“If you lived a century ago, you would have been prepared for the experience,” Temoc said. “Gods are not so common today as once they were.”
“Fine by me,” she replied.
Mal stood on air like a bride on an empty dance floor, waiting for the groom to emerge and the band to play.
Most days, downtown airspace was a muddy mess of airbuses and optera, Warden mounts and skyspires and flying machines. Every few hours a dragon passed overhead, beating three-hundred-meter wings on its journey to the Shining Empire. Dresediel Lex had an anthill for a sky.
Today, though, the sun shone at the apex of a bare blue vault, cut with smoke. Optera retreated to their nests. Skyspires fled. No private citizen would fly today, and the Wardens were busy.
She closed her eyes and saw Dresediel Lex as a sprawling web of power and Craft, the human stain wiped away to reveal the bent lightning at the city’s root. But this too was a mask, a deception—a way she had been taught to see.
She touched glyphs at her wrist and temples, and looked down, through basements, pipes, sewers, tunnels, caves, to the beating, blinding red heart of the planet, where two serpents quaked with unpleasant dreams.
Her pocket buzzed: a warning from the Craftsmen back at Heartstone. The Serpents’ hunger outstrips our power to contain them.
She opened her hands and waited for the eclipse.
Caleb, Teo, and Temoc approached the pyramid. No one challenged them. Teo glanced about, wary of security demons, but they were not attacked.
They left the parking lot and walked down a paved path flanked by topiary. Unconscious revenants sprawled in the loam between sculpted trees, sheers and clippers fallen in the shadow of shrubbery globes and pentagrams. When Mal attacked, the undead workers would have been near the night shift’s end.
He touched Teo’s hand. “Hey.” His voice sounded small.
“Hey,” she answered. Their footsteps were the only sound in the garden, beneath the Canter’s Shell.
“Are you all right?”
“All right?” She laughed. “No. What do you think?”
“I’m sorry. I was an idiot back there, in the crowd.”
“Usually you only hurt yourself. I don’t like being part of your collateral damage.”
“Hells.”
“Relax. I was kidding.”
“I deserve it,” he said. “This is my fault. All of it. If I hadn’t got mad at Temoc, I wouldn’t have let go of his arm. We wouldn’t even be here if I’d put the pieces together about Mal. If I’d pressed her about that pendant, about Allesandre. I think she was trying to tell me, but I didn’t listen. I spend my life evaluating angles, but as soon as my feelings get involved, it all goes to hell.”
“Don’t think like that. Blaming yourself for everything.”
“Why not?”
“Because Mal’s crazy. And your father, he’s helping us, but he’s crazy, too. We all are. You can’t hold yourself responsible for people’s actions. Even if Mal made you a bit stupid, you aren’t the one who came up with her plan. You aren’t the one who set her on this road. She’s her own woman, and she did this for her own reasons. It wasn’t your fault.”
He put a hand on her shoulder. “Sam will be okay.”
She didn’t answer.
They reached the wide, flat front steps of the pyramid. Caleb’s gaze swung to Temoc, and kept swinging. “Where’s my dad?”
“I thought he was behind us.”
The grass rustled in a light breeze, but there was no breeze.
Bushes to their right crashed and parted. Temoc stumbled out, wearing a gardening zombie’s jumpsuit. The revenant had been shorter, and larger around the waist, than Caleb’s father. Cuffs of trousers and shirt rode up on his calves and his thick wrists.
Temoc lurched as he walked, and held one of his arms akimbo. Light twisted in his grip, and trailed on the ground behind him. Caleb blinked, and the rainbow confusion resolved into many-jointed limbs, a barbed tail, and a chitinous body. A triangular head with serrated mandibles lolled at a broken angle from the neck clutched in the crook of Temoc’s arm.
Temoc let the demon fall. It struck earth, twitched once, and blurred to match the grass.
“I thought,” he said, “a uniform might let the building recognize me as one of its own. It seems your lawn is well defended.” He joined them at the steps, and ushered Teo toward the revolving door.
She climbed the steps, extended her hand, and touched the door. Glass glowed red beneath her fingers. She pulled her hand back. Nothing happened. She did not die.
She touched the door again, and this time it recognized her. She pressed, and it moved.
“Follow me,” she said, and stepped into shadow.
43
Crystal lamps hung lifeless above RKC’s dark lobby. No sun shone through the doors. Faint ghostlights set into floor and baseboard runners were the only source of illumination; they traced a branching red labyrinth that connected elevators and stairwell to the entrance. Bas-reliefs glowered from the walls—gods in agony, the King in Red triumphant, hearts torn from chests and altars split to shards.
Demons wandered through the foyer, their footsteps like glass on stone. They took many forms: a looming silent shade whose five arms ended in scalpel forests, a spider with legs six feet long. A bus-sized centipede tasted the air with tremulous antennae.
Caleb’s lungs and stomach tried to squeeze into his throat. Teo cursed in High Quechal.
The demons did not attack, or seem to notice them. Nor did they intrude on the labyrinth. A giant spider crossed one crimson path, but it lifted each leg well clear of the red lines and did not step between them.
Simple enough. Stay on the path, and remain safe. Stray, and be devoured. Strange to have a security system that posed no danger to any intruder with eyes.
Caleb stepped forward, but Temoc gripped his arm like a vise. “Don’t.”
“What?”
“There are demons here.”
“I can see that.”
“They haven’t attacked yet. We don’t know what might set them off.”
“It looks like we’ll be fine if we stick to the path.”
“What path?”
“That path.” Caleb pointed to the floor, to the red ghostlight lines—the red ghostlight lines, which cast no shadows. Oh. “You can’t see any light on the floor, can you?”
“I see a small red circle around us. You were about to cross the circle’s edge.”
“Ah. What about you, Teo?”
“I see green lines.”
“Damn.”
“Exactly. My lines turn left after five feet.”
Caleb’s red path remained straight for ten feet, then curved sharply to the right. “So there’s a safe path for you, and a safe path for me, and none for Temoc.”
“Makes sense. It can tell that we’re supposed to be here, and he isn’t.”
“RKC has fed upon both of you for years. The beast knows your taste, and hungers for fresh meat.”
“You’re a creepy man,” Teo said.
“This,” Temoc said, indicating the demon-filled room with a wave of his hand, “is your office building.”
Caleb tried not to think about teeth and claws and legs and pincers. “Dad, I don’t suppose you can fight them off?”
“This would not be a battle,” Temoc said. A thing like a crystal mantis scuttled up to the edge of the red circle, and stared at them with mirror eyes. “I would disappear under claw and fang.”
“Can you climb the pyramid from outside?”
“Perhaps. But there will be defenses outside as well.”
“Okay. Then I’ll carry you.”
“You’ll carry me?”
“If the demons can’t cross my path, we have to make it so they can’t attack you without attacking me.”