chances for finding her dwindled to nothing. Especially if the Wardens decided to peek inside his head for any details about the runner he might have missed.
Dry dwarf pines rustled beside the path. Caleb turned to look, and a slender blade settled against the swell of his throat. He froze. Sharp points and edges pressed into his back. A needle breathed over his right eyelid. He heard the silence of something large standing still, and near.
“State your name and business,” said a voice like chalk on slate.
“Caleb Altemoc.” He swallowed. His throat pressed against the security demon’s claw. “I’m from RKC, here to see Alaxic.” Slowly, he reached into his pocket, and slid his badge out of his wallet. “I have an appointment.”
The claw did not slide across Caleb’s throat, nor did the spines of the demon’s chest impale him. This was probably a good sign.
Caleb waited.
The Tzimet in Bright Mirror Reservoir were to proper demons what a monkey was to a man: similar in shape, sometimes even stronger, but pale imitations with regard to intellect and cruelty.
Minutes passed. He waited on the hillside, millimeters from death.
Footsteps. He tried to turn his head, but the thorns at his cheek prevented him.
A woman entered his field of vision: skin a shade darker than Teo’s, face round, red-tinged hair pulled back in a bun. She wore a khaki suit with a knee-length skirt, and carried a clipboard. She glanced from his face to the clipboard, and held out her hand. “You must be Caleb. I’m Allesandre Olim. Mister Alaxic is eager to meet you.”
Claws, blades, and thorns released him. One moment, a sneeze would have driven ten spikes through Caleb’s skull; the next, he stood free on the path. Caleb accepted Allesandre’s hand and shook it. Her grip was firm, and she did not smile.
“Apologies for the security. Our work here is delicate, and dangerous. This way, please.”
“You have effective guards,” Caleb said, and would have turned to look behind him. Allesandre shook her head, and he stopped. “The demon’s still there, isn’t it?”
“Will you follow me?” she said, and left the path.
Caleb followed. The hillside where they walked looked rocky and uneven, tangled with sagebrush and weeds, but he felt a smooth stone walkway under his feet.
Allesandre led him to a circle of standing stones. With a wave of her clipboard she slid a five-hundred-pound altar aside, revealing a rough-hewn tunnel into the earth, and rock steps descending.
They climbed down the steps for a long time.
At first the tunnel felt warm as desert noon, then warm as a baker’s oven. Dim red light illuminated wall carvings of the Hero Sisters, eagle-headed gods, and of course serpents: the ancient Quechal who dug this passage had etched a double bar of stylized scales under each graven figure.
“This,” Caleb said, “is a strange place to work.” The Quechal carvings reminded him of childhood, of nights listening to his father chant holy tales of blood and murder. He remembered some of these designs from the walls of his father’s temple in the Skittersill, before it burned. “You don’t see carvings like these anymore.”
“The bas reliefs are authentic,” Allesandre said. “Five hundred years old, give or take a century.”
Caleb lifted his hand from the wall. “Trying to save on real estate?”
“Hardly,” she replied. “Sites like this are vital to our work.”
When he first heard the voices, he took them for wind through fissures in the rock. Deeper, deeper he followed Allesandre, and the whisper rush resolved to words in an obscure form of High Quechal, a jumble of nouns, adjectives, and verbs from which he caught snatches of meaning: Serpent. Flame. Lost. Burn. Make. Mold. Crush.
Stinging sweat ran down his cheeks, the line of his jaw. His shadow and Allesandre’s, melded, stretched long and thin behind them, a road into the darkness from which they had come.
The passage opened onto a broad, black stone ledge on the lip of a vast cavern. Light from the depths cast the world crimson. Stalactites hung jagged overhead, twined round by metal pipes. Chant braided with the rhythm of machines.
Men and women crowded the ledge. They wore loose white linen, and tool belts girded their waists. They worked at stone altars and plinths, adjusting bee-carved dials, pulling levers shaped like snake’s heads. Burning motes danced in the air before their faces. The technicians chanted as they worked, heads bobbing to keep time.
The words and carvings were High Quechal, but this place lacked the trappings of ceremony: no priest, no priestess with bone flute, no Mat-Keeper with blade upraised. Modern, angular Craftsman’s glyphs glowed from every surface.
