Louder, because there were no waves.
The waters of Seven Leaf Lake lay flat and even as a pane of glass from horizon to horizon, reflecting the universe aflame with sunset. Caleb’s breath stopped. The slightest exhalation might shatter this perfect mirror of the world, and with that mirror the world itself.
Then the screams began.
At first he felt them in his stomach, but they rose in volume and pitch to fill his ears, the insensate fury of a Skittersill mob, rage so strong it broke into despair. The screams came from nowhere and everywhere at once, rising to crescendo as the sun fell.
Mal’s arms remained outstretched. The Wardens did not move. They stood sentinel.
The setting sun spilled its blood on the water. Night crept in from the edges of the world. The first stars appeared, puncture wounds in the sky from which darkness spread. Glyphs burned at Mal’s wrists, around her fingers, beneath her collar.
Caleb felt the screams in his teeth.
When the sky deepened to the rich purple of a king’s robe, he saw light in the lake.
Phosphorescent fish, he thought, or invisible creatures too tiny to be seen. In deep caves, as a child, one of his mother’s native guides had shown him underground eels, skin slick with green radiance.
He was wrong.
Gods writhed in the water.
Starlight sank into Seven Leaf Lake and branched into rippling, multicolored thorns. Figures thrashed, impaled upon the light: humans, deer, wolves, snakes, mice, great-winged birds, Scorpionkind, all wriggling like caught fish. The smallest was three times the size of Seven Leaf Station.
The screams came from their open mouths.
He remembered, back in Dresediel Lex, telling the King in Red that the local spirits of Seven Leaf Lake had been subdued. He said this without emotion, because that was how it was written in the report.
Caleb’s knees struck the metal deck. His hands rose to block his ears, but he forced them down, and forced his eyes open. He had been to Bay Station, had seen gods entombed and tortured. These were nowhere near so grand: remnant spirits, that was all, lesser deities that grew with the tribes that once roamed these mountains. When the tribes died or moved on, their gods remained, living off scraps of wonder and remembrance, barely conscious.
Conscious enough, though, to realize when someone came to take their land, their water. Conscious enough to fight. Conscious enough to be a threat—and Dresediel Lex would tolerate no threats.
Mal clapped her hands twice. Machines clanked and Craft hummed its sphere-music. A curtain of water, reflective as mercury, curved over Caleb and Mal, the Wardens and Seven Leaf Station, blocking their view of the lake and the tortured beings within. Above, the water closed the sky in a shrinking circle, a hundred feet in diameter, fifty, twenty-five. A red star gleamed in the circle’s center.
The circle closed, and cut off the cries like a guillotine blade. The water blocked out moonlight, stars, sky, and lake, and cast the station in a bloodless light. The air smelled of rain and burnt metal.
Caleb realized he was still kneeling. He stood, using a nearby chair as a prop. Beside him, Mal sagged.
“Those are gods,” Caleb said. “They’re in pain.”
“They’re not gods. Not exactly. And when someone comes to salve the world’s pain, those things can take a number like the rest of us. Meanwhile, Skittersill and Sansilva and Stonewood and North Ridge and Central and the Vale will have water to drink.” She turned a wheel on a nearby altar, and a hatch telescoped open in the floor, revealing a flight of stairs down into the station. “I’m going to bed.” She took the first and second steps slow, but on the third her strength failed her and she steadied herself against the wall. “You should get some rest.”
She descended out of sight. A closing door cut off the tap of her footsteps. Caleb remained, alone, on deck with the Wardens. For a while, he watched his own reflection distorted in the water, and listened. He heard nothing. He was used to that.
He followed Mal into darkness.
28
Seven Leaf Station was not designed for comfort. Below the surface, between banks of slowly revolving Craft circles and humming soul catchers, Heartstone architects had added as an afterthought a few bare rooms for the station’s staff. The Wardens split four chambers among themselves. Caleb chose a cold bed in a room with a writing desk, a few pictures of a dead man’s family, and a chessboard set with a problem involving knight moves. He glanced at the board but didn’t mull over the problem. He had enough of his own.
Troubled by the thought of sleeping in a corpse’s sweat, Caleb stripped the bed and remade it with fresh linens. He lay down to rest, but sleep evaded him. He saw blood and water flow from a cut throat, surging in time to the beat of the machines that drained the lake.
He stood at last, slipped on his shoes and jacket, and left the room with the chess problem still unsolved. Turning through a maze of corridors he found the Wardens’ larder; he poured a cold glass of water, assembled a plate of rice and meat and tortillas, and bore them back into the twisting halls.
There was no mystery as to where Mal slept. When Caleb and the Wardens followed her into the under-station, they found all the doors open save one, marked “Manager’s Quarters” in thick block letters.
The door was still closed. He knocked, waited, and heard her muted by steeclass="underline" “Go away.”
“I brought you food. You didn’t come to dinner.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“It’s not for your sake. What if we hit bad weather on the way back and I’m thrown out of the basket? I want you strong enough to catch me.”
“Who says I would catch you?”
He opened the door and stepped inside.
The manager’s suite was larger than the other rooms, but still small. It smelled faintly of incense, and contained an overstuffed bookcase, a desk, a nightstand, and a large bed.
The far wall was transparent. Beyond it writhed the gods impaled on thorn-tree contracts, larger underwater than they had seemed from the surface. Currents and passing fish distorted their features. Their cries did not penetrate the walls.
Mal sat in silhouette, cross-legged on the bed with her back to Caleb. She was naked from the waist up, the curves of her neck and ribs and the swell of her hip lit blue and green and red by light from the window. As he entered, she lifted her shirt from the bed and slid it on, one arm at a time, without hurry. She fastened one button at her breast, but did not look back at him. “I thought I told you to stay out.”
“You didn’t. You told me to go away.”
“And you listened so well.” She set a slender object down on the nightstand. In the dim light he could not tell what it was.
“I’m a good listener.” He set the plate of food on the desk, turned the desk chair to face her, and sat, watching her back.
She seemed so still, a statue in contrast with the fluid pain beyond the window. He focused on her outline.
“Allie was a colleague,” she said. “She left for Seven Leaf soon after the Bright Mirror thing. This would be her big break into management. She wrote me, at first. Her letters stopped coming a month ago, but I was too busy to check.”
“It must have been hard for her,” he said, “so far away, no friends.”
“Nothing but the work, and what work.” Mal waved at the water and the things inside it. “Subdue these spirits, torment them. Even if they aren’t conscious the way we are, they feel.”