Caleb left Seven Leaf Lake soon after dawn, with an escort of two Wardens. He told Four that the King in Red wanted a report on their success, that Mal would stay until reinforcements arrived. This was not, exactly, a lie. Mal could have stopped him, but she didn’t.
They took flight as the first rays of sun glanced off the long flat plane of the lake. Sleep had haunted him all night, ambushing from the darkest corners of his mood. Sharp-fingered devils charged his fitful dreams, demons with his own face devouring the flesh of screaming gods.
He shaded his eyes against the sunrise, leaned back into the gondola, and drowsed.
The Couatl carried him south. Lake gave way to waterfall and smooth-flowing river. Every few miles, stone circles protruded from the forest, their centers thick with shade. Silver glyphs glowed against gray granite. The standing stones bled Seven Leaf Lake south, to slake his city’s thirst. Soon the falls would cease to thunder, and the river shrink to a stream.
One hundred twenty eight million acre-feet of water. After a decade or so, the city’s growth would outpace the lake’s ability to refill itself. The forest would feel the effects long before then.
After three hours they stopped for lunch on a cliff overlooking a deep valley, and ate bread and cheese and drank stale canteen water and agave liquor.
The Wardens napped on the cliff after lunch. Caleb, restless, walked a hundred feet into the woods, found a sturdy birch tree, and struck it with his palms, with his feet and the sides of his hands, scaring away broad-winged birds that roosted in the canopy. He ripped his knuckles’ skin, and left a smear of blood on the white bark. He pushed against the trunk until his shoulders, arms, legs, belly all convulsed and he let out a long, low cry.
A roar answered from the valley, larger, deeper, a sound made by no human throat.
Shaken, he returned to the Wardens, who stood with weapons bared, roused by his cry or the valley’s answer. They packed quickly, and flew south.
By day’s end the Drakspine peaks mellowed into farms and bare hills. Here, amid long dry rows of wheat, the Wardens kept observation posts, small adobe buildings beside barn-sized hutches where Couatl warmed their eggs. Caleb’s escorts spent most of the evening writing reports; afterward, he challenged them and the other attendant Wardens to a quick game. As he played, he did not look the goddess in the eye.
Talking over cards, he listened for news, but heard little more than farmers’ gossip, rumors of Scorpionkind raids on outlying settlements. When he asked about the city, the Wardens glanced at one another and claimed they had heard nothing certain.
They reached Dresediel Lex the next morning. Serpents of smoke tangled in the air above Sansilva. Caleb’s heart leapt, but when they crested the Drakspine he saw the damage was limited to the 700 block. Some shops burned, that was all, a few lives destroyed. Wardens circled above emptied streets.
They landed in the pyramid’s parking lot, strewn with broken bottles, rocks, clapboard signs, all the detritus of a protest turned riot. Two Wardens met them and rushed Caleb across the lot into the pyramid. Glancing over his shoulder he saw Muerte Coffee, empty, its front window webbed with cracks.
His escorts bore him wordlessly across a lobby manned with guards and security demons, into a waiting lift. By the sixtieth floor, he stopped asking questions.
The foyer of the Red King’s office was empty save for dark leather furniture, a grim portrait on one wall, and Anne, Kopil’s secretary, at her desk. She acknowledged Caleb with a curt nod, and turned a stone desktop idol counterclockwise; the double doors behind her, marked with deaths-heads, opened without sound. The Wardens thrust him into the shadow beyond, and the doors slammed shut.
“Caleb.”
The voice was weak, a bare suggestion of wind. For a confused moment he thought it belonged to his father, captive, tortured, and he turned in slow terror of what he might see.
He stood in Kopil’s office, beneath the crystal dome on the pyramid’s peak—the office without entrance or exit. There was no sign of the doors through which he had come.
A hospital bed rested near the altar-desk. The carpet was rolled back, and someone had drawn a mandala around the bed with white and purple and yellow sand. Red sheets clad the mattress, and a red robe wrapped the skeleton who lay upon it.
The shadows that clung to Kopil looked light and insubstantial. His gestures were weak, the sparks of his eyes dull and rust-colored. The Kopil who confronted Caleb in this office months before had been a river in flood, and here he lay at ebb.
Caleb stared. Everything he could say seemed wrong.
The King in Red beckoned Caleb with a twitch of his fingers. He approached.
Bare jaws worked silently until the Deathless King could speak. “What happened?”
“You look different,” he said, and wished he had said something else.
“I am different,” Kopil replied with a low, grating laugh like a snake’s rattle. “I lie reduced, and the water flows. It has been half a century since I last felt weakness. Do they appreciate what I do for them, I wonder.”
“There are people who have sacrificed more,” he said, though he didn’t know why, “and lived less comfortably, with death their only promise of release.”
Kopil did not seem to understand what he had said, or if he understood, did not care. “Is Seven Leaf Lake ours again?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
Caleb did, though he left out many details. He did not mention his scars, or Mal’s acquaintance with Allesandre, or her bloodletting and their fight beneath the lake. Dates, times, names, these he related with precision. Four and her team deserved commendations for their service. Seven Leaf was safe again, and the water flowed.
