“The hungrier the Sisters grow, the hotter they burn. We use their soulstuff to power our Craft, and they burn more fiercely. We harness that heat to drive thaumaturgical engines. At this moment, we can only pull a few hundred thousand thaums a day before they start to toss in their sleep. Their dreams are the seeds of earthquakes.”
“The King in Red isn’t buying you because of your waterworks,” Caleb said. “He wants the Serpents.”
“RKC needs our water, but the lakes and rivers we have harnessed will not sustain Dresediel Lex for long. Your master believes he can use the Serpents’ heat to purify the ocean, like your system at Bay Station. Pull saltwater into these caverns, let it evaporate, collect and cool the steam. The prospect of nearly unlimited power also intrigues him, of course.”
“Gods.”
“No.” Alaxic smiled, slightly. “But close. And your master wants them. I do not care for him. When he conquered our city, I strove against him in the air, and fought him on the earth. I learned his dark arts after the War, hoping to cast him down with his own power. But I am tired now, and I refuse to let the Craft carry me on to skeletal immortality. Do you understand?”
Caleb did not understand, but he could not think of anything to say.
“Craftsmen hedge risks, gird themselves against worst-case scenarios. But the worst case here far outstrips any hedge you can secure. If your master mismanages Aquel and Achal, there will be no second chance, no insurance, no recovery. If the Sisters wake, the city will burn. If the King in Red wants my Concern, he must guarantee that RKC will preserve the Sisters’ slumber before all other priorities, even his own life. I want a contract written and signed in blood, or the deal is off.”
“We can’t give you a blanket guarantee.”
“You can. And you will. Your master needs my Concern more than I need to sell.”
Caleb remembered Tollan pacing her office, and the black anger of the King in Red. He looked over the platform’s edge, and envisioned the Serpents towering above Dresediel Lex with diamond fangs bared.
“I don’t have the authority to agree to those terms.”
“Pass them along. Or do not, and let the deal fall through. I leave this in your hands: do you trust your master to put our people’s safety before his own?”
The sleeping serpent twitched. A groan of tormented rock rose from world’s root.
“I do,” Caleb said after the echoes died.
Alaxic nodded, once. Caleb could not tell if he was satisfied. “Allesandre will show you out.”
8
When Caleb delivered the message to Tollan, she cursed for three straight minutes. Contract revisions so late in a deal were expensive, and precarious. For two days, a trio of senior Craftsmen corralled Caleb in his office, asking question after repetitive question about his conversation with Alaxic. They forced him to complete forms in triplicate, in cuneiform, in blood.
He emerged from those days in a wandering fog. He drank to soothe himself to sleep, but talons of black ice haunted his dreams. Visions slunk out of darkness into day. Once, he looked up from his paperwork and thought he saw Mal walking past his office door.
On the wager’s third day, Caleb left the office before eight for the first time since Bright Mirror. Rather than hopping an airbus home over the mountains, he ate a quick dinner at an expensive Sansilva bistro and headed downtown to the glowing neon strips of the Skittersill.
As he traveled east from the pyramids, streets narrowed and buildings hunched low to the earth. Lamplight flickered in the mouths of painted demons in shop windows. A pair of eyes sculpted from glowing transparent tubes glared down from an optician’s billboard. Sour smoke wafted from an open club door. A blind man played Quechal airs badly on a three-string fiddle. Far above, Wardens circled. Their mounts’ wingbeats thudded in Caleb’s breast.
Drunks crowded the sidewalk. An airbus landed on a nearby platform and unleashed a deluge of students: sharp young men with slick hair, eager women in halter tops and short leather skirts, their smiles all printed by machine.
Dresediel Lex had been one of the first cities liberated in the God Wars, but not all the city’s rulers perished with their gods. Priests poured out their blood on battlefields, true, but some noble Quechal families laid down arms. They were neither rewarded nor punished for their surrender. They sunk into the earth—and into the Skittersill, where they thrived, feeding off the city’s sin.
Teo’s family came from that stock. These days they owned manufacturing and shipping Concerns, but her grandfather had been a slumlord, and worse. And when his children went straight, others took their place.
Caleb came here to play cards, when he wanted easy money and didn’t mind extra risk. A careless winner in the Skittersill was as likely to leave his table dead as wealthy.
Tonight, he had a purpose. Mal claimed to be a cliff runner, and her skills bore out her boast. Running was a select hobby. Even in a city the size of Dresediel Lex, most runners would know one another. So he had to find a runner.
Caleb knew little about the cliff-running community, but runners were addicted to risk. That addiction should carry into other arenas.
His usual tables were too rich for players who jumped off rooftops in their spare time. Cliff runners needed every thaum they could scrounge to buy charms of speed, strength, and balance from booze-tinged back alley Craftsmen—and to buy doctors when those charms failed. A cliff runner who gambled would look for cheap, vigorous action.
He tried six bars before he found the right game: four angry children in spiked leathers, and a woman with a long white scar running from the crown of her skull down past her ear. The skin around the scar looked slick from recent regrowth. She played with contempt for her companions; she did not smile, or laugh, or even speak. She wanted to be anywhere but here.
She wasn’t the only one. The goddess above their table listed from player to player, a staggering, tired jade.
Caleb bought in. The players suspected him at first—he handled the cards well—but he drank more than they did, and played with careful abandon. His soulstuff flowed freely, and the others relaxed. Over an hour he dared his companions into riskier play, and the goddess quickened in the table’s center. She touched each player with a chill like cold water on skin; she demanded worship, and they knelt.
Flames quickened in the scarred woman’s eyes.
Caleb lost several small hands, doubled up through a member of the leather brigade, and rose at game’s end slightly richer than when he sat down. When he thanked them all and made his way to the bar, the scarred woman joined him. She bought his drink, and waved off his protests. “I’m Shannon,” she said.
Caleb introduced himself. “You play well for a newcomer.” He raised his whiskey to the light, and watched the room through its amber lens.
“What’s to say I’m new?” She knocked back her shot, and ordered another.
“You’re comfortable with risk in general but you’re not used to poker. You took a ten and a seven to the flop, but you scared off three hands better than yours.”
“A woman has to get her thrills somehow,” she replied with a crooked smile.
“Where did you get yours before you started to play cards?”
“Cliff running.” She leaned back against the bar. “I was a good runner. Skill matters to a point and after that it’s how much you’re willing to bleed. Three months back, I bled too much.” She swung her hand through a plummeting arc, and turned her head to show him the scar.
“Looks bad.”
“It was bad,” she said. “I was out for almost a month, and when I woke my balance was twisted. I train when I can. During the week I come here, and hope the game will keep me from growing scared.”