Reluctantly, he pressed against the crystal wall with his scars, and bent its Craft to let him pass. A familiar tingle washed over him, and he entered the arctic chill of Mal’s spire.
Craftsmen and Craftswomen preferred the cold. Dancing elementals of air and ice cooled their buildings to the edge of sanity. Shivering in his thin jacket, Caleb climbed three flights of stairs. Mal’s room was one of four on the spire’s third floor. A mailbox on the wall bore her name engraved on a silver plate.
He knocked on the door, but received no answer. Waited, knocked again—still nothing. He set his ear against the door, but heard no movement. Working late, most likely. She was a busy woman.
Fine, he thought, and turned to go. He forced himself to stop. The next bus wouldn’t come for another hour. If he left and returned, he’d arrive at midnight; his apology would not go over well if he had to wake Mal to deliver it. Better return the next night—but what if the same thing happened? And the night after that?
A bead of sweat trickled down the back of his neck. His hands shook for reasons unconnected to the cold. He touched the doorknob, turned, found it locked. A deadbolt, no Craft for him to pry apart or bend. Of course. In a flying tower full of wizards, who would trust an enchanted lock?
He paced, and counted slowly to a hundred. She did not appear. He cursed, and she did not answer that summons, either.
Caleb sat beside her door, and laid the flowers on the carpet. He drew a deck of cards from his pocket and dealt a hand of solitaire.
The denizens of Mal’s tower all worked late, or else came and went without recourse to the hall. Minutes ticked by to hours. Caleb played every variant of solitaire he knew, four times, then won and lost three fortunes to himself at poker. No human presence relieved his isolation. Every quarter hour, regular as clockwork, an elemental eddy whisked by, trailing frost, and he clutched his jacket tight across his chest.
Midway through his fourth fortune, he heard a sound like a champagne flute crushed to sand: an inhuman approximation of the clearing of a throat. He paused, hands hovering above the cards, and looked up. Two demons—he thought there were two, invisible save as impressions in the air, glass scythes and scissor mouths, spiked fangs of crystal and eyes upon eyes—stared down at him.
He started to gather his cards, but they seized him before he could finish.
Either the demons could not talk, or they chose not to. They twisted Caleb’s arms behind his back and thrust his head down. He staggered through white-walled halls, until they arrived at a dark, small room with a table and two chairs. The demons threw him inside, and closed the door.
He sat under a punishing spotlight, and wondered if the Wardens would come, if there was any law against lingering outside a woman’s door and waiting for her to return.
Probably.
He would have played more solitaire, but half his cards remained on the floor outside Mal’s apartment, with the flowers. Instead he practiced palming the cards that remained, sleeving them, sliding them into and out of his pockets. He did not cheat, but even an honest player should know how. When sleights of hand grew dull, he placed his feet up on the table and tipped his hat down over his eyes.
He woke to the click of an opening latch.
He blinked, blinded by light. Exploding galaxies faded into a dim mess of purple and red.
Demons stood in the door.
He did not struggle when they took his arms in their scissor-grip and marched him out.
“Where to now, gentlemen?”
No answer. He hadn’t expected one.
When they did not steer him down the stairs toward the exit, he started to worry. Not handing him over to the Wardens, then—unless the Wardens used a different landing structure than the spire’s residents. But he had seen no such structure from the air. If they didn’t plan to hand him over or let him go, why move him from the cell?
Unless they had other uses for him. What powers ruled in a skyspire? The city’s law, or the law of the Craft, or no law at all? And what if the demon guards had not in fact reported his capture, and were only waiting until the rest of the spire would be too fast asleep to hear his screams?
Demons, he recalled, kept peculiar diets.
As they marched him up a winding stair, he searched for opportunities of escape. None suggested themselves.
When they turned onto the third floor, he began to look more intently. They brought him to Mal’s door, opened it, and thrust him in.
He stumbled, and caught his balance on a hardwood floor.
Shadow soaked the small bare room. Moonlight filtered through the large rear windows, illuminating gray carpet, a leather chair, a small coffee table, and a machine designed for either torture or home exercise.
The city burned below.
Something moved to Caleb’s right, and he turned, expecting to see Mal.
Instead, he saw snakes: a wall of them, writhing.
He swore, jumped back, and after a panting, panicked moment, he recognized Urban Grotesquerie. Sam’s piece. Sold at auction. “Seven hells.”
Demon laughs sounded like spider legs skittering across a steel floor.
“Give us a few minutes.” He recognized Mal’s voice, from the corner beside the exercise machine. He turned to her as the demons withdrew and closed the door behind them.
He pointed at the snakes. “I know the woman who made this. Girlfriend of a friend of mine. I’ll tell her you put it on display.”
Mal moved between him and the city, and pointed to the ceiling. Recessed ghostlights glowed, and details filled in the room. Closed doors led off the main chamber. A photograph, framed, hung on the wall opposite Grotesquerie: a girl, a man, and a woman, in front of an adobe house of the kind that had been common in the Skittersill twenty years before. “You’re lucky I saw the cards,” she said. “And the flowers.”
“I thought they’d have cleaned up after they grabbed me.”
“Demons don’t clean. Another hour, and the maid would have come by, and who knows how long you’d have been stuck there.”
She looked much as he remembered her: hard and elegant. She wore a dark suit and a pencil skirt.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wear a skirt.”
“Formal dinner. Dress to impress.”
“Looks nice.”
“I thought about leaving you in that cell, for the Wardens. I thought about throwing you off the top of this spire. Tell me why I shouldn’t.”
He opened his mouth, but no words emerged. His rehearsed, stolen speech would not fit through his throat.
Mal started to turn away.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She waited.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Still, she said nothing.
“I didn’t think. It’s hard to live in your parents’ shadow. Believe me, I know. I don’t want you to forget them. Even if I disagree with them. Even if I disagree with you.”
“What do you want?”
“You,” he said at last. “If you’ll have me.”
She turned away. “You don’t have the first idea of the trouble you make for yourself, wanting me. Go. I’ll persuade the building not to press charges.”
“No,” he said with more conviction than he felt. He walked to her, placed his hand on her arm. Her skin was tawny and soft. She did not pull away. Traffic surged through the streets and skies beneath them. “Without you, there’s no race. I’m just running, in the dark, alone. And so are you. Burdened, with no one to share the burden.”
“This won’t work.”
“I’ll take that risk, if you will.”