Read Online Two Serpents Rise by Max Gladstone - Free Book Online

and left her there, and wondered at himself the whole way home.

 
    9
    Dresediel Lex had worse neighborhoods than the Skittersill. Some places were too dangerous for the dangerous, and one of these was Stonewood.
    Before the Craftsmen came, the petrified forest to the city’s southeast stood barren, uninhabited and uninviting. After Liberation, refugees flooded in, hoping for new lives, jobs, family, free of gods. Some found what they sought, and others—drunk, mad, or simply poor—pitched their tents in Stonewood, and banded together in loose clans for protection against the giant spiders that spun steel webs between dead and ancient trees.
    The people of Stonewood were less organized than the Skittersill mob, but jealous of their territory. Every few years, some enterprising hoods ventured south from Skittersill to stake a claim among the poor and lost. Their bodies were never found. The bodies of men and women from Stonewood who crept north to work or beg or whore appeared often indeed.
    Ten acres of shattered buildings and blighted land separated the two districts, and preserved them from constant bloodshed. During Liberation, a god had died there, draining life from soil and air in his desperate bid for survival. After sixty years, living beings still walked uneasy on those streets. Beggars who slept on the broken roads did not wake, or woke transformed by nightmare visions. No one visited the borderland, save cliff runners who came to drink and dance in the ruins.
    Caleb waited for Sixthday, when, Shannon said, Mal came to run. He suspected she was a high-pressure professional of some sort, Craftswoman maybe. Cliff running was her passion and escape, hence the late-night trips into the mountains, the precautions against being seen.
    At dusk he donned denim pants and caught a driverless carriage through the Skittersill. When the cab refused to take him farther south, he paid the horse and walked.
    The Skittersill ended in a jagged row of abandoned buildings, and the border began: rubble, ruined stone, rusted steel, the skeletons of shops, temples, towers broken by the dying god.
    Two blocks in, he saw firelight rise from the roofless wreckage of a warehouse. Caleb approached the ruin, and ignored the shadows that detached from rock and fallen wall to follow him.
    He met no sentries, only men and women lying drunk near fallen statues, smoking weed as they reclined against the foreheads of dead kings. Marks covered every surface, painted warnings and boasts in arcane calligraphy. Runners flitted between broken towers above, or scaled walls, spiders racing spiders.
    One wall of the warehouse lay collapsed, felled by time or a flailing divine limb. Cliff runners gathered inside, corded with muscle, covered with scars and tattooed on arm and chest and neck.
    A collection of pillars to the rear of the warehouse had once supported a lofted office, long since gone. Runners tested themselves there, jumping between pillars. Some landed and leapt again with ease, and others fell into packed dirt. A thick middle-aged man in a leather jacket shouted encouragement and abuse to them from below. A yellow tattooed face grinned on the back of his shaved head. This had to be Balam. Older by at least a decade than any of the other runners Caleb had seen: a survivor, fortysomething and ancient in a young man’s endeavor, his peers long since retired or dead.
    Caleb approached, waited for a lull in Balam’s tirade, and said, “Excuse me.”
    The man turned to him with thin-lipped surprise and contempt. Caleb had dressed to blend in, but jeans and leather jacket left him several pints of ink and a handful of piercings away from looking like he belonged. He’d debated dressing to show his scars, and decided against it; the scars would earn him respect, but also the wrong sort of attention. Who knew where the Wardens had informants? So he endured scorn, and pressed on: “Shannon said you could help me find Mal.”
    “Maybe I could.”