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

by Max Gladstone

Yes, the gods said, and he understood. He understood, and wanted to fall to his knees and weep hot tears into the consuming fire, that took everything from him, and left him with— Power.

In her shock, Elayne almost let the Skittersill ignite. It was not a dragon. Well. It was not a dragon anymore. Dragons, in their age, and wisdom, and might, rarely meddled in human affairs. They took sides in the God Wars, when after long decades the struggle finally threatened to crack the egg of the world—lent aid to Craftsmen, then retired once again to their quiet slow empires and millennial games. Some, young and curious, hired themselves out as carriers for air freight, but the elders kept apart. But dragons were not sentimental for their dead. The dead were landscape, the dead were for devouring. Humans had some atavistic reluctance to transform their corpses into weapons; dragons had no such qualms, and did not flinch at Craftsmen’s first careful question as to whether they would mind, so much, if humans ran a few experiments with their bodies.

Then the King in Red swelled, and his teeth grew long and the sparks in his eyes sharp and fierce as any hell. He thrust out his staff, and Temoc flew back through the air. His scars burned to seize the edges of the Craft that held him, but this Craft had no edge, just an endless torrent of will. The King in Red could not last long with such power in him—his mind would shatter in ten seconds, but he needed less than ten. Temoc was about to die. As the people of Chakal Square had died. As their risen remnants died. As Chel died. And now Temoc. Old soldier. Broken shell. Father. Fool.

Not to the gods above, traitors and accursed. Not to the gods of her childhood, whose people had hunted her through wood and field. Not to the Lord of Alt Coulumb or the squid kings of Iskar or the Shining Empire Thearchs. She prayed up, and in, and out, in broken desperation, in case something might hear. Save him. Please.

She opened her eyes. She knelt in and beyond Chakal Square, in a circle of Craft and of the living burned. Around her, the Skittersill stood beneath a blue sky—the same in every particular but for the dead. Wardens and Couatl lay tangled with protesters. Charred meat clung to bones. Blood crusted on rock. The god melted atop his dry fountain in the center of the square. Had they saved a hundred? Perhaps not even so many. The dragon hung above them all. On the undead beast’s back, Wardens moved. The King in Red stood, staring. Chel and the captain lay still. The square and the whole city fell silent. Elayne felt that silence press her down. She wiped sweat from her face and her eyes. Only sweat. Thank you. No answer came. Around her, the twelve wept, and Tay. The people they’d saved moaned in their sleep. The sun shone overhead, and she cast no shadow.

Behind her, moans rose from the circle she had saved. Around them, the Skittersill remained. People lived in those buildings, worked there. They were safe. This was not a total defeat. She almost believed that. Fires danced in the pits of Kopil’s eyes. “You defied me.” “I did not,” she said, “to my shame. I should have, long ago. We were supposed to be better than this. Our rule was supposed to make people free, and safe. You led a revolution against bloody gods. But what god ever did for his people like you’ve done for yours?”

“Look around.” The square was fire pit and charnel house in one. Bones jutted from scorched skin. Slagged tentpoles were skeletal arches above blackened stone. “You wanted the God Wars back. Is this the clarity you missed? Because I don’t see it. Maybe you could show me.” “Let me pass.” She met his gaze. “Try it, and I will break you.” Dry wind whipped the hem of her charred jacket. His crimson robes snapped like a sail. He was tall, and mighty. “You cannot fight me.” “Let’s see.” He might have won. She had powers he had not guessed, and he was weary from battle with gods and their champion. But he saw her, and saw too the young woman he had known, who flew in the vanguard of his army and smote their enemies to rubble. And he saw her fury and scorn and smelled too, the cooked meat.

“Have you come to take me in?” She shook her head. “To kill me, then?” “No.” “Why not?” “Why would you deserve it?”

have any idea of the weakness of your position? Your moon goddess Seril has returned, in secret of course, since half the city still hates her. They’ve hated her for decades, since she abandoned them to fight in the Wars and died. That she’s back, concealed, changes nothing. Kos will defend her to the death—so she’s a weak spot, pure leverage for your enemies to exploit. Hundreds of Craftsmen find the very existence of a godly city in the New World an affront. You’ve given them an opening. When they learn Seril’s back, girl, they will come for you. They’re not as smart as me, nor half so ambitious. They won’t pussyfoot like I did. They will kill your gods, and your friends. They’ll carve them to pieces. They will occupy this city and remake it into a gleaming citadel of Craft and commerce. No more Criers—newspapers on every corner and zombies in the market. You’ll weep if you live to see it.

“The Skittersill Rising was my first big story. I saw the protest go wrong. I saw gods and Craftsmen strangle one another over a city as people died under them. I know better than to trust either side, much less both at once. Priests and wizards break people when it suits you. Hells, you break them by accident. A gargoyle saved me last night. They’re doing good work. But the city deserves the truth.” “It’s not ready for this truth.” “I’ve heard that before, and it stinks. Truth’s the only weapon folks like me—not Craftsmen or priests or Blacksuits, just payday drunks—have against folks like you. Trust me, it’s flimsy enough. You’ll be fine.”

