16
Serpents covered the gallery wall, asps and vipers, hooded cobras, slender finger-wide coral snakes and bulge-bellied anacondas. Writhing, they ate each other.
Caleb watched close up, his nose inches from rippling scales. A diamondback rattler devoured a garden snake; a fat flat-headed serpent from the jungles of southern Kath ingested the rattler’s tail in turn. Hisses filled his ears.
“Grotesque,” he said, and shivered. “I don’t know what you see in Sam’s work.”
“Grotesquerie,” Teo said from behind him.
“That’s what I said.”
“Not what I meant. That’s the name of the piece. Urban Grotesquerie.”
“I see where it comes from. This is sick.” The rattlesnake wriggled forward, as if by devouring prey it might escape the jaws behind.
“It’s art. If you’re looking at it, it’s working.”
Caleb turned away.
Teo’s gallery was floored in varnished wood and lit by tall windows facing south. Sam’s work hung on the white walls: twisted, inhuman creations, sculptures of men devouring the entrails of other men in a cannibalistic network, bas reliefs of cities that had never been and would never be. On the exhibition’s opening night three weeks before, as Teo chatted up donors, buyers, and benefactors, Caleb had spent twenty minutes staring at the only thing on the walls that qualified, as far as he was concerned, as a painting: an image of two triangles interlaced, in oils on unfinished canvas.
Those triangles haunted his sleep for ten days afterward, towering yet so small he could hold them in his palm. In dreams he tumbled into that painting, his soul stretched long and thin—a thread in rough canvas. Around him he heard other threads, men, women, children, falling forever and screaming as they fell.
Teo sat beside a small table upon which rested an open bottle of champagne and Caleb’s empty glass. She drank from her own glass, and smiled as she swallowed. Caleb poured more wine, and offered Teo the last drops, which she refused—“You need good fortune more than I do!” He sat down facing her.
“To fortune,” he murmured. They touched glasses and drank together. He watched her as she watched the snakes. A trick of Craft projected their hisses out into the room, so that no matter how Caleb shifted or where he stood, serpents seemed to hover at his back, forked tongues flicking the saddle ridge of his ear. “That’s uncomfortable,” he said, swatting at empty air.
“It’s art,” she repeated. “Supposed to be uncomfortable. Makes you think.”
“Makes me think about getting eaten by snakes. I saw a snake eat a deer once, out in the Badlands. The deer had been paralyzed, maybe stung by the Scorpionkind or something. This big viper wriggled out of a hole, wrapped the deer up, killed it, and ate it. Some of my nightmares look like that.”
“What do the other ones look like?”
He pointed at the wall of serpents.
“This doesn’t speak to you? Thousands of snakes, pressed so close together they have to kill one another to eat?”
“You think she’s talking about the city.”
“Of course she’s talking about the city.”
“It’s different.”
“How, exactly?”
“Well. The snakes eat one another,” he said, but when she smiled at that he tried again. “People in Dresediel Lex aren’t so close together,” but that was a difference of degree, and he wanted a difference of kind. “Gods, I don’t know. That, though”—he waved vaguely at the wall of snakes—“isn’t everything. What about compassion? Love?”
“We get those all the time from cheap romances. Only a true artist can show us this.”
“You don’t believe the world is that bleak any more than I do.”
“I don’t have to agree with Sam to like her work.”
“Especially if you’re sleeping with her.”
“Exactly.” Teo sipped champagne. “Speaking of which, how is love working out for you so far?”
He looked away from her. “Love has nothing to do with Mal.”
“The hell it doesn’t. Love, lust, whatever you want to call it. Why else would you almost die trying to protect her?”
He grimaced, and remembered the agony of healing. “To the King in Red.”
“To Lord Kopil,” Teo said with a jaunty toast to Caleb and the snakes. “Long may he burden my soul with unearned thaums.”
“The Heartstone bonus came through this week, I see.”
She tapped the curved Iskari lettering on the champagne bottle. “You think I’d pay for a Hospitalier ’83 on my salary?” Despite her family’s wealth, Teo tried to live within her personal means. The soulstuff her parents pressed on her, she threw into the collection, curation, purchase and sale of art. “The bonus cleared last week. You haven’t seen your share?”
“Not yet. Not that I’m hurting for thaums after winning our bet.”
“You’re lucky I’m the trusting type. I never saw evidence of your victory.”
“To your unwarranted faith in my honesty.” He drank, and closed his eyes, and the serpents’ hisses became the sound of steam in the cave beneath the world, the groan of shifting rock as Aquel and Achal tossed in their sleep. “I’m worried about this deal.”
“We’ve done seven months’ due diligence. The King in Red wanted every avenue checked. You personally reread whole sections of that contract.”
“I did. Sections. The thing is seventy thousand pages long. They folded space to fit it in one conference room for the signing. It’s not even all on paper: some paragraphs are carved on stone plinths, some on the pyramid itself. Nothing that complex is safe.”
“Every morning you walk into your bathroom, put your hand to the tap, and fresh water flows out, courtesy of Red King Consolidated. That’s a complicated system, and you trust it daily.”
“Pipes, filters, pumps I understand. It’s easy to tell when they’re broken. The Heartstone deal isn’t about water. It’s about Craft: power pledged on the promise of more power, demonic pacts, bargains with beings beyond our reality. Some of its clauses depend on the going price of souls in the Abyss.” An exaggeration; he’d been to some of the nearer hells on business trips, but their denizens did not seem so interested in the soul trade as stories claimed. “The structures of Craft involved are so complex even their creators barely understand them. We’ve fixed all the problems we can find—it’s the problems we can’t that worry me.”
“That’s Sam’s point.” Teo waved at the snakes on the wall. “This city is stranger and more alien than we can conceive—snakes wriggling over one another, feeding on one another.” She interwove her fingers and twitched them.
“Don’t remind me.”
“Think about it this way,” she said. “Look at the snakes again.”
“No.”
“Do it.”
They slithered, devouring but never satisfied: a twist of Craft allowed the serpents being eaten to writhe out of their predators’ gullets unscathed, only to be consumed again.
“I’m looking.”
“Imagine you were a snake.”
“I’d rather not. Especially in this context.”
“Imagine you were a snake,” she repeated, and he did. He wound over and around himself, forever hungry, consuming as he consumed, his world a matrix of pain and fear. “All you see are snakes, and the world makes no sense at all. But from a distance we see the pattern of which the individual snake is only a piece.”
