parchment.
The wall clock read 9:47 A.M. Caleb ate a hurried breakfast under the baleful stares of bloodthirsty paintings, washed his plate and the frying pan, and left in a rush, realizing only after Teo’s door clicked shut behind him that he had left his hat on her coffee table.
Dresediel Lex crushed him in a cacophonous embrace. Carts and carriages and wagons clogged the street outside Teo’s building. Drivers shouted at pedestrians, horses, and other drivers as if they could break gridlock by inventive language and the threat of violence. Couatl, buzzing optera, airbuses and simple balloons tangled in the flat blue sky.
Heat ruled the city, dry dominant heat like a god’s gaze or the breath of a forge. All bowed before the heat; buildings prostrated themselves, and people slouched nearly naked beneath the beating sun. By this hour Craftsmen, bankers, brokers, and all others who dressed for work were safely ensconced in air-conditioned offices. Actors and students and night-shift workers walked the streets in shorts, light shirts, miniskirts, tunics, sleeveless ponchos. Caleb caught himself following the long bare legs of three young women down the sidewalk, and closed his eyes. A sharp smile surfaced from the confusion of his memory: the woman, Mal.
He bought a newspaper from a corner stand for two thaums—cheap enough, but his head ached from spending even a little soulstuff. Hangover, had to be. He’d won a good chunk of soul the night before, shouldn’t need to visit the bank for a week or so. The newspaper held no news about Bright Mirror Reservoir, a good sign. The King in Red did not control the press directly, but news of a crisis like Bright Mirror had to be managed.
Caleb walked two blocks to the airbus station and caught the next dirigible downtown. The bus moved west and north, threading around and beneath skyspires toward the 700 block of Sansilva, where eighty-story pyramids rose to worship the sun.
No real worship had taken place there since Liberation, of course. Still, the pyramids impressed.
The air lost its haze, and the sky retreated from the earth. Craftsmen and Craftswomen drew power from starlight and moonlight, though they could also drink from the sun, or from candles, fires, living beings. Smoke and exhaust from the city’s wagons, factories, and cooking stoves would not disturb simple, day-to-day Craft, but the Concerns of the 700 block brooked no interference with their dark and delicate work. They burned their sky clean.
In the depths of winter, when rain washed sweat from the city’s brow and flash-flood rivers coursed down alleys, the sun still beat down on the 700 block. At night, sorcerous clouds covered the poorer districts, Skittersill and Stonewood, Monicola and Central and Fisherman’s Vale, reflecting light back to earth so that, in dark Sansilva, even the faintest stars would hang exposed to hungry Craftsmen.
Caleb got off the bus a half-block from RKC’s headquarters, the obsidian pyramid at 667 Sansilva. True Quechal protesters stood outside, chanting and waving clapboard signs: NO DEMONS IN OUR WATER. THE GODS DEFEND. NO WATER WITHOUT BLOOD. Half wore modern clothes, slacks and shirts and skirts, and half garments even Caleb’s father would have thought clownishly traditional: white dresses hemmed in silver cord for the women, and cotton kilts for the men, their bare and unscarred torsos covered with Quechal glyphs in red paint. Four black-uniformed Wardens watched the crowd, arms crossed. Sunlight glinted off their badges, and off the silver planes of their faces.
As Caleb approached, a soapbox preacher pointed to him with one gnarled finger and cried, “Flee this place! Traitors walk here, traitors to blood, traitors to Gods and their own kind!”
Caleb ignored the man and edged around the crowd. No sense wondering how the True Quechal had learned about Bright Mirror. Their noses were better than vultures’ for smelling rotten meat.
“If you will not flee,” the old man called, “then join us. It is not too late. Stand against the blood-betrayers, the worse-than-dead! Take up the cause!”
“Get lost,” Caleb shouted in High Quechal as he walked past.
The old man’s face twisted in confusion. He probably didn’t know High Quechal, beyond a handful of half- remembered words from some underground religious service. Few spoke the priests’ tongue these days. Caleb only knew it because his father had taught him.
He walked through the protest. Behind, the chants and slogans swelled again to crescendo.
Caleb stepped off the lift at the pyramid’s twenty-third floor, into the silence of men and women working.
He wound through cubicles toward the Director’s corner suite. Tollan would want to see him before he drowned in the sea of paperwork no doubt already covering his desk. Much as it pained Caleb’s boss to admit, some truths could not be conveyed in the blanks of official forms.
He saw her office door, and slowed.
Tollan’s door was a pane of frosted glass—a source of comfort to the whole department, because from her general position in the office they could tell her mood. If she was at her desk, the world was at peace; if pacing, at war; if tending her peace lily, best hide and wait for the axe to fall.
Caleb could not see Tollan, or her desk, or her peace lily. A black blade had cut her office from the universe. Terrible things moved in that blackness, and few of them were human.
The door crept open.
Caleb ducked into the nearest cubicle, startling its blocky, middle-aged occupant from his work.
“Sorry, Mick.”
“Caleb? Where have you been? The boss is looking for you.”
“I’ll talk to Tollan when she’s done with—”
“Not the boss,” Mikatec whispered. “The
Caleb knelt behind the cubicle wall. Mick had papered his workspace with pictures of his younger, sleeker self, playing ullamal, holding athletic trophies, screaming triumph. Caleb crouched beside his coworker’s memories, and listened.
Quills scratched paper. Chair wheels squeaked. Fingers drummed on a desk. An actuary the next row over coughed.
From the darkness beyond Tollan’s door came a voice like the end of the world: “I hope our trust in you is not misplaced.”
Color faded from the pictures of Mick’s glory. Ghostlights overhead flickered and died. Someone—a new hire, had to be—cursed, and someone else shushed her. The noise of pens and chairs and drumming fingers stopped. The risk management department grew still.
Tollan’s door swung shut.
Three distinct, sharp taps trespassed on the hush, then three more, then the thud of a bronze-shod staff on stone. The noises repeated. A heavy robe swept over the stone floor.
Caleb held his breath.
The King in Red moved among the cubicles, wreathed in power. The taps were his triple footsteps: the bones of his heel, the ball of his foot, the twiglike toes striking in sequence. “As you were,” he said. No one stirred. Sixty years ago, the King in Red had shattered the sky over Dresediel Lex, and impaled gods on thorns of starlight. The last of his flesh had melted away decades past, leaving smooth bone and a constant grin.
He was a good boss. But who could forget what he had been, and what remained?
The footsteps receded, and light seeped back into the world. An elevator bell rang. When the doors rolled shut, Caleb exhaled, and heard others do the same. A thin layer of sweat slicked his brow.
He patted Mick on the shoulder, loosened his collar, and walked to Tollan’s office.
Tollan paced behind her desk, cradling a glass of mescal. She took a sip, and shook herself. Her long black hair was up in a tightly coiled braid, which left her face severe and thin.
“Where have you been?” she asked when he closed the door.
“Sleeping.”
“Sleeping.” She laughed without humor, and looked down as if surprised to find herself holding a drink. “Once in a while I convince myself I’m used to him, I can handle him. Then I see him angry.” She squeezed the glass as if to crush it, reconsidered, and set it on her desk.
There was no need for her to say whom she meant.
