The Craft Sequence: The First Five Novels (Craft Sequence #1-5)

by Max Gladstone

“You miss our gods?” “Why shouldn’t I?” “They’re soaked in blood.” “So am I. So are you. So’s this city. You seem to think it’s different if we kill for gods or for water; either way the victim dies at the end.”

“We’re better fed, I’ll grant, but so what? Cows on a farm are fed. As for ’protected,’ Dresediel Lex only ever fell to one adversary: the one who rules us now. My problem isn’t that we no longer sacrifice, it’s that we’re no longer conscious of the sacrifices we make. That’s what gods are for.”

Unconscious, his silence was the silence of the sea. His slow indrawn breaths were the rolling tide, the sleeping twitch of his hand a hurricane. Eons past, in deep time, the first Quechal had looked out over the ocean, seen chaos, and given it form, and name, and life.

“I can’t believe I did that.” “It happens. Everyone takes their first sight of Qet in a different way. I’ve seen grown men kneel; one Craftsman I know wept.”

“I thought it would be like the Serpents,” she said. “But it’s worse.” “Yes.” “They’re beasts, however big they are. Terrors. But that’s a God. Not a half-conscious spirit like the ones we bound in Seven Leaf. Qet ruled us, once. Loved us. And we loved him.”

“Those are chains,” he said, “of a sort. Qet fought the King in Red during Liberation. The Sea-Lord was broken on his own altar. But he didn’t die.”

We sacrifice our right to think of ourselves as good people, our right to think our life is good, our city is just. And so we and our city both survive.”

Since the Skittersill Rising, Caleb’s father had become a myth, to his son as much as to the rest of the city: a name shouted from newspaper headlines and whispered in dark corners. He was a legend, and a legend could not be a father.

“Disgusting.” He laughed. “You are comfortable when violence is done by others on your behalf—when gods are imprisoned, when men are slain or reduced to slavery, you do not blink. But faced with the need to dirty your own hands, you shudder.”

“You will not stop me,” Temoc said. “The Gods lived before you, and when you die they will endure.” “I died eighty years ago.” Kopil’s voice held no trace of humor. “Your gods and I have that much in common.”

laughed when the Canter’s Shell shattered, and the Serpents laughed with her. She understood Allesandre’s madness now. Sanity was the gap between perception and desire, and that gap had closed. The Serpents’ power belonged to her: millennia of sacrifice congealed into will and flame. What could she imagine that she could not create? What could she hate that she could not destroy?

In their diamond mouths, in their gleaming teeth, in their molten hearts, they received him. All were received. All lived. No, not lived—all endured, sleeping through centuries: every sacrifice, every victim, caught and one with the Serpents.

“The God Wars aren’t over,” Caleb said. “I know several gods who would disagree,” Kopil said, “were they alive to do so.” “The God Wars never ended on this continent, because nobody signed a peace. The Iskari have a peace, and the Shining Empire, but here we’ve kept up the war in silence. Craftsmen score victory after victory, but gods are patient. Ideas don’t die easily. True believers pass faith, and anger, to new generations.”

He took the King in Red’s hand. Power struck him, filled him, shone through his scars. The long scroll of history began to write itself.

“Basically. I’ve had a few bad experiences. Most of our sponsors, they have a history. The King in Red broke the Quechal gods on his altar, and killed the moon in single combat; Ilyana Rakesblight and the Blade Queen seared the sky over Kho Katang. You don’t even want to know the outline of half the stories I’ve heard about Belladonna Albrecht.”

“A goddess of thieves,” Cat said, as if the thought was funny. “I don’t know about thieves. She was ours.” Cat nodded. “My goddess back onshore, she was moonlight and order and water and stone. A lantern in dark places.” For the first time, she didn’t sound angry at her old life. Sad, instead, and distant.

“Look at Dresediel Lex, ruled by hungry skeleton kings. Look at crumbling Alt Selene. Would you rather we be the butcher of a continent, like Shikaw, or a mechanical wasteland like King Clock’s country? Or I guess we could have sold ourselves to the Iskari, or to Camlaan. Played host to military bases and squid cathedrals. They’re worse than tourists, I hear.”

