Two Serpents Rise

“Yes,” Temoc replied.

“Do you have a sacrifice planned?”

“I will spill my own blood.” Temoc’s voice soured with distaste.

“That is not enough.”

“Of course not. I would have kidnapped a Craftsman, made the ritual preparations, and drawn his heart, but since North Station I have not had the luxury of a permanent base from which to plan. The Wardens’ eyes are everywhere. I would not need a scheme of any kind if I had one of the great altars at my disposal, but few survive, and all those are watched.”

“So the old ways pass,” Alaxic said. “As they should. There are new times ahead.”

“The old ways will not pass while I live.”

“Nor while I live,” Alaxic said, and laughed a dry-leaf laugh, and tapped his teapot. “Fortunately, we are neither of us long for this world.”

Temoc regarded his empty cup, and swore.

“I apologize for the deception.” Alaxic drained his mug. “I thought it was better this way. You and I, the last two priests of the old Quechal, gone. Life belongs to those younger than ourselves.”

Temoc’s scars burned. He staggered back, and dropped the cup from fingers already numb. He turned to run, but his limbs would not obey him. The old man raised one finger. Craft crackled in the night air.

Alaxic’s grin widened. Breath rustled in the hollow chamber of his chest. Stars spun overhead. Temoc bared his teeth. Knives of moonlight pressed against his skin. Sweat beaded on Alaxic’s face, and on Temoc’s; their eyes met, and the world turned like a key in a lock between them.

The rattling leaves paused, and Alaxic slumped in his chair, still.

Temoc staggered for the balustrade and leapt into space, landing in a desperate roll that sent rocks and gravel scampering down the hillside scree. Behind him, an alarm sounded, as servants discovered Alaxic dead.

Temoc crawled to a bush, bent double, and was violently ill. He threw up four times, gasping in between for air. His nerves were brambles lodged inside his skin. With shaking fingers he clutched at his belt, found a roll of leather marked by holy symbols, and pulled from within a green jade disk that shimmered faintly in the moonlight.

The disk broke between his teeth like porcelain. He chewed it into sand and forced himself to swallow. The sand coated his throat and sat in his stomach like ice.

Some time later, his shivers subsided, and the brambles withdrew. Unsteady, he rose to a crouch.

Behind him, hunting dogs howled.

He ran.

Book Four RISING

36

Caleb drowned in dreams of fire, death, and lust. He tumbled from the sky, stretched out to ribbons that floated in blissful agony on the air. He was a tower, falling to an unseen foe. Bodies struck stone and broke into disconnected limbs, like bundles of sticks dropped from a height. Skin bubbled from bones, and the bones too burned.

In a cave at the world’s heart, two sleeping serpents writhed with expectant hunger. Their mouths opened. Tongues long as thoroughfares whipped out to taste sulfurous air.

He lay prostrate and paralyzed under a descending knife. As the blade pierced his flesh he recognized the woman who held it.

“Mal,” he gasped, and woke coughing. He sat halfway up and collapsed onto the yielding ocean.

The ocean. Gods, devils, and everything in between. He had slept on the open ocean. He opened his eyes, slowly and with much protest from his tired body.

Midnight-and-milk sky hung overhead. Dawn threatened to the east. He sat up with a groan, and found himself alone and naked on the water. His clothes lay a few feet away, pants and shirt and jacket folded beside sock-stuffed shoes. Mal must have folded them before she left.

He didn’t wonder where she had gone, nor did he blame her for leaving: what would they have said to each other, waking on the Pax? The normal script, the “I had a good time last night”s and the “should I make some coffee”s and the “let’s do this again soon”s, seemed flimsy and insincere. Gods, did he remember a shark? What was real, and what was dream? His memories beggared reality, and ran together like mixed paint.

Bruises lined his ribs, legs, and arms in triple rank, sized and spaced correctly for the points of a shark’s teeth. The shark was real, then. Judging from the scratches on his back, and the half-moon marks of human teeth on his arm and shoulder, so was Mal.

Fumbling with laces, buttons, and buckles, he clothed himself and stood. Gorgeous day for an eclipse: blue skies without a shred of cloud. The first rays of sunrise gleamed off Dresediel Lex. No ships moved on the water. Only a thin column of smoke from the tower on Bay Station marred the morning.

Wait.

The smoke rose from a broken tower. And the island looked no different from any other island, bereft of the Craft that should have sheltered it.

Bay Station sat squarely in front of him, undefended, ordinary. He slipped into a rolling, pitching jog, each step rippling the ocean. He tripped on his own waves, floundered. After a few minutes the pain in his ankle subsided and he could stand again. He limped the last half mile to the island.

Disaster unfolded in the gloaming. The black tower was cleft from pinnacle to foundation. Piles of rubble jutted from sand and grass, fallen masonry amid turned earth and broken trees. Ruined walls laid bare the tower’s inner chambers: office chairs splintered, conference tables overturned, a chalkboard shattered, its diagrams in pieces.

Black-clad guards lay in a semicircle around the beach where Caleb made landfall. Some bled from wounds in chest or arms or legs, some were crushed or tangled horribly around themselves, others burned until their skin was a charred cracked crust. One scarred, burly man had vanished from the waist down. Ropes of his guts coiled on the sand.

Further up the beach, Caleb found what remained of the marksmen: piles of dust nested in the shreds of uniforms. There had been archers and spearmen, bullet-throwers and lightning-callers, in the tower. They must have died when the building fell.

The odor of burnt meat filled his lungs. He should have cried out, torn his hair, thrown up in a nearby bush, but his stomach refused to turn. He staggered toward the tower with a revenant’s uncertain gait.

Caleb found them next, the revenants, the zombie cleaning force marshaled as a last line of defense. In pieces, they still moved. A hand clutched the stub of a wrist. A head tried to roll upright by clenching its jaw.

The tower’s double doors, fifteen feet tall, nearly as broad, and half as thick, were crumpled on the broken lobby floor. Dawn shone sharp through holes in the wall. Caleb picked past rubble and potted ferns and the empty reception desk, to the winding stair that led down to the caverns.

He descended.

Char blackened once-white walls. A spiderweb made from acid had bored into, or out of, the stone. He slid down steps melted to slag. The doors at the foot of the stairs were torn to metal splinters.

A man lay impaled on those splinters. His white coat marked him as a Bay Station Craftsman, a researcher studying the comatose god. The skin of his face had melted away. Eyeballs, somehow intact, stared unblinking from the skull. Metal spikes poked through his chest to dimple his bloodstained jacket.

Caleb would have closed the dead man’s eyes, but there were no eyelids left to close. He stepped over the