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

by Max Gladstone

She closed her eyes, found her center, and opened her eyes again. “Cafal has to justify her actions to the judiciary, and a few months back the judiciary decided to be more careful with civil protest. They’re spread thin. Last winter there was an outbreak in Alt Selene, and they won’t risk the same here.” The skeleton nodded. The crimson sparks of his eyes dimmed in thought. “I don’t understand,” Batac said. “The protesters have no Craftsmen. What threat do they pose?” The King in Red answered for her: “They can break the world.” “Oh,” Batac said. “If it’s a little thing like that.” The carriage jolted over a bump in the cobblestones. Batac was a merchant, not a magus; Elayne spent a juddering minute considering how to frame the issue in layman’s terms. “Belief shapes the world. Dreams have mass.”

“You have to understand—Tan Batac and his partners live uptown. They want change for their own sakes. The people in this camp are fighting for their lives.” “And for the return of the old order, with you in charge?” “I’m a priest, not a king.” “This city’s never seen much difference between the two.” “But the Wars are over,” he said. “Especially in the Skittersill.” “You’re still here, and so am I.” “Your side won, in case you didn’t notice.” A woman waved to him and he waved back. “My king fell, and my gods are dead. I would have died with them, if not for you.”

Elayne knelt by the stretcher. Lines of time clung to her as spiderwebs—the moment thick with hagiography, each observer trapping Elayne and Temoc and the girl in a tale. Forget history, though. Forget politics, and focus on the patient.

“It was a different time. The good people of my hometown tried to kill me when they learned I’d taught myself the basics of Craft; I didn’t even know that what I did had a name. Lots of Craftworkers my age have similar stories, women especially. I ran away to the Hidden Schools—but they were under threat so often back then, I’d just as well have joined an artillery battalion. Soon I entered the fight in earnest. When I met your father I was fresh from the Semioticists’ Rebellion in Southern Kath. Bad business. They sent me here for an easy assignment: help Kopil broker peace with your gods. It wasn’t so easy as we thought. Talks broke down. Peace failed.” And snow fell on Dresediel Lex for the first and last time. Lightning crackled in the sky above, eternally, a tree of thorns on which Craftsmen impaled the gods they caught and killed. Engines of war rent the skies asunder. The King in Red blazed with hellfire in the heavens. She’d found Temoc in Sansilva snow, speared through the stomach with a thorn of ice. She had healed him. She wasn’t sure even the King in Red knew that.

What would be left if I turned my back on service?” “A man,” she said. “This is a problem of mine with the Kathic tongue,” he replied. “In High Quechal, man is an honor to be earned. It is not a state that remains when all else is ripped away.”

Elayne did not smile, either. Somewhere in the last few years she’d lost the knack of doing so in a reassuring manner. Her teeth seemed to multiply, her grin too broad, as if her bones strained against her flesh: the skeleton in waiting.

“They can die,” she said, though she’d maintained the opposite to Cozim. “If she wanted to kill you, she could have.” She’d spent most of the afternoon trying not to think these thoughts. She knew the Craft was dangerous. God Wars vets, those still living, told stories: war machines, crawling undead and demon hordes, sigils that turned your mind inside out when you read them. And every day she saw Craftwork miracles—ships with masts tall enough to scrape the sky, metal sailless hulks larger inside than out. What could the people who made such things do when they went to war? Best not to think, because thinking terrified. “She didn’t.”

But no matter how carefully she kept herself, someday she would take that final stepwise jump, shed muscle and organ, and survive as—what, exactly? A skeleton, on the most prosaic level, but more. None of her friends who’d gone before her could explain the change to her satisfaction. They offered comparisons, many and myriad and no more consonant than those of blind men feeling up an elephant. How was it to see in cold heartless relief, to abandon the soft colors filtered through—created by?—jelly globe eyes for pure harsh wavelengths, to throw wide and close perception’s doors at once? She could imagine such an experience, her imagination was strong, but she had no way of knowing whether her imaginings were correct. She suspected not.

The last one: the God Wars. The failed summit before the final assault on Dresediel Lex. Liberation forces approached the meeting scarred by years of war; Elayne herself had been seventeen and suffering nightmare visions of thorn-beings hunting her through deep jungle. They bore their losses with them to meet with gold-draped priest-kings of Dresediel Lex who deigned to grant them audience. The conference failed in the first minute, but days passed before anyone realized.

