“Why don’t you show the people what you’ve done?”
“Think how you reacted when you saw the truth. Can you imagine that magnified through an entire city?”
She did not answer.
He leaned back, unfolded his legs in front of him, and thought for a long while.
“The sacrifice,” he said, slowly. “We come out here, learn the price of our world, and we go back convinced it’s worthwhile, because we don’t have any choice. Whenever I pass a beggar in Skittersill, when I hear about riots in the Deep Vale, when I run afoul of True Quechal punks or when some fool like my father tries to start a revolution, I know that they’re all of them party to Qet’s torture. Spend long enough with that in your mind and you can’t fight for anything anymore. You wander through this city, and wonder if anything you do will make up for the horror that keeps the world turning. To live, you rip your own heart from your chest and hide it in a box somewhere, along with everything you ever learned about justice, compassion, mercy. You throw yourself into games to mark the time. And if you yearn for something different: what would you change? Would you bring back the blood, the dying cries, the sucking chest wounds? The constant war? So we’re caught between two poles of hypocrisy. We sacrifice our right to think of ourselves as good people, our right to think our life is good, our city is just. And so we and our city both survive.”
She rocked beside him, or else the waves rocked her. Her gaze rested in the cup of her hands, like a statue of a monk from the Shining Empire. Their sages claimed that all was nothing, or nothing all. For a moment, he understood.
“It’s funny,” he said. “The first time I saw Qet, I couldn’t handle it either. I didn’t call upon dark magic or anything like that, but I tackled my boss, demanded an explanation. You did the same to me tonight.”
“What’s funny about that?”
“We have a lot in common. We both keep secrets, and maybe we don’t even know we keep them. When we try to share ourselves with other people, we don’t know how to begin.”
“Is that what drew you to me?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“Everything I said just now—about Qet, and sacrifice, and what it does to us—it’s not an answer. It’s an escape. The question remains: how are we supposed to live? The world can’t be a war between the too-certain and the bankrupt, between my father and the King in Red. But what else is there?
“It took me a long time to figure out why I chased you. You’re beautiful, and compelling, but I’ve known beautiful and compelling women before, and none of them caught me like you did. I think, somehow, I decided you had the answer. Maybe you don’t. Maybe no one does.”
She placed a hand on his shoulder, and he fell silent.
She leaned back and lay on her side, body rolling softly with the sea. Her lips opened. Inside them he saw a waiting darkness.
“I don’t know all the answers yet,” she said. “I think I will, though. Someday soon. I’m working on it.”
“I can wait.”
“Dangerous, to trust someone else’s answers more than your own.” Her fingers traced the curve of his collarbone, finding a nest for the heel of her hand. “You might not like what they have to say.”
“I think I will.”
From the ocean behind them came a dull pop as if a cork had been pulled from a giant wine bottle. A needle of sparks knit through the night, apexed, and burst into a brilliant blue sphere.
The second explosion came faster, a red globe within the blue, and the third faster still, a mist of yellow-white stars that twisted and schooled like fish made from light. The fireworks, he thought, were as tall as the Serpents would be if they reared above the city.
“Look,” she said.
“I see them.” Her eyes mirrored the explosions, and the stars behind.
She kissed him, and drew him toward her. He gave himself to the kiss, wrapped an arm around her curving back, and pulled her toward him in return.
The fireworks above Dresediel Lex that night cost thirty million thaums. A grown man earning a decent wage could work for four hundred years and still not earn that much. The Nightflower Collective, owners of the barges and their explosive cargo, conducted similar events every few weeks around the world: always there was a High Prince’s birthday to celebrate in the Shining Empire, some Iskari ritual that demanded dramatic accompaniment. Once, the Empire of Deathless Koschei ordered a solid month of festivities to celebrate the construction of the Dread Lord’s golem son. The Collective ordered its affairs with an army’s precision and an artist’s skill, each flood of light succeeded in rushing crescendo by the next.
Caleb and Mal rolled together on the waves in grand confusion. His hands tangled in her shirt; she ripped a button from his cuff with a sharp pull and it flew through the air to sink. Her pants slid off easily. Explosions overhead battered hearts and lungs as he gripped the curve of her hips, the taut muscles of her legs. When they kissed, the sky erupted in reflection of their minds, and they kissed often, lips finding arms and shoulders, stomach and sides as often as each other’s mouths.
A precisely timed sequence of blasts formed a pyramid in the sky, two serpents rising above with mouths flared. The ocean was smooth against Caleb’s skin, and it warmed beneath him as he scrambled among heaped clothes for the condom he had placed in his pocket before he left his house. She bit his neck, he clutched her, they fell together. The chill of Craft faded from her skin. Reflected flame burned in her eyes, and as they lay with each other, on each other, in each other, the flame built. She was a single purpose crafted into flesh, and as Caleb grappled with her, he forgot terror, forgot fear, forgot himself and became a single purpose too.
A great wave rolled from below, and a shark’s maw enclosed them. The solid sea surface shielded them from the beast’s teeth, but for a moment they were wrapped in the cave of its mouth. Mal let out a laugh that was a scream, her teeth gleaming white, her mouth red, surrounded by many ranks of fangs. Her laugh shook the world.
The shark released them and fled to safer depths. Caleb and Mal remained, set large upon the surface of the water. Mal panted, skin slick and bright as she crouched astride him. They breathed in unison, and clutched each other forever.
Fireworks burst and burned, flared and retreated. The sky broke open time and again only to reclaim its darkness. All was subsumed in flames, which were themselves dancers, singers, beaters of drums, flowering on the infinite to die.
The universe faded back into view, and found Caleb and Mal sleeping on the dark ocean.
Hours passed. She shivered and pulled him closer. A slit of pink tongue wet her lips. She swallowed.
“I’m sorry,” she said, but only the ocean heard.
INTERLUDE: TEA
Alaxic sat on the balcony of his villa in the Drakspine, and watched the sleeping city. His skin was thin as parchment, his bones twig-slender and brittle. An autumn leaf of a man, a cicada husk, he waited in his chair. He raised a steaming mug of tea to his thin lips, sucked hot liquid into his mouth, forced himself to swallow.
“You have not aged well,” said a shadow from the balustrade.
The old man fixed his gaze on the tea, and the reflections within: reflections of starlight, of the candle flame beside his chair, of the ghost he did not recognize as himself.
“The Craft,” he croaked, “does not reward one with a long and healthy life, if one wishes that life to end someday. I will not permit myself to be trapped within a skeleton for all time.”
“You will not find true death pleasant.” The shadow advanced. Candle flame chiseled out rocky muscles, massive fists, black eyes, scars that glowed on the dark skin. “You are a traitor to gods and man. Demons wait hungrily for your soul.”