He spoke of the agony of the gods in the lake, and shuddered when Kopil said, “Good.”
“The riots should stop now,” he said, but the King in Red waved the subject away.
“They were barely worth the name of riot. A tussle with the Wardens. Someone knocked over a few fire barrels, and the coals ignited a line of Sansilva shops. We couldn’t use tainted water on the fire—some Tzimet might survive the heat—so we flew saltwater in from the ocean.”
“The Vale looked quiet when we passed over.”
“Not much trouble there. Wardens arrested a few agitators, prophets proclaiming the Twin Serpents’ return, that sort of thing.”
“Do you think,” Caleb said, but stopped himself.
“What?”
“Do you think they knew we’re drawing the Serpents’ power? Do we have an information leak?”
“One of the men we arrested was a salesman from Centervale with three children and a pending divorce; another, a minor landowner; the third, a junior league ullamal coach. Their wives, husbands, children claim none had any religious history, not even the coach. They dreamed of the Hungry Serpents, and when they woke, they prophesied in tongues of flame.”
“A thousand people must go mad in Dresediel Lex every day.”
“Three thousand. But the visions here were all the same. They saw Aquel and Achal, waking.”
“We only have six weeks to the next eclipse.”
Kopil sighed. “I know. RKC has already volunteered to pay for the fireworks. Fifteen thousand souls for simple merriment. We could buy everyone in the city a cup of decent coffee for that. And yet the revelers must revel.”
“The Serpents are on peoples’ minds as the eclipse nears, is my point. When they go crazy, their madness takes a form to fit their fears. It’s just dream stuff. Nothing serious.”
“Have you ever read Maistre Schatten?”
“Who?”
“Schatten wrote about dreams and myths and the unconscious: Sleeping Giants, The Shadow’s Refuge, The Ends of Time. Did you ever read them?”
“No.”
“I knew the man,” Kopil said. “Old in his fifties, shaken and shattered by a life of delving under the placid surface of his clients’ minds. Do not ignore dreams. They are a line from the past to the future. All nightmares are real.”
“You’re worried.”
“I’m worried,” the King in Red replied. He crooked one finger, and a brown paper envelope floated from his desk to Caleb’s hand. Caleb opened the envelope, and slid Mal’s shark’s-tooth pendant into his palm. The closed-eye glyph and the tracking pattern were cracked and blackened. “Yesterday, the sigils and enchantments on this pendant burned themselves out—around noon, when you struck down Alaxic’s aide.”
Caleb pursed his lips. Allesandre had spouted no True Quechal rhetoric, no promises of the gods’ return. Then again, she had been all but a goddess herself, at the end. And when she usurped Seven Leaf, she had let Tzimet into the water. She would have been a logical poisoner’s agent—she knew Mal was sneaking into Bright Mirror and North Station. As Alaxic’s aide, as Mal’s friend, Allesandre could have set Mal up, pointed her toward a dealer in Quechal artifacts who would give her the tracking amulet. Only the faintest strands of the deal would lead back to Allesandre herself. “Interesting,” he said.
“Are you still in contact with the cliff runner from whom you took this amulet?”
He blinked. “I could try to track her down. I don’t know if she’ll talk to me.” Both statements were true.
“The talisman is dead. Even the tracking signals have ceased. Only broken glyphs remain. My people copied the glyphs, studied the tooth down to its component atoms, and found nothing. This supposed link between your cliff runner and Alaxic’s aide is our only lead. Find the runner. Ask her if she recognizes a woman of Allesandre’s description. You may offer to return the talisman, if she requests it in exchange. Report back to me on your success.”
Caleb slid the tooth into his jacket pocket. “I’ll try.” No need to say more than that.
“Do.” Kopil clicked his teeth together three times, and rested his skull back against the pillow. “Weak, I feel something like fear again.”
“I don’t understand,” Caleb said.
“We’ve built a world in the last six decades, but it has not endured the test of time. We inhabit the gods’ abandoned buildings like spiders in an old house. Madmen flock to worship departed lords and dead ladies, to tear down all we have built. They seem to hate me. Perhaps they’re right to do so.”
“No.”
“Gods perished at my hand half a century ago. Was that for any purpose, beyond satisfying my vanity, my lust for vengeance?”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
Caleb pointed to the altar stone. “It’s been sixty years since the last death on that altar.” He saw Mal again, blood black against her dusky skin. “Our city is cruel. It exploits its children. But it does not corral those it fears and hates, does not kill them to appease bogeymen. There’s a lot wrong with this world you’ve made, sir, but that much is right.”
Kopil lay still beneath blood-colored sheets and blood-colored robes.
“I take it your time with Ms. Kekapania did not go well,” said the King in Red, after a time.
“No,” Caleb replied. “It did not.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Thank you.”
“You are right, of course. About the sacrifice, and the value of our creation. But do not underestimate the power of dreams.” The red sparks in his eye sockets blinked out. “I see the Serpents when I sleep, too.”
Caleb said nothing.
“You may leave.”
A Warden flew him home over the Drakspine. Dry heat sucked his blood and spirit. Yet, standing for the first time in days outside his own house, in full sunlight, he could not shake the chill from his bones.