the Twin Serpents twining a woman with a threefold face, a goddess without a name. As he shuffled, the designs began to glow.
He laid the deck in the center of the silk, and Four touched it with the first finger of her right hand; the Warden beside her followed, and after him another, and then Mal. With each touch, the designs brightened. The players gave shreds of themselves, their hearts, minds, lives, loves, patches of the dust and lightning that formed them.
The light detached from the deck, and, rising, assumed a woman’s form, half-turned away: a tempting and inviting figure, a face that would be beautiful if Caleb could see it fully. The goddess sprinted beyond her worshippers’ reach, teasing them with gifts withdrawn at their moment of greatest need.
She hovered over the makeshift table in the wilderness, small and perfect as a porcelain doll. At Andrej’s late in the evening, where kingdoms were won or lost at hazard, she towered, glorious, a green light at the end of a long pier that he might pursue and embrace to drown.
Caleb dealt the first two cards to each player, and waited as the betting began with Four. He glanced at his cards—two of swords and eight of wands. Just as well. A bad hand was a fine way to open the evening. Ease in.
The goddess assumed their features as they bet: Mal’s taunting smile, the square solidity of Four’s shoulders, one Warden’s back, another’s delicate wrist, a third’s laugh. Caleb folded, and watched.
Four won the first hand, with twos full of jacks. Mal had a nine and a seven, and grinned as the power left her. Had she meant to lose the hand, to make the Wardens bold?
He shuffled and dealt again.
Time stopped for them, though the blue sky darkened to black and a jeweler’s dusting of stars emerged. The goddess grew, all things in turn to her worshippers, demanding, cajoling, reprimanding. The fire burned so low Caleb had to squint to see his cards.
Play was a simple matter of calculating odds and finding tells: Four touched her chin when a card turned to her advantage. Eight, jovial and immense, flexed his cards between his fingers when he held a strong hand. Mal was hard to read. She played with reckless abandon, yet seemed to win important hands and lose meaningless ones.
Once he crossed with her, riding king-queen in swords, and she followed him in a rising spiral of raises. They pressed against each other with the game as a thin cotton sheet between them, disguising nothing though it covered all.
He won, with a straight to her two pair. She laughed savagely as the goddess ripped her from herself.
They all had won and lost enough for one night. The game broke, and with a sigh the goddess dissolved, relinquishing the scraps of her divinity to the players.
Caleb closed his eyes as she entered him. Lightning danced through his blood, burned through his nerves. He would live forever, deeds resounding through legend.
He opened his eyes as if for the first time in years, so fresh did the world seem, and so raw.
The cards lay like inert slips of stiff paper on wrinkled silk.
Silence echoed in the mountain heights—not an absence of noise, but a presence in itself, a medium that endured human intrusion as the sea endures the passage of a ship. Before the ship came, there was the sea; as the ship passes, the sea rolls against the hull. When the ship is gone the sea remains. Without the sea, there could be no ships. Without the ships, there could be no sea, Caleb thought, not knowing what that might mean.
He listened to the silence above the Drakspine in the dark, beside the dwindling fire.
The players wandered off. The Wardens relieved the watch or took their rest, and Mal faded into the night while Caleb stowed and purified the cards.
Searching the campsite after his rituals were done, at first he could not find her. The Wardens stood guard or slept; those who acknowledged him did so with curt, quiet nods. He thought about Four, by the fireside, and about duty.
He was about to call Mal’s name, when he looked up.
She sat on the edge of the magisterium stump, her profile lit by campfire and stars. She watched the sky.
She must have heard him climb the tree’s gnarled roots. But when he stood beside her, hands scraped and arms aching with exertion, she did not look away from the stars and mountains. Couatl slept behind them in a coiled heap, wings furled over winding bodies. Long crocodile-toothed heads rested against cold, pliant scales.
“I never took you for a religious man,” she said, lost and faint as if she wandered beyond the horizon of a dream.
“I’m not.” He waited for her to turn, but she did not. “My father’s the last of the Eagle Knights, a priest of the old gods, and I work for the man who kicked his gods to the curb. More religion is the last thing I need in my life.”
“Yet you follow a goddess.”
He laughed, but she did not, so he stopped. “I wouldn’t call that a religion.”
“What would you call it?”
“The Lady of the Cards,” and he heard the capitals and wished he could unsay them, “lives between the players of a game. She’s their souls mingled, and has no power save over the game. The game ends, and she leaves. Not much of a goddess.”
“Yet you worship her.”
“Not really.”
“You observe her rites and rules in the dealing of a hand or the shuffling of cards. You worship her, sure as a ballplayer sixty years ago worshipped the Twins or Ili of the Bright Sails or Qet Sea-Lord or Exchitli. For you, at least, the card game never ends. You’re an occasional priest—pledged to a goddess who only exists occasionally.”
“You’re philosophical tonight.”
“Maybe I am.”
She faced north, toward a palpable darkness on the horizon, where the curtain of stars faded and failed.
“Looks like Craftwork,” he said.
“That’s Seven Leaf Lake. We’ll reach it before noon tomorrow.” She spoke with a measured tone that could have been excitement or fear or anger masquerading as control.
“Good.” Starshine was a potent source of power for Craft, rawest of all raw materials: starshine filtered through human mind became the stuff of souls, and Craftswomen could use it to accomplish wonders and great blasphemies. Whatever force had seized Seven Leaf, it would be less powerful at noon, with the stars hidden, than at any other time of day.
“That blot must be miles across. Is Seven Leaf supposed to pull down so much light?”
“No. The station’s drawing more power than it was designed to use. That narrows the possibilities. Narrows them down to one, actually: someone is inside, working against us.”
“Not someone,” he said after a while.
“Excuse me?”
“Our enemy isn’t faceless, is he? Pushing the station beyond its limits like that takes real Craft.”
“There are many trained Craftsmen in the world. They’re not all good people.”
“Sure.” The dark spot bled into the sky, growing as he watched. “But this one took over your station without raising a single alarm. This is an inside job. I’d wager a tenth of my soul you know who did it, or can guess.”
Her legs dangled over the edge of the stump. Her feet were bare, long and narrow, their bones slender. She looked back over her shoulder at him. “What if I do?”
“Tell me.” He sat down beside her. Tree frogs sang a senseless throbbing song.
“I tell you, and you tell the King in Red.”
“I won’t.”
“You will.”
“Fine,” Caleb said. “Trust me, or don’t. I’m going to bed.”
He was about to climb down and abandon her to the stars and sleeping serpents, but she put out a hand
