“I’ll recommend you if we pull this off.”
“I don’t think you’re allowed to write your boyfriend a recommendation.”
“You’re my boyfriend now?”
“This is our second date.”
“Some date. Fighting for our lives.”
“We’ll be fine,” he said, without conviction.
“Yes.” She sounded no more certain. “Next time, we’ll go someplace nice.”
“Sure,” he said as they passed into darkness.
The world changed, like walking on a tidal beach: one step dry and warm and yielding, the next wet, cold, firm. The pleasant sunlit world faded. Mountains surrounded them, crags old as the frame of the earth. Trees shivered in the wind of their passing, restless shades rising from hungry sleep. This was the world immortal. It would endure man’s scrabbling on its surface, and rejoice when the last city crumbled.
Was this how Craftsmen saw the universe? So pitiless, and dark?
Shadowy cords throttled the air overhead as the Couatl dove for the tree line. Where the cords passed, they left silence solemn as the halls of an ancient tomb.
The Couatl threaded through magisterium trees toward the falls: water rushing in torrents down an indomitable cliff. Up the bare rock they flew, until with a final surge of tired wings they crested the ridge and reached the lake.
Seven Leaf stretched before them, twenty miles at least from western to eastern shore and mountain-ringed.
Caleb had never seen so much fresh water in one place. Dresediel Lex was a desert city, no matter how it pretended to temperate ease. In his childhood he had played among cactus spines, and the forest he knew the best was the Stonewood, eons dead. An embarrassment of wealth lay below him, fresh water from horizon to horizon, salvation to his thirsty city.
The black lightning of Allie’s mind flickered and lanced above the waters. The sun was a pale ghost. Sickly blue-green luminescence shone from everywhere and nowhere at once, casting no shadows—undigested remnants of light, vomited up by their adversary.
Shade-wrapped Seven Leaf Station shimmered atop the water: a silver dome in the lake’s center, surrounded by a metal superstructure in the shape of a six-pointed star. Three rings of Craft circled the entire station, crackling with flame. Domes and towers blurred and flexed, sprouting annexes, buttresses, and arches that crumbled in moments, shining upside-down through time.
The Couatl sped toward the station. Their pinions carved vicious arcs in the gloom. When they crossed the outermost of the three Craft circles the world flashed white, and before the light faded they crossed the second and third in quick succession, a flare of black, a strain of music calling Caleb down a deep tunnel beyond which unfamiliar stars glared into a desolate abyss. Wards on the Couatl’s scales popped and hissed and sparked, and gouted smoke that stank of ozone and burning flesh.
They landed on a flat stone platform at the station’s edge. Four was the first to hit the ground, followed by One, Three, and Seven; Mal followed, as did Caleb, and the remaining Wardens reared the Couatl back into the air.
No sooner were the Couatl airborne than tentacle arms a hundred feet long burst from the lake. Most grabbed for the Couatl and missed, but two carved deep trenches in the stone platform where Caleb, Mal, and the Wardens stood.
Caleb stumbled back, slipped on the slick stone and fell. A tentacle curved overhead, dark against the gray sky. It struck, and Caleb flinched, but when he opened his eyes he was still alive. The tentacle twitched on the landing platform, severed halfway down its length. Four stood above him, ichor dripping from a long black blade she sheathed again at her side.
Three more tentacles rose to replace the fallen limb. Mal pulled Caleb to his feet, and they ran, following the Wardens down a long catwalk toward the central dome.
Couatl wove and rolled through the sky, dancing amid a storm of tentacles. Caleb had seen his share of human brawls, brutish and brief: breaking, snapping, tearing, that was how man fought man. The Couatl and the shadow-arms were made things, perfect mechanisms. They dueled with an artist’s precision.
Tzimet scuttled out of the water onto the catwalk, slick curved claws scratching metal. Four and her comrades struck them like a hammer, so fast their forms were lost in movement. Four’s hands burned with green flame as she punched through a Tzimet’s abdomen; Seven tossed a silver ball down the catwalk, and the ball shed thin rays of light that shredded shadow and black water.
This is what we’re good for, Four had said across the campfire. Last-ditch action, and violence.
They carved a hole in the horde, and running, Caleb and Mal followed.
The world warped: a phantom of Sansilva Boulevard lay under Caleb’s feet, broad and pyramid-flanked, and he would have run down that road into the lake had he not fixed his eyes on Mal and followed her instead. He fell a thousand feet from a sky-castle onto a blasted desert, but he followed Mal and the desert melted.
The dreams that nipped at Caleb’s mind turned ugly as he neared the dome. Demons gnawed his entrails, and peeled Mal’s skin in long strips that unraveled as she ran.
Footsteps rang on steel.
Light scattered Caleb’s illusions. Overhead, Wardens loosed lances of flame, spinning discuses of silver, and brilliant hooks against Allie’s tentacles. The dome’s surface twisted the firefight into a funhouse hell.
Four reached the dome and rushed through without pause, leaving only a ripple in reflected flames—the walls were not made of glass or chrome, but water.
Caleb grabbed Mal’s hand, and they stepped inside together.
Water enclosed him, and let him pass. When he opened his eyes, he was dry, and alone.
Darkness illuminated a wrecked room: broken tables, upturned chairs, scattered consoles and implements of Craft. A web of twisted wire and bent pipe filled the chamber, and a woman sat in the center of that web, cradled like an idol in an old priest’s hand. Caleb recognized her.
At their last meeting Allesandre had been clipped and precise, level as a frozen river. Her ice had thawed into a flood. Glyphs burned from her skin, marred her face with talon patterns, ringed her brow like a crown of knives. Tatters of a dark wool suit hung from her body. Eternities wrapped around themselves in her eyes.
Misshapen lumps of human flesh hung from her metal web, and corpses sprawled beneath her on the floor.
His gut turned, and he almost turned with it, almost fled back through the water curtain. Fear, more than bravery, prevented him. She would not spare him just because he tried to run. His only chance at survival lay ahead.
Her mocking smile cracked open. Blue light sparked between dagger teeth. “It’s been a long time.”
“Allesandre,” Caleb said. “Stop this.”
“Why?” the Craftswoman said pleasantly. “You put me here, asked me for this. You and your master.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t ask you for anything. I’ve only seen you once.” She did not answer. “Where are the others?”
“Your companions are dead. I let you live.”
Caleb heard flesh crisp to ash. Mal screamed. Craft-born hallucinations. Witchcraft. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
“I’m here to fix the water. Don’t try to stop me.”
Fire burned in her eyes. “Come, if you dare. Wrap your hands around my neck and kill me.”
A trick. Of course. Yet he felt her throat in his right hand, flesh and tendon and bone. Squeeze. Kill. No. He hadn’t moved. His hand was empty. He was alone in the dark.
“Come,” she said. “I’m waiting.” A flash of lightning cast her and the web of wire and the corpses in chiaroscuro. Four silhouettes hovered in the air about her, shadow cutouts contorted in pain.
Four shadows. Why four? Why did those silhouettes seem familiar?