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

Balam spoke slowly, as if his words were tough meat he had to chew for flavor. “But why would I?”
    A semicircle of runners gathered. Their leathers and spikes were uniforms of a sort, Caleb thought, sure as ancient Quechal paints and piercings.
    “Mal challenged me to find her. I’ve traced her here.” He sounded more confident than he felt.
    Balam’s stomach protruded from his jacket, a swell of muscle beneath a thin layer of flesh. His skin glowed roundly in the firelight. “You can’t catch her.” He looked Caleb over, examining the thin arms under his jacket, the slender legs inside his trousers. “Might kill you even to try.”
    “She challenged me.”
    The trainer rested his thick fingers on the mound of his belly. “Mal runs like there’s something after her with teeth and something ahead brighter than gold. If you go against her, you will fall, and you will shatter. Do you understand?”
    “Yes,” Caleb said. I just want to talk with her, a small part of him railed. He ignored it.
    “You like the ground too much. Run from it, and it’ll break you.” Balam turned back to the pillars. The runners there, who had paused to watch the conversation, sprang once more to motion. The audience on the ground remained, because Caleb remained. Balam ignored them. His fingers tapped his stomach like a drum. He smelled of leather, and smoke, and animal sweat.
    “I’ll find Mal.” Don’t blink, Caleb told himself, any more than normal. Count your heartbeats. This is no different from bluffing any player at any table in the world. “Or I’ll tear the city apart looking for her.” Or the Wardens would.
    “Best get started.”
    Caleb had almost decided to leave when he noticed the runners beside him staring into the southern sky. Beyond the pillars rose the warehouse wall, and on top of the wall a woman stood silhouetted against the gray night. Caleb recognized her, even before wind fanned the flames behind him and threw flickering red light on her face. She was a blaze of sunset wrapped in skin: hands on hips, elbows out, head back. She wore tan trousers, thin-soled boots, a sleeveless shirt and brown gloves, all worn, all torn.
    Caleb recognized her, and ran. There were no ladders, no stairs leading up the wall, but a few pillars rose nearby. From those he could leap and reach the wall, grip the edge, pull himself up. She could escape before he reached her, but if she wanted to escape why show herself at all?
    Long use had worn handholds into the nearest pillar. He climbed. She watched him. The other runners paused.
    He reached the top of his pillar. Monkey-fear seized his gut as he sought the next: five feet away. Five feet, easy, he told himself, you used to jump from rock to rock in your back yard all the time, five feet apart give or take. Nothing to worry about, only tense and go.
    He landed before he realized he had jumped, and the shock shot through his body, every cell screaming: never do this again. He might have listened, but his balance was too far forward. Stopping wasn’t an option.
    He leapt to the next pillar. Fear pounded through his veins instead of blood. Three more pillars, two, one, and then only the gap between pillar and wall. He was moving too fast to stop, and airborne above broken stone.
    He struck the wall chest-first. The world inverted, and he coughed up dust and dry rock and coppery blood. He didn’t fall.
    His arms splayed out atop the ruined wall, and the rest of his body dangled over the drop. Legs flailed for a foothold in pitted brickwork. His fingers slipped and found no purchase.
    He tried to pull himself up, but his left arm was a solid bar of pain, an exploding universe contained in the shoulder joint. Broken? No, that would hurt more. Dislocated, maybe. Damn.
    Footsteps on brick. Brown thin-soled boots stepped between his arms, and she knelt. He saw the curve of her calf, and remembered her jumping, twisting, falling from Bright Mirror Dam into night. The closed-eye