Two Serpents Rise by Max Gladstone

Author:Max Gladstone [Gladstone, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery, Science Fiction, Fantasy
ISBN: 9780765333124
Google: zdBEAwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0765333139
Barnesnoble: 0765333139
Goodreads: 16059411
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2013-10-28T11:00:00+00:00

28

Seven Leaf Station was not designed for comfort. Below the surface, between banks of slowly revolving Craft circles and humming soul catchers, Heartstone architects had added as an afterthought a few bare rooms for the station’s staff. The Wardens split four chambers among themselves. Caleb chose a cold bed in a room with a writing desk, a few pictures of a dead man’s family, and a chessboard set with a problem involving knight moves. He glanced at the board but didn’t mull over the problem. He had enough of his own.

Troubled by the thought of sleeping in a corpse’s sweat, Caleb stripped the bed and remade it with fresh linens. He lay down to rest, but sleep evaded him. He saw blood and water flow from a cut throat, surging in time to the beat of the machines that drained the lake.

He stood at last, slipped on his shoes and jacket, and left the room with the chess problem still unsolved. Turning through a maze of corridors he found the Wardens’ larder; he poured a cold glass of water, assembled a plate of rice and meat and tortillas, and bore them back into the twisting halls.

There was no mystery as to where Mal slept. When Caleb and the Wardens followed her into the under-station, they found all the doors open save one, marked “Manager’s Quarters” in thick block letters.

The door was still closed. He knocked, waited, and heard her muted by steel: “Go away.”

“I brought you food. You didn’t come to dinner.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“It’s not for your sake. What if we hit bad weather on the way back and I’m thrown out of the basket? I want you strong enough to catch me.”

“Who says I would catch you?”

He opened the door and stepped inside.

The manager’s suite was larger than the other rooms, but still small. It smelled faintly of incense, and contained an overstuffed bookcase, a desk, a nightstand, and a large bed.

The far wall was transparent. Beyond it writhed the gods impaled on thorn-tree contracts, larger underwater than they had seemed from the surface. Currents and passing fish distorted their features. Their cries did not penetrate the walls.

Mal sat in silhouette, cross-legged on the bed with her back to Caleb. She was naked from the waist up, the curves of her neck and ribs and the swell of her hip lit blue and green and red by light from the window. As he entered, she lifted her shirt from the bed and slid it on, one arm at a time, without hurry. She fastened one button at her breast, but did not look back at him. “I thought I told you to stay out.”

“You didn’t. You told me to go away.”

“And you listened so well.” She set a slender object down on the nightstand. In the dim light he could not tell what it was.

“I’m a good listener.” He set the plate of food on the desk, turned the desk chair to face her, and sat, watching her back.

She seemed so still, a statue in contrast with the fluid pain beyond the window.

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