“I’ll destroy you.”
“Possible.”
“I destroy everything I touch.”
“I don’t care.”
“I wish I could believe that.”
“Do.”
Leaning in to her felt like leaning toward a cactus—every second swelling with the promise of pain. Her lips were round, and close, and still the pain did not come.
He kissed her, and did not die. He was so shocked by this that he pulled back, but she followed him, and kissed him in turn.
A minute passed, an eternity. A scythe-claw rapped on the door, and Caleb heard a muffled voice like the death of something beautiful. Mal replied in the same language, and stepped back. He shivered from her absence.
“I need you to leave,” she said. “I have documents to review, and work tomorrow.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
“But—”
“Sorry.”
He tasted her lips on his lips. “See you next month, I guess?”
“We don’t have that long.” She hugged herself, looked down at the city, looked back. “I’ll wait for you in the foyer at RKC, tomorrow night, at five.”
“You’ll wait for me?”
“For you,” she said, “and no one else. Now go, or else the demons will eat your soul and I’ll have to take a husk to dinner.” She snapped her fingers, and the door opened.
He almost left without kissing her again.
Almost.
32
The next day Caleb worked like a man possessed. He tore through stacks of memos, processed claims and ran figures, outlined complex deals and hedges against failure. Her fire would devour him if he let it, so he buried his mind in news and risk reports.
The nightmares had not stopped after Seven Leaf. Madmen crowded hospitals, crying the Twin Serpents’ names. An itinerant philosopher in Stonewood immolated himself in a public square at noon, ranting about Aquel and Achal. When others rushed to douse him, he fought back with burning flesh, melting skin, crisping meat. A mother in the Vale nearly threw her two young children out of a second-story window, before her husband stopped her. She claimed to doctors and reporters that she had seen snakes of flame coiled inside her babies.
Somewhere, Temoc was laughing. Caleb felt sure of it.
Incidents of madness clustered near Heartstone installations. Caleb wrote a memo, a call to discontinue the Two Serpents project, with the frankness of a man certain he would be ignored. The Serpents had come to the city’s aid in its hour of need. If their use entailed risk, well enough—they required more study before they were used again. The first investigations into the Craft had transformed kingdoms to deserts. This was no different.
At four forty-five he closed his books, capped his pens, cleaned his quill, sharpened his chisel, and walked to the lift. As he descended, he ran through an inventory of doom.
The doors rolled back, and he saw her across the hall, ablaze in a white linen dress. Arms crossed, one eyebrow raised, Mal looked inviting as the emptiness beyond a cliff’s edge.
He didn’t run to her, but he walked quickly. She kissed him on the lips.
“You’re wearing a dress.”
“I do that sometimes,” she said. “Come on. Let’s get something to eat.”
“Something to eat” turned out to be dinner at an Iskari restaurant named Esprit, on the lowest level of a skyspire overlooking the ocean, the kind of place a wealthy couple in a mystery play might eat. At first the eremite decor, the silver place settings and expensive porcelain and sunset view crushed Caleb into insignificance. Then he looked across the table at her.
They discussed ephemera: the color of the sky, the sharp bright bubbles of the champagne, the transgressive thrill of spending so much on a single meal.
“We don’t have much time, when you think about it,” Mal said. “I want to appreciate as much as I can before it’s gone.”
“Morbid,” Caleb replied. “But I won’t argue.”
As tuxedoed waiters served course after airy, delicate course, Caleb and Mal spoke of wine, of ullamal (Mal was not a fan, and Caleb found himself defending the conduct of players he would have condemned to Teo), of childhood games, and art. A string quartet behind a curtain played a gavotte he didn’t recognize. At first Caleb thought it strange that no one danced, but the entire evening was its own kind of dance, with subtle steps and pleasant turns. He blundered through, cheerful as a child at a waltz, and laughed when Mal recounted the story of their first meeting back to him.
“You had the most serious expression I’ve ever seen on a human face. I would have laughed, but I thought that might make matters worse.”
“You did laugh, if I remember right.” He sipped a dessert cordial, and felt it go down slow. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the Tzimet in the lake, and the Serpents.”
Her smile faltered. “What do you mean?”
“I spent all day doing damage control. When we draw power from the Serpents, their, I don’t know, their hunger bleeds out into the city. A woman almost killed her kids, a guy burned himself. More people going mad all the time. We’re responsible.”
“What choice did we have?”
“I don’t know. But I can’t stop thinking about Hal, the guard who died at Bright Mirror. We took reasonable precautions against Tzimet. No one can blame us for what went wrong—but maybe they should. We could run a perfect operation: a Concern that hurt no one, every risk sorted and managed, each contingency accounted for. It would cost hundreds of millions of souls even to come close. Too much. So he died.” The ocean rolled green and gray as slate below them.
She wore a string of tiny pearls at her throat. The pearls smiled even when she did not. “There are always risks. The world isn’t safe.”
“Why not feed the Serpents? If they weren’t so hungry, they wouldn’t drive people mad.”
“We can’t feed them without killing people.”
“You can’t give them soulstuff because…”
“Because the Craft is built on exchange. We give, and receive something in return. That’s the reason we can’t just magic ourselves food or water: use Craft to force a field to grow, and you’ll wear the earth to desert in a year. If we funneled souls into the Serpents, their power would flow back into us, and they’d get hungrier. All we can do is keep them sleeping, and that’s only if we’re careful.” She toasted him with cordial. “Here’s to being careful.”
“Here’s to that.” He drank. “Why not leave the Serpents alone? Let them sleep.”
“And one day they would wake, whether we called for them or not. Our grandparents feared Aquel and Achal. I think we should use them, not cower from them.”
Caleb didn’t know what to think. Sunset burned in her eyes.
“Maybe you’re right.”
They saw more of each other, though Caleb hesitated to call their meetings dates. Yes, they kissed, but they did not melt into romance. Mal studied the world around her, broke it into pieces. On their walks together, every mystery play or advertisement or empty storefront signified something about life or Craft, religion or politics or poetry. Being around her was a rush of genius and expectation. They danced, and talked, and danced again.
Their meetings were a welcome respite from the business of the coming eclipse: insurance bargains to be signed and sealed with demonic agencies, water rights secured, Warden patrols doubled in case of accident or unrest. He swam every day through end-time prophecies, waiting for night and Mal to save him.
He kept the shark’s-tooth talisman in his pocket, but every time he thought to mention it, he remembered Allie’s death, and their fight under Seven Leaf Lake, and decided to wait.