The next day Caleb worked like a man possessed. He tore through stacks of memos, processed claims and ran figures, outlined complex deals and hedges against failure. Her fire would devour him if he let it, so he buried his mind in news and risk reports.
The nightmares had not stopped after Seven Leaf. Madmen crowded hospitals, crying the Twin Serpents’ names. An itinerant philosopher in Stonewood immolated himself in a public square at noon, ranting about Aquel and Achal. When others rushed to douse him, he fought back with burning flesh, melting skin, crisping meat. A mother in the Vale nearly threw her two young children out of a second-story window, before her husband stopped her. She claimed to doctors and reporters that she had seen snakes of flame coiled inside her babies.
Somewhere, Temoc was laughing. Caleb felt sure of it.
Incidents of madness clustered near Heartstone installations. Caleb wrote a memo, a call to discontinue the Two Serpents project, with the frankness of a man certain he would be ignored. The Serpents had come to the city’s aid in its hour of need. If their use entailed risk, well enough—they required more study before they were used again. The first investigations into the Craft had transformed kingdoms to deserts. This was no different.
At four forty-five he closed his books, capped his pens, cleaned his quill, sharpened his chisel, and walked to the lift. As he descended, he ran through an inventory of doom.
The doors rolled back, and he saw her across the hall, ablaze in a white linen dress. Arms crossed, one eyebrow raised, Mal looked inviting as the emptiness beyond a cliff’s edge.
He didn’t run to her, but he walked quickly. She kissed him on the lips.
“You’re wearing a dress.”
“I do that sometimes,” she said. “Come on. Let’s get something to eat.”
* * *
“Something to eat” turned out to be dinner at an Iskari restaurant named Esprit, on the lowest level of a skyspire overlooking the ocean, the kind of place a wealthy couple in a mystery play might eat. At first the eremite decor, the silver place settings and expensive porcelain and sunset view crushed Caleb into insignificance. Then he looked across the table at her.
They discussed ephemera: the color of the sky, the sharp bright bubbles of the champagne, the transgressive thrill of spending so much on a single meal.
“We don’t have much time, when you think about it,” Mal said. “I want to appreciate as much as I can before it’s gone.”
“Morbid,” Caleb replied. “But I won’t argue.”
As tuxedoed waiters served course after airy, delicate course, Caleb and Mal spoke of wine, of ullamal (Mal was not a fan, and Caleb found himself defending the conduct of players he would have condemned to Teo), of childhood games, and art. A string quartet behind a curtain played a gavotte he didn’t recognize. At first Caleb thought it strange that no one danced, but the entire evening was its own kind of dance, with subtle steps and pleasant turns. He blundered through, cheerful as a child at a waltz, and laughed when Mal recounted the story of their first meeting back to him.
“You had the most serious expression I’ve ever seen on a human face. I would have laughed, but I thought that might make matters worse.”
“You did laugh, if I remember right.” He sipped a dessert cordial, and felt it go down slow. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the Tzimet in the lake, and the Serpents.”
Her smile faltered. “What do you mean?”
“I spent all day doing damage control. When we draw power from the Serpents, their, I don’t know, their hunger bleeds out into the city. A woman almost killed her kids, a guy burned himself. More people going mad all the time. We’re responsible.”
“What choice did we have?”
“I don’t know. But I can’t stop thinking about Hal, the guard who died at Bright Mirror. We took reasonable precautions against Tzimet. No one can blame us for what went wrong—but maybe they should. We could run a perfect operation: a Concern that hurt no one, every risk sorted and managed, each contingency accounted for. It would cost hundreds of millions of souls even to come close. Too much. So he died.” The ocean rolled green and gray as slate below them.
She wore a string of tiny pearls at her throat. The pearls smiled even when she did not. “There are always risks. The world isn’t safe.”
“Why not feed the Serpents? If they weren’t so hungry, they wouldn’t drive people mad.”
“We can’t feed them without killing people.”
“You can’t give them soulstuff because…”
“Because the Craft is built on exchange. We give, and receive something in return. That’s the reason we can’t just magic ourselves food or water: use Craft to force a field to grow, and you’ll wear the earth to desert in a year. If we funneled souls into the Serpents, their power would flow back into us, and they’d get hungrier. All we can do is keep them sleeping, and that’s only if we’re careful.” She toasted him with cordial. “Here’s to being careful.”
“Here’s to that.” He drank. “Why not leave the Serpents alone? Let them sleep.”
“And one day they would wake, whether we called for them or not. Our grandparents feared Aquel and Achal. I think we should use them, not cower from them.”
Caleb didn’t know what to think. Sunset burned in her eyes.
“Maybe you’re right.”
