A scream did come—but a scream of frustration, not pain, and issued from no human throat.
Mal dove off the dam into empty space.
Once, twice, she somersaulted, falling ten feet, fifteen. Caleb’s stomach sank. She fell, or flew, without sound.
Twenty feet down, she snapped to a midair stop and dangled, nose inches from the dam’s pebbled concrete face. A harness girded her hips, and a long thin cord ran from that harness to the crest of the dam.
Blue light flared above as Tzimet strained against the wards. Iron groaned and tore. A claw raked over the dam’s edge. Lightning crackled at its tip.
Mal pushed off the concrete and began to sway like a pendulum, reaching for the nearest catwalk—one level down from Caleb. He ran to the stairs. Another talon pressed through the dam wards, scraping, seeking.
At the apex of Mal’s next swing, he strained for her. She clasped a calloused hand around his wrist, pulled herself to him, wrapped a leg around the catwalk’s railing, and unhooked her tether.
“Thanks,” she said. Sparks showered upon them. Fire and Craft-light lanced in her eyes.
“You’re insane.”
“So I’ve heard,” she said, and smiled, and let go of his arm.
He grabbed for her, too slowly. She fell—ten feet back and down, to roll and land on a lower catwalk, stand, run, and leap again. She accelerated, jumping from ledge to ledge until she reached the two-hundred-yard ladder to the valley floor.
Caleb climbed over the railing to follow her, but the chasm clenched his stomach. His legs quaked. He retreated from the edge.
Above, demons clawed at the emptiness that bound them.
The Wardens would catch her in the valley, he told himself, knowing they would not. She was already gone.
4
An hour and a half later, a driverless carriage deposited Caleb on the corner of Sansilva Boulevard and Bloodletter’s Street, beside a jewelry shop and a closed coffee house. He hurt. Adrenaline’s tide receded to reveal pits of exhaustion, pain, and shock. He’d told the Wardens he was fine, he’d make it home on his own, thanks for the concern, but these were lies. He was a good liar.
Broad streets stretched vacant on all sides. The carriage rattled off down the empty road. Night wind brushed his hair, tried and failed to wrap him in a comforting embrace.
He remembered lightning-lit eyes, and a tan body falling.
He’d given the carriage the wrong address, and stumbled a block and a half to his destination, a ten-story metal pyramid built by an Iskari architect mimicking Quechal designs. Over the door, a plaque bore the building’s name in an art deco perversion of High Quechal script: the House of Seven Stars.
He exhaled. It was this, or home.
“You’ve come up in the world,” said a voice behind him, deep as the foundations of the earth.
Caleb closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and counted in his head to ten and back in Low Quechal, High Quechal, and common Kathic. By the time he finished (four, three, two, one), the flare of anger dulled to a familiar, smoldering rage. His nails bit into his palms. Perfect ending to a perfect day.
“Hi, Dad,” he said.
“Either that, or you’ve abandoned that rat-trap house in the Vale to live off your friends until they kick you out.”
“It’s a long way home. I’ve been working.”
“You shouldn’t work so late.”
“Yeah,” Caleb said. “I shouldn’t. I wouldn’t have to, either, if you’d stop trying to kill people.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Caleb turned around.
Temoc towered in the darkness beyond the streetlamps. He was a man built on a different scale from other men: torso like an inverted pyramid, arms as thick as his legs, a neck that sloped out to meld with his shoulders. His skin was a black cutout illuminated by glowing silver scars. The same shadows that clouded his body obscured his features, but Caleb would have known him anywhere: last of the Eagle Knights, High Priest of the Sun, Chosen of the Old Gods. Scourge of the Craftsmen and right-thinking folk of Dresediel Lex. Fugitive. Terrorist. Father.
“You’re telling me you don’t know anything about Bright Mirror.”
“I know the place,” Temoc said. “What has happened there?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, Dad.”
“I play at nothing.”
“Tzimet got into the reservoir. We’re lucky they killed a security guard before the water cycled into the mains this morning. Otherwise we’d have thousands out already, crawling in people’s mouths, spearing them from the inside.”
Temoc frowned. “Do you think I would do that? Consort with demons, endanger the city?”
“Maybe not. But your people might.”
“We stand up for our religious rights. We resist oppression. We do not murder innocents.”
“Bullshit.”
Temoc lowered his head. “I do not like your tone.”
“What about when you ambushed the King in Red five months back?”
“Your … boss … broke Qet Sea-Lord on His own altar. He impaled Gods on a tree of lightning, and laughed as They twitched in pain. He deserves seventeen-fold vengeance. I am the last priest of the old ways. If I do not avenge, who will?”
“You attacked him in broad daylight, with thunder and shadow and incendiary grenades. People died. He survived. You knew he would. No one who can kill gods would go down that easily. All you did was hurt the innocent.”
“No one who works for Red King Consolidated is wholly innocent.”
“I work for RKC, Dad.”
An airbus passed overhead. Light from its windows cast the pavement in alternating strips of brilliance and shade. The light revealed Temoc’s face in slivers: jutting cliff of jaw, heavy brow, dark, deep eyes, Caleb’s own broad nose. A dusting of white at his temples, and the firm lines chiseled into cheeks and forehead, were his only signs of age. No man in Dresediel Lex could say how old Temoc was, not even his son—he had been a hale young knight when the gods fell, which made him eighty at least. He nurtured the surviving gods, and they kept him young, and strong. He was all they had left—and for twenty years, they had been his only companions.
Caleb looked away. His eyes burned, and his mouth felt dry. He massaged his forehead. “Look, I’m sorry. It’s been a long night. I’m not at my, I mean, neither of us is at his best. You say you don’t have anything to do with the Bright Mirror thing?”
“Yes.”
“If you’re lying, we’ll find out.”
“I do not lie.”
Tell that to Mom, he could have said, but didn’t. “Why are you here?”
Caleb’s father might have been a statue for how little he moved—a bas relief in one of the temples where he had prayed before the God Wars, where he prayed and cut his arms and legs and dreamed that one day he would tear a man’s heart from his chest and feed it to the Serpents. “I worry about you,” he said. “You have been staying out late. Not sleeping enough. Gambling.”
Caleb stared at Temoc. He wanted to laugh, or to cry, but neither impulse won out, so he did nothing.
“You should take better care of yourself.”
“Thanks, Dad,” he said.
“I worry about you.”
