Two Serpents Rise Read Online Free PDF

buildings prostrated themselves, and people slouched nearly naked beneath the beating sun. By this hour Craftsmen, bankers, brokers, and all others who dressed for work were safely ensconced in air-conditioned offices. Actors and students and night-shift workers walked the streets in shorts, light shirts, miniskirts, tunics, sleeveless ponchos. Caleb caught himself following the long bare legs of three young women down the sidewalk, and closed his eyes. A sharp smile surfaced from the confusion of his memory: the woman, Mal.
    He bought a newspaper from a corner stand for two thaums—cheap enough, but his head ached from spending even a little soulstuff. Hangover, had to be. He’d won a good chunk of soul the night before, shouldn’t need to visit the bank for a week or so. The newspaper held no news about Bright Mirror Reservoir, a good sign. The King in Red did not control the press directly, but news of a crisis like Bright Mirror had to be managed.
    Caleb walked two blocks to the airbus station and caught the next dirigible downtown. The bus moved west and north, threading around and beneath skyspires toward the 700 block of Sansilva, where eighty-story pyramids rose to worship the sun.
    No real worship had taken place there since Liberation, of course. Still, the pyramids impressed.
    The air lost its haze, and the sky retreated from the earth. Craftsmen and Craftswomen drew power from starlight and moonlight, though they could also drink from the sun, or from candles, fires, living beings. Smoke and exhaust from the city’s wagons, factories, and cooking stoves would not disturb simple, day-to-day Craft, but the Concerns of the 700 block brooked no interference with their dark and delicate work. They burned their sky clean.
    In the depths of winter, when rain washed sweat from the city’s brow and flash-flood rivers coursed down alleys, the sun still beat down on the 700 block. At night, sorcerous clouds covered the poorer districts, Skittersill and Stonewood, Monicola and Central and Fisherman’s Vale, reflecting light back to earth so that, in dark Sansilva, even the faintest stars would hang exposed to hungry Craftsmen.
    Caleb got off the bus a half-block from RKC’s headquarters, the obsidian pyramid at 667 Sansilva. True Quechal protesters stood outside, chanting and waving clapboard signs: NO DEMONS IN OUR WATER. THE GODS DEFEND. NO WATER WITHOUT BLOOD. Half wore modern clothes, slacks and shirts and skirts, and half garments even Caleb’s father would have thought clownishly traditional: white dresses hemmed in silver cord for the women, and cotton kilts for the men, their bare and unscarred torsos covered with Quechal glyphs in red paint. Four black-uniformed Wardens watched the crowd, arms crossed. Sunlight glinted off their badges, and off the silver planes of their faces.
    As Caleb approached, a soapbox preacher pointed to him with one gnarled finger and cried, “Flee this place! Traitors walk here, traitors to blood, traitors to Gods and their own kind!”
    Caleb ignored the man and edged around the crowd. No sense wondering how the True Quechal had learned about Bright Mirror. Their noses were better than vultures’ for smelling rotten meat.
    “If you will not flee,” the old man called, “then join us. It is not too late. Stand against the blood-betrayers, the worse-than-dead! Take up the cause!”
    “Get lost,” Caleb shouted in High Quechal as he walked past.
    The old man’s face twisted in confusion. He probably didn’t know High Quechal, beyond a handful of half-remembered words from some underground religious service. Few spoke the priests’ tongue these days. Caleb only knew it because his father had taught him.
    He walked through the protest. Behind, the chants and slogans swelled again to crescendo.
    *   *   *
    Caleb stepped off the lift at the pyramid’s twenty-third floor, into the silence of men and women working.
    He wound through cubicles toward the Director’s corner