“It’s worth the price,” he said, though he was not certain.
“For how long?” Her voice was hollow. “Ten years from now, or twenty, this lake will be a dry and cracked bowl in the mountains and we will turn to the next, and the next after that. One day it won’t be mindless gods who suffer for our thirst, but other cities, other people. How long until we decide Regis doesn’t need its wealth of water? The cities of the frozen north, surely they don’t thirst like we do. Shikaw, next. We could drink this continent dry, from the Pax to the World Sea. Water is life, and life is worth any price, even life itself.”
He didn’t say anything.
She sighed. In the depths of Seven Leaf Lake, the trapped gods screamed. “This is the world we live in.”
“Why not try to fix things?” Even as he said the words they felt small. A broken window or a broken promise you could fix. The scene in the lake was beyond fixing.
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
She laughed, a sour, sad sound that hung on the station’s dead air like a corpse on a rack. “Everybody needs to make a sacrifice sooner or later, to survive. I guess this was my first—or the first one to hit me so close. I prepared for this moment years ago. I told myself I had.”
He didn’t ask what “this moment” was. In the flickering light, he could barely recognize Mal. Maybe she couldn’t recognize herself. He moved to the bed, which gave slightly under his weight. The mattress was a firm lie: the world beneath was only water. He slid next to her and touched her shoulders. Her muscles were knotted steel cables. He pressed into those knots with his thumbs and the heels of his hands. Mal stifled a cry as he began. He tried again, with a lighter touch. “Thank you,” she said this time.
The cropped fringe of her hair feathered against his fingers. Small, downy hairs trailed down the nape of her neck, an arrow pointing to her back and shoulders. He had expected her skin to be cool to the touch. Everything down here was. She was warm though, feverish.
So close, he studied her: smooth skin a shade lighter than his own, shoulders and neck dark and freckled by sun. He could not feel her glyph-marks—the Craft left no scars, unless you knew how to look for them.
He studied her to capture her, to capture the moment, but also to distract himself from the tortures outside the window. Why would she choose to face that? Maybe she felt it was a part of her sacrifice, or Allesandre’s. He pressed against her skin, and thoughts of sacrifice faded. He worked her shoulders until the steel melted and became almost human.
Sitting on Mal’s bed, massaging her back, Caleb felt time stretch and transform. This moment was a door ajar.
He leaned into her, silent, and she leaned into him. His arms drifted around her. Mal’s breath fluttered like wings. The tips of his fingers explored her jaw and throat, the slim even lines of muscle and the gently pulsing vein. She clutched his arms. He felt the line of her collarbone, the skin above the swell of her breasts.
It was wet. In surprise he lifted his hand from her and held it up to the light of tortured gods. His fingertips glistened dark and red.
Later he could not recall whether he recoiled from her, or she from him. One of them moved, or both, and seconds later she sat a foot away from him on the bed, in profile like a temple statue. Beneath the open collar of her shirt ran two long cuts, one on the left side and one on the right. Other cuts, long healed, lay below them, parallel to her collarbone: a necklace of scars. Her eyes glittered.
“Mal. What the hells, Mal.” The object she had placed on the nightstand was a knife—not the Craftwork blade that killed Allesandre, but a length of black glass with a handle of beaten gold and silver wire.
The half of her that faced him was in shadow. The half that faced the gods reflected the bitter green glow of their pain.
Behind her, on the windowsill, sat a stone carving, three inches tall and no broader than a woman’s arm: a hollow cylinder formed by the bodies of two serpents intertwined. Twin trails of thin gray smoke wisped from a coil of incense at the idol’s center. Rising, the wisps wound around each other and faded into air.
“It’s called—” she began.
“I know what it’s called,” Caleb said before she could finish. “Autosacrifice. Bloodletting. Cutting.”
“It’s not cutting.”
“What’s the difference?”
She wiped the blood with a handkerchief, folded the handkerchief and set it beside the knife. “I told you to leave.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“Hells, Caleb. You saw what I did up there. You see what’s happening outside. I need to atone.”
“Atone?” The bed shook with the force of his standing. He reached around her and grabbed the idol off the windowsill, leaving the incense and its excrement of ash behind. “Aquel and Achal.” He threw the statue onto the mattress beside her. It bounced, and rolled to rest with Aquel facing down and Achal snarling up. “These are bloodthirsty creatures. We have them locked up, and I’m glad for it. We killed people for them. Cutting yourself before that statue—do you know what it stands for?”
“Of course I do!” Metal walls reflected the force of her shout. Caleb stepped back. She stood, her half-open shirt flaring like the robes of a Deathless King. “The priests killed. Sure. But are we any different? Am I, after what I did today? You’ve seen Skittersill, and Stonewood, what our city does to the people who lose. Your father—”
“Don’t bring him into this. My father’s a criminal. A madman.”
“Your father led the Skittersill Rising! He tried for years to make peace between theists and Craftsmen, and when that failed he tried to protest. And they rained fire on him. They burned his followers by the hundreds.”
“He wanted to kill people. That’s the freedom they were fighting for, him and his followers. Freedom to kill people.”
“Freedom from persecution. Freedom to practice their religion. Freedom to sacrifice volunteers—people who wanted to die.”
“That’s murder! It’s murder when you carve someone’s heart out of their chest, no matter if you’re doing it because a god tells you to.”
Muscles on the side of her jaw twitched. “Fine. But what I just did was murder, too. When we sin, we shed blood to atone. That’s what my parents taught me.”
“Then they were crazy.”
He said the words before he knew them: they sprang to his mind, slithered down the spine to his lungs, infested the air, and burst out his mouth. Mal’s eyes widened, and her lips pressed thin together. Caleb opened his mouth to say something, anything, to apologize or explain.
The gods’ light faded, and it was too late.
Night filled the room. A great hand seized him, and threw him like a stone. He struck the wall, or perhaps the floor or ceiling. Directions no longer met in his mind. Weight pressed against his chest, the weight of thousands of miles of water. His ribs creaked and he fought to breathe.
“You don’t get to say that.”
She was talking. Good. Talking meant she wouldn’t kill him straight off.
Blood and silver, he thought, when did her killing me become a possibility?
He remembered her standing over him goddess-like on the border of the Skittersill. Deities kill those that follow them. He opened his mouth, but only a dry croak escaped his lips.
“My parents were good people.” Her voice was an anchor in his whirling world. “They were faithful, and they were angry, but they were good. They stood against the Red King in the Skittersill Rising, and fell. And burned. My mother took a week to die.”
He struggled against her Craft, but his arms did not move, his scars would not wake. Blood pounded in his ears. His lungs ached for air.