“People of Dresediel Lex,” he said, and what was left of her heart sank, because this was wrong, this was how you inspired an army about to invade some god-benighted state, how you whipped sorcerers and demons and soldiers to a frenzy, not how you addressed scared and angry civilians.

The wind returned—but this was no cold northern gale. Temoc’s was a desert wind, the wind of the Badlands before the God Wars, the wind that spoke to vision-questing shamans. The crowd fell silent. Anger stilled to expectation. Eyes turned skyward. This time there were no shadows, for Temoc was no Craftsman. His scars were divine gifts, and through them he held power gently. His face took shape over Chakal Square, constructed from sunlight and smog and faith.

“I.” Again the placeholder. “Am not sure I can put it clearer. We all live here. We’ve built lives in the Skittersill. This deal you propose might improve a bunch of numbers, all those values and figures and things. But if it destroys the community, those numbers don’t matter. Think of it like this, right?” The sparks of the King in Red’s eyes blinked off and on again as the skeleton tried to parse that sentence. Bill did not seem bothered—Temoc believed he would have said “bugged”—by that blank stare. “You have a spider. A normal one, little house spider, not like those big guys down in the Stonewood. It strings its web in a corner of your house and it looks all weird, misshapen and baggy, broken threads, and you think, poor guy, you should help him out. So one day you replace his web with a better one made of wire: sturdy, tight, strong. You think, awesome, little spider guy’s really going to like this new web. But you don’t see him around anymore. Because the things you thought were important about his web weren’t the things he thought were important. Or she. The wire isn’t sticky like the web, you didn’t get the shape right, the spider can’t fix the wire on its own if something bad happens. Maybe he’s a sheet web spider, used those loose strands of silk to catch bugs—only you don’t have any loose strands in the web you made, because you didn’t think they were important. Like that.”

He wanted to run. So many eyes weighed upon him. No man could bear so much hope alone. Master Alaptan, whose crown bowed his long and narrow neck, had warned young Temoc about the eyes, their weight. This was why priests wore raiment, this was the reason for the flowers, the scars, the knife and altar and the beaded skirt: so you could stand beneath such pressure without shattering. When he was young, he’d thought the old man had meant the weight of divine power, of the people’s hunger for corn and thirst for rain. But another thirst remained when all those needs were met.

Light returned. What the sister saw—and it was always so important, in Craft as in street magic, to consider what others saw, what they thought they knew, and what conclusions they might draw from that knowledge—what the sister saw was a black tide that ebbed to reveal her two bruisers bound to the wall by sorcery, and Elayne, free, with black fire burning in her eyes. Elayne righted her chair on the carpet, and sat down.

Dana tossed Elayne the pack. Elayne caught it in midair, with Craft, fished out a cigarette the same way, and lit it with a flick of her fingers. Again, wasteful, but again, appearances.

Because, Temoc thought, fear and dread are not the same. Because to say I’m scared suggests that something has scared me, that I know the shape of the beast that chases me down dream corridors. That my fear has an object, and that object has a name, and this name is known or at least knowable to me. One cannot fear a dry hot wind, one cannot fear to lie in bed awake beside one’s sleeping wife, one cannot fear one’s child. To say I fear suggests that something makes me fear, and I have never yet encountered a thing I could not break with my bare hands.

“Why this sudden concern?” “You’re part of a movement now. You don’t know what that’s like.” “I fought in the Wars.” “To defend your city, not to change the world. Causes have a gravity that’s hard to resist. I never told you what I did in the Semioticist’s Rebellion—why they took me off the field and sent me to the King in Red, before I met you.” He shook his head. “I burned down a forest to kill one man. It didn’t work. So I followed him across a mountain and a desert into another jungle’s heart. I killed five gods hunting him. Small gods, but still. I should have died myself. I almost did. He hurt my friends. Someone I loved tried to turn me from the hunt, and I didn’t listen.” A shawarma joint was the wrong place for this conversation. There was no right place for this conversation. “I want you to take care of your family, not end up bleeding out in a back alley.”

“You have learned the heathen Craft.” “We lost the Wars because we underestimated them. Only a fool makes the same mistake twice.”

