As Mal advanced, the sky turned against her.
Wardens swarmed her on Couatl-back, black serpentine streaks striking with arcs of lightning, with silver spears and nets of green thread. Wingbeats and thunder thickened the air. A golden lasso caught Aquel’s neck; the Serpent hissed in frustration.
Of course the Wardens had come. Lapdogs of the King in Red and his brothers, murderers, servants who did not ask why they served, who let themselves be shaped into weapons against their own people. The Wardens had burned her parents in the Rising, had unleashed fire on screaming crowds. They had missed Mal in their cull, and now they realized their mistake.
She smiled, and her teeth were pointed as the Serpents’ fangs. Let them come.
Aquel pulsed sun-brilliant and threw a wave of plasma against the Warden who had caught her. The golden line snapped, and the Warden who threw it fell in smoking pieces to the ground.
Mal laughed, but in her joy an emerald net snagged her limbs, her mind. The world collapsed to a projection inside a nutshell where she hung suspended, bounded empress of space. She lived and died in the net, lived and died again, infant with every indrawn breath, growing, swelling to maturity with the filling of lungs, dwindling as she exhaled to a fragile age, arms and legs thin as mast-cord, skin taut and dry, dying to inhale and be born again.
No. She was more than this. She was rage, dying, and born again she was vengeance. The Wardens would not bind her.
Fire burst from Mal, and she was free. Spears of flame lanced in all directions, burning holes through pyramids, reducing Wardens to ash. She felt each death. She was Dresediel Lex. She was Quechal. They were her children, though twisted and deformed. She wept and moved on.
More Wardens rose against her. She broke the wings of their mounts and they fell. Some swooped low above the crowd, catching refugees and winging them to safety; these she did not strike down. Their kindness pleased her.
She approached the Canter’s Shell, and pointed toward it. Thin ropes of flame snaked from Aquel and Achal, surrounded the blue bourn and pressed in. The shell’s logic, its Craft, its mechanisms strained against the Serpents’ power, the weight of history and wrath older than gods.
At first she thought the shell might hold.
Then it began to crack.
* * *
Caleb closed his eyes to the billowing dark, and saw. The King in Red wore midnight like a halo. Temoc’s skin bled light. Around them, between them, space twisted and gave birth to fever dreams, knives and hooks, grasping claws, chains and webs of iron, barbed tentacles and hideous geometries.
“You will not stop me,” Temoc said. “The Gods lived before you, and when you die they will endure.”
“I died eighty years ago.” Kopil’s voice held no trace of humor. “Your gods and I have that much in common.”
A blade swung out of darkness toward Temoc’s throat, but blunted and burst to steam.
Wings spread from Temoc’s back. The hooks and chains glowed with his faith. White light spiraled through space between them.
“Interesting.” The King in Red cocked his head to one side. “You are not dead.”
“This pyramid was ours for a thousand years.” Chains wrapped Kopil’s robes. “You have perverted it, but it still answers to me.” Spears swung down to pierce the Craftsman, claws to tear and teeth to rend.
The King in Red snapped his fingers.
Spears and claws and teeth stopped. Time’s depths hummed.
Kopil stepped forward, feet tapping triple time on glass. Fire burned in his eye sockets. The hum deepened in volume and pitch.
Sweat shone alabaster on Temoc’s brow.
“This pyramid was yours,” Kopil said. “Now it’s mine.”
White spirals flickered, flared, and burned red in the night.
Darkness opened three thousand eyes. A fanged mouth gaped beneath their feet. The mouth had always been there, gnawing the world’s marrow, unseen. They were standing on its teeth.
Caleb’s eyes snapped open, and he fell, blind, shivering.
A cry of frustration split the shadows, and a cold corpse-wind rushed past his face.
Light returned, and the dome was empty save for Caleb, the King in Red, and Teo collapsed on the altar.
Caleb ran to her. Her chest rose and fell, rapid, shallow. Eyes darted behind closed lids. He tore off his jacket, pressed it against the cut in her arm. Blood everywhere. Blood on the altar, blood on the ground where she had reached for the contract.
