Mal grabbed his wrist. “What are you doing?”
“Helping, I thought.”
“Allie almost destroyed this place. Pull the wrong thread and everything might unravel. We could sink. Or the spirits bound in the lake could break their chains.”
He released the wire. Its falling tip scraped the deck.
“Good. Thank you.”
“Is there any way I can help?”
“Well,” she said, softly, considering. “Pick up that wire again, and close your eyes.”
The web hung in darkness. She touched his shoulder. “See the red lines?”
Faint solar afterimages shadowed the blue and silver strands. “I do.”
“Those threads tie the station to the Serpents back in DL. Without them, we’ll have to spend another week rebuilding the local generators. Using the Serpents, we’ll have water flowing in a few days at most. Help me link them to the system.”
“How?”
“Touch one of the red lines, first—only one.”
With his free hand, Caleb clutched the nearest line. Fire shot up his arm, crisping nerves, singeing muscle.
Mal caught him as he stumbled. “You’ll get the hang of it,” she said as he recovered his balance. “You’re not being damaged; your soul’s just reacting to the Craft. All you need to do is merge the red lines with the blue.”
He grabbed another thread, and this time he was ready for the pain. When he touched the red line to the blue he felt a movement in his heart like shuffling cards as the two strands melded into one.
He opened his eyes. The wire he held was the same color, the same weight, but something had changed about the way it gathered and reflected light.
“That’s it,” Mal said. She examined the wire. “Do the same wherever you see a red and a blue line twinned. You’ll save me a day at least. I’ll focus on the hard stuff.”
She turned to a tangle of bent metal, closed her eyes and furrowed her brow.
He left her to her work, and went about his own.
They paused for a brief lunch around three. Sweat soaked Caleb’s shirt. Mal had discarded her jacket and rolled up her sleeves; her arms quivered as she lifted the canteen to her lips. She tore her meat with her teeth. They ate without speaking. When Caleb was only half-finished with his lunch, she stalked back to work.
Later he remembered that afternoon as a series of images, mostly of Mal: she knelt atop a Craft circle cut into the steel platform with the blade of her knife. She stripped Allesandre’s body from the web, cleaned the wires of blood and meat, and replaced the dead woman with a cold iron ring. She leaned against a console, shaking. A handkerchief tied over her hair kept sweat from her eyes.
Sunburnt, exhausted, five hours later, they stepped back to examine their handiwork. The station was clear of human refuse, and Allesandre’s web re-strung. Smashed crystal screens stared from control kiosks. Gears and levers, frayed wires and mystic diagrams protruded from broken panels. But when Mal said, “That’s it,” Caleb did not challenge her.
The setting sun cast the station’s shadow long upon the water, and their shadows with it: the Wardens, Caleb, and Mal.
“It’s working?” Caleb asked—the first words he had spoken since lunch.
“No.” She moved her hand in a swift circle. “Now it’s working.”
At first, nothing seemed to change: a stretching, still span in which he wondered if Mal had fixed the station at all, or if she had snapped when Allesandre died, and spent the afternoon drawing ineffectual lines in metal. He waited in silence. Four’s feet scuffed the deck as she shifted. Caleb slid his hands into his pockets, and the sound of fabric on skin was louder than the waves.
Louder, because there were no waves.
The waters of Seven Leaf Lake lay flat and even as a pane of glass from horizon to horizon, reflecting the universe aflame with sunset. Caleb’s breath stopped. The slightest exhalation might shatter this perfect mirror of the world, and with that mirror the world itself.
Then the screams began.
At first he felt them in his stomach, but they rose in volume and pitch to fill his ears, the insensate fury of a Skittersill mob, rage so strong it broke into despair. The screams came from nowhere and everywhere at once, rising to crescendo as the sun fell.
Mal’s arms remained outstretched. The Wardens did not move. They stood sentinel.
The setting sun spilled its blood on the water. Night crept in from the edges of the world. The first stars appeared, puncture wounds in the sky from which darkness spread. Glyphs burned at Mal’s wrists, around her fingers, beneath her collar.
Caleb felt the screams in his teeth.
When the sky deepened to the rich purple of a king’s robe, he saw light in the lake.
Phosphorescent fish, he thought, or invisible creatures too tiny to be seen. In deep caves, as a child, one of his mother’s native guides had shown him underground eels, skin slick with green radiance.
He was wrong.
Gods writhed in the water.
Starlight sank into Seven Leaf Lake and branched into rippling, multicolored thorns. Figures thrashed, impaled upon the light: humans, deer, wolves, snakes, mice, great-winged birds, Scorpionkind, all wriggling like caught fish. The smallest was three times the size of Seven Leaf Station.
The screams came from their open mouths.
He remembered, back in Dresediel Lex, telling the King in Red that the local spirits of Seven Leaf Lake had been subdued. He said this without emotion, because that was how it was written in the report.
Caleb’s knees struck the metal deck. His hands rose to block his ears, but he forced them down, and forced his eyes open. He had been to Bay Station, had seen gods entombed and tortured. These were nowhere near so grand: remnant spirits, that was all, lesser deities that grew with the tribes that once roamed these mountains. When the tribes died or moved on, their gods remained, living off scraps of wonder and remembrance, barely conscious.
Conscious enough, though, to realize when someone came to take their land, their water. Conscious enough to fight. Conscious enough to be a threat—and Dresediel Lex would tolerate no threats.
Mal clapped her hands twice. Machines clanked and Craft hummed its sphere-music. A curtain of water, reflective as mercury, curved over Caleb and Mal, the Wardens and Seven Leaf Station, blocking their view of the lake and the tortured beings within. Above, the water closed the sky in a shrinking circle, a hundred feet in diameter, fifty, twenty-five. A red star gleamed in the circle’s center.
The circle closed, and cut off the cries like a guillotine blade. The water blocked out moonlight, stars, sky, and lake, and cast the station in a bloodless light. The air smelled of rain and burnt metal.
Caleb realized he was still kneeling. He stood, using a nearby chair as a prop. Beside him, Mal sagged.
“Those are gods,” Caleb said. “They’re in pain.”
“They’re not gods. Not exactly. And when someone comes to salve the world’s pain, those things can take a number like the rest of us. Meanwhile, Skittersill and Sansilva and Stonewood and North Ridge and Central and the Vale will have water to drink.” She turned a wheel on a nearby altar, and a hatch telescoped open in the floor, revealing a flight of stairs down into the station. “I’m going to bed.” She took the first and second steps slow, but on the third her strength failed her and she steadied herself against the wall. “You should get some rest.”
She descended out of sight. A closing door cut off the tap of her footsteps. Caleb remained, alone, on deck with the Wardens. For a while, he watched his own reflection distorted in the water, and listened. He heard nothing. He was used to that.
He followed Mal into darkness.
28
