Two years before, the King in Red had bought the place from Illyana Rakesblight, the Deathless Queen who designed the center to replace the fallen Goddess of Plenty. After the purchase, Illyana retired to an island she raised from a distant ocean, and the King in Red assumed her role. Each knife and abattoir became an extension of his power. Caleb’s job had been to review the plant and ensure RKC would profit enough to offset operating costs. The center was a good investment, he decided after weeks of waking up shivering from nightmares of nothing-wrong, of smiling as he was flayed alive by sharp, spinning wire; the King in Red agreed. Caleb earned a promotion from his nightmares, never entered the Rakesblight Center again, and renounced all meat for seven months after the deal cleared.
He skirted the edge of the center’s parking lot. No true night ever fell in Dresediel Lex, but there were shadows enough to hide. Soon he reached the alley between the center and the warehouse next door, which belonged to a demon-summoning Concern. He found a fire escape set into the center’s wall and began to climb.
Cliff runners flitted across the gap between the buildings above, silent as falcons falling, so swift he might have missed them between blinks.
He climbed faster, and tried to calm his heart. Reaching the top of the ladder, he clamored to the roof and stopped, amazed.
The runners waited, arrayed for war.
Some stood and some crouched on the flat black roof, uniform in their lack of similarity. Short hair and long, thick and thin, skin tattooed or clean or pierced, dressed in basic black or strips of multicolored cloth, armored with chain or girded by soft leather. Caleb felt underdressed in his denim pants and cotton shirt.
The runners did not speak to him or to each other. Noise might attract Wardens and other undesirables. They communicated through gesture and glance.
Fifty curious gazes turned to him. He ignored all but one.
Someone had chalked a white line on the roof from north to south. Beyond that line the city rolled over buildings and below skyspires, to the black ocean and the cold sand.
Mal stood on the line, arms crossed, waiting.
As he approached her, the air grew warm. She’d slicked her hair back against her scalp, and bound it with a leather strap.
“I’m glad you made it,” she said.
Rooftop gravel ground beneath his feet as he approached her.
“Why are you chasing me?”
“I’m trying to protect the city.” He took another step. “And you.”
The cliff runners watched.
Ten feet. Five.
“You’re the one who needs protection,” she said.
Three. Two. One. He smelled sweat, sandalwood, and leather. “I’ll take my chances.” He reached for her.
He blinked.
When his eyes opened, Mal was halfway across the roof already and gaining speed. Caleb had no time to drop into a crouch: he fell forward, caught himself with his leg, and pressing off the ground he fell and caught himself again, tumbling more than sprinting after her.
Mal reached the roof’s edge first, and leapt to an outbuilding a story lower than the warehouse. She landed with a roll as Caleb launched himself into the yawning gulf.
12
The world opened beneath Caleb, six stories’ drop onto solid gray asphalt. Emptiness and wind tore at his mind, but he landed on the neighboring roof, and rolled. His knee throbbed. Adrenaline dulled the pain, and he staggered to his feet and ran again.
Mal had already reached the outbuilding’s edge and leapt, this time across a twelve-foot chasm toward a stockhouse that supplied the Rakesblight Center with victims. Caleb gaped in disbelief. The distance was too great. Not even Mal could make such a jump—nor did she.
She struck the wall feet-first, caught the ledge overhead by her fingertips, and pulled herself onto the roof. How had she learned that? If her first try had not been perfect, she would not have survived for a second.
No time to speculate. Caleb jumped, and closed his eyes.
Dresediel Lex was built of stone, glass, and contracts—promises stronger than steel, tying the city together by pledge and payment. Bonds of contract were invisible, unless you looked at the world as Craftsmen learned to look, with eyes closed and mind open.
The black behind Caleb’s eyes came alive with blue-white webs, strands several feet thick, as if woven by pyramid-sized spiders. The contract lines stretched to the horizon. They bound building to building, tied skyspires to the earth, lit streetlamps, pumped water through subterranean pipes, cooled hallways and made the desert city livable. Ahead, these lines converged on the nova palace of North Station.
Falling, Caleb grabbed a silver cord.
Scars all over his body burned as they woke and drew on the cord’s power. He shot forward, dragged by a line of lightning. Cold fangs sank into his arm. His eyes snapped open from the speed, and the visible world resolved blue around him again. The contract cord had carried him almost a hundred feet; he flew over the stockhouse’s rooftop. With a shout of triumph, he released the cord and fell to the gravel, landing with knees bent. The chemical stench of close-kept pigs enveloped him; wards burned off most of the stink, but not all.
Mal sprinted ahead of him, toward North Station. With eyes open, Caleb could no longer see the station’s burning soul, the blaze of contracts—only its colossal physical form, a sprawling complex of cooling towers and thick pipe, lit by ghostlight and gas flame, and surrounded by a barbed wire fence.
Once Mal crossed that fence, alarms would sound, and Wardens would arrive. She’d be caught, and his work to find her, to learn what she knew and keep her free of the Wardens’ hands, would be meaningless.
He could not let that happen.
Bloodstained aprons, sheets, towels fluttered on clotheslines at the far end of the roof. Mal left a wake in sanguine cloth. He followed her, reached the roof’s edge steps behind, jumped.
Lava coursed in his veins and melted his muscles. Every exhalation broke upon a rushing indrawn breath. He gripped the reins of Dresediel Lex and they scorched him with their chill. Already his hand felt frozen. His flight, like everything, had a price. These cords took his soul as they carried him. Soon they would drain him completely and he would fall.
Mal landed on the fence, climbed without apparent concern for the barbed wire—another cliff runner’s trick, maybe, or else enchanted gloves—and dropped to a service shed on the other side. As she landed into North Station, the sky erupted in red light. A banshee shrieked, and others around the station perimeter cried out in answering alarm. Mal paused atop the shed like a locust on a blade of grass, then sprang onto a thick conduit and ran toward a cyclopean cooling tower at the station’s heart.
He landed on the conduit behind her. The noise of his impact caused her to glance back. Her eyes widened; she fled, and he followed. As they ran through the forest of vents and ducts and pipes, he called to her, panting: “We need to talk.”
“You’re persistent.” Her voice was even, conversational.
“It’s a virtue.”
“How are you flying?”
“I made a gamble.”
“I hope you didn’t risk anything valuable.” She ducked under a chest-height conduit; he vaulted over it and struck his shin on a jutting metal bar. His pants tore.
“Only my soul.” He grabbed for her, but she sprinted ahead, reached the coolant tower, and began to climb.
From the pipe she leapt to the lowest rung of an access ladder, climbed that and jumped again, this time to a duct that ivied around the tower. She moved from handhold to handhold easily as a guitar player changing chords.