“They taught you?” “They teach anyone. Their innermost secrets, can you imagine, are published in codices any idiot can check out of a library. Once you learn those, their schools will teach you more, for a fee. It is a different way. Alien to my mind. To see as Craftsmen do, there is much you must unlearn, or learn doubly. Sometimes I think that’s why the Wars lasted so long. Not because either side showed mercy. The first necromancers had to learn, as I have, to think in two worlds at once: they were born in a world of reciprocity, of divine fervor, of sacrifice and glory, and they had to learn a new world of tools and of control. The second generation grew up knowing only that new world—and so their every act shored it up. They could best impose their will when they did not realize it was will. To them, conquest felt like sight.”

Yet Craftsmen see stars as sources of energy, nothing more. They hope to leave this globe one day and stride through the heavens, free at last. This difference springs, I think, from the fact that their first magus, Gerhardt, was an Easterner, Schwazwald-born, Iskari trained—both maritime mercantile cultures, star-revering. But any Craftsman will tell you his beliefs about stars are experimentally verified truths, not perspectives.”

“And that is why you want to start a war.” Alaxic chuckled. “Not the most elegant segue.” “I did not come here to talk philosophy.” “Without clarity of principle, our discussion will have no meaning.”

Her barriers broke like porcelain, and his replaced them. A hundred guillotine blades fell, east and west along Jackal, cutting the Skittersill off from the northern city. Diamond-shimmering walls, pregnant with nightmare: gaze upon them and go mad. Many did in that moment, and fell back writhing with visions of shining teeth and gnawing doom. The King in Red stood in his own city, his place of power. What force could resist him? Screams from the east. Rising barriers snapped arms and legs. A woman wept. “It is done,” Kopil said. “We are at war.”

“They’re walling us in. Anyone in the square is an enemy of the city, now. They’re declaring war.” “Excellent!” “Are you insane?” “The King in Red has named us his enemies. We are soldiers now, together. Everyone who thought there was a peaceful path from Chakal Square will face the truth today.” “There are families here. My family is here.” “Then they will fight.” The voice behind the helmet echoed with the tinny noise of marching boots. “They will fight, and we will win.” “Not like this. What will you do against Couatl? Against Craft?” “What we can,” the Major said. “And more, with you at our head. Temoc, last of the Eagle Knights. You could drive them weeping before you.” “The whole corps of Eagle Knights could not stop the Craftsmen in the last war, not with the gods behind us.”

“Is that why we fought, your honor? To let people die needlessly because the Craft can only do so much?” “We fought,” she said, and stopped. “I fought, that is, because people were trying to kill me, and I would be dead now if I let them succeed. You were young, then. I think the young fight for different reasons, or tell themselves they do.”

The long slow night draws near. Looks like you’ve lived cleaner than I did. I was a mess, after the Wars. Twenty-two-hour days. We rebuilt this city with our bare hands, mortgaged our souls a hundred times over, a thousand, to pull Dresediel Lex out of the shadows. My life was work. No time for love, for the gym, for long walks on the beach or any of the other things people who don’t know what it means to give yourself to a cause say we should do with our time. Maybe they aren’t wrong. By sixty I carried a lot of extra weight and a vicious temper. I hadn’t slept eight unbroken hours in a decade. So when the doctor told me what was growing in my lung I wasted a week on self-pity, then said what the hells, let’s get this over with. I wasn’t using the body for anything important. Took a couple months’ vacation, threw myself into premortem prep, wrestled a dragon for the secret of eternal life, hid my death in a needle in an egg in a chicken in a trunk on an island in an ocean in a safe-deposit box down at First Lexican Bank, then went for the final buff-and-wax. And now I can smoke the occasional cigarette with impunity. I recommend early transfer to anyone who asks. Reduces the trauma.”

Gods called to Temoc, and he knew their names. Ili of the White Sails. Ixaqualtil, chanting through his many mouths from the foot of the dead sun’s throne. Qet Sea-Lord sang his surf-song, and Isil sang the wind.

Had she looked at him that way before, and he just failed to notice? Turn her away, warned the Temoc who lived in a small house in the Skittersill and tended his flock and did not raise his hand against the kings of this earth. You do not want to hear the message she bears. She’s the war, come home. “Get inside,” he said. “I’ll be back. Bearing the not-wolves, he walked away, and felt her watching as he went.

