In Balam’s childhood when his grandmother lay drunk on corn beer on cool dry winter afternoons she had told him tales of old gods and heroes. Beyond these he knew no sacred signs, no holy chants beyond those repeated before an ullamal game. But he recognized the cobra-hooded coils above Sansilva, the house-sized scales slick as water if water burned, taller than the pyramids, tall enough to eat the sun, or kindle it aflame again with the darting forked lava spouts of their tongues. Shining in every color and none, cored white as alabaster: Aquel and Achal, greater than goddesses, fiercer than demons, the world’s first children.
He almost froze in awe and wonder, and if he had, he would have been lost. The crowd saw, and whatever they understood, whether they recognized the Serpents or thought them Craft-born terrors or demons run loose, they knew to flee. Desperate they stumbled away from the Serpents: down alleys and into swaying buildings, despite the rain of glass. But most ran along the path of least resistance, down Sansilva Boulevard, and their tide carried Balam toward the Canter’s Shell and forever.
Balam pushed against the crowd, with muscles built down decades of cliff running and decades more of teaching runners. A stone statue stood fifty feet upstream, some robed Iskari goddess, a break in the human tide. Fifty feet might as well be miles. He thrust himself into spaces between people, he struck men in the stomachs, he tore free from clawing fingers, and pressed toward the statue.
Heat passed over him, raised rivers of sweat on his arms: the heat of the Serpents’ gaze, or else their distant breath.
His legs ached. A flailing elbow caught him above the eye and tore his skin. Blood ran down his face. He growled, and fought harder, in and down, gripping cobblestones with his feet, desperate not to lose the slim scrape of traction that bound him to the earth and kept him safe from pounding feet and pulsing legs.
Men and women died around him. They fled the Serpents like ants flee the beam of a magnifying glass. Those too slow were crushed, or burned.
The air stank of panic and sour sweat.
Ten feet left. An eternity. He could not cross the distance. He could count his wounds, and weaknesses: a finger broken when a woman he was fighting past shifted left instead of right. Blood in his eyes. A back twisted by too much running, by a youth spent sprinting over rooftops. Forty years of fat.
Damn the crowd. Damn the Wardens for circling above the damage. He might not make it, but for one more moment he would fly.
Six feet. He released his hold on the ground, but rather than let the tide carry him forward he grabbed the shoulders of the men pressed against him and pulled himself up, onto them, over their bodies, through the forest of arms and heads, a cliff runner’s last leap—
Too short. He landed a foot shy of the open space around the fountain; his weight pressed bodies beneath him to the ground, but others surged over him, over them, dragging him back. He roared in frustration, reaching toward that stone Iskari goddess to strangle her promises of victory.
A hand closed around his: a steel grip, slender but implacable, a rock against the tide.
He pulled with strength that could tear stone, and the hand pulled back, and in a tumble he lay panting in the statue’s shadow beside his savior, a woman, not even Quechal: blond hair in tangled braids, a scar on her temple. Her eyes were wide with terror, and she sucked in breath like a horse after a sprint. So did he. He swore, and cursed, and spit.
“Thank you.”
She nodded.
“Balam,” he said, and tapped his chest. He could not raise his hand to offer it to her.
“Sam,” she said. Around them, the world continued to end.
Mal tossed, spun, caught inside the Serpents.
“Stop,” she said, in High Quechal and then in Low: “Stop.”
The Serpents swayed, brighter than the dying sun. She hovered level with round crystal eyes a hundred feet tall. Heat scored her skin. Sweat ran down her face—altar sweat, the sweat of the bound woman who sees the knife. The Serpents’ scales pinged and hissed and cracked as the air tried and failed to cool them.
They waited for her.
A smile crept across Mal’s face.
The Serpents twitched, and her smile faltered.
The smell of sacrifice rose from the pyramid at 667 Sansilva. The serpents smelled it, and so did she.
Temoc. No other priest remained to make an offering. Alaxic had killed the others, one at a time down the decades, with poison, blade, and Craft. Temoc should have been the last. Somehow, he must have escaped, and reached the altar with a victim.
No matter. She would burn him from his place of power.
She flew down Sansilva toward pyramid, sacrifice, and victory. The Serpents slithered after her.
Sea was the word for world, rocking, rolling, turning. Sea, and Caleb floated upon it beneath a woman who laughed knives and kissed with steel. His pain floated up toward a sun like a burning ring in the heavens: a hollowed sun, a hallowed sun.
Caleb followed the pain up, toward the light.
He blinked at the gray arch of the crystal dome. His skull throbbed. So did his hand, his ribs, and the rest of his body.
Incense coiled in the air.
“Qet Sea-Lord, Exchilti Sun-Shaper, Seven Stone, receiver of offerings. The Twins gave of themselves when the sun their father died. Yes, they gave of themselves—suckled the Serpents on their blood and heart-flesh. In innocence they suckled them, and we give innocence in their memory.”
The words were High Quechal, spoken in the vocative of address to the divine, with a priest’s conjugations and declensions. The voice belonged to Temoc.
He remembered: the blow to his head, Temoc’s arm around Teo’s neck, the rage and fear in her eyes as she went limp.
His vision cleared.
Temoc bent over the altar, his back to Caleb. Shadow flowed silken over his skin, wreathed his body from head to foot in a darkness like priestly robes.
Mounds of copal incense burned at the altar’s head and foot. In one large hand Temoc held a hook-bladed obsidian knife.
Blood dripped from the knife’s tip, and from the gargoyle mouth in the altar’s side.
Caleb’s world chilled, and drained of color.
“Let me go!”
Teo. Still alive. Gods. Temoc was bleeding her before the sacrifice.
“Each age is called to give of itself,” Temoc chanted. “We fortunates are called to give our hearts.”
Caleb rose. His father rocked with priestly fervor. Teo lay spread-eagled on the altar, hands and feet locked in obsidian cuffs. She pulled against her bonds, and shouted obscenities. Blood ran from her left wrist down grooves in the glass, and dripped from the altar’s mouth into a coffee cup.
He searched for a weapon, but saw none. The King in Red was more partial to deep magic from before the dawn of time than to up-swords-and-sally-forth. Nothing useful in the office clutter, either. Books, few large enough to do damage. Chairs too heavy to lift or swing. Temoc had pushed the detritus of Kopil’s desk onto the floor to make room for Teo: papers, a coffee mug, the picture of Kopil and his dead lover.
The picture, in the heavy silver frame. Caleb hefted it, testing its weight and the sharpness of its corners.
Teo’s stream of invective paused for breath. Her head lolled to one side, and she saw Caleb. Her eyes widened.
Caleb swung the picture frame with both hands into the side of his father’s head.
“We have to go,” Sam said.
Balam shook himself back into the world. “Go where?”
“Anywhere. That pyramid over there, on the left. Those things are coming.” She peeked over the lip of the
