her grip on his body grew soft. He saw himself in her eyes; she saw herself in his.
A shell closed over that silence, sealing it away. She stepped back, cupped her chin in her hand, and said, “I have an idea.”
26
Morning was cold and overcast, the trees mist-haunted. A caul of fog covered river and earth, transforming the black magisterium stump into a dour promontory. Couatl woke and stretched their wings.
The Wardens moved in simple, straight lines, breaking camp, packing tents and bedrolls. They hung weapons near their saddles: wicked hooks on long chain, barbed javelins, automatic crossbows, razor-edged silver discs of many sizes. The weapons whispered sharp words when Caleb drew near:
Even Mal was grim this morning. “Are you ready?” he asked her as they settled into the gondola. She shook herself back from a distant lonely place to answer: “As ever.” She gripped his arm through his jacket. He set his hand on hers; at an unseen signal from Four, the Couatl surged skyward.
The morning pall did not retreat before the rising sun. The shadow dome, their destination, grew larger on the horizon with each wingbeat.
All morning they traveled up a narrow ravine between snow-edged ridges. Two plates of the earth’s crust jutted against each other here, buckling and crushing down slow generations. A river ran along the cleft, fed by the falls from Seven Leaf Lake, and their flight traced the river to its source.
The shadow-dome was miles across and just as high. It curved immense ahead, surface mottled like different oils mixed. Dark currents twitched within as they approached. “Why does it look different colors?” Caleb asked.
“Allie can’t watch everywhere at once,” Mal said. “She sees her world in pieces. When she peers at a section of the dome, it darkens.”
“You still think she’s the one we’re fighting?”
“Yes.”
After a pause, he asked: “Why do they move randomly? It’d be safer for her to have a system.”
“She probably thinks she does. Her mind’s warped, trying to contain all that power.”
“So we’re fighting a mad, almost omnipotent sorceress.”
“Yes.”
“Great.”
“For what it’s worth, madness tends to be a disadvantage in this sort of thing.”
“Glad to hear it.”
She sat in fierce profile, watching.
Caleb pondered his current predicament. A beast sacred and profane bore him north, with a beautiful, terrifying woman, to defend a city wonderful in its horrors. He lived in contradiction, and in fear.
His father would not approve.
The night before, Mal had knelt beside him in her tent and painted figures on his skin with silver ink that burned when wet, but cooled as it dried. Even now he could trace the outline of her sigils on his chest and arms and shoulders and back, the ink cold as Craft, a pattern to complement his scars. His war paint, his mark as her protector.
He laughed.
“What?”
“I’ve gone from manager to knight in two days. I think I deserve a bump in salary.”
“I’ll recommend you if we pull this off.”
“I don’t think you’re allowed to write your boyfriend a recommendation.”
“You’re my boyfriend now?”
“This is our second date.”
“Some date. Fighting for our lives.”
“We’ll be fine,” he said, without conviction.
“Yes.” She sounded no more certain. “Next time, we’ll go someplace nice.”
“Sure,” he said as they passed into darkness.
The world changed, like walking on a tidal beach: one step dry and warm and yielding, the next wet, cold, firm. The pleasant sunlit world faded. Mountains surrounded them, crags old as the frame of the earth. Trees shivered in the wind of their passing, restless shades rising from hungry sleep. This was the world immortal. It would endure man’s scrabbling on its surface, and rejoice when the last city crumbled.
Was this how Craftsmen saw the universe? So pitiless, and dark?
Shadowy cords throttled the air overhead as the Couatl dove for the tree line. Where the cords passed, they left silence solemn as the halls of an ancient tomb.
The Couatl threaded through magisterium trees toward the falls: water rushing in torrents down an indomitable cliff. Up the bare rock they flew, until with a final surge of tired wings they crested the ridge and reached the lake.
Seven Leaf stretched before them, twenty miles at least from western to eastern shore and mountain- ringed.
Caleb had never seen so much fresh water in one place. Dresediel Lex was a desert city, no matter how it pretended to temperate ease. In his childhood he had played among cactus spines, and the forest he knew the best was the Stonewood, eons dead. An embarrassment of wealth lay below him, fresh water from horizon to horizon, salvation to his thirsty city.
The black lightning of Allie’s mind flickered and lanced above the waters. The sun was a pale ghost. Sickly blue-green luminescence shone from everywhere and nowhere at once, casting no shadows—undigested remnants of light, vomited up by their adversary.
Shade-wrapped Seven Leaf Station shimmered atop the water: a silver dome in the lake’s center, surrounded by a metal superstructure in the shape of a six-pointed star. Three rings of Craft circled the entire station, crackling with flame. Domes and towers blurred and flexed, sprouting annexes, buttresses, and arches that crumbled in moments, shining upside-down through time.
The Couatl sped toward the station. Their pinions carved vicious arcs in the gloom. When they crossed the outermost of the three Craft circles the world flashed white, and before the light faded they crossed the second and third in quick succession, a flare of black, a strain of music calling Caleb down a deep tunnel beyond which unfamiliar stars glared into a desolate abyss. Wards on the Couatl’s scales popped and hissed and sparked, and gouted smoke that stank of ozone and burning flesh.
They landed on a flat stone platform at the station’s edge. Four was the first to hit the ground, followed by One, Three, and Seven; Mal followed, as did Caleb, and the remaining Wardens reared the Couatl back into the air.
No sooner were the Couatl airborne than tentacle arms a hundred feet long burst from the lake. Most grabbed for the Couatl and missed, but two carved deep trenches in the stone platform where Caleb, Mal, and the Wardens stood.
Caleb stumbled back, slipped on the slick stone and fell. A tentacle curved overhead, dark against the gray sky. It struck, and Caleb flinched, but when he opened his eyes he was still alive. The tentacle twitched on the landing platform, severed halfway down its length. Four stood above him, ichor dripping from a long black blade she sheathed again at her side.
Three more tentacles rose to replace the fallen limb. Mal pulled Caleb to his feet, and they ran, following the Wardens down a long catwalk toward the central dome.
Couatl wove and rolled through the sky, dancing amid a storm of tentacles. Caleb had seen his share of human brawls, brutish and brief: breaking, snapping, tearing, that was how man fought man. The Couatl and the shadow-arms were made things, perfect mechanisms. They dueled with an artist’s precision.
Tzimet scuttled out of the water onto the catwalk, slick curved claws scratching metal. Four and her
