“Horrible,” Alaxic said. “I don’t know what I’d do if I were in your shoes. Makes me glad I’m retired.”
“Are you really?”
“Glad?”
“Retired.”
He exhaled fog into the cold. “You’ve watched me for the last few months, you and your spies. What do I do?”
“You drink tea, and you read.”
“I drink tea, and I read. I don’t plot, I don’t scheme. I don’t want the old world back any more than you do.”
A winged serpent flew overhead, and was transfixed by arrows of light. It shrieked, and fell in bloody pieces to the street around them.
“Yet you still dream of old battles.”
“And you haven’t forgiven me, in five decades, for surviving this one. You resented my success in the Hidden Schools. You opposed the Wardens’ decision to set me free after the Skittersill Rising. You plotted against me as I built Heartstone, and took it from me when you had the chance.”
“You were a rebel. An anarchist.”
“I am a populist.” He looked up to the sky, where Craftsmen clad in engines of war tore gods asunder. Heavenly blood fell, mixed with snow. “At least I only dream about old battles,” he said. “You’re still fighting them.”
A wave of night rolled over the world. When Alaxic looked again, the King in Red was gone.
HEARTSTONE
29
Caleb left Seven Leaf Lake soon after dawn, with an escort of two Wardens. He told Four that the King in Red wanted a report on their success, that Mal would stay until reinforcements arrived. This was not, exactly, a lie. Mal could have stopped him, but she didn’t.
They took flight as the first rays of sun glanced off the long flat plane of the lake. Sleep had haunted him all night, ambushing from the darkest corners of his mood. Sharp-fingered devils charged his fitful dreams, demons with his own face devouring the flesh of screaming gods.
He shaded his eyes against the sunrise, leaned back into the gondola, and drowsed.
The Couatl carried him south. Lake gave way to waterfall and smooth-flowing river. Every few miles, stone circles protruded from the forest, their centers thick with shade. Silver glyphs glowed against gray granite. The standing stones bled Seven Leaf Lake south, to slake his city’s thirst. Soon the falls would cease to thunder, and the river shrink to a stream.
One hundred twenty eight million acre-feet of water. After a decade or so, the city’s growth would outpace the lake’s ability to refill itself. The forest would feel the effects long before then.
After three hours they stopped for lunch on a cliff overlooking a deep valley, and ate bread and cheese and drank stale canteen water and agave liquor.
The Wardens napped on the cliff after lunch. Caleb, restless, walked a hundred feet into the woods, found a sturdy birch tree, and struck it with his palms, with his feet and the sides of his hands, scaring away broad- winged birds that roosted in the canopy. He ripped his knuckles’ skin, and left a smear of blood on the white bark. He pushed against the trunk until his shoulders, arms, legs, belly all convulsed and he let out a long, low cry.
A roar answered from the valley, larger, deeper, a sound made by no human throat.
Shaken, he returned to the Wardens, who stood with weapons bared, roused by his cry or the valley’s answer. They packed quickly, and flew south.
By day’s end the Drakspine peaks mellowed into farms and bare hills. Here, amid long dry rows of wheat, the Wardens kept observation posts, small adobe buildings beside barn-sized hutches where Couatl warmed their eggs. Caleb’s escorts spent most of the evening writing reports; afterward, he challenged them and the other attendant Wardens to a quick game. As he played, he did not look the goddess in the eye.
Talking over cards, he listened for news, but heard little more than farmers’ gossip, rumors of Scorpionkind raids on outlying settlements. When he asked about the city, the Wardens glanced at one another and claimed they had heard nothing certain.
They reached Dresediel Lex the next morning. Serpents of smoke tangled in the air above Sansilva. Caleb’s heart leapt, but when they crested the Drakspine he saw the damage was limited to the 700 block. Some shops burned, that was all, a few lives destroyed. Wardens circled above emptied streets.
They landed in the pyramid’s parking lot, strewn with broken bottles, rocks, clapboard signs, all the detritus of a protest turned riot. Two Wardens met them and rushed Caleb across the lot into the pyramid. Glancing over his shoulder he saw Muerte Coffee, empty, its front window webbed with cracks.
His escorts bore him wordlessly across a lobby manned with guards and security demons, into a waiting lift. By the sixtieth floor, he stopped asking questions.
The foyer of the Red King’s office was empty save for dark leather furniture, a grim portrait on one wall, and Anne, Kopil’s secretary, at her desk. She acknowledged Caleb with a curt nod, and turned a stone desktop idol counterclockwise; the double doors behind her, marked with deaths-heads, opened without sound. The Wardens thrust him into the shadow beyond, and the doors slammed shut.
“Caleb.”
The voice was weak, a bare suggestion of wind. For a confused moment he thought it belonged to his father, captive, tortured, and he turned in slow terror of what he might see.
He stood in Kopil’s office, beneath the crystal dome on the pyramid’s peak—the office without entrance or exit. There was no sign of the doors through which he had come.
A hospital bed rested near the altar-desk. The carpet was rolled back, and someone had drawn a mandala around the bed with white and purple and yellow sand. Red sheets clad the mattress, and a red robe wrapped the skeleton who lay upon it.
The shadows that clung to Kopil looked light and insubstantial. His gestures were weak, the sparks of his eyes dull and rust-colored. The Kopil who confronted Caleb in this office months before had been a river in flood, and here he lay at ebb.
Caleb stared. Everything he could say seemed wrong.
The King in Red beckoned Caleb with a twitch of his fingers. He approached.
Bare jaws worked silently until the Deathless King could speak. “What happened?”
“You look different,” he said, and wished he had said something else.
“I am different,” Kopil replied with a low, grating laugh like a snake’s rattle. “I lie reduced, and the water flows. It has been half a century since I last felt weakness. Do they appreciate what I do for them, I wonder.”
“There are people who have sacrificed more,” he said, though he didn’t know why, “and lived less comfortably, with death their only promise of release.”
Kopil did not seem to understand what he had said, or if he understood, did not care. “Is Seven Leaf Lake ours again?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
Caleb did, though he left out many details. He did not mention his scars, or Mal’s acquaintance with Allesandre, or her bloodletting and their fight beneath the lake. Dates, times, names, these he related with precision. Four and her team deserved commendations for their service. Seven Leaf was safe again, and the water flowed.
He spoke of the agony of the gods in the lake, and shuddered when Kopil said, “Good.”
