priests were gone, but their patterns and tools remained.
A crystal dome forty feet across stood in the center of those spirals. The Warden landed them beside the dome. Couatl claws clicked on obsidian.
The beast lowered its head. Caleb’s bonds disappeared, but he did not move.
“Go on,” the Warden said.
Caleb dismounted and almost fell. When the world ceased to pitch and yaw, he walked toward the dome, and through.
Crystal pricked his skin like a million needles. Upside-down the world was, and back to front, inverted in eyes and mind. Gasping, he breathed infinity. Panic seized him, but when he next inhaled, cool air filled his lungs. He coughed, shivered, swore, and stumbled forward onto a glass floor.
The dome was transparent from within. Morning light streamed from the cloudless sky onto a red Iskari carpet. An unoccupied and richly furnished room lay beneath the crystal: two plush leather couches, six unoccupied chairs, three freestanding bookcases packed with arcane tomes, and a tall desk of the same black glass as the pyramid, but stained a faint crimson.
“Hello?” he asked, and received no answer.
Warily, Caleb approached the desk. It was seven feet long, four feet wide, and cluttered with papers, pens, small clockwork toys, thick volumes of Craft, scrolls that murmured in tongues dead or yet to be invented. A sepia painting the size of a playing card rested in a heavy silver frame at one corner of the desk, beside a fist-sized depression in the glass.
Each corner of the desk bore a similar depression, and from them deep channels ran to gargoyle-mouth spouts in the desk’s sides. Quechal priests killed by removing the heart, but they drained blood before each sacrifice: blood loss induced euphoria, and brought victims closer to the divine.
“It would have been a waste to throw the thing out.”
Caleb turned from the altar.
A skeleton in a crimson bathrobe stood behind him. It held a steaming mug of coffee in one hand, and a folded newspaper in the other. A circlet of red gold adorned its skull, and two ruby sparks glittered from the pits where its eyes would have been.
Caleb snapped to attention, hands at his sides, chin up. “Sir.”
Lord Kopil, the King in Red, Deathless King of Dresediel Lex and Chief Executive of Red King Consolidated, did not acknowledge Caleb’s salute. “Obsidian isn’t porous, you know. It’s not physically possible for sacrificial blood to have colored that altar. Your gods—our gods, I suppose I should say, or the Quechal gods—made this possible: their hunger pulled blood into the glass, stained it like coffee stains teeth.”
With a bony index finger he indicated his own pale yellow cuspids.
“They were no gods of mine,” Caleb said.
“Your father’s gods, then,” Kopil allowed. He released his newspaper, which floated across the room to the cluttered desk. “Two drops, three, entered the stone for each sacrifice. Think about the millennia of full moons and midsummer’s days and eclipses that stone represents, thousands of deaths offered to the Hungry Serpents and Qet Sea-Lord and the rest. They have gone before—and none will come after.” The bones of his feet clicked like a crab’s claws against the floor. “You’ve worked for me for three years, six months, and two days, Caleb, yet we’ve only spoken a handful of times. Why do you suppose that is?”
Because you’re the most powerful Craftsman in Dresediel Lex, Caleb thought, and I’m a peon. “We don’t have much in common,” he said at last.
“The professors who recommended you to my service claimed you were intelligent and ambitious. I would like to think those are traits I share.” The skull possessed no lips to smile, nor did his tone convey any trace of humor.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Tollan says you’re talented. Yet you’ve remained content with a mid-level position in risk management.”
“I’ve done well there.” He paused, expecting his boss to interrupt, but the King in Red only sipped his coffee. “It’s exciting work.”
“It’s not.”
“Excuse me?”
“I wouldn’t expect a soldier to call a guard shift at our front desk ’exciting,’ and I don’t expect you to say the same about your current role in risk management. It’s good work, not exciting.”
“I like control: bets I can win, situations I can manage.”
“If you like control so much,” the King in Red asked, “why are your ribs broken?”
Caleb’s mouth went dry. “I fell.”
“Your soul is frailer than it was when you left this building two days ago.” Red sparks shone in the black holes of Kopil’s eyes. “You have used, or borrowed, much power in the last twelve hours. You may have fallen, but you flew first, I think. Nor is this your only recent injury: last week, you drew on the Company’s medical policy to heal a dislocated shoulder, and a hairline fracture of the collarbone.” Shadows shifted on the skeleton’s face. “For three years you’ve worked for me, confident, competent, unassuming, a perfect, invisible employee. On the night of the gravest assault against our company in three years, you suffer severe and mysterious injuries. How did you come by those injuries, I wonder.”
The King in Red’s voice was conversational and cold. Its chill seeped into the air, and stung Caleb’s skin.
“To what end have you bent your intelligence and ambition, Caleb? Not to glorify yourself in my service, I’m sure. Have you plotted with your father to destroy me? To destroy everything I have built?”
Caleb did not blink, did not show his fear. A pit yawned at his back, and the slightest misstep might send him tumbling without Mal to catch him. “No, sir.”
Kopil laughed, a chattering, unsettled sound of bare branches blown by wind. The sun faded and the sky bruised to gray. Silver glyphs glowed about his eye sockets.
An invisible serpent circled Caleb and lifted him from the floor. Scales pressed his arms to his sides. Cold carrion breath hissed against his neck.
“No?” Kopil said. “You were at North Station last night. Tell me why.”
Words skittered from Caleb’s grasping mind. “I was chasing a lead. A woman who snuck into Bright Mirror. A cliff runner.”
“Your report,” the King in Red noted absently, “made no mention of a woman. Only an intruder, of indeterminate gender and appearance.”
“If the Wardens tried to hunt for her, she would have disappeared. The cliff runners look after their own. She was innocent—a catspaw. She needed help, not an arrest party.”
Ruby eyes burned into his soul. “That was not your decision.” The invisible serpent tightened its grip. He gasped at the pain in his ribs.
“She had a pendant. It’s in my pocket. Take it out.”
The shark’s-tooth pendant twitched, wormed free of his pocket, and floated to eye level, revolving in the half light. Kopil regarded it. The closed-eye glyph glowed dull silver on the tooth’s surface.
“She thought the pendant kept her hidden. But that’s not all it does, I think.”
The King in Red snapped his fingers, and Caleb fell silent. No sound trespassed on the darkness.
At last, Kopil spoke. “A charm to track and observe the wearer. Well-hidden by the obfuscating ward. Clever, in a base fashion. Quechal Applied Theology—a modern Craftsman wouldn’t see it unless he knew how to look.”
“Someone found a cliff runner who likes to go where she doesn’t belong, gave her that pendant, and followed her until she led them to a place where they could hurt us. They tricked her into showing them how to sneak in, and sneak out again. They used her to poison Bright Mirror and blow up North Station.”
“The Wardens will find the person who made this, and the truth of your story.” Kopil slid the tooth into the pocket of his robe. “But your situation has not changed. You show me a talisman and claim a woman you will not identify wore it when she broke into our facilities—a fact you hid from Tollan, and from me. I find your testimony less than compelling.”
“I’m telling the truth.”
