Mal waited on the balcony. She shone with the risen sun.
She looked up as Caleb neared, and waved as he landed—or collapsed, rather, in a gasping heap on the balcony tiles. The opteran took a final sip of his soul, released him, and retreated to the sky.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said as he struggled to his knees. The universe was a lovely indigo. Demons tangoed between his temples. He groaned, swooned, and fell. She pulled him to his feet. Her touch burned like hot metal.
She tried to help him toward a chair, but he shook his head and pointed into Andrej’s. Someone, presumably Mal, had melted the balcony doors. They stepped over a glass puddle into the empty bar.
With Mal’s aid, he stumbled to a circular silver glyph inlaid in the wall by the card tables. Caleb produced a pin from his pocket, stuck his finger, and smeared a drop of blood on the glyph’s center. Behind the wall, counterweighted machines swung into motion, and the glyph began to glow.
“It won’t work,” Mal said. “The bank’s dead. RKC’s frozen, and everyone else in this city is sitting on their funds. You won’t be able to withdraw anything.”
And so the crisis would spread through the world. In the Skeld Archipelago young fishermen begging Deathless Kings to back their latest venture would receive no aid; a soup seller who heated his soups on morning credit would find none to hand.
Dull milky light seeped into Caleb from the glyph. “Andrej,” he tried, and found his voice steady. “Andrej keeps his own credit, for the tables.” His blood flowed, his heart beat. Color charged the world. His legs straightened and steadied.
“Better?”
“A bit.” He glanced at the glass puddle near the entrance. “Better than the door, at least.”
“I was thirsty. It was in the way.”
“Thirsty.” His head swam. “Gods, do you have water?”
Mal held him up, and together they returned to the balcony, to the breeze and open air.
A blue pitcher stood on a table near the banister. Mal fetched him a glass from the bar with a tine of levitation Craft. Hands shaking, he poured himself a cup of water, wet his finger, flicked three drops to the ground—“water in the desert”—and swallowed the rest so fast he choked and spent an undignified minute coughing into his arm. He poured a second cup, which he sipped like wine.
“You never appreciate things so much as in their absence.”
“Hells. Mal. Do you know what’s happened?”
She sat across the table, black leather bag in her lap. She clutched it as she watched him. “Tell me.”
“Qet.” He had to stop for breath. Saying one word felt like running a mile. He took the rest at a sprint. “He’s dead.”
Mal pressed her lips together into a pale line, and bowed her head.
“There’s no water.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Tzimet loose in the streets. Riots in Skittersill, I think, and near RKC. True Quechal, probably.”
“Or else normal people, scared and angry.”
“The King in Red’s closed himself behind a Canter’s Shell. I don’t know if he’s even still, ah—” He stopped before he said, “alive,” and considered. “Awake.”
“I expect he’s collapsed,” Mal said. “His contracts to provide water bind deep. Every faucet in Dresediel Lex, every toilet flushed or factory trying to fill its boilers, is a claim he can’t ignore. Not to mention the strain of keeping the Serpents asleep. He might as well be dead. The rest of the board, too. The more they were tied to RKC, the weaker they’ll be.”
“It doesn’t work like that. I know those contracts. There’s an escape clause, for emergencies. You don’t want the person most qualified to fix the water to collapse if it breaks.”
She shrugged, which he thought was odd. Then again, the entire situation was mad. How did he expect her to act?
He continued: “But the boss wouldn’t have raised that Canter’s Shell unless something was wrong inside the pyramid, as well as outside. We can’t count on his help.”
She nodded, and waited for him to speak.
“You have to reach Heartstone. We’ll fire up the Serpents, use their power to get the water running, kick out the Tzimet, calm everybody down. Once that’s done, one of the big Craft firms should be able to resurrect Qet, or a part of him at least. RKC will have a rough year, but we should survive, and so should the city.”
Mal watched him through half-lidded eyes. He poured himself more water, drank, licked stray drops from his lips. “What do you say?”
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why,” she repeated, “should we save Red King Consolidated?”
The marble tabletop was cool and solid. “Because the city needs water. Because people are dying, and we can help.”
“We will.”
Her voice was flat, as it had been on Seven Leaf Station, when the gods writhed beneath the lake. “Are you okay?”
“Never better.”
Mal was intensity restrained, so still the air seemed to shake. I have a secret, her body screamed.
“If we’re not going to save RKC, what do you think we should do?”
“Caleb.” She closed her eyes, and massaged them with her hand. When she opened them again, they looked soft, and red. “We have to wait.”
“That’s it? That’s your plan? Wait?”
“At first.”
“The riots will get worse.”
“They must. When the eclipse comes, we’ll use the Serpents to grant water to the city. They will rise, and we’ll chase the Tzimet from our land—and the skyspires, too. Craftsmen will flee rather than face the Serpents.” She said it as if reciting the bids in a round of bridge. “We can start fresh.”
He leaned back from the table, and from her. “Mal. What are you saying?”
