Enjoy this sneak peek of book six in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence!

The Ruin of Angels

Prologue

Ley built her sandcastle below the tide line.

Kai warned her, of course—what else was an older sister for? When Ley chose her spot and planted her flag, Kai said “They'll drown.” That last word tugged her when she spoke, as if it left a hook in her mouth. Kai almost apologized, but didn't. Drown was the right word. You couldn't go avoiding words just because they hurt.

When Ley sculpted the gap-toothed ramparts of her keep, like castles in picture books that told the kind of Schwarzwald fairy stories where kids got eaten, Kai said: “You see, that's the tide line up there, where the seaweed's drying.” When Ley carved a curtain wall with a bright blue trowel, moistening the sand and packing it between her palms, Kai said: “Your wall's too thin to keep the water out."

“The wall’s not to keep the water out,” Ley said. “It’s to keep out our enemies.”

“You don't have any enemies.”

Ley shrugged, and dug her moat.

Mom wasn't there to help. Today was a mourning day; she'd gone with her sisters to Kai’s father’s grave, to paint her face with ashes and sit naked, alone, until the tears came. She’d grieved with the children, noble and sharp in mourning white when the bearers brought her husband home—she stood chin out, brow high, eyes bright and black, impassive as a Penitent on the outside. As the old songs say, each body holds multitudes within. As a mother, she had helped her children mourn their shipwrecked father, who died saving his friends. As a wife, as a woman, she needed time to be herself, and weep.

She left Kai in charge because Kai was older, and because Kai didn't set fire to things just to see what color they burned. But Ley only had the vaguest grasp of the meaning of the phrase ‘in charge.’ Kai knew better than to test her younger sister on this point. She still had bruises from the last time she tried.

Kai left Ley to work and climbed the beach to build her own castles clear of the coming waves. The sand was drier here, and did not pack as well, so she brought a halved coconut shell to the surf, filled it with water, and carried it back to moisten the sand. She made a spreading bay city like Kavekana, with a mountain behind it like Kavekana'ai, and studded the shoreline with pebble statue Penitents watching seaward for the return of long-gone gods. Heroes. Fathers.

Each time she went back to the ocean, her sister's city had grown. Ley excavated alleys with her fingertips, and cut decorations on rooftops with a sliver of bamboo. From above, the city she built looked intricate as a Craftwork diagram or a work of high theology. Ley bent over her city in her swimsuit, brows low as if to cut off the half of the world that didn't concern her: the beach, the volcano rising inland, her sister.

Ley bit her lower lip as she worked.

“You have to do something,” Kai said. She chose her words carefully. Words were art—you could control them. “Or it will crumble.”

Up the beach, bigger kids shouted and screamed; a pale-skinned Iskari tourist girl dove to return a volleyball serve and fountained sand where she fell. The sea lay calm to the horizon, but no one swam. The red flag was up, gallowglass swarming today with their long stinging tendrils, but they were invisible above the water. White sails bellied on the bay: cutters and dinghies and barques wheeled in defiance of the massive moored container ships docked on West Claw, at the deepwater port.

“You aren’t listening.”

Ley didn't look up.

Fine. Let Ley build her doomed city. Kai marched back up the beach. She added houses to her island, and dug its bay deep, so the tide, rolling in, would fill it. Standing, she judged it good. Then she turned back.

Ley's metropolis sprawled on the shore. She’d worked out in a spiral from that central keep, spread townhouses and factories, extended her lanes as she came round to them again. Kai knew the world she had built from sand—but she knew Ley’s world, too, though she had never seen it before. Those broad thoroughfares with divided roads and sidewalks were commercial streets—no, avenues down which old emperors might have marched in triumph, processional boulevards bookended by arches. There were palaces, there high temples, here a factory; to the north, alleys grew so narrow Ley could not have made them with her fingers, must have dredged them with her bamboo strip. She had found a dream city inside them both, and made it real.

And the tide rolled in.

Ley's hands never stopped. The rest of her knelt rigid beside the districts she shaped, as her thin fingers carved and built and stroked sand smooth.

Kai grabbed her coconut shell, ran below Ley’s city, and started to build a wall.