Don’t look back. Bend the dream to your will. Mara is here. Find her and leave. You are here because you chose to be here. (But she could not believe that whisper. To believe was to admit her control, break the nightmare, return to the branching gardens of her own mind. The nightmare telegraph’s other double-logic: you must accept that all nightmares are real.)

Besides, I hold you a person of grave conscience. Such people commit atrocities, of course, but they suffer for them. Yet your nightmares are old: fears of being trapped, and devoured, and contained. I can taste their age, like that of a fine wine.

“We make our own choices. If we are lucky, we last long enough to live with them.”

“There are gargoyles in Alt Coulumb,” Kai said. “Seril’s children. The goddess made them. Zurish gods made the sentient ice that walks Koschei’s empire—or the ice made the gods. Some dragons claim they made themselves, but you never really know with dragons.”

“I don’t see a contradiction.” Their ascent grew steeper, and the horizon bucked and reared. Always at this stage of the climb Kai felt that deep monkey fear of twisted balance, of the eternal fall. “Yes, we evolved somewhere in the Old World, probably in the Southern Gleb. We spread over earth and sea for a few hundred millennia. An eon or so back, some people landed here after a long voyage, either from Kath or the Gleb, the Hidden Schools are still arguing which. And here, we became human.”

“The world is a collection of power, right? That’s Maestre Gerhardt’s line. So we study relations that give rise to power. Reality’s made of self-perpetuating patterns, some of which are complex enough to”—she opened a door in the stairway wall that had not existed before she reached for it, and emerged onto a stone floor, Teo following—“to alter themselves.” They walked down a narrow hall, lined with doors behind which slithery things hissed. “Truth is a momentary condition of these fluctuating patterns, a matter of negotiation. Our agreements, this contract”—waving the contract itself—“these are realer than any property of what you’d call matter. Gerhardt understood this first through comparative mythology, then through math. Beliefs give rise to truth.”

“The world’s a complicated place, and it changes, that’s all. People interpret the universe, and their interpretation alters it.”

“Once, there was darkness. All that was and wasn’t, in the same place and time. The Mother hung curled in the tight space of the first moments, and there she gave birth to Makawe and his sisters. That time-place was too small for them, so they pressed against its borders until they burst through, and found themselves atop a mountain above stretching water. But sunlight was too harsh, so they returned to darkness. Humans came next, rays of light rising out of the Mother. To hide from the sun we clad ourselves in mud, and shaped that mud into our bodies. It dried, and we were trapped within. Some the mud fit, and some it didn’t.”

That was not your dream. Whose dream, then? A goddess’s. The cries stopped. They watched her through time, living and dead alike. Great faces, miles broad. Women. Men. Animals. Wise. Loving. Accusing. Betrayed.

She’d thought the idols were alive. She was wrong. No one idol was alive. All of them were. Alive, and alone. Trapped. A single mind, trying to express itself through a succession of voices. Donning idols like masks as she, as She, reached out and down into the mortal world. Going mad in eons of deep time, without anyone to talk to, without worshippers to call her name. Whenever she tried to speak, her mouthpiece died. And each death, torture.

“You talk as if there’s a war coming.” “Of course there is. You read the newspapers. Giant serpents over Dresediel Lex. A god killed in Alt Coulumb, and the outbreak there a year later. These aren’t accidents. There’s a story here. And it’s not just the big things, the sudden changes and grand tales. Koschei’s armies fence with the Golden Horde across the steppe—because they’re scared. The Shining Empire stretches its tentacles across the Pax, and Dhistran armies train in police actions for an invasion they know will come one day. The world’s smaller than ever, and you put too many big things in a small space and they eye one another wondering who’s biggest. We may be social animals, but our gods are not. They’re hungry, and bloody.”

“We’ve waited since the wars for the gods to come back,” she said, and was surprised the words sounded so flat. Stone walls and statues ate the echoes of her voice. “And you’ve been killing them for years.” “When you say it that way, it sounds bad.” He shook his head. “We’ve been saving the world. One death at a time.”

“The gods won’t stop waking up,” she said. “Then we’ll keep killing them.” “The island is changing, Jace. You’re trying to save a world that’s going away. We all have been, since the wars. Old Kavekana’s gone.” She felt a thrill as she said it, a breaking of thick ice. “Something new is about to happen.”