An ancient man in a black suit stood by the railing at the platform’s edge. Hands behind his back, he stared down into the cavern. Scraps of thin white hair clung to his scalp. His body stooped, as if it could no longer bear his strength.
The white-robed crowd parted for Allesandre. Caleb followed in her wake. She stopped behind the old man, and said: “Sir, I’ve brought Caleb Altemoc, from RKC. Caleb, this is Mister Alaxic.”
Caleb swallowed, for reasons that had nothing to do with the heat.
“Altemoc,” said the old man, chewing the syllables of the name. His voice was high and spare. “Not Temoc’s boy by any chance?” There was no question which Temoc he meant.
“Yes, sir. My father and I aren’t close.”
“Hard to be close with a wanted felon.”
“I don’t approve of his life choices, and he doesn’t approve of mine. We have an equitable arrangement.”
Alaxic did not turn. “Strange that the most stalwart of the True Quechal would give his son a foreign name.”
“When I was born, he thought there was a chance for peace. He and my mother chose my name as a sign of that peace.”
“You were born before the Skittersill Rising.”
“Yes,” Caleb said.
“Dirty business.” Though Alaxic’s hands remained clasped behind his back, his fingers worked and twitched as if playing an invisible instrument. “Men standing to defend their rights. Killed by Wardens who should have protected them.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“And the other?”
“I’d be less generous.”
“Humor me. Speak freely.”
“I’d say the rioters were fanatics who wanted to sacrifice their neighbors to bloody-minded gods.”
“You don’t share your father’s faith.”
“I don’t respect murderers, as a rule. However they try to justify themselves.”
“Ah.” Alaxic turned from the ledge. He was not wrinkled, but worn, skin stretched thin and drum-tight. One eye stared white and sightless from his face, and a puckered, twisting scar bent the right side of his mouth into a smile. His remaining eye glittered, cold, black, and sharp. “A modernist.”
“I suppose.” Stop this conversation, he told himself. Don’t let yourself get dragged in. “I don’t imagine you asked me here to talk politics.”
“Politics and security,” Alaxic said, “are two sides of the same parchment.” He raised his hands, and tried to spread them. His fingers crooked in like claws, and quivered. “Dark writing on one side may be read from the other. Once, we sacrificed men and women on Quechaltan to beg rain from the gods. We do the same today, only we spread the one death out over millions. We no longer empathize with the victim, lie with him on the slab. We forget, and believe forgetfulness is humane. We fool ourselves. Your organization is founded on that foolishness.”
Don’t chase the bait. “Sir. The Bright Mirror infestation is an isolated incident. We’re studying what went wrong, so we can guard against it.”
Alaxic shook his head. “You don’t understand why you’ve been called here. You think your purpose is to soothe me to sleep. To convince me to sell my life’s work to your master.”
The engines of Caleb’s caution thrilled to motion. He felt as if a careful player had just glanced at his cards, then raised. “Why am I here?”
“Yesterday, Red King Consolidated sent me more documents about Bright Mirror Reservoir than I could read in a thousand years. But papers can lie. I want someone to stand with me face-to-face, and tell me I can trust your master.”
The air pressed close, heavy with chant and heat. “What do you mean?”
Alaxic beckoned him to the railing. “Look down, son of Temoc.”
Caleb almost refused on principle, but principle had no place on company time. He stepped to the platform’s edge, leaned out, and looked down.
Liquid fire filled the pit, rolling, burning, boiling, red and yellow, orange and white and blue. A tremor traveled from one side of the fire to the other, like a twitch on a horse’s flank.
Following that tremor, Caleb saw the eye.
What he had mistaken for an island in the molten rock was in fact an enormous eye ringed by scales of lava—an eye bubble-lidded like a snake’s, if a snake were large enough to swallow worlds.
A serpent lay coiled beneath them, a serpent larger than the cave, larger than the pyramids of Sansilva. Its immensity shattered all concepts of size. Uncoiled and rearing to strike, this creature would cast a long shadow over Dresediel Lex.
Sweat chilled on the back of Caleb’s neck.
That serpent had a sister. Caleb knew their names.
