“Is that what I think it is?” Her voice was so soft he could barely hear her.
“Yes.”
She stopped, mouth half open, tense as a scared cat. She closed her eyes and breathed deep, mastering herself. Chin high, she strode past him to the pit’s edge, and looked down.
Caleb waited. He examined the thick pipes that lined the cave walls, the glyphs ancient and modern carved into stone. Too soon, he ran out of objects for his attention, and approached Mal, walking heavily so as not to startle her.
She stood straight, and still. He touched her arm and felt tension beneath the envelope of her skin. Her nostrils flared.
A god lay in the pit. No statue, no graven idol could compare to this imperial thing. Spread-eagled, suspended in dark water, he was the size of a mountain. His massive lips, softly parted, bared teeth as large as carriages. His eyes were sails, his chest broad as a pyramid. Legs and arms thick and long as magisterium trees hung limp in the dark water that lapped at his sides.
Unconscious, his silence was the silence of the sea. His slow indrawn breaths were the rolling tide, the sleeping twitch of his hand a hurricane. Eons past, in deep time, the first Quechal had looked out over the ocean, seen chaos, and given it form, and name, and life.
Qet Sea-Lord was not dead, but not alive, either. His closed eyes did not move like the eyes of a dreaming man. Thick metal pipes protruded from his arms, his chest, his neck, his corded thighs, to join the hive of plumbing below the surface of the water. Silver bands circled his chest. Before each breath, the bands glowed with unearthly light, and after each breath the light faded.
Caleb said the god’s name gently, knowing Mal would hear.
She recoiled from the pit. Her eyes flashed white, and shadow cohered about her skin. Her teeth grew long, pointed like fangs and gleaming. She towered above him. Ghostlights flickered and shattered on the walls; Mal hissed, and lightning cracked between the fingers of her outstretched hand. She swelled like a cloud of smoke above an erupting volcano.
“This is what I wanted to show you, Mal,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
The magnesium flames of her eyes burned into him, but he stepped forward and extended his hand, palm up and open. She glanced from him, to the pit, and back.
In a black blur, she fled up the long hallway. A guard barred her way, but she struck him and he fell. Caleb ran to the guard and knelt beside him, felt his pulse. Still strong. Good. He rose to follow Mal, but another guard blocked his path.
“Get out of my way,” Caleb said.
“Who in all the hells was that?”
“My girlfriend,” he almost said, but stopped himself. “My boss.” That was also true, technically, and confused the guard long enough for Caleb to brush past.
“We’ll head her off at the beach,” the guard called after him.
“No,” he shouted back. She might hurt someone before the guards brought her down. “No. She’s just confused. This is her first time to Bay Station.”
“Oh,” the guard said. “That explains it.”
Caleb began to run.
He found her on the starlit beach. Silver waves lapped the sand, and the calm sea reflected the fat full moon. No halo of Craft clung to her, no ichorous claws tipped her fingers. Lit by the night, she resembled a cave drawing: a life defined in five lines of ink. He could almost ignore the guards surrounding her with weapons raised.
She turned to face him as he approached through the cordon.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” he replied. “Shall we go?”
“Yes.” She held out her hand. Her skin was cool to the touch, colder than the night air. She stepped onto the water. The ocean buoyed her up, and he walked beside her away from shore.
“Don’t look back,” he whispered. “The guards are hair-trigger tense. They won’t relax until you’re gone.”
“I can’t believe I did that.”
“It happens. Everyone takes their first sight of Qet in a different way. I’ve seen grown men kneel; one Craftsman I know wept.”
“I can’t— I mean, I knew, or a thought I knew. I thought I could handle it. The expectation, and the shock, and everything at once—I can’t believe I let you take me. I’m an idiot.” She spat the last word.
“Don’t talk that way.”
“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do.”
“I should have listened when you asked me to stop, when you asked me not to show you. I’m sorry.” A rising swell shifted his weight sideways, into her. She kept him from toppling. “I’m a bit of a jerk, I guess.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“It was a stupid thing to surprise you with.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “Stupid.” The sound of surf faded into rolling ocean silence. Dresediel Lex burgeoned on the horizon, a tumor of light that dulled the stars and blunted the moon. No ships passed them in the dark. Barges stood at anchor beyond the harbor’s mouth. “Think it’s safe to look back yet?”
“Yes.”
She glanced over her shoulder. “The island looks bigger from this distance. Less human.”
“It camouflages itself with Craft. If you could see the real island, you would know where it was, which would make it easier to attack.”
“Elegant system.” She stopped walking. “Can we stop here?”
She sat cross-legged on the water, and he sat beside her. The ocean surrounded them like a meadow.
“I thought it would be like the Serpents,” she said. “But it’s worse.”
“Yes.”
“They’re beasts, however big they are. Terrors. But that’s a God. Not a half-conscious spirit like the ones we bound in Seven Leaf. Qet ruled us, once. Loved us. And we loved him.”
“Yes.”
He traced ripples in the water in front of them.
“He’s not … dead.”
“No. Not exactly.”
“I heard he lived somewhere, in chains.” She sounded strangled and slow, as if every word had to be won from her throat by single combat.
“Those are chains,” he said, “of a sort. Qet fought the King in Red during Liberation. The Sea-Lord was broken on his own altar. But he didn’t die.”
“He didn’t survive, either.”
“Yes. He’s not strong enough to have a mind anymore. Flashes of awareness at most, on high holy festivals. Once in a while, he cries out, or babbles nonsense. But his power remains.”
“And so you use him. In pain.”
“We use what’s left of him. He was the bringer of rains from the ocean, Father of the Green Beside the Desert. We pump saltwater into his heart, and as the water runs through him, he removes the salt. He didn’t have such a physical form, before—like most gods. What you saw was a salt statue grown in his image. Pipes and pumps draw purified water back into the reservoirs of Dresediel Lex. Whenever a tap is opened or a glass raised in this city, Qet is there. Or what’s left of him.”
“Why did you show me this?” Her hands rested in her lap, one inside the other. Her thumbs pressed together, their tips white.
“I wanted,” he began, but he could not complete his sentence. The false serenity of her face terrified him: still as the surface of Seven Leaf Lake before the gods began to scream. “You asked what we sacrifice, to live the way we live. This is our sacrifice.”
“This isn’t a sacrifice,” she snapped. “This is abuse. Exploitation.”
“We drained the water table around Dresediel Lex a hundred years ago, maybe more. We suck lakes, rivers, streams dry like a starving leech. Even Seven Leaf won’t last long. Ten years, twenty at the most, before we have to reach further afield. We’ve studied Qet day and night for five decades and no Craftsman has been able to duplicate his methods. We can take from him, though, and we do, and so we survive.”