If he hadn’t cut her free, the cuff would have kept pressure on the vein. If he hadn’t cut her free, she would have died at his father’s hand.
“Caleb.”
The King in Red’s voice.
He whirled. “Fix her.”
Red stars stared from a blank skull. “I can’t.”
“You can. She saved you. Do something.”
“She’s too weak. She has lost much blood. If I touch her with Craft, it will drain her.”
“Then heal me.”
“What?”
“Try to fix me. Do to me what you’d do to her.”
“You are not injured.”
“No time to explain. Do it.”
Shadows flowed from the King in Red, and plunged through Caleb’s skin. His heart slowed, his hands froze. Kopil’s Craft worked within him. His cuts and bruises and broken bones ached for healing, but he denied them. Pressure built, until his scars felt ready to burst from flesh.
He lifted his jacket from Teo’s arm, and touched her wound.
His light flowed into her, and her pain into him. Her wounds closed, faded, and vanished. Her breath deepened, her eyes fluttered, and she woke.
“Hi,” he said, and sagged against the stone.
“Hi,” she replied. “We have to stop seeing each other like this.”
* * *
Oven heat pressed Balam down. The road around him hovered silver as a mirage. The Serpents were so close now, rearing less than a stadium’s length behind the statue. Their coils slagged asphalt and concrete.
Sansilva was not yet empty. Much of the crowd had escaped, but those that remained were frantic and impassable. Knots of men and women clogged the sidewalks and open spaces, tumbling and brawling in their terror. Still, he saw the beginnings of a path through them, a road over broken glass to the safety of a bank pyramid. Uncertain, and shifting, but a path nonetheless. If they waited, another might present itself. Then again, maybe not.
Sam waited in a sprinter’s crouch. She remained, he thought, due more to concern for him than to belief he could actually judge the proper time to leave.
No sense straining her patience. Balam stood, and as one they ran.
* * *
Caleb could not stand on his own, but Teo and the King in Red helped him.
“What,” Kopil said, “is going on? Why has Heartstone turned against us? Why is Bay Station broken? Why is the city in tumult?” He produced a pipe from the pocket of his robe and lit it with the tip of his forefinger.
“Is my father—”
“Fled. He used some trick, some hidden means of escape built here when this place was still a temple.” Kopil took a long drag of tobacco and exhaled smoke. “He has spent the last thirty years running and hiding. He is skilled in that regard. Now. No delays. Tell me what has happened.”
“You remember Malina Kekapania?”
“From Heartstone. Your girlfriend.”
“Yes.” Of all the things to remember. “She attacked Bay Station, killed Qet, and she has awoken Aquel and Achal. She wants to chase Craftsmen out of Dresediel Lex. Alaxic planned it from the beginning.”
Kopil took a drag on his pipe and exhaled smoke. The red lights in his eye sockets blinked off, and on again. “I will tear satisfaction from his soul.”
“Too late. He’s dead. I think.”
“In which case I will content myself with his disciple.”
“Who has Aquel and Achal at her back. Can you defeat them?”
Kopil shook his head. “Our plan was to preserve their slumber.”
“You’ve killed gods.”
“You,” he said coldly, “do not understand the Serpents. The more they hunger, the more they burn. Any Craft I use against them will take from them, and increase their hunger. Only sacrifice can assuage them, but I will not give them sacrifice.”
Kopil’s eyes blazed. The dome overhead wavered and grew transparent. Angry orange cracks split the blue curve of the Canter’s Shell above and around the pyramid; to the south and east, along Sansilva Boulevard, rose two distorted columns of light taller than skyspires.
A ring of sun burned around the moon’s shadow. Beneath, the city lay broken. Small human shapes ran for cover.
Kopil drew on his pipe.
Nothing could stop the Serpents except a sacrifice. Caleb could have let Temoc do it: feign unconsciousness until the blade descended.
Teo gripped his hand, and he felt sick.
The cracks in the Canter’s Shell widened, and the surface of the sun leaked through.
“So that’s it?” Teo asked. “She wins?”