“That’s Achal,” Alaxic said. “Aquel’s in the depths now. They turn and move in their slumber, as we do. They’re bigger than we are, though.”
“Guard and shield us from the fire,” Caleb whispered in High Quechal. The words came unbidden to his lips.
“Well.” Alaxic smiled. “I see you have some religious sentiment after all.”
“That.” He tried again to speak. “Do you have any idea what that is?”
“We know exactly what she is. Better than anyone in history.” Alaxic stared down into the pit. “At the beginning of time, the earth trembled and split, and many men and gods died. The twin daughters of the Sun descended into the depths, seeking the cause of the tremors, and found two massive serpents, larger than mountains, older than the earth. Once, they had slithered between the stars.
“Demons danced around the serpents, inciting them to tremble, to riot. The sun’s first daughter tore her heart from her chest, and threw it into the first serpent’s mouth; the serpent gained her wisdom, and her name—Aquel. The demons tried to prevent the sun’s second daughter from doing the same, but she threw her heart over them into the second serpent’s mouth, and the serpent gained her wisdom, and her name—Achal. Aquel and Achal took pity on gods and men, and chased the demons from their fiery domain into the cold of space. They slept, then, but sleeping they forget. When the sun dies, the demons return, and the Serpents wake, and we give hearts and souls to remind them we are their children.”
“Not anymore, we don’t.”
“As you say.”
“And I wasn’t talking about myths.”
“Neither was I,” Alaxic said.
“We fed those things on our flesh for three thousand years. They’re not gods. They’re animals, if that. Congealed power. We used them as weapons once, and broke this continent in half. Destroyed a dozen cities. Millions died.”
“Millions died because, in the darkness of our ignorance, we dared try to control the Serpents. We have learned, in the centuries since the Cataclysm. For thousands of years the Serpents fed on us. Now it’s our turn to feed on them.”
Technicians chanting. Quechal carvings marked with Craft. Steam pipes in the heat. “You’re drawing their power.”
“The hungrier the Sisters grow, the hotter they burn. We use their soulstuff to power our Craft, and they burn more fiercely. We harness that heat to drive thaumaturgical engines. At this moment, we can only pull a few hundred thousand thaums a day before they start to toss in their sleep. Their dreams are the seeds of earthquakes.”
“The King in Red isn’t buying you because of your waterworks,” Caleb said. “He wants the Serpents.”
“RKC needs our water, but the lakes and rivers we have harnessed will not sustain Dresediel Lex for long. Your master believes he can use the Serpents’ heat to purify the ocean, like your system at Bay Station. Pull saltwater into these caverns, let it evaporate, collect and cool the steam. The prospect of nearly unlimited power also intrigues him, of course.”
“Gods.”
“No.” Alaxic smiled, slightly. “But close. And your master wants them. I do not care for him. When he conquered our city, I strove against him in the air, and fought him on the earth. I learned his dark arts after the War, hoping to cast him down with his own power. But I am tired now, and I refuse to let the Craft carry me on to skeletal immortality. Do you understand?”
Caleb did not understand, but he could not think of anything to say.
“Craftsmen hedge risks, gird themselves against worst-case scenarios. But the worst case here far outstrips any hedge you can secure. If your master mismanages Aquel and Achal, there will be no second chance, no insurance, no recovery. If the Sisters wake, the city will burn. If the King in Red wants my Concern, he must guarantee that RKC will preserve the Sisters’ slumber before all other priorities, even his own life. I want a contract written and signed in blood, or the deal is off.”
“We can’t give you a blanket guarantee.”
“You can. And you will. Your master needs my Concern more than I need to sell.”
Caleb remembered Tollan pacing her office, and the black anger of the King in Red. He looked over the platform’s edge, and envisioned the Serpents towering above Dresediel Lex with diamond fangs bared.
“I don’t have the authority to agree to those terms.”
“Pass them along. Or do not, and let the deal fall through. I leave this in your hands: do you trust your master to put our people’s safety before his own?”
The sleeping serpent twitched. A groan of tormented rock rose from world’s root.
“I do,” Caleb said after the echoes died.
Alaxic nodded, once. Caleb could not tell if he was satisfied. “Allesandre will show you out.”