“If the King in Red recovers, he won’t let Qet’s death go unpunished. He’ll destroy the old religion and everyone who follows it, snap the spines of the last gods and goddesses, break their bones and feast on their marrow. But only if he recovers. If he doesn’t, we have a chance to take a different path.”
“You’re talking as if this is an opportunity.”
“It is. You asked me for an answer, last night. This is it. RKC is dead. Let it rot. Build something new.”
“No.”
“When the cards are dealt, and the players go all-in, what do you do if you hold the winning hand?”
“But you don’t hold the winning hand.”
“We do,” she said.
The world chilled. Caleb forced himself to speak. “Who’s ’we’?”
“Me, and people like me. People who care about fixing our city, our world. You, too, if you’ll join us.”
He licked his lips. To the south, fires spread. “Mal.” He didn’t, couldn’t, say anything more.
“Caleb.” She leaned across the table, laid her hand on his, gripped tightly. Long hours of climbing had left her fingers smooth and hard. He thought her running, a goddess in flight.
“You’re talking about rebellion. Regime change.” He exhaled. “I get it.” Gods writhing in the lake. Qet Sea-Lord dead in a sea of filth. Burning nets fell from the sky to snare her parents, his father, the thousands of the Skittersill Rising. The Rakesblight Center slaughtered twenty thousand pigs every day, turned animals to meat with hooked blades and spinning diamond wheels. “Not today. Please. Not now. Even if you chase the Craftsmen out of town, where would that leave you? In the middle of a desert, without any water. Qet is dead. Without the firms you won’t be able to bring him back to life. Let’s save the city first, then talk.”
“I’ve taken care of that.” She released his hand, placed her leather bag on the table, and undid the brass buckle. Her shoulders slumped, and her hands trembled.
She opened the bag and turned it toward him in the same motion.
He fell.
* * *
Falling, forever, into a sky without stars. Silent colossi moved through limitless space, invisible presences whose immensity built the world. He was a speck of dust, a leaf drifting down a cave chimney.
A misshapen planet of meat and rainbow blood hung below him. Severed arteries and limp veins the size of skyspires dripped ichor.
He fell through nothingness toward the heart of a god.
* * *
Caleb caught the table’s edge and pulled himself upright. The bag gaped. The heart filled the space within, yet was somehow swallowed by that space, too, a single bright spot in blackness deeper than the deepest cave, longer than the longest tunnel.
“What is this?” he said, though he knew already.
“His heart,” she replied.
“Where did you get it?”
She closed the bag. “I cut it from his chest with a knife of lightning. I would have used obsidian, but I couldn’t lift a blade that large. Lightning is less traditional, but easier to handle. And the effect’s the same.”
“You…”
He trailed off, hoping she would finish for him, but she didn’t.
“You attacked Bay Station. While I was asleep.”
“Yes.”
“I saw what happened there.”
Pain flickered across her features. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what? Sorry for what you did, or sorry I saw it?”
“Both. The attack had to be last night, because of the eclipse today. Bad luck. I tried to get you to turn back. I should have insisted. But. I didn’t want to be alone before it happened.”
“You’re lying. You couldn’t have done all that. You’re not powerful enough. No one is.”
“The Serpents are with me. I am weak, but they are strong.” She opened her hand, and fire blossomed in her palm—not the cold fire of Craft, but a hungry inferno, a burst of heat that blew desert wind in his face. She closed her hand, and it stopped. “Nothing can stand against them.”
“Gods. You’re serious.”
“I am.”
“But drawing power from the Serpents makes them hungrier.”
“Which weakens RKC, and Kopil. Alaxic insisted on that condition. You remember? RKC has to keep the Serpents sleeping. When I attacked Bay Station, everything I threw against them weakened their defenses. The more RKC fights, the more it’s caught.”
“And once Bay Station cut out, RKC tried to draw water from Seven Leaf, but…” He remembered his own work: melding red wires with blue, splicing the Serpents into the system. “Hells.”
“Your people audited Seven Leaf with a magnifying glass and sharp calipers before you bought us; we couldn’t tie Seven Leaf to the Serpents until the deal was done.”
“Oh,” he said. “No.”
“So we broke the station, knowing we could rebuild it later. Allie started the work. You and I finished it. Now, when RKC tries to pump water out of Seven Leaf Lake, it draws power from the Serpents, and the King in Red fades further.”
“The True Quechal didn’t poison Bright Mirror.”
“Of course not. They can barely paint graffiti without misspellings. Their hearts are in the right place, but they’ve had nothing to guide them for eighty years. No sacrifice. No transcendence. They’re small, and petty, and mean.”
“Your entire Concern was a sham.”
