The door closed behind Mal. “Sorry I’m late. The crowd’s grown outside.” Her footsteps approached through the dark. Stripes of lamplight revealed and concealed her by turns as she circled the table. “I’ll do better than stand to account. I can fix this.”
“Explain.”
“The Serpents have all the power we need. You’ve wanted an excuse to draw on them for months.”
Caleb glanced down at his notes, turned a few pages, and found the figure he sought. “We’d have to spend more power keeping them asleep than we can draw from them.”
“Much more,” Mal said. “But over a longer time. The Serpents grant you a reprieve. Think of it as a loan to yourself, with interest.”
“That doesn’t make sense. We can’t loan soulstuff to ourselves.” He expected others to join in, but no one spoke. All eyes had turned to Kopil.
The King in Red‘s eyes burned in shadow. “Your people have caused this chaos. Why should we trust you to fix it?”
Before the dread lord of RKC, Mal looked smaller than he remembered.
“Because I can imagine what you’ll do to us if we fail,” she said.
“Can you.”
“I have a powerful imagination.”
“It will be worse than you imagine. For you not least of all.”
“Give me a chance. Use the Serpents to preserve the illusion of your strength. In three days, I can fix Seven Leaf Lake.” She held so still the world seemed to spin around her. “If all the demons from all the hells stand in my way, I will break them.”
In the ensuing silence Caleb heard the breaths of the four people in the room who still breathed: Tollan, Chihuac, Mal, and himself. Most of RKC’s executive board had discarded lungs and blood on the thorn-paved path to their current positions.
“So let it be,” Kopil said. “We will send Caleb with you.”
The number of breaths reduced by one. Stunned to strangulation, Caleb looked up at his boss. Bony hands rested on the table beside Kopil’s mug of cold coffee.
Mal bore the King in Red’s gaze, and Caleb’s, and the board’s, as if they were the stares of frightened rabbits.
“Alone?” Caleb asked.
“Of course not.” The King in Red struck his teeth together, and Caleb heard laughter echo up from a deep well. “You’ll travel with an escort of Wardens, on our fastest Couatl. Leaving tomorrow morning, you should reach Seven Leaf early the following day. Assess the situation and determine what aid you require. Fix the problem within three days; if you cannot do so, whisper my name thrice before a mirror in darkness, and I will send aid.”
“I understand,” Mal said.
The conference room stretched cavernous about them. Mal turned from Kopil to Caleb, and smiled a cliff runner’s smile.
“This should be fun.”
22
Mal excused herself to prepare. Caleb wanted to follow her, but he could not snub the Directors in their power. They wrung information from him: captives in a hot, dry cell, fighting for a drink from the same mangled sponge.
“How much water can we cut back from manufacturing and agriculture in the next week without damaging crops?” asked Alana Mazetchul, who had little love for RKC’s industrial business. Ostrakov, whose department served farmers, makers, and builders of things, cut in before Caleb could answer Mazetchuclass="underline" “How many souls are lost every minute our manufacturing plants stand dead?” More questions followed that, each one pointed, though Caleb could not see the purpose of every barb. He answered in raw figures with no commentary. He could not allow himself to be torn between these fanged eminences. He had problems enough already.
For thirty minutes they grilled him, and as each minute passed he felt Mal retreat further into the night.
The King in Red listened, and made occasional notes on his yellow notepad with a quill pen. He did not speak.
At last, Caleb exhausted the pool of questions. The meeting adjourned with a solemn incantation: “We wait, and we rise; we move, and the earth trembles.” They stood as one and left the room severally—somber, disturbed, and determined not to betray their exhaustion as they retreated into shadows. Sixty years ago, these men and women broke the heavens, and made the gods weep. They had spent the time since learning how hard it was to run a world.
Tollan joined Caleb at the front of the room. “Well done,” she said, with a ghost of a smile. “Don’t die up there.”
“I’ll try not to.”
She left.
Two others remained in the conference room. Chihuac waited by Kopil’s throne; in the crook of one arm she carried a scroll as long as a sword. The King in Red leaned on the table and levered himself to his feet. The sparks of his eyes dimmed, and Caleb heard something like a cough rattle where his esophagus once had been.
“Sir?” Forgetting his notes, he moved to the King in Red. “Are you okay?”
“Of course,” the skeleton said. “Thousands cry out to me that they thirst, that they are wounded; thousands more will join them soon. Their need tears at my soul. I could die, satisfying them, and if I die, so will they. Yet if I do not satisfy them, they will also die, and the city will die, and I will die at last. I am, in short, a perfect image of health. Someone will carve me on a monument.”
“I’ve drawn up figures,” said Chihuac, “for increased Warden deployment over the next week.”
“We will discuss them in my office in ten minutes. I must speak with Caleb. Alone.”
She withdrew. Her shoes were soft-soled, her step light. She walked into shadow and disappeared. He heard no door open or close in her wake.
“What’s your plan?” Caleb said when they were alone.
“What do you mean?”
“Why are you sending me north? I won’t be able to help.”
“Your mere presence will suffice.” Kopil lifted his coffee and his notepad and walked into the unbroken black. Caleb followed.
The last trace of light failed. Cloak and King were different textures of darkness. Caleb blinked, and with eyes closed he saw a hallway outlined about them in silver-blue fire, and the King in Red a lightning mosaic, a many-limbed spider with a thousand slavering mouths.
He opened his eyes, and saw nothing.
Liquid shadow welled about his legs. Viscous, palpable, it rose from his ankles, to his knees, to his waist. The tips of his fingers trailed over the surface of the shade. Shadows covered his chest, his neck. When they reached his mouth he expected to choke, yet when he inhaled they sat sweetly in his lungs. The dark enclosed him. He could not see the red of Kopil’s cloak. His body was ice. He closed his eyes.
His next step pressed him against a cobweb wall. His heart quickened, but he strode forward. The King in Red did not mean to kill him. Dead, he could not go on this mad mission to the north.
Except as a zombie, of course.
He wished he’d thought of that earlier.
The shadows parted, as if he were floating upward through a subterranean lake and suddenly breached the surface. He blinked cobweb from his eyes, and clutched at the retreating liquid dark. He caught a handful, black and quivering like mercury in his palm.
He glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see the conference room at the end of a long hall, but saw only a closet of red: crimson robes, scarlet suits and ties, shirts the color of blood both fresh and dried.
“Can I get you a drink?” asked the King in Red.
Caleb wheeled around. He stood in a bedroom, large, elegant and sparsely furnished, walled on two sides by smoked windows. Thin metal pillars supported a high, unfinished rock ceiling that glimmered with ghostlights. Bookcases lined the walls, stuffed with red and black leather volumes polished by age and use. The room’s opulence was almost obscured by mess: books piled on desk and floor and furniture, a stack of scrolls collapsed by the chair, a crimson duvet rumpled and askew on the king-sized bed. In an adjoining kitchenette, the King in Red poured reposado tequila into a lowball glass.