She built artlessly, because art was not the point. She did not know why Ley hadn't listened, why she made this weird familiar city, she did not know why Ley left glittering traces of her soul in the ramparts beneath her fingers. Kai did not know; she suspected. She could have asked Ley, taken her by the shoulders and shaken her and screamed until she stopped and tried to explain. But Ley's face reminded Kai of Mom’s in mourning white, and the words she might say if Kai forced her to speak were words Kai knew she could not bear to hear.

So she built the wall. With her hands, she built it, with her own surging shoulders and legs, with Mom's thick fingers and Dad’s sailor’s muscle. She gutted the sand with her coconut shell. The sun burned her eyes and warmed her skin and covered her with sweat.

“Boy!” a voice called to her in Iskari from up the beach: the volleyball girl, drunk, in a white bathing suit. “Boy, you can't stop the tide."

Kai ignored the girl, whose friends shushed her and tried to explain. Kai's wall was more of a hill really, with a moat behind it almost as deep as Kai was tall. She judged the wall’s height against the tide line, and started to curve upslope, to guard the outer edges of Ley's city. She sweat and trembled.

There wasn't time. She couldn't close the eastern wall before the tide rolled in. She knew this, and did not let herself know, because if she knew she would have stopped trying. Further up the beach, an audience gathered: tourists and other monsters drawn by the two girls striving in the sand. A skeleton in a flower-print shirt watched them, rolling a newspaper into a tighter and tighter cylinder between his finger bones. Kai ignored them, too, and kept fighting.

The water rose as she built the east wall. Every wash of surf drew more sand off the wall, back out into the deep. Kai wasn't patting the sand down, now, just digging it, tossing it up, hoping for the best. Behind her, a wave crested the west wall and splashed into the moat. Wet sand stuck to Kai's feet. She sank. The south wall cracked. Salt rivers poured into the moat and soaked Kai to her waist. The north wall sloughed into the water. Kai scrambled to shore it up, but the next wave rushed in.

Waves tossed Kai from the moat onto the beach. She spat out saltwater and sand, and when she recovered she looked back, expecting disaster.

But Ley's city stood.

The waves covered it, and drained away through carved alleys which should have collapsed just like Kai's wall. Impossible. But Ley stared down through the water and the wash, and her city did not die.

Her soul shimmered in the sand. She stood above the city into which she'd built herself, over the world she'd made, and forced it real. The sand held its shape. The city sank, but stayed. It would not drown while she had breath.

Ley stood like a goddess over her creation, as the waves rolled in. She stretched out her hands as if to calm the ocean, and for a moment Kai believed it might obey.

Then Ley fell, screaming, into the dirty water. She drew a breath in the surf, gagged, choked—disappeared in the wash and foam.

Kai ran into the surf, caught her sister around the shoulders, and dragged her to dry sand. Ley coughed up water, screamed again though she had no breath. A white phosphorescent thread tangled around her leg: a gallowglass tendril, torn free and set drifting on the tide in search of an unwary victim. Probably not fatal. Kai gloved her hands in a gob of seaweed and peeled the tendril free. Snot ran from Ley's nose, and her eyes rolled white behind slitted lids. She breathed deep and fast. Venom leaked through Kai's makeshift glove, and burned her palm.

With the tendril gone, Ley stopped screaming, but didn't open her eyes. Kai slung her sister's arm over her shoulder, and pushed up with her legs. She took three steps, and stumbled into foam. Building the wall had cost her: she could not take Ley's weight. She ground her teeth and tried to will herself upright.

She stood too fast—someone else held Ley's other side. The Iskari girl in the white suit, the one who'd called her—“Boy,” she said again, in Iskari. “What was she doing?"

Kai had not expected that question. She didn't think the Iskari girl expected it either—the girl was scared, she didn't know why Ley fell, easy to see she’d never suffered a gallowglass sting before, a gallowglass would leave a bright red scar on that sharp white skin—she was embarrassed, the way tourists sometimes felt when they helped or even noticed locals, talking because she felt she had to speak.

