Flames quickened in the scarred woman’s eyes.
Caleb lost several small hands, doubled up through a member of the leather brigade, and rose at game’s end slightly richer than when he sat down. When he thanked them all and made his way to the bar, the scarred woman joined him. She bought his drink, and waved off his protests. “I’m Shannon,” she said.
Caleb introduced himself. “You play well for a newcomer.” He raised his whiskey to the light, and watched the room through its amber lens.
“What’s to say I’m new?” She knocked back her shot, and ordered another.
“You’re comfortable with risk in general but you’re not used to poker. You took a ten and a seven to the flop, but you scared off three hands better than yours.”
“A woman has to get her thrills somehow,” she replied with a crooked smile.
“Where did you get yours before you started to play cards?”
“Cliff running.” She leaned back against the bar. “I was a good runner. Skill matters to a point and after that it’s how much you’re willing to bleed. Three months back, I bled too much.” She swung her hand through a plummeting arc, and turned her head to show him the scar.
“Looks bad.”
“It was bad,” she said. “I was out for almost a month, and when I woke my balance was twisted. I train when I can. During the week I come here, and hope the game will keep me from growing scared.”
“Doesn’t it bore you, after what you’ve done?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes, it surprises me.” She shivered as she downed her second shot. “What do you want with a washed-up runner?”
“Pardon?”
“This isn’t my game, but it is yours. I can tell. Even this dive has two tables that play for higher stakes. When I ran, I never went to a course that wouldn’t challenge me. You joined our table for a reason, and I don’t think it had anything to do with those kids.”
“You’re not a humble person.”
“Humility is a vice of which I have never been accused.”
“I’m looking for a runner,” he admitted, “named Mal. Malina, maybe. Quechal woman, short hair, about my height. I hoped you could help me.”
Shannon sucked air through her teeth. “Crazy Mal.”
“That sounds like her.”
“She’s good. You won’t know what to do with her when you find her.”
“I’ll worry about that when I do.”
She laughed, a blunt sound heavy with alcohol. “I can’t help you much. Mal keeps apart from the rest of us, and I’ve been away too long to know where she runs now. The courses change.” She finished the drink. “Walk me home,” she said, and limped through the crowd toward the door.
He escorted her down long straight streets below signs ghostlit in colors no god ever made. They turned off the Corsair Parkway onto a lane of small clapboard houses nestled against the foot of the Drakspine. Craftsmen’s palaces gleamed on the mountain peaks, and clouds and skyspires shone with the city’s light. Shannon’s house was dark. As they reached the stoop he heard within the sound of laughter and muffled conversation.
“Roommates,” she said. She laid a hand on his arm. Her eyes reflected the city like still pools. “Do you want to come inside?”
“Yes.” He didn’t move.
She sank onto the stoop, and looked up at him. “But.”
“I’m on a quest, I think,” he said, not having realized this before. “Or something like one.”
“Those went out of fashion a long time ago.”
“Maybe. Maybe that’s the problem. I’m sorry.”
She bent her legs, crossed her arms over her knees, and let out a long-held breath. “It’s better this way. I’m drunk.”
“You’re strong,” he said. “You’ll be running again soon.”
She smiled.
“Where can I find her, and when?”
“She used to run on Sixthday, in the border between Skittersill and Stonewood. You’ll find a trace of her there, if anywhere. Look for the fire. Balam can help you—he’s a fat man, with a smiling face.” Shannon tapped the back of her head. “Here. He trains runners. He’ll know more than I do.”
She uncurled back against the steps, and waited below him, considering. A carriage passed on a side street. The jangle of tack and harness faded, and so did the laughter inside the house.
“Go, then” she said at last. “If you won’t stay.”
He thanked her, 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.” 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 pendant dangled around her neck, but it did not glow. She cocked her head to one side like a bird either curious or about to strike. Her eyes were wide, her eyebrows raised.
“If it isn’t the policeman,” she said.
“I’m no Warden. I’m not trying to arrest you.”
“Then why are you here? You’ve gone through a lot of trouble to find me.”
“I need to talk to you. For your own safety.”
“You do know how to make a girl feel safe,” she said, and: “A week from tonight, on top of the Rakesblight Center, at ten. Come. Race. If you catch me, then we’ll talk.”
“I’ll catch you.”
“Let’s see.” She touched the back of his right hand with her fingertip, cool and smooth and hard-polished from gripping rock. He closed his eyes, consciousness slipping; when he opened them again, she was gone.
He fell, right arm wheeling and left jutting at an odd angle from the socket: an angel with one wing broken. He struck something heavy and round and human, and thick arms set him gently on the broken ground. Caleb looked up into Balam’s blunt face. Other cliff runners peered down, astonished and confused. They crowded him with warmth.
“You still want to catch her?” Balam asked as Caleb struggled against his body’s weight to rise.
“Yes.”
The trainer didn’t reply.
Caleb closed his eyes, and thought about Mal, and about this strange massive man, old in middle age, and about Shannon and her scar. Who was Mal, to have this hobby?
He levered himself into a sitting position, and the pain from his arm almost made him vomit.
“You love the ground too much,” Balam said. “Or it loves you.”
“Where’s the nearest hospital?”
All told, once he escaped the god-shattered wasteland, once he staggered into a hospital waiting room, once the doctor looked down over the gold rims of her glasses and reached through his skin to set his shoulder from the inside, once he woke from the swoon of pain and soul-loss, he judged the evening a success.
Seven days. More than enough time to heal, and prepare.
When Teo met him in the hospital, she looked so worried he almost didn’t tell her the story.