“Oh,” she said with a small laugh like bells. “Can you.”
Blue flames flashed from her eyes, and he froze. His hand refused to twitch, his chest to rise or fall. Sweat stung his eyes, but he could not blink.
“This is a taste of what she’ll use against us tomorrow,” she said. “You see why I’m worried. I want to protect you. If I must, I’ll knock you out and leave you here, warded and sleeping, until this is settled.”
His starved lungs spasmed. Time beat slow. Air pressed against his palms: air subtly ribbed like the surface of a plank of wood. Her Craft had bound him in strong cords woven spider-fine.
But he could feel the cords. What he could feel, he could touch, and what he could touch, he could seize.
A chill spread through his scars. He closed his fists, and the paralysis broke. He held two fistfuls of stinging nettle, but the relief of being able to blink and breathe was so strong he forgot the pain. Her Craft glimmered in his grip.
He looked up. Mal had recoiled into a fighting crouch, her eyes wide.
“What” was all she could manage.
“Well,” he said, “did you expect me to let you strangle me for my own good?”
“You,” she said when she tried to speak again.
“I’m coming with you. I might die. I’m okay with that.” As he spoke he realized he was not lying. “I like the thought of standing beside you. Whatever happens.”
“You,” she repeated.
“I have your Craft, yes.” The scars on his fingers bent the blue light of her power like lenses. “I didn’t think you would be surprised. I’ve done it before. Remember the bar? Dancing?”
“You’re glowing.”
He looked down. Cerulean lines twisted about his torso. They shone through his shirt like moonlight. “That’s a hell of a lot of power to use just to knock someone out.”
“Those aren’t Craftsmen’s glyphs.”
“They aren’t glyphs at all. Like I said at Andrej’s. They’re scars.”
“High Quechal.”
“Yes.”
“You’re an Eagle Knight.” He heard awe in her voice, and it sickened him. “Your father—”
“My father’s an Eagle Knight, and a priest, and a terrorist, and a bunch of other things I’m not.” He unbuttoned his shirt. Scars glowed from his skin, curving and intricate: Qet Sea-Lord bleeding the oceans, Exchitli the Sun falling into the Serpents’ fangs to seal the bargain that made the world. The Hero Twins blazed above his heart.
He released her Craft.
Darkness bloomed purple. He closed his eyes, and waited alone in the dark for a slow count of ten. A warm pressure settled against his chest. He recognized her calloused fingers, and the hiss of her breath when she touched his scars.
“Eagle Knights,” he said with eyes still closed, “used the gods’ power in battle. My father’s the last. When he was ten, he knelt at the peak of the pyramid where I work today, and carved the symbols of their order into his skin. Last step of the initiation. Some of his blood’s still in the altar stone there.”
“Gods, Caleb. What did he do to you?”
“When I was ten.” He opened his eyes. Her face was inches from his, but distant as the moon’s. “Well—” He tried again, and again stopped. Words laced with acid formed in his stomach. They hurt rising to his tongue. “When I was ten, he left my mother and me. But he didn’t want me unprotected.” He grimaced. “So he gave me the most powerful gift he knew. He drugged me at our last dinner, and came for me in the night with a black glass knife. Mom found us as he was finishing. Blood everywhere.”
One of her hands clutched his shoulder; the other cupped his ribs. She did not draw him to her, but her strength creaked his bones.
“He thinks he did right by me. I think he’s a fanatic. But the scars give me strength. They let me touch Craft, grab it, bend it. I’ve never liked to use them in my work, because I didn’t want to owe him anything. Until now. Until you. My father’s madness has never brought me anything, but at least it’ll let me stand at your side.”
The river rolled south. Sentinel stars stared down.
“Say something,” he whispered.
She could have walked away, as she had done so many times before, as he might have himself under the same circumstances. He wouldn’t have blamed her. Worse was for her to stand, hands on his shoulders, watching him with that wasteland expression between concern and fascination and terror, as if he were a traffic accident or a shark-gnawed carcass on a beach.
But terror receded, and fascination. Her mouth closed, her shoulders sagged, the corners of her eyes and her grip on his body grew soft. He saw himself in her eyes; she saw herself in his.
A shell closed over that silence, sealing it away. She stepped back, cupped her chin in her hand, and said, “I have an idea.”
26
Morning was cold and overcast, the trees mist-haunted. A caul of fog covered river and earth, transforming the black magisterium stump into a dour promontory. Couatl woke and stretched their wings.
The Wardens moved in simple, straight lines, breaking camp, packing tents and bedrolls. They hung weapons near their saddles: wicked hooks on long chain, barbed javelins, automatic crossbows, razor-edged silver discs of many sizes. The weapons whispered sharp words when Caleb drew near: flay, flense, shatter, twist.
Even Mal was grim this morning. “Are you ready?” he asked her as they settled into the gondola. She shook herself back from a distant lonely place to answer: “As ever.” She gripped his arm through his jacket. He set his hand on hers; at an unseen signal from Four, the Couatl surged skyward.
The morning pall did not retreat before the rising sun. The shadow dome, their destination, grew larger on the horizon with each wingbeat.
All morning they traveled up a narrow ravine between snow-edged ridges. Two plates of the earth’s crust jutted against each other here, buckling and crushing down slow generations. A river ran along the cleft, fed by the falls from Seven Leaf Lake, and their flight traced the river to its source.
The shadow-dome was miles across and just as high. It curved immense ahead, surface mottled like different oils mixed. Dark currents twitched within as they approached. “Why does it look different colors?” Caleb asked.
“Allie can’t watch everywhere at once,” Mal said. “She sees her world in pieces. When she peers at a section of the dome, it darkens.”
“You still think she’s the one we’re fighting?”
“Yes.”
After a pause, he asked: “Why do they move randomly? It’d be safer for her to have a system.”
“She probably thinks she does. Her mind’s warped, trying to contain all that power.”
“So we’re fighting a mad, almost omnipotent sorceress.”
“Yes.”
“Great.”
“For what it’s worth, madness tends to be a disadvantage in this sort of thing.”
“Glad to hear it.”
She sat in fierce profile, watching.
Caleb pondered his current predicament. A beast sacred and profane bore him north, with a beautiful, terrifying woman, to defend a city wonderful in its horrors. He lived in contradiction, and in fear.
His father would not approve.
The night before, Mal had knelt beside him in her tent and painted figures on his skin with silver ink that burned when wet, but cooled as it dried. Even now he could trace the outline of her sigils on his chest and arms and shoulders and back, the ink cold as Craft, a pattern to complement his scars. His war paint, his mark as her protector.
He laughed.
“What?”
“I’ve gone from manager to knight in two days. I think I deserve a bump in salary.”