“Playing,” Kai replied, in the same language, and didn’t correct her about the other part. The girl helped her carry Ley upslope. The crowd drew back as they approached, clearing space on the boardwalk. They set Ley down slowly beside a discarded resort brochure. The skeleton watched them both from behind ruby spectacles, newspaper still clutched in his hand. He could have done something, Kai thought—a Craftsman like that, all the power in the world at his disposal, lightings danced when he crooked his finger, he could have stopped her pain in an instant.

He adjusted his spectacles.

A lifeguard shouldered through the crowd.

“Playing at what?” the girl asked.

Kai didn't answer. The lifeguard bent low, took a charm from his neck and applied it to the sting. Blood seeped through torn skin, but at the charm’s touch, flesh calmed, and blood stilled. Ley stopped shaking. She drew her first even breath.

“She wanted to save it,” Kai said. Her voice hooked after save—speaking Iskari forced her to gender the pronoun, and she was not sure whether she chose right. She remembered the angle of Ley’s head, so like Mom’s, fierce and without compromise, watching the body born home. She could have said, save him.

Behind her the sun set and the tide rolled up, the ocean at innocent ease as if it had never killed a man. The parapets and pinnacles of Ley's city melted, its triumphal arches seeped out into the deep. Salt water filled Kai's model bay, and the tiny Pentients she built stared out over the flat, poison water.

“Save what?” the girl asked.

But Kai wasn't sure, and if she knew, she would not say.

Chapter One

Who would break into a bank to leave something?

The practice is much more reasonable than one might think, though the practitioners’ motives tend to involve someday removing more than they originally left. You might circumvent the bank's wards, dodge its construct and revenant and demonic and even, sometimes, living human guards, evade its detection magics, dance across its pressure plate floor, answer ye its riddles three, to leave, for example, a beacon glyph that would guide subterranean tunnelers, or a weapon to disable all that intricate security on the occasion of a later and more forceful raid. A simple listening device, in the right place, could yield the needed intelligence to corner or crash a market, or make a small, substantial killing—literal or metaphorical. But few people would break into a bank solely to leave something, and fewer still would break in to leave a letter.

So while the mailroom of Iskari First Imperial in Agdel Lex noticed that the vellum envelope which appeared in their priority delivery box one workday morning, sealed with blood-colored wax and the impression of a wolfsbane flower, lacked the customary sender's marks, the demon on duty considered this merely an administrative assistant's oversight. Mortals. Honestly.

If the letter needed shipping to the Shining Empire, or across the sea to Alt Coulumb, or even north to Telomere, the demon would have wasted precious sorting minutes hunting down the relevant admin so as to bill the postage properly—but an envelope for internal delivery needed no postage. The demon hissed, anyway, and pondered taking bloody, demonstrative action. She'd warned the admin pool against using priority flags for internal mail—in-building post went round hourly, and, while some market developments did require immediate response, once you allowed priority flags for intraoffice mail, even the most inane check-ins mysteriously ended up TRIPLE URGENT. A little bloodshed ought to clarify the situation.

The postage demon consulted the building register and found—odd—the recipient was unlisted. She closed her many eyes, and replayed, in her mind, as her therapist had suggested, a comforting series of human screams, starting with a ten on the pain scale, counting down. That relaxed her enough for work. Then she checked the guest list, and realized her mistake.

Kai Pohala, whoever she was, was only visiting the office for one day; whoever sent this message couldn't attend her meeting in person, and wanted to be sure the letter arrived before she left. Sensible. Saved on postage, even. No one had to die today.

Though you never could tell when a bleak morning at the office might look up.

*

Agdel Lex had a shattered beauty from the air, but Kai was too busy trying not to vomit to pay much attention. Turbulence got to her—the flight attendants claimed they'd talked with the dragon, who said not to worry, entirely customary for the Agdel Lex route this time of year, well within the airship's stress tolerance. Doubtless they would repeat that “nothing to worry about” line right up until they all went down in flames. No incentive to tell anyone to panic, after all. Blood and hells and all the gods, she hated flying.

