“So you think I should stop worrying about the fact that I can’t see how Heartstone fits together?”
“I think you should realize that the world isn’t all cut to your scale. Sam’s gallery openings and premieres and patrons keep these serpents alive, even though their little snaky brains can’t comprehend that stuff. RKC, Heartstone, they’re so big they might as well be gods. We shouldn’t expect to understand them entirely.”
“What about the King in Red? Or Alaxic? Do you think they comprehend what they’re doing?”
“They’re Deathless Kings. Their minds aren’t bound by brains and fleshy bits anymore. Maybe they think differently from the rest of us.”
He remembered a small picture in a silver frame, and the way the King in Red leaned against his desk, shoulders slumped and head bowed. “Maybe.” Teo glanced at him, curious, but whatever she wanted to ask, she changed her mind.
“Regardless,” she said. “May more deals like Heartstone leave us rich in soulstuff and good wine.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Caleb said. On the wall, vipers hissed in a reptilian hell.
17
When Caleb and Teo reached the pyramid at 667 Sansilva, the giant auditorium was already crowded with RKC employees in work robes and formal dress. Snakelings wound about the pillars that supported the balcony, long bodies glistening. Humans, skeletons, and well-preserved zombies, a scattering of Scorpionkind, brass giants bearing the vision-gems of distant Craftsmen, and all the other rabble of RKC crowded in the seats and aisles.
Caleb and Teo shouldered between a golem and a paunchy balding man in a skullcap. The speeches had begun; they could not see the stage, but the vaulted ceiling threw the King in Red’s voice down upon them.
“The last three months,” Kopil said, “have been a time of trial. Together we spilled gallons of ink and blood. Together we moved mountains. Together we suffered grueling meetings in the Abyss.” The crowd murmured assent. Teo had ventured into the Abyss herself during the negotiations, painted in henna and silver wards against the odd intelligences that lived there. “Heartstone Holdings has remade the Craft of dousing and well-drilling in its own image. An analyst at Traeger Matins Laud once suggested that Heartstone might supplant us as provider of water to this city. For a few years, I almost believed they could do it.”
The King in Red pitched that line as a joke, and was rewarded by a few uneasy chuckles. Shedding the confines of the flesh had not improved Kopil’s sense of humor, but people laughed anyway. Vast power made even bad jokes funny.
Caleb squeezed past a young woman with blue skin and a zombie carrying a brain in a bubbling jar.
“We decided that together we would be greater than either of us apart. Red King Consolidated, of which we are all limbs”—the young woman with blue skin touched her forehead, throat, and heart, as did others scattered through the crowd—“began the dance of union with Heartstone Holdings. Today, we achieve our goal. The contract is signed, the last sigil graven into stone. Red King Consolidated and Heartstone will be one.”
A round of applause began, perhaps spontaneously or perhaps a junior executive’s attempt to curry favor. Either way, it spread from the front rows through the auditorium. The King in Red was watching. No one wanted to be the only person not to clap.
“I present Alaxic, Chairman of Heartstone, and his Chief Craftswoman Ms. Kekapania, to seal the pact between our firms.”
Caleb shouldered at last to the front of the standing crowd, stopped, and stared. Teo tripped and fell into his back, but he did not notice.
Three hundred feet away, the King in Red commanded center stage, his robe bloody, his arms outstretched. Crimson sparks burned from his eye sockets. Shadow cloaked Alaxic beside him.
Mal stood between them.
She wore a charcoal suit, not a cliff runner’s leathers, but the cant of her chin and the defiance in her gaze had not changed. Her short hair swept up and back from her head in frozen waves. She looked upon Red King Consolidated, and smiled.
“Mal,” Caleb said, and realized that he had spoken out loud, in the silent auditorium. Kopil paused, and searched the audience for the speaker. Mal’s smile widened. Had she heard? Did she recognize his voice?
“Malina Kekapania,” said the King in Red, “has been my primary liaison with Alaxic throughout this process.”
The old man raised his head and moved papery lips. His voice passed over the audience like crumbling windblown leaves. “My blood is shed upon the contract, and signing it, I am quit of Heartstone Holdings.” He bared long white teeth in a ghastly grimace of what Caleb hoped was pleasure. “Ms. Kekapania will seal the bargain in my stead.” He clutched his hands behind his back, retreated a step, and watched the stage with glittering black eyes.
“What’s wrong?” Teo whispered.
“That’s her.”
“Her who?”
“Mal.”
“Some of you,” Mal said, to Caleb and to the crowd, “may be surprised to see us here.”
No kidding, Caleb thought.
“This deal,” she continued, “has hung for months on technicalities and minor disagreements, but its end was never in doubt. Heartstone prides herself on knowing what she wants. The question we’ve had through these negotiations has always been: what can we do together?” Her eyes scoured the room. “Now we’re here. What’s next is up to us.”
“Yes,” Kopil said. Caleb’s mouth formed the same word.
The light faded, and Caleb’s mind opened to the universe. He fell a hundred stories and did not smash or splatter when he hit bottom, but spread like a drop of water through thin cloth.
A silver-blue gossamer net connected the audience. Caleb breathed, and two thousand pairs of lungs breathed with him. Two thousand hearts beat in two thousand breasts.
He sank into the ocean of Red King Consolidated. Blood rushed in his veins and water rushed in pipes under the desert. Lightning danced down his nerves, crackled along glyph lines across the city. Octopus arms of Craft wove through sea and stone, binding RKC to Deathless Kings and giant Concerns in cities across continents and oceans: to Alt Coulumb, to Shikaw and Regis, to the metropolitan sprawls of the Shining Empire, the mines of Koschei, the gear-bound desert cities of King Clock.
The King in Red shone crimson. A million contracts wove through the iron bars of his spirit, and bound him. Caleb could not see where his soul ended and RKC began.
Mal stood transfigured, a figure of adamant edged with razor blades. Space bent with her breath.
In the dark behind them both, Alaxic lurked half-visible, avuncular ghost to their glory.
The world doubled: Caleb saw the King in Red on stage, doll-sized by distance, a puppet of the cords that bound him, and saw himself also through the King in Red’s eyes, caught in webs of silver. They were all at once themselves and not themselves, human and Deathless King, mortal and immortal, bound by dread pact and mystic pledge.
The King in Red turned to Mal, the blazing anchor of the world.
“I stand embodied representative for Red King Consolidated, as majority owner of my soul and Chief Executive of this Concern.” Caleb’s lips did not open, but his mind echoed the words. The King in Red spoke for him, for all of them. “I accept the terms of our contract and the privileges and responsibilities stipulated there.”
Mal, or rather Heartstone Holdings overshadowing her, stared into Kopil’s burning eyes and said through dagger teeth: “I stand embodied in this my servant; as Heartstone, I accept the terms and conditions of our pact, and the responsibilities and privileges therein. What we forge today never will be sundered.”
“What we forge today never will be sundered,” Kopil repeated and the audience with him.
Mal drew close, walking six inches above the stage as if the air was solid ground. The King in Red embraced her, and she returned his embrace with arms of fire; their worlds tilted toward each other, and they