Though a half-drunk Telomiri priest had told her once that traitors did not burn in hell. They froze. She pondered the tortures of ice. Fire seemed pathetic by comparison—people burned fast, and passed out from smoke. Ice could bind and crush, cut, pierce. From ice one might sculpt hooks. Pliers. Spears. Cages.

Stone-still, hands aflame, she tried to quell the voices in her head. Gods. Kai had kept her vow. And this was her reward.

She’d asked Claude about his time inside, and he answered as well as he could, but she now understood the limits of his explanation. The experience beggared thought. From his broken sentences, she imagined the Penitent as a walking iron maiden, applying pain to force the prisoner to act. She imagined a metallic whisper in her ear, a prompt or request, with torture to follow. She was right, and wrong.

She didn’t, but she was done. She decided to resist him, and in exactly the same moment to obey. The thought formed natural as falling. The pain came after, when she realized what had happened. The Penitent shaped her will from the inside out. Makawe built these as a teaching tool. The crystal had no mind of its own, only conviction. It used the prisoners’ minds to act on that conviction. Her thoughts were not her own. Not quite right, she realized as she approached his desk. Her thoughts were her own—as her thoughts would be if she shared the statue’s faith. The part of her that did not was a railing voice pressed down: her self reduced to a bad conscience, struggling for control. Wires cut and rolling joints crushed. She strode through a scalpel thicket, and left pieces of herself on each branch and twig. She stopped beside Mara, faced Jace’s desk, and stood at attention. She tried to run, but pain turned her stomach: physical pain from her body’s resistance, and mental anguish from her own failings. Resistance meant suffering. But how could she not resist the usurpation of her mind? By agreeing with the statue. By sharing its devotion, and its judgment. She didn’t know whether that thought came from her or from the crystal.

She’d never seen the ocean like this before. Before she had heard the orchestra’s discordant tuning notes, and now they melded to symphony. Light and wave, a clear view to the earth’s curve broken only by skyspires. The sea was a roiling deep peopled with hungry monsters, but its surface shone bright. Sunlight made the ocean more than monstrous repose. This was her freedom, to watch the waves, ennobled by the light of Penance. Below the surface, Kai tumbled, drowning.

Whatever else one might think of poets, they are excellent barometers for metaphysical shenanigans. Not as good as proper prophets, but these are fallen times.”

Meanwhile the Penitents stood watch, and kept faith. This was Kavekana’s duty, the duty of the whole Archipelago—but weak flesh forgot its promises. No matter. Stone endured. Stone watched. Stone reminded. And if reminders failed, stone would punish.

“Every minute we waste is one more that thing has to work.” “It’s already worked.” The old man stayed curled over. A wail drifted down the green slope from Penitent Ridge, and he flinched. “People break differently than you think. It’s not that you hurt someone enough and one moment they snap. It happens by degrees. Small accommodations. Insinuations. She’s moving now, from shade to shade.”

Modern Penitents, drunken watchmen whispered in their cups—drink was the one vice permitted them, and they indulged like other men and women, maybe worse—modern Penitents were sculpted under a Craftsman’s guidance, from living rock on some distant atoll to which even the Iskari Navy now gave a wide berth. They were sharp, industrial, and reminded Izza of the warships that docked at East Claw: straight lines and planes angled to form a joint or suggest a muscle. Kai’s Penitent was different. Thin furrows whorled its back, as if a giant had built the thing by hand and left fingerprints behind.

“Teo, what the hell did you just do?” “Some day maybe I’ll tell you about Quechal priests and the scars they leave. Trust me, it hurts more than it looks.”

“Familiarity breeds contempt” was a saying Kai’d heard at school. The saying did not apply to Archipelagic ocean. In waters beset by star kraken, sentient storms, and sunken cities where alien monsters lived, familiarity bred terror and, failing that, death.