Not to mention that her Godsdamn silver bowl wouldn't hold still on the Godsdamn seat back tray table—there was a depression, yes, a little courtesy carving in the teak inlay meant to hold the tiny cups of horrible coffee, but it was too far forward and to the right, and much too small, to hold her brand new “fits-anywhere!” folding sacrificial vessel. If she placed the bowl exactly in the tray table's center, it pressed into the back of the seat in front of her, the inhabitant of which had, naturally, reclined, and if she moved the bowl toward her chest, its lip would touch her shirt, and, given Kai’s luck, a sharp bump would spill blood all over everything. She hesitated, frowned, and tapped the four-armed sculpture of knives and glass sitting ahead of her in 14F on one of its shoulders, once she found a spot she felt reasonably sure wouldn't carve her open when she touched it. “Excuse me.” Sir, or Ma'am? Godsdamn mainlander languages and their Godsdamn gender-dependent forms of respectful address. Whatever. Focus. The sculpture rotated its head independent of the rest of its body, and glared at her with ruby eyes. “Could you raise your seat?”

It answered in a language she didn't understand, that sounded like the death of something beautiful. But it turned back ahead, smoothly as it had turned to face her, and did not raise the seat.

Fine. She wedged the bowl against its seat back. The cabin lurched and swooped and steadied, and for a stomach-churning moment she only saw ocean and wing beyond her window, no sky at all, not even land, before the dragon reared and corrected itself, tossing Kai's insides through another loop. Fine. Get this over with. She took a sacrificial pipette from her inside jacket pocket, peeled open the paper to reveal the glass, and, between lurches, stabbed herself in the forefinger. Blood filled the slender glass tube through the magic of capillary action. The cabin shook again, fuck, you'd think they'd find some halfway competent ageless lizards to fly these runs, and the pipette waggled in the meat her finger. She plucked it out when the flight eased; the pipette was small, and her professional wards closed the wound instantly. Still stung, though.

Kai bent over the bowl, pursed her lips over the pipette's opening, and blew. Blood spattered and ran down the silver's non-stick coating, following intricate spidery trails she interpreted, in the back of her mind, using a dozen augural disciplines from six continents. A bloodreader of the Sanguine Host would warn her of a troubled morning—no surprises there. Aizu humourists would say, hm, family trouble? Unlikely. Maybe she was reading it wrong. She hadn't been called upon to build an Aizu idol in a while. She flagged that particular theology for review.

Kai returned the pipette to its wrapper. The man in the seat next to her coughed into his fist, shifted his weight, and said nothing in a way that said quite a lot.

“Hey,” she said, “everybody has to pray sometime.”

He tried to look as if he had not heard.

“I mean,” she said, “do I go to your altar and slap the knife out of your hand?"

He turned the page of his copy of The Thaumaturgist, and said nothing, in a way that pegged him as Camlaander to Kai. She liked this about Camlaanders: if you pretended you couldn’t interpret their radiant discomfort, they’d never clarify—they’d just shut up and wait for a later opportunity to describe your revolting behavior to friends who would agree with them.

Kai's blood pooled. She looked into her reflection, but they hit another bump, and the reflection shattered. As good as she could expect, under the circumstances.

She breathed out above the water.

Lady. I'm listening.

There, in the sky, approaching a foreign city beneath the belly of an ancient beast, tossed by winds, stuck in coach because in the Priesthood’s estimation her venture excursion didn't rate a business class fare, she felt the touch of a cool blue hand upon her brow.

The touch melted against her forehead and rolled down her skin, like honey tears, hot and sweet and deep, to bead and tremble on her lips, then slip within. She tasted salt and sand and volcanic rock. Root musk rolled down the back of her tongue into her throat. She burned all over at once, and exhaled the beauty that wormed in her veins.

Across an ocean, on an island far away, a girl—a young woman now, gods, Izza was sixteen—looked up from her work, and let her gaze unfix, and said, silently, through the goddess that bound them both—Aren’t you landing in an hour?

There's been a change of plans, Kai prayed. I have to stay abroad a few more days. Everything will keep at home.

For better or worse. We're fixing the Penitents one at a time, but it's not easy, and the kids don’t like it. They forced people to be good, by one way of thinking—it won't make any difference if we force them to be good by another. The problem's the force, not the good.

Kai agreed. But: the constables won't like losing their training base, and the people won't like losing their protectors. Changing a culture takes time.

You've only had the Penitents for sixty years.

That's forever, as far as most people are concerned.

You said there was a change of plans, Izza said. What changed?

