Mal returned to the cliff runners as a goddess in white leather, offering no explanation for her absence. Caleb did not run with her, but waited beside Balam, and watched.
She soared on currents of air, leapt and turned, rolled and ran. She was a monkey, a flame, a flash, an angel, a demon in flight. Caught between sky and earth, she was most herself. When she touched down, she stood lightly, as if one wrong step might break the ground beneath her feet.
A week before the eclipse, on Monicola Pier beside the rolling Pax, he showed her the tooth.
It hung from her fingers, caught by sunset, swaying.
“Kopil says it burned when Allie died.”
“And you think it means she wasn’t mad. That she betrayed me. Betrayed us. Poisoned Bright Mirror Reservoir, and all the rest.”
“It seems likely. Doesn’t it?”
“You have one explanation for the facts,” she said. “Perhaps she was working against you all along. Or she was only recruited after she saw the gods at Bright Mirror and decided she could not be a part of your world. Your adversary would have bound her to his purpose with subtle cords and bargains. When we turned her power against her, some might have flowed back through those bonds, and destroyed this tooth.”
“I don’t buy it. She must have been a radical from way back.”
She smiled sadly. “Why?”
“She was only at Seven Leaf for a few weeks. People don’t change so fast.”
“Maybe you don’t know people as well as you think. You didn’t handle Seven Leaf Lake well. Neither did I. What would we have become if we remained?”
“What we do there is ugly, sure, but it didn’t make me want to set demons loose on the city.”
“I doubt that was her goal.” She lowered the tooth.
“What do you mean?”
“I think Allie didn’t want to cause harm. I think she wanted to recover something she’d lost. Seven Leaf confronted her with that loss, and she responded in the only way she knew.” When he looked at her uncomprehending, she tried again. “She saw spirits in pain, and wanted to stop their pain. That was the seed. Everything else—the power, the madness, the betrayal—followed.”
“Their pain is horrible. But we need that water. She must have known that.”
“Does our need justify our methods?”
He remembered the torment beneath the lake, and did not answer.
“We were born together,” she said, “men and gods: our first cave wall scratches let them into the world. We miss them. Allie missed them, I think. I sympathize with her.”
“You miss our gods?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“They’re soaked in blood.”
“So am I. So are you. So’s this city. You seem to think it’s different if we kill for gods or for water; either way the victim dies at the end.”
“Why not find another pantheon? Iskar still has gods, and they get along fine. Orgies and existentialism, the occasional burnt aurochs, once in a while a tentacle or two. Seems better.”
“Iskar’s gods aren’t ours, though.”
“Oh, I see, we need to preserve our heritage. Will you burn the pale skins out of Stonewood next?” Barges shifted on the water, pulled by broad-backed sea turtles forty feet across: firework ships moving into position for the eclipse. Their burning arrows would frighten hungry stars away from the wounded sun.
She laughed. “Our economy would collapse. Every tie to the rest of the world would be cut. We must be cosmopolitan, without sacrificing our identity. Walk our own path.”
“Isn’t that what we’re doing now?”
“How many of the Craftsmen and Craftswomen in this city are Quechal, do you think? Twenty percent? Thirty, at most?”
“Something like that.”
“In a city that’s eighty percent Quechal.”
“I don’t see your point.”
“We’re occupied. We don’t talk about it that way, but we are.”
“We’re not occupied. We’re a world city. There’s a difference.”
“Are you sure?”
A cold breeze off the ocean shivered her, and he placed an arm around her shoulder. From the sidewalk an observer might have thought them man and wife, or lovers. Caleb didn’t know what they were. No words seemed to fit. Children ran down the beach, volleying a ball back and forth. “You loved your parents. You value the things they valued. But our gods killed people. They’re gone, and I don’t miss them.”
Mal stopped shivering, but she did not remove his arm. “You don’t get to choose your parents. Why should your gods be any different?”
“What do you suggest? We should bring back the altar and the knife? People will fight you if that’s what you want, and I’ll lead them. We can’t do those things anymore.”
“Of course not,” she said. “That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean, then?”
“Think about your father. You don’t live the way he lives.”
“No. I have a roof over my head, and I don’t have three quarters of the city out to kill me.”
Waves lapped the thick pylons of the pier. Caleb watched the barges and thought about sharks moving underwater.
“But you have something of him in you, anyway.”
“Scars.”
“Those, yes. But that’s not what I meant. You have his determination. You know a few things in your marrow, and you will never compromise on them. You took parts of your father into yourself and reinvented them. Your mother’s in there, too: contemplative, independent, solitary, strong. You made yourself out of what they gave you.”
“What does this have to do with sacrifice?”
“We used to know that everything ends, and it is better to give one’s death than accept it. The first corn sprang from a dead man’s body. Qet’s blood makes the rain. Beasts give themselves to the hunter; kings give themselves to their people. Sacrifice was the center of our world. We defended that world from Iskari invaders four hundred years ago, but then the Craftsmen came, and here we are.”
“Here we are: better fed, better protected, more justly policed than ever in history.”
“I don’t think the Wardens are just.”
“I know.”
“We’re better fed, I’ll grant, but so what? Cows on a farm are fed. As for ’protected,’ Dresediel Lex only ever fell to one adversary: the one who rules us now. My problem isn’t that we no longer sacrifice, it’s that we’re no longer conscious of the sacrifices we make. That’s what gods are for.”
“What do you suggest?”
“We should bring them back, on our terms. We form a society with sacrifice, but without death.”
“Sacrificing what? Shreds of cotton, clods of earth? A bit of wine, stale bread? Gods are hungry, thirsty creatures.”
“I don’t know what they would accept. But we need them.”
“People don’t miss the gods.”
“They do. You do.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’ve been chasing me for months. Half the things you’ve done should have killed you.”
He laid his hand over the back of hers, on the railing. A ridge of scar tissue ran below her knuckles.
She looked at him through the black sway of her hair. “You didn’t know me. You saw something in me you thought was worth your blood.” His expression must have changed, because she frowned, and shook her head. “You saw something you could chase, something for which you could bleed. You wanted to sacrifice yourself, and you’ve never been given the chance. I know the feeling. Desperate for duty. For purpose. Direction. It’s why I saved you, when North Station fell.” She handed the tooth back to him. “I’m sorry I can’t say more. Allie was a friend, and I think I understand her—but I can’t help you with this.”