“Seven Eagle, bind her. Seven Eagle, heal her. Seven Eagle, make her strong, for the battle that we now fight, for the battle that does not end, for the ending that comes when none are ready.”

“Craftsmen do not fight wars of attrition,” Temoc said. “They prefer disruptive victories, surgical strikes. If they press you on all sides, they do so only to focus your attention on the periphery so they can strike the center. Beware your skies. Protect vulnerable targets.”

If you went back, you could save us.” “And doom you. If I go back, the King in Red stops fighting a new rebellion, and starts fighting an old war. People will die.” “They’re dying anyway, and worse. They’re losing. Your generation got its last stand. This is ours, and we’re falling apart. Ten years from now, we’ll look around and say, remember when we couldn’t fight back?” “But you will be there to say it.”

“I would love to put the King in Red to flight,” he said. “To wake the gods from slumber and strike against the powers of the Craft. But the world has changed. I thought Chakal Square was a way forward.” Her eyes were bright and wet. “This isn’t your fault. It isn’t the Major’s. It is barely the King in Red’s. The peace is broken.”

That at least was the idea, though so much was lost—though the gods themselves passed on. Ixchitli, Sun-Lord, torn open on his own altar by the King in Red. Isil gone. Qet Sea-Lord her consort reduced to a hollow husk and that husk imprisoned by foul Craft. The Hunchback burned, Tomtilat’s web torn. No sacrifices to the Serpents on Quechaltan in forty years. And the others, bereft of their city, ripped from their people, faded. Slept, not quite dead, nor yet strong enough to speak. Some few still worshipped in their little ways, and the gods’ songs and stories would linger in Lexican dreams for generations yet, even if their true names passed away. There would always be a spider who bargained with a fly, there would always be two sisters who played ball with demons, there would always be monsters who tried to eat the sun, even if marrow and majesty seeped out from the myths.

“No,” Temoc said. “It is the only way.” “We left that path. The people—” “The people don’t care about theology. They are passion and fear and anger and they need gods to fuel that passion, soothe that fear, stoke that anger.” The Major grabbed Temoc’s arm in one gauntleted fist, and squeezed. The plates of his fingers tugged at Temoc’s shirt, and the blood on his hands left a stain among the other stains. “And I’m almost gone anyway.” “I can save you.” “For a day or two, until I die. But you can do better. You can make me mean something.” Blasphemy even to propose it. Well. Not blasphemy. The gods demanded sacrifice. But for twenty years Temoc had taught another way, preached sacrifice in the living body. To feed the gods and live as the modern world could still permit.

The Major’s heart was slick in his hand. His people cried rapture as he held it high. And the gods were in and with them all. Skies opened. Artificial clouds boiled away. Throughout the Skittersill, ghostlights died and fires failed. Night fell upon their faces, and above them all the stars shone. The Major lay beneath, a husk.

The King in Red was ancient, unbowed, no longer human. More, and less. He was a mind of cold blades that threshed the world from its chaff. He had slept. Now, he woke.

“He’s my son,” Mina said. “Help him.” No emotion in her voice, anymore. On the ride over she hadn’t been able to tell Elayne the whole story, but the important elements came through. The boy scarred by his father’s knife. The old line carried forth into a new generation—the warrior-paladinate handed to a boy unready for the pain or duty the scars promised. Temoc’s last attempt to guard his son from a world that would grip him even tighter now he bore these scars. But Caleb had saved himself and his mother in the hotel. Maybe that justified the burden he would bear.

Above and beneath them all, the gods moved, and Temoc heard their footsteps. The Hunchback capered among the fallen, raked his fingers through dreams as a man on shore might rake his fingers through wet sand. Ili of the White Sails spread her wings and breathed over sleepers and quick alike, stirring them with raincloud fragrance. Ixaqualtil Seven Eagle panting dagger-toothed chased dreamers through his hells, long tongue lolling, and his breath stank with the devoured. The seven corn gods grew, praise be to them, blessings upon us all who die that we may be ground to powder and that powder used to make new worlds. Gods and goddesses of thunder and of the demon wind, of rivers and mountains long sunk beneath the waves, of war and healing, of death and rebirth, of games and the players of games. From Chakal Square’s faith they wove themselves, from the instant’s glory of the sacrifice.

