short-brimmed hat and a leather jacket. “Let’s go. We’ll figure out the rest on the way.”
41
Mal stood at the edge of the world. Smoke and flame and cries of riot rose from Dresediel Lex. New life swelled within the urban shell, ready to break the ground, burst upward, fly.
She tried not to think of Caleb. He didn’t understand, yet. He would, she hoped. He was a good man, and almost wise, even if this city had warped him into a mess of indecision.
She could remedy that, given time.
The wind shifted. She looked up from the streets, from the riots, and smiled.
The skyspires were moving. They retreated from Sansilva and downtown, floating east toward the Drakspine and Fisherman’s Vale. Reflections of rising smoke slid over their crystal walls.
The Deathless Kings that ruled those spires had caught her scent. Blind prophets trapped in silver cages, card-laying soothsayers and elder augurs, saw her face emerge from the dim confusion of probable futures, framed by fire, laughing. They saw death come to Sansilva, and decided they should leave.
That was the problem with the Craft. A Craftswoman’s power derived from deals with great Concerns, with devils and demons from beyond the stars, with the secret powers of the world. These pitiless masters did not permit their servants the easy relief of death. A Craftswoman grew great in power, age, and wisdom, but she was bound to the systems that gave her strength: averse to risk, hesitant in action, a cog in a machine beyond her ken. A slave.
Mal was no one’s slave.
But watching the spires leave, she felt their loss. Until this moment, she could have stopped. Turned herself in. Claimed Alaxic had controlled her somehow, or the Serpents had. She could have returned to her job, her apartment, her life, her moonlit runs. To love.
But the spires knew the future, and they were leaving. She had made her choice, even if she didn’t know it yet.
She took her silver watch out of her pocket. The watch had five hands, and six concentric dials marked with letters, glyphs, numbers. A black hand swung from one letter to the next, and spelled out a message from Heartstone’s head cantors.
Serpents restless. Please advise.
No sense answering. They would understand soon enough.
The moon climbed as a silver sickle toward the sun.
She poured more water, drank, and set the empty glass on the table. Bending, she shouldered the bag that held Qet Sea-Lord’s heart. Power radiated through the leather, rhythmic as rolling waves.
She walked toward the balcony’s edge. The railing exploded, and stone splinters rained onto the city.
Mal stepped out into empty air. Fire quickened within her, and in the black spaces of her soul, she was no longer alone.
Caleb, Temoc, and Teo walked down Sansilva Boulevard, past upturned carriages and carts. Tzimet quivered and recoiled when Temoc turned his gaze upon them. They feared the Eagle Knights of old. Unfortunately, the Tzimet were not the only obstacle between the trio and their destination.
Caleb heard the mob first—bellowing terror, voices cracked with thirst. Then he saw it. Heads and bodies pressed together, rippling and roiling like the sea at storm, overflowing the boulevard to spread out down side streets. The Cantor’s Shell curved above them all, bluer than the parched sky, taller than the tallest pyramids. Its reflection captured world and crowd.
Approaching from the ground, Caleb found the protesters both more and less intimidating than they’d seemed from the sky: less, because the black mass of hair and clothes and noise resolved into individual men and women, and more, because those men and women were near enough to hurt him.
Teo stopped on the sidewalk. “Can we go around?”
“No,” Caleb said. “I flew by here earlier. The crowd surrounds the pyramid.”
Temoc removed a pouch from his belt. Coils and claws pressed against the leather from the inside. “The Gods’ power will cow the masses.”
Caleb thought he heard the pouch growl. He shook his head. “You’ll attract the Wardens. They’re almost as scared as the mob, only they’re armed. Give them something to shoot at, and they’ll shoot.”
“We will fight them, and they will fall.”
“If the Wardens open fire, they’ll hit the crowd, too, and we’ll be trampled in the panic—unless you plan to burn through all these people. We’re here to avoid killing, right?”
Temoc did not reply, but he returned the pouch to his belt.
“Okay,” Teo said. “Optera?”
“The bugs are unclean. Their existence offends Gods and man.”
“Don’t the ends justify the means?”
“A sacrifice demands purity of intent and form. If we use the bugs, we will have neither.”
“You just suggested we fight our way to the pyramid.”
“Battle is holy. Craft-twisted beasts are not.”
“You can’t be serious.”
No response.
“Caleb?”
“Crowd’s thick. Dangerous to force our way through. Unless.” He groped in his jacket pockets until he felt something smooth and fiercely pointed, which he drew out into the light. The shark’s-tooth pendant lay dull in his palm, its surface broken and burned. “I took this off Mal months ago. It helped her sneak into Bay Station, and Seven Leaf. Hid her from anyone without a priest’s scars, including Wardens.”
Temoc took the pendant from Caleb, turned it, lifted it to the sun. “Broken.”
“I know, but the glyphwork is old Quechal style. Can you see what’s wrong?”
“The bonds between the two symbols, here, the seeing and the not, were burned away. Overtaxed.”
“Can you fix it?”
“I would require a week of fasting, preparation, meditation, to repair this link. In four days I could make a new talisman on the same model.”
“We don’t have a week. Or four days.”
“Or four minutes,” Teo said. “I don’t like the looks the crowd’s throwing our way.”
“A glyph-combination like this consists of two pieces: the seeing-not and the not-seeing.” Temoc drew a line from each end of the negation glyph to each corner of the stylized eye. “The first link directs attention from the wearer. The second suggests to others that the area where we walk is occupied. Without the one, we will be seen. Without the other, we will be crushed by those ignorant of our presence. These links are severed now, but I can re-forge them in my mind, using the amulet as a focus.”
“Great.”
“But I cannot do so and extend this protection to all three of us at the same time.”
“So much for that idea.” Teo tipped her hat brim down over her eyes. “Do we fight our way through?”
“Dad,” Caleb said. “You can’t hold the links alone. Could we do it together?”
Temoc looked from the amulet, to Caleb, and nodded.
They advanced, and the crowd parted before them.
Caleb’s left hand, and Temoc’s right, wound through the amulet’s leather lace. Caleb’s right hand clasped Temoc’s left wrist, and Temoc’s left clasped Caleb’s right. Teo walked in the circle of their arms.
Seeing not, Caleb repeated to himself. Look anywhere but here. A closed eye shone in his mind, surrounded by billowing clouds. No, not closed—stitched shut.
“You must empty this space in their minds,” Temoc had said. “We become a moment of distraction, a daydream. I will fill the gap that remains.”
