Two Serpents Rise Read Online Free Page A

on a different scale from other men: torso like an inverted pyramid, arms as thick as his legs, a neck that sloped out to meld with his shoulders. His skin was a black cutout illuminated by glowing silver scars. The same shadows that clouded his body obscured his features, but Caleb would have known him anywhere: last of the Eagle Knights, High Priest of the Sun, Chosen of the Old Gods. Scourge of the Craftsmen and right-thinking folk of Dresediel Lex. Fugitive. Terrorist. Father.
    “You’re telling me you don’t know anything about Bright Mirror.”
    “I know the place,” Temoc said. “What has happened there?”
    “Don’t play dumb with me, Dad.”
    “I play at nothing.”
    “Tzimet got into the reservoir. We’re lucky they killed a security guard before the water cycled into the mains this morning. Otherwise we’d have thousands out already, crawling in people’s mouths, spearing them from the inside.”
    Temoc frowned. “Do you think I would do that? Consort with demons, endanger the city?”
    “Maybe not. But your people might.”
    “We stand up for our religious rights. We resist oppression. We do not murder innocents.”
    “Bullshit.”
    Temoc lowered his head. “I do not like your tone.”
    “What about when you ambushed the King in Red five months back?”
    “Your … boss … broke Qet Sea-Lord on His own altar. He impaled Gods on a tree of lightning, and laughed as They twitched in pain. He deserves seventeen-fold vengeance. I am the last priest of the old ways. If I do not avenge, who will?”
    “You attacked him in broad daylight, with thunder and shadow and incendiary grenades. People died. He survived. You knew he would. No one who can kill gods would go down that easily. All you did was hurt the innocent.”
    “No one who works for Red King Consolidated is wholly innocent.”
    “I work for RKC, Dad.”
    An airbus passed overhead. Light from its windows cast the pavement in alternating strips of brilliance and shade. The light revealed Temoc’s face in slivers: jutting cliff of jaw, heavy brow, dark, deep eyes, Caleb’s own broad nose. A dusting of white at his temples, and the firm lines chiseled into cheeks and forehead, were his only signs of age. No man in Dresediel Lex could say how old Temoc was, not even his son—he had been a hale young knight when the gods fell, which made him eighty at least. He nurtured the surviving gods, and they kept him young, and strong. He was all they had left—and for twenty years, they had been his only companions.
    Caleb looked away. His eyes burned, and his mouth felt dry. He massaged his forehead. “Look, I’m sorry. It’s been a long night. I’m not at my, I mean, neither of us is at his best. You say you don’t have anything to do with the Bright Mirror thing?”
    “Yes.”
    “If you’re lying, we’ll find out.”
    “I do not lie.”
    Tell that to Mom, he could have said, but didn’t. “Why are you here?”
    Caleb’s father might have been a statue for how little he moved—a bas relief in one of the temples where he had prayed before the God Wars, where he prayed and cut his arms and legs and dreamed that one day he would tear a man’s heart from his chest and feed it to the Serpents. “I worry about you,” he said. “You have been staying out late. Not sleeping enough. Gambling.”
    Caleb stared at Temoc. He wanted to laugh, or to cry, but neither impulse won out, so he did nothing.
    “You should take better care of yourself.”
    “Thanks, Dad,” he said.
    “I worry about you.”
    Yes, Caleb thought. You worry about me in those last raw hours before nightfall, before you try to tear down everything we who work in this city build during the day. You worry about me, because there’s no more priesthood, and what are kids to do these days when there are no more reliable careers involving knives, altars, and bleeding victims? “That makes two of us,” he said, and: “Look, I have to go. I have work in four hours. Can we