“No,” Kopil said. Wind rose atop the pyramid, bearing the dry scent of a thousand years of dead sand. The King in Red reared to his full height. The surface of his skull shone. One hand held a curving knife of lightning, and the other crackled with black flame. “Ms. Kekapania holds the Twin Serpents in thrall. If she dies, they will lack direction, and perhaps they can be contained.”
“She’ll kill you.”
“I died a long time ago. I have the might of RKC at my disposal—my own Craft, that of the Board, and beyond them the millions who live in this city. She has weakened us, but we remain strong.”
“The last time someone used the Serpents as a weapon, they broke this continent in half.”
“In the God Wars, I tore space and time asunder. I made a crack in the world.” The King in Red walked toward the pyramid’s edge. Air rippled as he moved. His power pressed against the skin of reality. “We shall see which of us is the more fearsome.”
Caleb caught Kopil’s sleeve. He did not turn or seem to notice. “If you fight her, no matter who wins, the city will lose. I know you’re angry. But this isn’t the way.”
“Do you have an alternative?”
Sacrifice, Temoc said.
“I do.”
The shell shattered into mathematical shards. Each spinning splinter reflected the broken, burning city. An eclipse chill blew through the cracks, ruffling Caleb’s hair and Teo’s shirt. Kopil’s robes flared like wings.
* * *
Balam felt rather than heard the shell break, as if every joint in his body had popped at once. He pressed on, pounding through the pain, eyes blind to all but their path—until Sam, behind him, shouted: “Stop!”
He looked back, looked up, looked everywhere at once, and saw a spinning blue curve, three hundred feet on a side, slice through the pyramid ahead as if hundreds of years of stone and steel had never existed. The blue boiled away in an instant, but falling, it scooped out a ten-story section of pyramid, and the floors above strained, creaked, collapsed in a rain of steel and spark and tortured metal.
Sam grabbed his arm again, and pulled, and following her he fled back toward the fire.
* * *
Mal laughed when the Canter’s Shell shattered, and the Serpents laughed with her. She understood Allesandre’s madness now. Sanity was the gap between perception and desire, and that gap had closed. The Serpents’ power belonged to her: millennia of sacrifice congealed into will and flame. What could she imagine that she could not create? What could she hate that she could not destroy?
Atop the pyramid stood a figure in red.
She remembered the taste of Kopil’s teeth, when they exchanged the traitor’s kiss.
How to break him? Slowly or swiftly? A simple rush of plasma, or dismemberment—or should she split his body atom from atom?
As she pondered, a weight struck her from behind.
* * *
“Give me souls. All the souls you can spare.”
“In exchange for what?”
“For nothing. I need you to give them freely. No strings attached, no contract, no consideration.”
“The Craft doesn’t work that way. I can’t give you something without taking.”
“Look.” He removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. The scars on his arms glowed. “This is how I helped Teo. I don’t have any Craft of my own, but I can use others’ power, and pay the price myself. The old priests bore the gods’ power with these scars, worked miracles with them. My father still does. Maybe I can do the same: give the Serpents power without taking anything in return.”
“You’ll kill yourself.”
“Maybe.”
“I’m no god.”
“And I’m no priest. But we’re the closest we have.”
* * *
Mal spun, searching for her adversary, but the skies seemed empty. Again she heard leathery wingbeats, and claws tore into her back; she responded with a wild jet of fire. A colorless blur crossed the corner of her eye. She spun after it, but saw nothing.
She summoned a whirlwind that swept several hundred pounds of sand from a nearby construction site into the air around her.
A shape flew through the dust: a Couatl, with a woman crouched on its back, medium height, with broad shoulders and thick arms and a Warden’s smooth visage.
Mal recognized her, in the instant before the woman’s cloak adjusted to the dust in the air and she disappeared again.
“Hello, Four.”
* * *
The lights in Kopil’s eye sockets dimmed. “So, how is this done? I’ve never had a priest before.”
“Give me your blessing, and your power. I’ll take it from there.”
The King in Red raised one skeletal hand, and placed his palm on Caleb’s forehead. The bones of his fingers shook.
Caleb dissolved in light.
* * *
Mal sent waves of lava in all directions, roped the sky with lightning; Four and her Couatl rode the waves, and circled to safety. The Serpents struck, but their fanged mouths closed on air.