* * *
They saw more of each other, though Caleb hesitated to call their meetings dates. Yes, they kissed, but they did not melt into romance. Mal studied the world around her, broke it into pieces. On their walks together, every mystery play or advertisement or empty storefront signified something about life or Craft, religion or politics or poetry. Being around her was a rush of genius and expectation. They danced, and talked, and danced again.
Their meetings were a welcome respite from the business of the coming eclipse: insurance bargains to be signed and sealed with demonic agencies, water rights secured, Warden patrols doubled in case of accident or unrest. He swam every day through end-time prophecies, waiting for night and Mal to save him.
He kept the shark’s-tooth talisman in his pocket, but every time he thought to mention it, he remembered Allie’s death, and their fight under Seven Leaf Lake, and decided to wait.
Mal returned to the cliff runners as a goddess in white leather, offering no explanation for her absence. Caleb did not run with her, but waited beside Balam, and watched.
She soared on currents of air, leapt and turned, rolled and ran. She was a monkey, a flame, a flash, an angel, a demon in flight. Caught between sky and earth, she was most herself. When she touched down, she stood lightly, as if one wrong step might break the ground beneath her feet.
A week before the eclipse, on Monicola Pier beside the rolling Pax, he showed her the tooth.
It hung from her fingers, caught by sunset, swaying.
“Kopil says it burned when Allie died.”
“And you think it means she wasn’t mad. That she betrayed me. Betrayed us. Poisoned Bright Mirror Reservoir, and all the rest.”
“It seems likely. Doesn’t it?”
“You have one explanation for the facts,” she said. “Perhaps she was working against you all along. Or she was only recruited after she saw the gods at Bright Mirror and decided she could not be a part of your world. Your adversary would have bound her to his purpose with subtle cords and bargains. When we turned her power against her, some might have flowed back through those bonds, and destroyed this tooth.”
“I don’t buy it. She must have been a radical from way back.”
She smiled sadly. “Why?”
“She was only at Seven Leaf for a few weeks. People don’t change so fast.”
“Maybe you don’t know people as well as you think. You didn’t handle Seven Leaf Lake well. Neither did I. What would we have become if we remained?”
“What we do there is ugly, sure, but it didn’t make me want to set demons loose on the city.”
“I doubt that was her goal.” She lowered the tooth.
“What do you mean?”
“I think Allie didn’t want to cause harm. I think she wanted to recover something she’d lost. Seven Leaf confronted her with that loss, and she responded in the only way she knew.” When he looked at her uncomprehending, she tried again. “She saw spirits in pain, and wanted to stop their pain. That was the seed. Everything else—the power, the madness, the betrayal—followed.”
“Their pain is horrible. But we need that water. She must have known that.”
“Does our need justify our methods?”
He remembered the torment beneath the lake, and did not answer.
“We were born together,” she said, “men and gods: our first cave wall scratches let them into the world. We miss them. Allie missed them, I think. I sympathize with her.”
“You miss our gods?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“They’re soaked in blood.”
“So am I. So are you. So’s this city. You seem to think it’s different if we kill for gods or for water; either way the victim dies at the end.”
“Why not find another pantheon? Iskar still has gods, and they get along fine. Orgies and existentialism, the occasional burnt aurochs, once in a while a tentacle or two. Seems better.”
“Iskar’s gods aren’t ours, though.”
“Oh, I see, we need to preserve our heritage. Will you burn the pale skins out of Stonewood next?” Barges shifted on the water, pulled by broad-backed sea turtles forty feet across: firework ships moving into position for the eclipse. Their burning arrows would frighten hungry stars away from the wounded sun.
She laughed. “Our economy would collapse. Every tie to the rest of the world would be cut. We must be cosmopolitan, without sacrificing our identity. Walk our own path.”
“Isn’t that what we’re doing now?”
“How many of the Craftsmen and Craftswomen in this city are Quechal, do you think? Twenty percent? Thirty, at most?”
“Something like that.”
“In a city that’s eighty percent Quechal.”
“I don’t see your point.”
“We’re occupied. We don’t talk about it that way, but we are.”
“We’re not occupied. We’re a world city. There’s a difference.”
“Are you sure?”
A cold breeze off the ocean shivered her, and he placed an arm around her shoulder. From the sidewalk an observer might have thought them man and wife, or lovers. Caleb didn’t know what they were. No words seemed to fit. Children ran down the beach, volleying a ball back and forth. “You loved your parents. You value the things they valued. But our gods killed people. They’re gone, and I don’t miss them.”
Mal stopped shivering, but she did not remove his arm. “You don’t get to choose your parents. Why should your gods be any different?”
“What do you suggest? We should bring back the altar and the knife? People will fight you if that’s what you want, and I’ll lead them. We can’t do those things anymore.”
“Of course not,” she said. “That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean, then?”
“Think about your father. You don’t live the way he lives.”
“No. I have a roof over my head, and I don’t have three quarters of the city out to kill me.”
