The next day’s dawn clawed at Caleb’s eyes. He tugged his hat brim low, and climbed the gravel path that wound up the sandy hill toward Heartstone’s headquarters. The driverless carriage that had brought him rolled away into heat and haze.
Caleb felt about sunrise the way he felt about RKC’s accounting department: necessary, and best kept at a distance. But Alaxic, Heartstone’s chief executive, was a busy man, and when he set the meeting early, Caleb hadn’t argued—he needed this talk to end well. If Alaxic took pressure off the King in Red, the King should relax his grip on Tollan and the Wardens, leaving Caleb free to search for Mal. If not, Caleb’s chances for finding her dwindled to nothing. Especially if the Wardens decided to peek inside his head for any details about the runner he might have missed.
Dry dwarf pines rustled beside the path. Caleb turned to look, and a slender blade settled against the swell of his throat. He froze. Sharp points and edges pressed into his back. A needle breathed over his right eyelid. He heard the silence of something large standing still, and near.
“State your name and business,” said a voice like chalk on slate.
“Caleb Altemoc.” He swallowed. His throat pressed against the security demon’s claw. “I’m from RKC, here to see Alaxic.” Slowly, he reached into his pocket, and slid his badge out of his wallet. “I have an appointment.”
The claw did not slide across Caleb’s throat, nor did the spines of the demon’s chest impale him. This was probably a good sign.
Caleb waited.
The Tzimet in Bright Mirror Reservoir were to proper demons what a monkey was to a man: similar in shape, sometimes even stronger, but pale imitations with regard to intellect and cruelty.
Minutes passed. He waited on the hillside, millimeters from death.
Footsteps. He tried to turn his head, but the thorns at his cheek prevented him.
A woman entered his field of vision: skin a shade darker than Teo’s, face round, red-tinged hair pulled back in a bun. She wore a khaki suit with a knee-length skirt, and carried a clipboard. She glanced from his face to the clipboard, and held out her hand. “You must be Caleb. I’m Allesandre Olim. Mister Alaxic is eager to meet you.”
Claws, blades, and thorns released him. One moment, a sneeze would have driven ten spikes through Caleb’s skull; the next, he stood free on the path. Caleb accepted Allesandre’s hand and shook it. Her grip was firm, and she did not smile.
“Apologies for the security. Our work here is delicate, and dangerous. This way, please.”
“You have effective guards,” Caleb said, and would have turned to look behind him. Allesandre shook her head, and he stopped. “The demon’s still there, isn’t it?”
“Will you follow me?” she said, and left the path.
Caleb followed. The hillside where they walked looked rocky and uneven, tangled with sagebrush and weeds, but he felt a smooth stone walkway under his feet.
Allesandre led him to a circle of standing stones. With a wave of her clipboard she slid a five-hundred- pound altar aside, revealing a rough-hewn tunnel into the earth, and rock steps descending.
They climbed down the steps for a long time.
At first the tunnel felt warm as desert noon, then warm as a baker’s oven. Dim red light illuminated wall carvings of the Hero Sisters, eagle-headed gods, and of course serpents: the ancient Quechal who dug this passage had etched a double bar of stylized scales under each graven figure.
“This,” Caleb said, “is a strange place to work.” The Quechal carvings reminded him of childhood, of nights listening to his father chant holy tales of blood and murder. He remembered some of these designs from the walls of his father’s temple in the Skittersill, before it burned. “You don’t see carvings like these anymore.”
“The bas reliefs are authentic,” Allesandre said. “Five hundred years old, give or take a century.”
Caleb lifted his hand from the wall. “Trying to save on real estate?”
“Hardly,” she replied. “Sites like this are vital to our work.”
When he first heard the voices, he took them for wind through fissures in the rock. Deeper, deeper he followed Allesandre, and the whisper rush resolved to words in an obscure form of High Quechal, a jumble of nouns, adjectives, and verbs from which he caught snatches of meaning: Serpent. Flame. Lost. Burn. Make. Mold. Crush.
Stinging sweat ran down his cheeks, the line of his jaw. His shadow and Allesandre’s, melded, stretched long and thin behind them, a road into the darkness from which they had come.
The passage opened onto a broad, black stone ledge on the lip of a vast cavern. Light from the depths cast the world crimson. Stalactites hung jagged overhead, twined round by metal pipes. Chant braided with the rhythm of machines.
Men and women crowded the ledge. They wore loose white linen, and tool belts girded their waists. They worked at stone altars and plinths, adjusting bee-carved dials, pulling levers shaped like snake’s heads. Burning motes danced in the air before their faces. The technicians chanted as they worked, heads bobbing to keep time.
The words and carvings were High Quechal, but this place lacked the trappings of ceremony: no priest, no priestess with bone flute, no Mat-Keeper with blade upraised. Modern, angular Craftsman’s glyphs glowed from every surface.
An ancient man in a black suit stood by the railing at the platform’s edge. Hands behind his back, he stared down into the cavern. Scraps of thin white hair clung to his scalp. His body stooped, as if it could no longer bear his strength.
The white-robed crowd parted for Allesandre. Caleb followed in her wake. She stopped behind the old man, and said: “Sir, I’ve brought Caleb Altemoc, from RKC. Caleb, this is Mister Alaxic.”
Caleb swallowed, for reasons that had nothing to do with the heat.
“Altemoc,” said the old man, chewing the syllables of the name. His voice was high and spare. “Not Temoc’s boy by any chance?” There was no question which Temoc he meant.
“Yes, sir. My father and I aren’t close.”
“Hard to be close with a wanted felon.”
“I don’t approve of his life choices, and he doesn’t approve of mine. We have an equitable arrangement.”
Alaxic did not turn. “Strange that the most stalwart of the True Quechal would give his son a foreign name.”
“When I was born, he thought there was a chance for peace. He and my mother chose my name as a sign of that peace.”
“You were born before the Skittersill Rising.”
“Yes,” Caleb said.
“Dirty business.” Though Alaxic’s hands remained clasped behind his back, his fingers worked and twitched as if playing an invisible instrument. “Men standing to defend their rights. Killed by Wardens who should have protected them.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“And the other?”
“I’d be less generous.”
“Humor me. Speak freely.”
“I’d say the rioters were fanatics who wanted to sacrifice their neighbors to bloody-minded gods.”
“You don’t share your father’s faith.”
“I don’t respect murderers, as a rule. However they try to justify themselves.”
“Ah.” Alaxic turned from the ledge. He was not wrinkled, but worn, skin stretched thin and drum-tight. One eye stared white and sightless from his face, and a puckered, twisting scar bent the right side of his mouth into a smile. His remaining eye glittered, cold, black, and sharp. “A modernist.”
“I suppose.” Stop this conversation, he told himself. Don’t let yourself get dragged in. “I don’t imagine you asked me here to talk politics.”
“Politics and security,” Alaxic said, “are two sides of the same parchment.” He raised his hands, and tried to
