The King in Red’s secretary rose from her desk to bar Elayne’s way. “If you don’t have an appointment, you’ll have to wait.”
“He’ll make time,” Elayne said. She’d taken an hour-long carriage ride through traffic and three elevators to reach the King in Red’s foyer, on the top floor of the pyramid he’d remodeled into an office building. The trip had not calmed her. The secretary was no fit target for her anger, but Elayne would not let herself be detained in Kopil’s lobby, no matter how elegantly appointed it might be.
“He’s secluded.” The woman pointed to the obsidian doors behind her, carved with serpents and dead gods. Closed, the doors’ engravings formed an enormous skull, eye sockets aflame. “No one enters after he’s lit the fires. His schedule clears tomorrow at two. I’ll pencil you in, or if it’s urgent we can squeeze you between his security briefing and the evening market rundowns.”
Elayne closed her eyes.
Neon spiderwebs and interlocking ghostlit gears filled the foyer around her. The door was well Crafted, but not well enough to stop Elayne. She found the timekeeping mechanism in an instant, and its bond to the schedule on the secretary’s desk. Trivial to twist the schedule’s sense of local time; it was always two tomorrow afternoon somewhere.
The door ground open. Grave-blackness gaped beyond.
The secretary gaped, too. “See?” Elayne said. “I told you he’d make time.”
She strode past secretary and doors into a shadow that closed about her like a mouth. Stone steps rose through the night. She could have summoned fire, but she needed none.
After a long climb she emerged into a deeper darkness in which the King in Red sat, wreathed by lightning.
He hovered cross-legged in midair, finger bones resting on the sharp protrusions of his knees. Blue-white sparks leapt from his skull to the crystal dome above. Their brief flashes illuminated the outlines of his office: altar-desk, stuffed bookcases, umbrella stand. Somewhere, a Zurish contrabass choir chanted songs of praise and terror.
“What exactly,” she said, “were you trying to pull?”
The choir faltered and failed. Crimson stars caught fire in the King in Red’s eye sockets. “I see you visited our friends in Chakal Square.”
“I did. Especially our mutual friends.”
The skeleton sighed, and stood. Robes fell heavy around him. Toe bones tapped the floor. The lightning faded, and normal ghostlight returned to the room: a sparsely furnished crystal dome atop the eighty-story pyramid of 667 Sansilva, from which Red King Consolidated distributed water to the fourteen million people of Dresediel Lex. A long time ago, priest-kings had sacrificed people on the red-tinged altar that now served Kopil for a desk. “I didn’t think Temoc’s involvement was worth mentioning.”
“Wrong. You thought it was worth not mentioning.” A carafe of coffee rested on a side table near the desk. Elayne poured herself a cup with the Craft, and floated it through the air to her waiting hand. “You knew about the Alt Selene ruling. You’re not that far out of touch. You thought Chakal Square might be a problem. You investigated, and learned Temoc was involved.” She drank the coffee. “This is good.”
“I add more black to it,” he said. “Temoc is the last priest of the old gods. His fathers killed thousands. His hands are not clean.”
“You kept news of Chakal Square under wraps, put our work and your city at risk, because you didn’t want to deal with him. And then you tried to start a riot, so your Wardens could arrest him for disturbing the peace.”
“Really, Elayne. You can’t believe a radical’s accusations.”
“This morning they caught a man trying to poison the camp. You mean to tell me Tan Batac came up with that idea all on his own?”
“He did,” Kopil said at last. “But I didn’t stop him.”
“He almost poisoned hundreds of people.”
“Food poisoning,” he said. “Unpleasant, but hardly dangerous.”
“If you’re in good health, which I can’t say for everyone in Chakal Square. That was low.”
“Temoc and I have unfinished business.”
“I’ve made deals with actual demons, with a lot less at stake. So have you.”
“This feels different,” Kopil said. He leaned against the black-red glass of his desk. Bony fingers settled on a silver picture frame. She did not need to look to know what image it contained. Kopil, younger, with his arms around a man she’d never seen alive.
“I know it’s hard,” she said. “They cut Timas open on that altar. But you’ve had your revenge. You broke their world and built a better one in its place.”
“It’s not enough.”
She couldn’t argue the point. She’d loved, and lost, but her loves and losses had never been so deep, so sudden, or so bloody. “Would he want you to set all you’ve built at risk for the sake of a grudge?”
Skyspires turned slowly above them. The falling sun lit the smog a million shades of green and yellow and red. “This was easier before,” he said.
“In the Wars, you mean.”
“Gods try to smite you, and you smite them first. Armies of light against armies of darkness. Craftsmen advancing the cause of knowledge and freedom and humanity against ignorance and oppression.”
“Humanity?”
“Or whatever you want to call us,” he allowed. “But times have changed. My people turn back to old and bloody gods.”
“That’s freedom for you.”
He bowed his head. Shadows lingered in the folds of his robes and the depressions of his skull. “Everything was clear in the old days. You walked the lines like the queen of Death.”
“I was seventeen,” she said. “More seems clear at seventeen than is. You were forty, still fleshy, still human, which imparts a likewise palsied perspective.”
“What do you want from me, Elayne?”
Once those pits in his skull held eyes, and skin covered his high cheekbones. A long time had passed since then. “An apology. For keeping secrets when you said you wouldn’t, for treating me like just another minion. We’ve known each other too long for that.”
“I am sorry,” he said, and she thought he meant it.
“Call back your agents. Quit the skullduggery. Work with the Chakal Square crowd. Temoc will gather leaders from the camp. We’ll meet, and compromise, and deal. Be wise for once, as well as strong.”
She wondered how many people in Kopil’s life could bear his gaze without flinching.
“Very well,” he said. “But Tan Batac won’t understand.”