“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” he admitted. “You remember university?”
“What do you think I’ve forgotten?”
“You remember when you told me you’d decided to break up with Ivan, that you’d met a girl. That you needed to do this, that it was a part of you. I asked you why you’d come to me. You said you had to know you were telling the truth to yourself, and the only way to know that was to tell it to someone you trusted to know when you were lying.”
She tilted her head to one side. “Do you think this is the same thing?”
“As coming out?” He put up his hands between them. “No. Of course not. Shit. Sorry.”
“Apology noted.”
“But this could kill me. I’m not being figurative. The Wardens will want my head for lying to them. I’m maybe obstructing justice, aiding and abetting who knows what. It’s not like I’m above suspicion, either. Tollan has been good to me, but I doubt she ever forgets who my father is. So I want to know—am I telling the truth? Is this something I need to do? Or am I about to commit suicide because I want to get in this woman’s pants?”
“I said I wouldn’t be your conscience.”
Caleb drained the last of his coffee, and stood. The shop felt too small. Skeletons mocked him from the walls, waving their arms in an obscene dance. Fire built inside him, fed by words he didn’t remember how to speak. Teo bit her lower lip, teeth showing white against her dark skin. Weighing scales shifted in her eyes.
“Do it,” she said at last, as if passing sentence. “Find her. But if you don’t manage it in two weeks, I’ll go to Tollan myself. She will kill you for keeping this from her, and I’ll never work in this city again because I waited to tell her. I’ll have to throw myself on the tender mercies of my family, and be cursed to wear nice dresses and glad-hand Craftswomen at parties, or else join my cousins in the hedonism tango. I’ll hire a Craftsman to raise you from the dead once Tollan’s done with you, just so I can kill you again. I’ll do that whenever I get bored. And life with my family is so. Very. Boring.” She emphasized each word with a tap of her forefinger on the table.
“You’re serious.”
“I am serious.”
“Why let me look for her at all? Why not go to Tollan right now, or force me to?”
“Because four years ago you would have gone all in with two queens in hand and a third showing, rather than let yourself be bluffed out of the pot. Because you used to have fire, and you’ve got scared. You’re becoming a risk manager in truth as well as title, and it’s hard to watch. This is a stupid idea, but I won’t stand in your way. In fact, I’ll lay you a soul and a half that you won’t be able to find her and learn what she knows before my two week deadline’s up.”
“Three thousand thaums.” Two months’ payment on his house. Buy-in for one hell of a high-stakes game. “Odds?”
“I’ll give you two-to-one against. I don’t want to bankrupt you.”
“You sure you can cover it? I don’t want to send you running back to Mama when I come to collect. I know how uncomfortable your family makes you.”
“You should talk.”
“You’re on.”
They shook. The yellow skeletons grinned.
He grinned back at them.
7
The next day’s dawn clawed at Caleb’s eyes. He tugged his hat brim low, and climbed the gravel path that wound up the sandy hill toward Heartstone’s headquarters. The driverless carriage that had brought him rolled away into heat and haze.
Caleb felt about sunrise the way he felt about RKC’s accounting department: necessary, and best kept at a distance. But Alaxic, Heartstone’s chief executive, was a busy man, and when he set the meeting early, Caleb hadn’t argued—he needed this talk to end well. If Alaxic took pressure off the King in Red, the King should relax his grip on Tollan and the Wardens, leaving Caleb free to search for Mal. If not, Caleb’s chances for finding her dwindled to nothing. Especially if the Wardens decided to peek inside his head for any details about the runner he might have missed.
Dry dwarf pines rustled beside the path. Caleb turned to look, and a slender blade settled against the swell of his throat. He froze. Sharp points and edges pressed into his back. A needle breathed over his right eyelid. He heard the silence of something large standing still, and near.
“State your name and business,” said a voice like chalk on slate.
“Caleb Altemoc.” He swallowed. His throat pressed against the security demon’s claw. “I’m from RKC, here to see Alaxic.” Slowly, he reached into his pocket, and slid his badge out of his wallet. “I have an appointment.”
The claw did not slide across Caleb’s throat, nor did the spines of the demon’s chest impale him. This was probably a good sign.
Caleb waited.
The Tzimet in Bright Mirror Reservoir were to proper demons what a monkey was to a man: similar in shape, sometimes even stronger, but pale imitations with regard to intellect and cruelty.
Minutes passed. He waited on the hillside, millimeters from death.
Footsteps. He tried to turn his head, but the thorns at his cheek prevented him.
A woman entered his field of vision: skin a shade darker than Teo’s, face round, red-tinged hair pulled back in a bun. She wore a khaki suit with a knee-length skirt, and carried a clipboard. She glanced from his face to the clipboard, and held out her hand. “You must be Caleb. I’m Allesandre Olim. Mister Alaxic is eager to meet you.”
Claws, blades, and thorns released him. One moment, a sneeze would have driven ten spikes through Caleb’s skull; the next, he stood free on the path. Caleb accepted Allesandre’s hand and shook it. Her grip was firm, and she did not smile.
“Apologies for the security. Our work here is delicate, and dangerous. This way, please.”
“You have effective guards,” Caleb said, and would have turned to look behind him. Allesandre shook her head, and he stopped. “The demon’s still there, isn’t it?”
“Will you follow me?” she said, and left the path.
Caleb followed. The hillside where they walked looked rocky and uneven, tangled with sagebrush and weeds, but he felt a smooth stone walkway under his feet.
Allesandre led him to a circle of standing stones. With a wave of her clipboard she slid a five-hundred-pound altar aside, revealing a rough-hewn tunnel into the earth, and rock steps descending.
They climbed down the steps for a long time.
At first the tunnel felt warm as desert noon, then warm as a baker’s oven. Dim red light illuminated wall carvings of the Hero Sisters, eagle-headed gods, and of course serpents: the ancient Quechal who dug this passage had etched a double bar of stylized scales under each graven figure.
“This,” Caleb said, “is a strange place to work.” The Quechal carvings reminded him of childhood, of nights listening to his father chant holy tales of blood and murder. He remembered some of these designs from the walls of his father’s temple in the Skittersill, before it burned. “You don’t see carvings like these anymore.”
“The bas reliefs are authentic,” Allesandre said. “Five hundred years old, give or take a century.”
Caleb lifted his hand from the wall. “Trying to save on real estate?”
“Hardly,” she replied. “Sites like this are vital to our work.”
When he first heard the voices, he took them for wind through fissures in the rock. Deeper, deeper he followed Allesandre, and the whisper rush resolved to words in an obscure form of High Quechal, a jumble of nouns, adjectives, and verbs from which he caught snatches of meaning: Serpent. Flame. Lost. Burn. Make. Mold. Crush.
Stinging sweat ran down his cheeks, the line of his jaw. His shadow and Allesandre’s, melded, stretched long and thin behind them, a road into the darkness from which they had come.