“Doesn’t it bore you, after what you’ve done?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes, it surprises me.” She shivered as she downed her second shot. “What do you want with a washed-up runner?”
“Pardon?”
“This isn’t my game, but it is yours. I can tell. Even this dive has two tables that play for higher stakes. When I ran, I never went to a course that wouldn’t challenge me. You joined our table for a reason, and I don’t think it had anything to do with those kids.”
“You’re not a humble person.”
“Humility is a vice of which I have never been accused.”
“I’m looking for a runner,” he admitted, “named Mal. Malina, maybe. Quechal woman, short hair, about my height. I hoped you could help me.”
Shannon sucked air through her teeth. “Crazy Mal.”
“That sounds like her.”
“She’s good. You won’t know what to do with her when you find her.”
“I’ll worry about that when I do.”
She laughed, a blunt sound heavy with alcohol. “I can’t help you much. Mal keeps apart from the rest of us, and I’ve been away too long to know where she runs now. The courses change.” She finished the drink. “Walk me home,” she said, and limped through the crowd toward the door.
He escorted her down long straight streets below signs ghostlit in colors no god ever made. They turned off the Corsair Parkway onto a lane of small clapboard houses nestled against the foot of the Drakspine. Craftsmen’s palaces gleamed on the mountain peaks, and clouds and skyspires shone with the city’s light. Shannon’s house was dark. As they reached the stoop he heard within the sound of laughter and muffled conversation.
“Roommates,” she said. She laid a hand on his arm. Her eyes reflected the city like still pools. “Do you want to come inside?”
“Yes.” He didn’t move.
She sank onto the stoop, and looked up at him. “But.”
“I’m on a quest, I think,” he said, not having realized this before. “Or something like one.”
“Those went out of fashion a long time ago.”
“Maybe. Maybe that’s the problem. I’m sorry.”
She bent her legs, crossed her arms over her knees, and let out a long-held breath. “It’s better this way. I’m drunk.”
“You’re strong,” he said. “You’ll be running again soon.”
She smiled.
“Where can I find her, and when?”
“She used to run on Sixthday, in the border between Skittersill and Stonewood. You’ll find a trace of her there, if anywhere. Look for the fire. Balam can help you—he’s a fat man, with a smiling face.” Shannon tapped the back of her head. “Here. He trains runners. He’ll know more than I do.”
She uncurled back against the steps, and waited below him, considering. A carriage passed on a side street. The jangle of tack and harness faded, and so did the laughter inside the house.
“Go, then” she said at last. “If you won’t stay.”
He thanked her, and left her there, and wondered at himself the whole way home.
9
Dresediel Lex had worse neighborhoods than the Skittersill. Some places were too dangerous for the dangerous, and one of these was Stonewood.
Before the Craftsmen came, the petrified forest to the city’s southeast stood barren, uninhabited and uninviting. After Liberation, refugees flooded in, hoping for new lives, jobs, family, free of gods. Some found what they sought, and others—drunk, mad, or simply poor—pitched their tents in Stonewood, and banded together in loose clans for protection against the giant spiders that spun steel webs between dead and ancient trees.
The people of Stonewood were less organized than the Skittersill mob, but jealous of their territory. Every few years, some enterprising hoods ventured south from Skittersill to stake a claim among the poor and lost. Their bodies were never found. The bodies of men and women from Stonewood who crept north to work or beg or whore appeared often indeed.
Ten acres of shattered buildings and blighted land separated the two districts, and preserved them from constant bloodshed. During Liberation, a god had died there, draining life from soil and air in his desperate bid for survival. After sixty years, living beings still walked uneasy on those streets. Beggars who slept on the broken roads did not wake, or woke transformed by nightmare visions. No one visited the borderland, save cliff runners who came to drink and dance in the ruins.
Caleb waited for Sixthday, when, Shannon said, Mal came to run. He suspected she was a high-pressure professional of some sort, Craftswoman maybe. Cliff running was her passion and escape, hence the late-night trips into the mountains, the precautions against being seen.
At dusk he donned denim pants and caught a driverless carriage through the Skittersill. When the cab refused to take him farther south, he paid the horse and walked.
The Skittersill ended in a jagged row of abandoned buildings, and the border began: rubble, ruined stone, rusted steel, the skeletons of shops, temples, towers broken by the dying god.
Two blocks in, he saw firelight rise from the roofless wreckage of a warehouse. Caleb approached the ruin, and ignored the shadows that detached from rock and fallen wall to follow him.
He met no sentries, only men and women lying drunk near fallen statues, smoking weed as they reclined against the foreheads of dead kings. Marks covered every surface, painted warnings and boasts in arcane calligraphy. Runners flitted between broken towers above, or scaled walls, spiders racing spiders.
One wall of the warehouse lay collapsed, felled by time or a flailing divine limb. Cliff runners gathered inside, corded with muscle, covered with scars and tattooed on arm and chest and neck.
A collection of pillars to the rear of the warehouse had once supported a lofted office, long since gone. Runners tested themselves there, jumping between pillars. Some landed and leapt again with ease, and others fell into packed dirt. A thick middle-aged man in a leather jacket shouted encouragement and abuse to them from below. A yellow tattooed face grinned on the back of his shaved head. This had to be Balam. Older by at least a decade than any of the other runners Caleb had seen: a survivor, fortysomething and ancient in a young man’s endeavor, his peers long since retired or dead.
Caleb approached, waited for a lull in Balam’s tirade, and said, “Excuse me.”
The man turned to him with thin-lipped surprise and contempt. Caleb had dressed to blend in, but jeans and leather jacket left him several pints of ink and a handful of piercings away from looking like he belonged. He’d debated dressing to show his scars, and decided against it; the scars would earn him respect, but also the wrong sort of attention. Who knew where the Wardens had informants? So he endured scorn, and pressed on: “Shannon said you could help me find Mal.”
“Maybe I could.” Balam spoke slowly, as if his words were tough meat he had to chew for flavor. “But why would I?”
A semicircle of runners gathered. Their leathers and spikes were uniforms of a sort, Caleb thought, sure as ancient Quechal paints and piercings.
“Mal challenged me to find her. I’ve traced her here.” He sounded more confident than he felt.
Balam’s stomach protruded from his jacket, a swell of muscle beneath a thin layer of flesh. His skin glowed roundly in the firelight. “You can’t catch her.” He looked Caleb over, examining the thin arms under his jacket, the slender legs inside his trousers. “Might kill you even to try.”
“She challenged me.”
The trainer rested his thick fingers on the mound of his belly. “Mal runs like there’s something after her with teeth and something ahead brighter than gold. If you go against her, you will fall, and you will shatter. Do you understand?”