Two Serpents Rise Read Online Free PDF Page A

can look now,” Teo said.
    She’d wrapped herself in a plush white bathrobe, hair a tangled mass on her forehead. Compton wound sinuously between her bare feet, and licked sweat from her ankles. Over Teo’s left shoulder, Caleb saw a blonde wearing white cotton briefs and nothing else stagger into the apartment’s one bedroom and slam the door. “She seems nice,” he said, lamely. Teo didn’t respond. He tried again: “Sorry. I’ll go.”
    She assessed him with a glance: clothes in disarray, hair standing up, tie crooked and loose. “What happened?”
    “The Bright Mirror thing went south. There was a girl there, and she woke the Tzimet up. I have to be in the office early, but I need sleep. Hoped I could use your couch.” I didn’t realize you were using it, he thought but didn’t say. “Sorry. Dumb idea.” He didn’t want to go home. “I hope I didn’t screw up anything for you.”
    She sighed. “You didn’t screw anything up. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Don’t worry about it. Sam’s emotional. An artist. She’ll be fine in the morning. The couch is yours, if you want it.”
    “I shouldn’t.”
    “I can’t let you stumble back out into the night looking like a half-strangled puppy. I’ll tell her you’re one of my idiot cousins or something. Don’t make me regret it.”
    “Too late,” he said, but she had already turned her back on him.
    Lights off, he lay on Teo’s couch in the dark, staring up at the terrifying cubist landscapes that adorned her living room. A panorama of the Battle of Dresediel Lex hung over the couch, burning pyramids and torn sky, spears of flame and ice, bodies impaled on moonlight sickles, warring gods and Craftsmen rendered in vivid scrolls of paint. One corner of the painting showed Temoc locked in single combat with the King in Red, before he fell.
    Caleb’s eyes drifted shut. Tzimet towered above him, reaching toward the cold stars. Compton dug claws into his leg. He rolled onto his side. Leather creaked.
    He drifted to sleep, drowning in a black sea.

 
    5
    Dreams of knives and blood on stone woke Caleb to the hard harsh morning, to the light beyond Teo’s windows and to the crick in his neck. He pulled himself off the white leather couch like a man pulling himself out of hell, and staggered for her bathroom, rubbing one hand over the scars that webbed his torso.
    A long shower later, he dripped across Teo’s living-room carpet to the hall closet. His nightclub suit would do, a sharp pressed gray with a white shirt, so long as he left the vermilion vest and spats and cravat behind. Yesterday’s shoes were scuffed, but serviceable. He’d have them polished on the way, and find a toothbrush, too.
    From Teo’s spare pantry he scrounged a bowl of polenta, and two eggs, which he scrambled. On the table as he sat down to eat, he found a note written in her sharp hand.
    I’d say help yourself to breakfast, but I know you already have.
    See you at work. The door will lock behind you.
    Sam’s pissed, by the way. No surprise. I’ll work my way back into her good graces, but you owe me coffee, at least.
    The signature was an uppercase T in pen strokes so deep they dimpled the thick parchment.
    The wall clock read 9:47 A.M. Caleb ate a hurried breakfast under the baleful stares of bloodthirsty paintings, washed his plate and the frying pan, and left in a rush, realizing only after Teo’s door clicked shut behind him that he had left his hat on her coffee table.
    *   *   *
    Dresediel Lex crushed him in a cacophonous embrace. Carts and carriages and wagons clogged the street outside Teo’s building. Drivers shouted at pedestrians, horses, and other drivers as if they could break gridlock by inventive language and the threat of violence. Couatl, buzzing optera, airbuses and simple balloons tangled in the flat blue sky.
    Heat ruled the city, dry dominant heat like a god’s gaze or the breath of a forge. All bowed before the heat;