Kai wished she'd pressed the matter as soon as the call went through. Now, it felt like she was hiding something. Management approved the venture offering, she prayed, and we arranged meetings while I was finishing up in Telomere. I have an overnight in Agdel Lex.

No answer returned through the ecstasy channel.

Just a quick stopover, she explained. The city has a good startup community these days—nightmare telegraphics mostly, dreamshaping and fearcraft, along with the usual high-energy Craftwork. Nightmare Quarterly called it “thriving.” That kind of investment has more risk than most of our faithful like, but that means more upside, too—a few big bets that pay off will give us breathing room to change our raw materials investment profile, and divest from Grimwald holdings in the southern Gleb.

Still, silence.

Look, yes, Maya thinks it's a bad idea. I fought for budget, I pulled every favor I could imagine, and even then I just got qualified permission to extend a feeler. So while I was in Telomere cleaning up the Martello thing, I asked Twilling, you remember him, in Sales, to reach out to his friend in the Iskari venture community here. I've given myself a notional budget of a couple million thaums; I'll make the deals we need, go home, present the investments as accomplished fact, and everything will be fine.

More silence. Wary.

She prayed, too fast: It's a peaceful city these days. The fighting's further south, past the Wastes. I'm just going to meet with a bunch of artists, who will probably be glad— the airship shook. No, not the airship. Her shoulder. Her eyes snapped open. Her veins throbbed with the attenuation of pleasure, and she struggled to focus on the soft weak lines of reality. The Camlaander sitting beside her was studiously reading his magazine. Who—

A flight attendant stood in the aisle, frowning. “We're landing soon. Please raise your tray and refrain from excessive prayer."

Fine, Kai said, then remembered she had to use her mouth. “Fine.” And she closed her eyes again.

Look, I have to go. Trust me, this will work. If we want to change Kavekana, if we want to fix the Penitents and everything else without a revolution, the priesthood needs the right kind of surplus—we can’t just double down on bone oil and necromantic earths. This will help the Blue Lady. This will help the city. And it will net me a nice bonus check, which will help us buy more kids out of debt. Again, her shoulder shook. She ignored the flight attendant, and prayed faster: It’s fine. My sister's been sending me postcards from here for the last, like, five years. She's having a grand old disgustingly bohemian time.

“Ma'am,” the flight attendant repeated, harsher this time. “We're starting our final descent. Please."

“Did it ever occur to you,” Kai said, “how stupidly epic that sounds? Final descent. Poets take a final descent into this hell or that. Emperors have a final descent from the throne before someone chops their heads off. We're about to land, which process we will presumably survive to descend again.” Everyone was looking at her, which was, she conceded, reasonable. “Won’t we?”

“Prayers can interfere with navigation."

“How many navigational instruments does your basically immortal, enormously powerful lizard need to tell her how to go down?"

“Agdel Lex local airspace presents singular navigational challenges—“

“For the love of whatever gods you profess,” the Camlaander said, and Kai noticed for the first time the white-knuckled grip with which he held his magazine, the nervous sweat beaded on his forehead, the porcine smell of his fear, “won't you please make your call once we're safely on the ground?"

She prayed again. Got to go. Local problems. I don't know why you're so hung up on this.

Five years ago, Izza replied, in Agdel Lex, I saw the Rectification Authority burn out the Gavreaux Junction hunger strikers. Six hundred people. The leaders went into lock-up, and if they ever came out, I didn't hear about it.

That's horrible. But I'm not coming to reinforce the colonial authority, just—

The connection failed. The Blue Lady’s honeyed touch slid from between her lips, and vines of joy unwound from her thorn by thorn. She opened her eyes, red, furious. The flight attendant had shut her bowl; the last remnants of blood smoked within, dried to flakes, and Kai smelled acid and copper and burnt iron. She shoved the flight attendant's hand away, and folded the rest of the bowl herself. “You didn't have to do that. I was almost through."

“We're past the cutoff, ma'am."

Gods save us all from petty tyrants. “Down is down. Does your dragon have eyes, or doesn’t she?"

“We're landing in Agdel Lex, ma'am. Down isn't always where you left it, and you can’t always trust your eyes.”