scraped the floor. He leaned his crutches against the railing, and lowered himself into a chair.
The sun declined toward ocean. Rooftops and skyspires reflected and refracted tawny light. Tendrils trailed from the spires to the city: pulleys, block and tackle, raising steel girders and glass plates to repair crews in the buildings’ upper floors. Craning his neck over the rail, Caleb could see road workers repaving Sansilva Boulevard.
A waitress came by, and he ordered a whiskey and water, and savored it, lost in thought.
Teo arrived a little before five, and sat beside him with her drink.
“Hey.”
He sipped whiskey, felt it burn in his throat, and turned to her with a weary smile. “Hey. You got my letter.”
“I was waiting for it.”
“And you came.”
“Of course I did. You look.” He wondered what she would say next. Wan? Bruised? Shrunken? “Better than you did in the hospital. How are you feeling?”
“Used up.” He tapped his cast, propped on a chair. Then he touched his ribs, and his gloved right hand, and the side of his temple. “Hollowed out. The soul doesn’t fit the flesh.”
“You should have saved more. Your account with RKC barely held enough to keep you alive. Couldn’t you have kept some of that soulstuff back?”
“The Serpents needed a whole person, a real sacrifice to give the rest of the soulstuff shape.”
“That was you. The whole person, sacrificed.”
“Yes.”
“So who am I talking with now?”
“Still me. At least, that’s my opinion. Same body, same brain, a transfusion of my own stored soul to replace what I lost. Philosophers might argue. I don’t know.”
Teo drank away that line of inquiry. “If you were all they needed, why not go in alone? Why take power from the King in Red?”
“Aquel and Achal were hungry. One soul might not have satisfied them. We needed to feed the Serpents enough to keep them asleep for centuries. A mass sacrifice, concentrated in one person.”
She looked him in the eyes, and he sensed the question forming: did you expect to die? She did not ask it, which spared him the need to answer.
With a grimace, he pointed to crutches and cast. “Now I’m stuck healing the old-fashioned way. At least I’m drawing sick pay.”
She waited for him to say more. When he didn’t, she filled the silence. “Sam’s fine, by the way. Burned her arm, twisted her knee in the earthquakes, but she’s recovered faster than you.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“She’s lucky. Artists.” She pronounced the word like an expletive. “She deserved worse, running off like she did.”
“Don’t say that.”
A crane lowered a steel girder onto the pyramid opposite. Welding sparks cascaded down the structure’s side. “Any word of Mal? Or Temoc?” She hesitated before saying his name.
He drank, and thought about the amulet. “Temoc hasn’t shown himself since the eclipse, to me or anyone. But he won’t stay gone forever.”
“Good,” Teo said. “When he returns, someone will make him pay.”
“Good luck. My father is debt resistant.”
Sparks fell like stars.
“It’s boring without you. I go to Muerte on my own. A banker tried to hit on me the other day. I told her I already had a girlfriend. Tollan keeps asking when you’ll come back.”
He checked his watch, and returned it to his jacket pocket. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”
“You’re quitting.”
“Yes.”
“What will you do?”
He lifted his leg from the chair. “Hold on. I don’t want to have to do this twice.”
“Twice? Who else do you expect?”
“Me,” Kopil said from behind her.
Teo jumped to her feet. The King in Red looked the same as ever: forbidding, crimson, skeletal.
“Good afternoon, sir,” Caleb said, and touched his cast again. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t stand.”
Kopil crooked a finger. A nearby chair shuddered to life and walked over to him with groans of tortured steel. He sat. Teo shifted from foot to foot, then sat herself. Caleb focused on his drink.
“I have come for your answer,” said the King in Red.
“Am I missing something?” Teo asked.
“After he woke, I offered Mister Altemoc a promotion to senior risk manager at Red King Consolidated. He has demonstrated his worth in a crisis.”
“That,” Teo said, “is an understatement.”
“I don’t think so,” Caleb replied, and raised one hand against objections. “I stumbled into Mal’s plot. I barely survived, and I stopped her by luck.”
“You were effective. RKC values effectiveness.”
“I know.” Caleb sipped his whiskey. “That’s why I hope you’ll agree to be my first sponsor.”
Kopil blinked. “What?”
Teo leaned against the table, face grave, and listened.
“The God Wars aren’t over,” Caleb said.
“I know several gods who would disagree,” Kopil said, “were they alive to do so.”
“The God Wars never ended on this continent, because nobody signed a peace. The Iskari have a peace, and the Shining Empire, but here we’ve kept up the war in silence. Craftsmen score victory after victory, but gods are patient. Ideas don’t die easily. True believers pass faith, and anger, to new generations.”
Kopil scraped a finger bone across the table surface. Iron rusted and stone blackened at his touch. “And each time they rise up, we will defeat them. We will fight until the sun burns to a cinder, and then we will fight among the stars.”
“We won’t last that long.” Caleb pointed north, past mountains and orange groves, toward Seven Leaf Lake eight hundred miles away. “This city has doubled in size in the last decade, and will double again in the next. The Craft makes Dresediel Lex possible: we provide water, food, and shelter. But use the Craft to farm, and the soil dies. Use the Craft to drill wells, and the land itself sinks. We went hundreds of miles north to steal water from Seven Leaf Lake, and we’ll drain that dry before long. What’s next? War with Regis, Shikaw, or Central Kath? War with Alt Coulumb? Craftsmen against Craftsmen? If you thought the God Wars were bad, just wait. This isn’t just our problem. It’s the world’s problem.”
“Our Craft will improve,” Kopil said.
“It won’t, not the way we hope, not for a long time. The Craft takes as it gives. You can’t heal the land with something like that, any more than you could destroy the Serpents. It only makes the problem worse.”
“You sound like a theist.” In the Deathless King’s voice Caleb heard breaking stone. “Or like your father.”
Caleb’s hands did not shake. He met the King in Red’s gaze, and did not look away. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it. The old ways are gone, but we need peace with the gods. Their powers don’t drain and break the land. They can fulfill their function, and let the world of Craft fulfill its own. A partnership. The pantheons regain power and respectability. The city, the world, gets a new lease on life. People like Mal, like my father, like Alaxic and the True Quechal, lose the authority that fear and oppression gives them.”
Kopil scraped a second trench in the stone.
“I’m not a theist, sir. But think about the Serpents. We sacrificed to them for three thousand years, maybe more, because that was how we always conceived of our relationship. We never tried a different approach. That’s changed now. I changed it. I think I can do more. I can use power, your power, to fix the world, piece by piece.”