Four pressed her assault with spear and talon and arrow, with discus and net of despair. The attacks did not wound Mal, but they broke her focus.
Mal swept the sky above her with fire, and heard the Couatl turn sharply and beat away toward the ocean. Not dead, but wounded at least. She returned her gaze to the pyramid. A fountain of light danced on its summit.
She did not notice the whistle of air overhead, but she did notice when a pair of hands closed around her neck.
* * *
Balam and Sam ran around the burning corpse of a fallen Couatl, down the few remaining ribbons of intact road. The broken Canter’s Shell had scored trenches several hundred feet deep into Sansilva and the pyramid parking lot. They searched for a path through the maze. Steel fell around them, and glass and molten wires and chips of stone.
Sam skidded to a halt: the asphalt ahead had buckled up in the shell-shard’s wake. What had seemed a straight road was actually the lip of a deep trench.
Behind them towered the Serpents.
“We can go back,” Balam shouted.
Sam didn’t hear him. She had turned to the pyramid’s peak.
* * *
Souls flooded Caleb, a wash of experience and broken memory: a lover’s kiss ringside in the swell of victory, a dockhand’s sweat after a hard night on the pier, the glint of a butcher’s knife in motion, and the shine in a glass of whiskey as a bartender drew off a shot.
Playing poker he had felt other souls collapse into his own, a few at a time. He could not count how many joined him in those few seconds’ rush. Lives swelled him and burst his skin.
The world fluoresced and vibrated. Dresediel Lex was a tapestry of life, debt, ownership, dedication, faith, investment. Multicolored light knotted around the fluttering shadow of Kopil’s spirit. Teo’s shadow was larger, her bonds fewer: to her gallery, to her apartment, to Sam.
To him.
“Caleb,” she said, and he wondered what she saw when she looked at him.
“I’m here.” Beneath his voice he heard other voices: the chorus that now comprised him.
She stepped forward, hugged him fiercely, and said: “Go all in.”
“That’s the plan.”
She let go. “And come back.”
He turned from her, to Kopil, to the Serpents, and stepped off the pyramid’s edge into empty air.
* * *
“We have to get out of here.” Balam grabbed for her shoulder, but she shook her head, and pointed to the sky.
“Watch.”
* * *
Mal struck Four with diamond-tipped fingers, but the Warden squeezed harder. Her silver mask pressed smooth and slick against Mal’s ear. “Can’t stab you,” Four said through her teeth. “Can’t cut you. But you can still die.”
She twisted Mal’s neck, which did not break. The Serpents’ power coursed through her. She was their vessel, or they were hers; her bones were metal and her nerves flame. But Mal had not yet lost the habit of breathing. When Four squeezed her windpipe, she gasped for air, and found none.
Spots and sparks swam across her vision.
She could burn Four to ash, but doing so she might burn herself. A foolish way to die.
As foolish as being strangled by a person you can’t even see?
Oh.
Yes.
The world contracted to a long thin tunnel. She placed her hand on Four’s arm, and pulled.
* * *
The sky bore Caleb’s weight. Scars on his ankles and the soles of his feet woke to grip the air.
He advanced.
* * *
Mal pulled, not at Four, but at the Craft that bent light through the air around her. Invisibility required power, and that power came from somewhere. The most likely source was Four herself.
Mal drank deep.
Her vision dwindled to a single gray spot. Too late.
No.
Four’s grip slackened. Her legs loosed. Mal heard her adversary groan.
Air sweet as wine filled her lungs.
She caught the Warden by the arm before she fell.
Four’s jacket smoked in Mal’s grip. Effortlessly, she pulled the Warden up, took her throat in one hand, and bared her teeth. Four struggled, weak. Her flesh burned, seared, smoked. The face beneath her mask was round, with broad eyes—a Quechal face.
Shame.
“Let her go, Mal.”
She looked up, and blinked away a wash of light.
* * *
Mal had changed.
Her dusky skin was molten stone, her hair a field of ebon flame. Her eyes were radiant jet. Beside her hovered the leather bag containing Qet Sea-Lord’s heart.