What people, she mocked herself as she said the words. A few refugees. Street kids. Children of no country, and a goddess with no children. Yet. Are you sure? And then there was Cat. Chosen of a goddess, and alone. Like her, in a way. And maybe she’d known that weeks ago, when she saw the woman fight Penitents bare-handed. Lonely, unsure, marooned on a strange island, she saw a girl, a woman, about to make her own mistakes, and tried to save her from them. “I am,” she said, and touched Cat’s arm. The silver shell parted, and so did the secret skin Izza wore outside her own. “Thank you.”

No one wanted to realize the island was changing.” “Except for you.” “Except for I only came after him, came after all of you, for selfish reasons. Because everyone acted like I was crazy, and I had to prove I wasn’t. That’s not justice. Mara, maybe she should have been the one to save us. But Jace stuck her in one of those things. I’m not a just woman. I’m not a revolutionary. I don’t know what I am.”

She looked at him, sideways, really looked at him: strong jaw, flat cheeks and nose, hard eyes under a heavy brow, muscles bulging against shirt and jacket, the man that had been made out of the boy. And she saw, inside him, something younger, like that trace of grit that stuck in oysters for years makes a pearl. Three years they lived together, and she’d never seen that. The broken boy, wondering now, maybe wondering always, what he’d be. The boy who never got the chance to decide, and searched in books for images of the hero he thought he might have been if he had not lost his way.

Cat flew, and Kai watched her go: trailing moonlight as she rose through time and space and layers of story, out into the world. Leaving Kai here, at the center.

The great challenge, in theft, is the transport of stolen goods. A thief of souls must have a receptacle for the souls she’s stolen: gold and gems, magisterium wood, works of art, raw material transformed by human hands. Like the last work of a brilliant poet. She opened the paper she’d torn from Margot’s notebook. Ink shimmered green in the light of stars and candles. The green glow rose, and other colors unfolded from it, drifting through the chapel toward the paintings on the walls. Red, for the Eagle; Silver, for the Squid; Blue, for the Lady. And there in the room’s center, where the light mingled, hung a suggestion of face and form, indistinct, massive. Izza realized her skin was shining. “Who is that?” “You know her,” Izza said. “You’ve known her all along. But we’ve never told her story before now.” “Will you?” She heard a note of hope there, and wondered whether she deserved it. Behind the altar, at the head of the chapel, she faced her audience of one. No. Two. “In the beginning,” she said, “was the Mother.”

“We fought south of the Shining Empire, in the islands off Kho Khatang. They needed gods and priests who knew boats and islands and water. I took to the skies as a bird of flame, and our warriors clogged the channels. Craftsmen rode in on dragonback, and demon chariots that trailed lightning. Clinging fire fell. They poisoned the land and sea. They poisoned time. The Carrion Queen and the Blade Child caught me in the sky, and our battle burned. Unlucky travelers who visit the delta at night see echoes of our struggle, and go mad.” He breathed, ragged. “We died. All of us but me. And I woke blind and broken.”

“You could have stopped us. Helped us.” “It wasn’t my place to speak, to claim to know what was best. I tried that before. You see? My sisters and I, we knew that if the Craftsmen won, they’d destroy the world—next century, if not this one. The power they wield’s too great, and human minds are weak, and hungry. Sensible decisions lead to sensible decisions and before long the land lies barren. So we did what we thought was right, and we died for it, and we dragged our children along to die with us. A generation sacrificed in a single battle. That was our legacy. Mine. Can you blame me for thinking the island deserved a new path?”

Kai laughed. “What’s so funny?” “There were all these prophecies,” she said, “about the gods’ return. Unnatural ships would come over the sea, bearing the world’s wealth. Our greatest poets would sing on the seashore before Makawe. Kavekana’ai would be crowned with light. And they’ve all come true, and nobody realized.” “Guess that’s the way with prophecies,” Izza said. “Guess so.”

The Penitent was built, after all, to heed Kavekana’s gods, and wait for their return. A voice vibrated through the web, small, lost. Izza? She had told herself she wouldn’t cry. I’m here, she said. We’re here. All of us. Nick and Ivy and Jet and the Blue Lady and the Squid and the Wind Woman and so many more. And Kai. You don’t know Kai yet. You’ll like her. I don’t remember, Sophie said. I don’t remember me. That’s okay. She tried to smile. We’ll remember for you.