She laughed bitterly. “Have you ever tried running a Concern? You need people to do the work. People to manage those people, and to manage those in turn. The Concern is a dumb god and human beings are its cells. After his defeat in the God Wars, Alaxic studied the Craft. He started Heartstone to beat Kopil at his own game. We made contact with the Serpents in their slumber. And when we were ready, Alaxic showed the King in Red what he had found. Kopil raced to acquire us—he couldn’t let Alaxic control the Serpents. Out of two thousand employees, only a handful knew the full plan. Alaxic. Allie. Me. A few engineers, a few Craftsmen. The True Quechal—even if they’re small and petty, they have their uses. When you need someone to take a suicide run into North Station, for example, why not use a premade band of zealots, any one of whom would gladly die at a Goddess’s side?”
“That was you.”
“Once Kopil knew we had the Serpents, we had to convince him he was under attack, which made him more desperate to acquire us, to control them. He wanted insurance. Security.”
“You played me all along.”
“No.” Mal pushed her chair back and rose. Her expression was earnest, desperate. “I didn’t plan for you to see me that night. At first I was scared. I wanted to get rid of you.” Her heels tapped on marble as she rounded the table toward him. He stood and retreated, not fast enough to escape. “But you chased me, through death and pain and fire. You chased me, devoted, suicidal, scared—and I saw you wanted more than me. You wanted to give your life to something. To change the world, only you’d forgotten how.”
“Yes.” The word fell heavy from his lips.
“Well, here we are. Let’s change. Let’s change the world. Together.”
“You sound like my father.”
“Your father wants the gods back on their pedestals. I want us working as one: humans with Craft, gods with divine power, priests with Applied Theology. But we need space to build that society. We need the time and the power to change, and we’ll never have that time or power with Craftsmen crushing us. We need freedom, and I can win that freedom. Not in a decade or three. Today. In one stroke.”
“You want a moderate revolution. You just need to kill a few people first.”
“A few people. Yes. To free a city. To save a planet. Dresediel Lex will be a model for the world.”
“I kind of like it the way it is.”
She reached for his hand but he drew back. They circled the table, and each other.
“This city bothers you as much as me. I’ve seen the way you look at the long streets, the empty-faced men and women. You hold back when you talk, when you think, because you know thinking too deeply will drive you mad. I’ve dragged the madness out into the open. There’s no need to hide anymore.”
He slowed, despite himself, and she caught him in her orbit. She gripped his arm, and through his jacket he felt the feverish warmth of her fingers.
She pressed against him. One hand slid up his arm to cup his chin, curve around the back of his neck, and pull his head to hers, his lips to her lips.
They kissed, atop the pyramid, as the world crumbled.
The kiss was a collision. Hunger shot through them both, and need. They kissed violently, and violently they broke apart, each stumbling from the other.
Caleb looked at her, and imagined years beside her, leaping from rooftop to rooftop above blood-soaked streets as two serpents reared in the sky.
He grabbed the bag off the table, and cradling it in his arms ran from her toward the door.
“Caleb!” she cried behind him, which was all the warning he received before a curtain of flame blocked his path. Glass and metal melted. Recoiling from the bloom of heat he skidded on marble, nearly fell, and ran again, this time toward the banister.
“Caleb, please!” The air thickened to slush and ice, but he opened his scars and the ice thawed. The world inverted, directions twisted, but his scars bore him forward. The marble balcony became an ocean of clashing stone waves and he pressed through. Blind, staggering, he struck the railing, and threw himself over the edge.
He fell ten feet, and stopped, arms jerked nearly out of their sockets. His scars protected him from Mal, but did not guard her bag and the heart it held. Closing his eyes, he saw the silver cords of Mal’s Craft binding the leather. He flailed at those cords, but they rewove themselves faster than he severed them.
The strap warmed in his hand. He gripped it tighter, teeth bared. Heat seared his skin. He held a length of molten metal.
With a cry, he released the bag, and fell again.
After five feet he struck the side of the pyramid, bounced off stone, and slid, accelerating down the incline. Rock tore his pants and jacket. His fingers scraped for handholds, found none. The bag floated back to the balcony and Mal’s waiting hand.
He reached the step of the pyramid and tumbled into emptiness. Out of reflex his eyes closed. Silver-blue cobwebs whipped past his face. Desperate, he clutched at them.
The Craft lines slowed his fall; unlike the cords around North Station, though, these were too thin to support him. They ripped free of the wards that cocooned the pyramid, and those in turn unraveled; an avalanche of Craft followed Caleb down, sparking off pyramid stones.
He shattered the skylight of the pyramid’s next step. Impact rainbowed his world in pain.
He stood, slowly, favoring his left leg. His ribs hurt: bruised, he hoped, not broken. He was alive. He brushed glass splinters from his face and clothes with his jacket sleeve.
Opening his eyes, he found himself in a gray office beside a desk glittering with skylight glass. Thick books filled shelves on the office walls; a three-ring binder lay open on the desk.
Caleb waited for Mal to follow him. She did not.
She would not. He’d made his choice.
But what had he chosen?
When he trusted his legs to carry him, he limped out of the office toward the stairs.