“Let her go.”
She shrugged, and dropped Four.
The Warden tumbled through empty air. Caleb did not move to help her; after a few flailing seconds, her Couatl arrived, grabbed her in its talons, and flew to safety.
He met Mal’s gaze.
“You caught me,” she said at last.
“You look surprised.”
“Surprised, and glad.” The Serpents’ mouths moved in time with hers. He saw faces in the diamonds that lined their throats: Quechal faces, painted, pierced, tattooed, plain, agonized or rapturous or simply watching. “I thought you might be dead.”
“I’m not.”
“I hoped that was true,” she said, and tilted her head to one side. The Serpents echoed her movement. “There’s something different about you. You’ve picked up a halo, and your scars are live.”
“There’s something different about you, too.”
“Yes.” She laughed. “I suppose there is.”
“You don’t have to go through with this.”
“I’m an arrow in flight.”
“Arrows don’t have a choice. People do.”
“What choice?” She smiled, sad, distant. “My choices were made twenty years ago, when my parents died. Or sixty years ago, at Liberation. Or earlier than that. The world’s tossed in bad dreams. Someone has to wake it up.”
“There are other ways.”
“Not for me.” She approached. The Serpents shifted to flank him. Three mouths moved in tandem. Who was the speaker, and who the puppet? “You don’t have to fight me.”
“I do.”
“I’m sorry.” She reached for his face. The heat of her touch seared his cheek, boiled his skin. He should have recoiled, but did not.
He wanted to take her in his arms, to shrivel to ash, to kiss her with melting lips.
“You don’t have a chance. Temoc stopped his sacrifice.”
“I know. I kept him from killing my friend.”
“You’re too sentimental for your own good.” Her eyes were an ocean, luminous. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, either,” he said, and gave her his soul.
* * *
The heart is the spirit’s anchor, Temoc had said. Aquel and Achal hungered not for flesh, but for Quechal souls.
When Caleb bet in a poker game, a piece of him flowed into the game, into the goddess. Each player gave her a part of himself, and at game’s end she divided her favor among them according to their victories and defeats.
What if the goddess outlasted the game? What if she stretched through centuries, beyond any purpose she might once have served?
Living, she would grow hungry.
Perhaps the myth was true. Perhaps the Serpents existed before the Hero Twins found them, great beasts that broke the world with their madness. Perhaps not. Perhaps the Quechal threw two sacrifices into the heart of a volcano, and the sacrifices endured, and received sacrifices in turn. They clutched one another in the heat of their dying, and survived.
Caleb gave his soul to Mal, and through her, to the Serpents—his soul, and the souls he bore, so many that they carried him on a flood. There was no bargain, no quid pro quo. He streamed into Aquel and Achal, and became more.
In their diamond mouths, in their gleaming teeth, in their molten hearts, they received him. All were received. All lived. No, not lived—all endured, sleeping through centuries: every sacrifice, every victim, caught and one with the Serpents.
He felt the stone knife plunge into his chest ten thousand times, and ten thousand times his death cry rose over the chants of the priests, in High and Low Quechal and languages older still. The dying souls rose with their hearts, dreaming last dreams of a mother’s smile, of a coyote’s laugh at nighttime, a mug of chocolate, a victory dance, a lover’s embrace. Dreams fell into the Serpents’ mouths, and the Serpents ate them, and became them. Soul, accreted onto soul, accreted onto soul, down millennia.
When the sun died, the Hero Twins gave their hearts to the Serpents, became one with them, to save the world.
The Quechal were the Serpents.
The Serpents were Quechal.
Caleb was a thousand, a hundred thousand. He was the smile of Kopil’s lover on Sansilva Boulevard beside the pyramid of the Sun.
Somewhere, he heard Mal scream.
You can’t sacrifice other people anymore.
You have to sacrifice yourself.
Serpentine thoughts twined and spun around him, minds linking to minds. Aquel and Achal joined with the souls he had borne. Their hunger ebbed. He opened four immense eyes and stared out on a crystal world.
Mal burned within him, around him.
“Stay with me.”
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.