Two Serpents Rise Read Online Free

these were his world.
    Wards at the dam’s crest stopped floods during the winter rains. They should hold the Tzimet.
    Emphasis on “should.”
    He swore. Mal (if that was her real name) was his best lead, and she’d be dead soon, if she wasn’t already. One misstep, a log rolling wrong underfoot, and she would fall into a demon’s mouth.
    He waited for her screams.
    A scream did come—but a scream of frustration, not pain, and issued from no human throat.
    Mal dove off the dam into empty space.
    Once, twice, she somersaulted, falling ten feet, fifteen. Caleb’s stomach sank. She fell, or flew, without sound.
    Twenty feet down, she snapped to a midair stop and dangled, nose inches from the dam’s pebbled concrete face. A harness girded her hips, and a long thin cord ran from that harness to the crest of the dam.
    Blue light flared above as Tzimet strained against the wards. Iron groaned and tore. A claw raked over the dam’s edge. Lightning crackled at its tip.
    Mal pushed off the concrete and began to sway like a pendulum, reaching for the nearest catwalk—one level down from Caleb. He ran to the stairs. Another talon pressed through the dam wards, scraping, seeking.
    At the apex of Mal’s next swing, he strained for her. She clasped a calloused hand around his wrist, pulled herself to him, wrapped a leg around the catwalk’s railing, and unhooked her tether.
    “Thanks,” she said. Sparks showered upon them. Fire and Craft-light lanced in her eyes.
    “You’re insane.”
    “So I’ve heard,” she said, and smiled, and let go of his arm.
    He grabbed for her, too slowly. She fell—ten feet back and down, to roll and land on a lower catwalk, stand, run, and leap again. She accelerated, jumping from ledge to ledge until she reached the two-hundred-yard ladder to the valley floor.
    Caleb climbed over the railing to follow her, but the chasm clenched his stomach. His legs quaked. He retreated from the edge.
    Above, demons clawed at the emptiness that bound them.
    The Wardens would catch her in the valley, he told himself, knowing they would not. She was already gone.

 
    4
    An hour and a half later, a driverless carriage deposited Caleb on the corner of Sansilva Boulevard and Bloodletter’s Street, beside a jewelry shop and a closed coffee house. He hurt. Adrenaline’s tide receded to reveal pits of exhaustion, pain, and shock. He’d told the Wardens he was fine, he’d make it home on his own, thanks for the concern, but these were lies. He was a good liar.
    Broad streets stretched vacant on all sides. The carriage rattled off down the empty road. Night wind brushed his hair, tried and failed to wrap him in a comforting embrace.
    He remembered lightning-lit eyes, and a tan body falling.
    He’d given the carriage the wrong address, and stumbled a block and a half to his destination, a ten-story metal pyramid built by an Iskari architect mimicking Quechal designs. Over the door, a plaque bore the building’s name in an art deco perversion of High Quechal script: the House of Seven Stars.
    He exhaled. It was this, or home.
    “You’ve come up in the world,” said a voice behind him, deep as the foundations of the earth.
    Caleb closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and counted in his head to ten and back in Low Quechal, High Quechal, and common Kathic. By the time he finished (four, three, two, one), the flare of anger dulled to a familiar, smoldering rage. His nails bit into his palms. Perfect ending to a perfect day.
    “Hi, Dad,” he said.
    “Either that, or you’ve abandoned that rat-trap house in the Vale to live off your friends until they kick you out.”
    “It’s a long way home. I’ve been working.”
    “You shouldn’t work so late.”
    “Yeah,” Caleb said. “I shouldn’t. I wouldn’t have to, either, if you’d stop trying to kill people.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    Caleb turned around.
    Temoc towered in the darkness beyond the streetlamps. He was a man built