Waves lapped the thick pylons of the pier. Caleb watched the barges and thought about sharks moving underwater.
“But you have something of him in you, anyway.”
“Scars.”
“Those, yes. But that’s not what I meant. You have his determination. You know a few things in your marrow, and you will never compromise on them. You took parts of your father into yourself and reinvented them. Your mother’s in there, too: contemplative, independent, solitary, strong. You made yourself out of what they gave you.”
“What does this have to do with sacrifice?”
“We used to know that everything ends, and it is better to give one’s death than accept it. The first corn sprang from a dead man’s body. Qet’s blood makes the rain. Beasts give themselves to the hunter; kings give themselves to their people. Sacrifice was the center of our world. We defended that world from Iskari invaders four hundred years ago, but then the Craftsmen came, and here we are.”
“Here we are: better fed, better protected, more justly policed than ever in history.”
“I don’t think the Wardens are just.”
“I know.”
“We’re better fed, I’ll grant, but so what? Cows on a farm are fed. As for ’protected,’ Dresediel Lex only ever fell to one adversary: the one who rules us now. My problem isn’t that we no longer sacrifice, it’s that we’re no longer conscious of the sacrifices we make. That’s what gods are for.”
“What do you suggest?”
“We should bring them back, on our terms. We form a society with sacrifice, but without death.”
“Sacrificing what? Shreds of cotton, clods of earth? A bit of wine, stale bread? Gods are hungry, thirsty creatures.”
“I don’t know what they would accept. But we need them.”
“People don’t miss the gods.”
“They do. You do.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’ve been chasing me for months. Half the things you’ve done should have killed you.”
He laid his hand over the back of hers, on the railing. A ridge of scar tissue ran below her knuckles.
She looked at him through the black sway of her hair. “You didn’t know me. You saw something in me you thought was worth your blood.” His expression must have changed, because she frowned, and shook her head. “You saw something you could chase, something for which you could bleed. You wanted to sacrifice yourself, and you’ve never been given the chance. I know the feeling. Desperate for duty. For purpose. Direction. It’s why I saved you, when North Station fell.” She handed the tooth back to him. “I’m sorry I can’t say more. Allie was a friend, and I think I understand her—but I can’t help you with this.”
He took the tooth from her, and slipped it back into his jacket. His grip on her hand was so tight that his forearm trembled. Mal raised an eyebrow. He released her hand, and chose his next words carefully. “We do sacrifice. We pay bits of soul every time we use a faucet.”
“It’s not the same. Those are payments, not sacraments. What, really, do we sacrifice to live the way we live?”
Children sprinted along the waterline. Rising tidewater dulled their footprints, filled them with eddies and sand. By the fourth wave, the footprints vanished as if they had never been.
The last child paused every few strides to lift a shell from the beach and throw it into the Pax. She mouthed a prayer with each throw, an offering to Qet Sea-Lord in payment for her passage along the shore. Caleb’s mother had taught him the words to that prayer, when he was young. After the Skittersill Rising she never mentioned it again.
Caleb followed the arc of a thrown shell, imagined it drawn out past the barges and their harnessed sea monsters, through the deep toward Bay Station.
“I know what we sacrifice,” he said. “But I don’t have the words to tell you.”
“What, then?”
“I can show you, if you’ll let me. Do you have plans for the night before the eclipse?”
Calculating eyes watched him. “I do. What do you have in mind?”
“Come with me to Bay Station.”
“I can’t.”
“It won’t take all night. We’ll be ashore in plenty of time for fireworks.”
Her weight shifted from left leg to right. One hand slid down her dress to rest against her thigh.
“Where should I meet you?” she asked.
“There.” He pointed to the little girl, still throwing seashells. A battered lifeguard chair stood beside her, covered in peeling paint and weathered Quechal glyphs.
“Ominous.”
“We’ll be safe.”
“Fine,” she said. “It’s a date.”
She cupped his chin in one hand, guided him to her, and kissed him. Her mouth was cooler than the twilight. Her kiss danced like a spark down his neck and through his limbs. It quickened in his scars. He wrapped an arm around her waist, and pulled her closer. The vibration inside him built to shiver them both apart.
She slipped from him, and walked away.
Teo had once claimed that human history began with a storm: the interval between lightning and thunder, between the flash and the rumble felt in the body’s core, was primitive man’s first experience of time—the awakening of consciousness, the birth of the gods.
As Mal receded down the pier—quick strides, long for her body—Caleb believed Teo’s theory. Godhood began with watching her leave, and feeling her still present.
When she reached the road, she hailed a driverless carriage and disappeared into the evening traffic up the Pax Coast Carriageway toward the hills. Caleb bought a churro from a street vendor whose cart bore the brand of a winking skull, and walked down to the beach. He lifted a shell from the tidal sand, and poured out the water within. He tested the shell’s weight, and threw it into the advancing tide.