He did not look up when Chel joined him beside the altar. What she had to say, she would say. What she could not say was not his responsibility to force from her. Nor his right. “You came back,” she managed at last. “I could not let you die.” “But we will, now,” she said. “The Wardens won’t stop.” “Nor can we, now the gods are here.” “They’re terrifying.” “They always are,” he said, breaking off his prayer. They heard him speak, and drew near to listen. “They are more than us, but they are us too. And we terrify.”

Approaching from the air, she’d been overcome by memory: the greatest battle of Liberation was fought here, forty years ago. Here, Kopil broke gods on their altars. Forty years gone and still, to her eyes, rivers of rainbow blood rolled down the pyramid’s steps, and ichor slicked its surface.

“Yes. And I plan to use gripfire.” Stars watched. Worn obsidian carvings danced their frozen dance. Books sat on shelves, dead words on dead wood from dead forests. “On civilians,” she said. “They’ve sacrificed to blood gods. That makes them enemy combatants.” “You mean you think they deserve it.” “Well,” he said. “More or less.” “More or less,” she echoed, and walked away from him.

Gods moved through the Skittersill. With closed eyes she saw them. Back in the wars she’d shipped out to the Shining Empire from a port in Xivai where whales gathered by the thousands to mate. Sometimes they exploded from the waves in majestic fountain breaches, but even hidden, they shaped the surface. The sea boiled with whales.

They were close enough for him to whisper and be heard. “I had no choice.” “I don’t believe you,” she replied, with false conviction. She left him standing on his grass mats before his altar, beneath the stars.

“This is the last day,” he said, softly, and he saw the ripple of shock as each person in the camp heard his voice at once, clear and direct as if he spoke to them alone. “This is the last day. I have seen the King in Red come. I have seen his weapons, and they are grand.”

“I ask you now, if you are strong enough, to walk away. If you have children here, take them and go. The hero’s path today is to leave. Be the seed that flies from the fist of the King in Red, and floats away to bloom where he does not expect. Tell the truth of Chakal Square: of human beings defending their beliefs, their homes, their ways of life, from an enemy who gave no quarter. If you accept this burden, you will prove yourself stronger than those who stay. It is easy, fast, to fight and die beside your brothers in the sun. It is harder to build, to teach, to live, and to remember.”

Some left Chakal Square. Not all. Not as many as Elayne hoped. Not as many as Temoc hoped, either. But some.

Some left to accept Temoc’s challenge: because they were strong, and they could bear their scars in secret, and teach the many meanings of Chakal Square. To a bent wiry man with the first strands of gray in his beard, Chakal Square was the resurgence of the Quechal nation, decades crushed beneath a foreign heel. To a young woman with flames couched behind her eyes and a rippled burn scar on her face, Chakal Square meant the gods, meant the rebirth of faith in the face of danger. To a journeyman poet come with his notebook to write the movement’s history, the Square was a dream made real. To a Longsands union worker it was one fight in the war between men and the undead powers that sought to rule them. Chakal Square was a beacon. Chakal Square was the moment everything went wrong. Chakal Square was the future. Chakal Square was the past, Chakal Square was the path between. Chakal Square was birth, and death, and all these meanings followed those who walked away.

Those who remained did not ask one another why. They had passed beyond words, would be one way to write it—a poet’s lie, almost true. They stayed, that was all. Whether from fear or hope, for fellowship or isolation, in joy or sorrow, did not matter. They stayed. Reasons were for those who left.

Elayne said yes, because she did not want to fight the King in Red. Because the Craft was the way of peace, truth, freedom. So she believed. If the system is broken, do what you can from within to fix it. What else was there? The argument tasted like sand in her mouth. She said yes for those reasons, and also because she could not defeat the King in Red in his own city.

We gain strength from ties, she thought. That’s the Craftswoman’s way. Web yourself to others with bonds and debts, mortgage your life for power, and use that power to make nations dance. Until one day you are called to dance yourself.

Elayne drew the heat from the woman’s burns, and the pain. Pain was a form of art, after all: a concentration of the soul, an extension of time. Pain gave power, and with power, Elayne could—almost—hold the dome upright, and keep the Skittersill from burning. Maybe the woman would die. Elayne had seen worse burns— —not since the Wars— —but she’d not die yet.