“And then the God Wars came.” Aev nodded. “Your once human Craftsmen, who style themselves masters of the universe, have slim regard for awe or wonder, for anything they cannot buy and sell. So deadly are they, even hope becomes a tool in their grip.”

“‘Even’ is a human concept,” Aev said. “Stone bears the marks of all that’s done to it, until new marks erase those that came before.”

“The gods.” Tara steepled her fingers, and in that gesture she recalled Ms. Kevarian, Tara’s teacher, mentor—and Denovo, too, the monster whose student Tara had been. “They aren’t part of time and space like we are. They’re second-order effects of humanity. We feel them. When we pray, or take the field against them, we … bind them into time. But they don’t do small talk. In general, only saints can hear their voices.”

“We had a place here once,” she said, “but our home has changed. Now we skulk in shadows, for our presence endangers those our Lady shaped us to protect. We are servants denied service. Even the little we do, it seems, is too much. We were not made to be secret ministers. If we hide forever, what difference remains between us and the frozen ones who wait in the Geistwood grove?”

The moon came out. Before, the moon had been a slender curve. No longer. An orb hung overhead, and there was a face within it Matt recognized from a distant past that never was, and since it never was, never passed. Shadows failed. Silver flame quickened within paving stones. Alt Coulumb lived. There was a Lady in it, and She knew them.

Tara had summoned dead things to walk, ridden lightning; she knew the seventy-seven names of Professor Halcyon. There were ways to deal with this damn Crier, full of smug certainty. She could seize Jones’s mind. Wouldn’t be that hard—tell a story to bring the woman in, lower her defenses so Tara’s Craft could take hold. She’d done it before. As it had been done to her. So easy. Tara cursed the teachers who gave her options that were always easy, but never right.

“The rules are looser between a Lady and Her priestess.” “Oh, no.” “Not that you’re a good priestess: you don’t sacrifice or pray, and you ward your dreams so thick I’m surprised you haven’t gone insane. Humans need to dream, you know. It’s how the mind breathes. But you have fought on my behalf. You let me live inside your heart. I must admit, this is a new one on me: I’ve never had a Craftswoman priestess before.” “I’m not a priestess.” “You just don’t like the sound of the word. Priestess.” She savored the sibilants. “How else could I talk to you like this?”

“What exactly are you trying to prove?” Seril asked. “That book’s mine. I wrote every word myself. My name’s inked on the inside cover in my own blood, and worked in glyphs I created back when I thought I’d invented a game of catching stars and stealing souls. No one can take that book from me unless I let them, and even then there’s a limit to how much they can do with it. This book here,” she pulled a thick red-and-black tome labeled “Contracts” from the shelf, “this bears my name, but only in pen, and my first name, too, and lots of people share it. Besides, there are a few thousand copies of this edition. You could lift it without much effort. And this,” she returned the textbook and selected a dog-eared Cawleigh paperback from the lowest shelf, “I got this for two thaums from a secondhand dealer dockside. You could beat me half to death with this if you wanted.” “I’m considering it.” “The more proof you have something’s yours, the more you control it. That’s not even Craftwork, it’s basic Applied Theology.

“Some days ‘was’ seems the wrong word, given how long the Wars lasted and how they shape us still. Everything Kos is, comes from his neutrality back then. His priests are brokers to the world—so he’s bound by your rules. Not so badly as the poor neutered godlings of Dresediel Lex, or for Spider’s sake the Iktomi, but still bound by treaties and contracts and worse. But I—you have to understand, back in the Wars it seemed your kind would break the world before the century’s end. Your power grew each passing year, and your claws pierced deeper.”

“We fought. You people have such grand names for yourselves, don’t you? The King in Red. The Lady of Sorrows.”

“My next memories are dragged out and slow,” she said. “Rage and exile, moonlit dances beneath tall trees. I might have stayed there forever, a shadow of a shadow forgotten by history, until your people ground the world to dust. But Kos found me, and my children saved me. As did you. And here I am. That’s what happened.”

“I wish I could help you,” she said. “Documents are Kos’s style. Fires must be monitored, tended. The engineers came to him, or he to them, because they are of a kind. I am different. Stone is stone, the moon the moon. Each is its own temple.”

“Despite its rust,” the Cardinal said, “I’ve always been partial to St. Winnick’s Wrench. For similar reasons to your affection for St. Hilliard, in fact: it’s an old tool, not adjustable, iron-made rather than stainless steel, and so rusty despite Sister Reliquarian’s efforts that I doubt you could use it to adjust a bolt without flaking away half the thing’s substance. But it reminds me that we must do the best with what we have. If we are to believe those Ebon Sea philosophers who claim there is such a thing as an ideal wrench, a wrench of which all other wrenches are made in imitation, then the wrenches we hold are no more like that ideal wrench than we are like the ideal being in whose pattern we are formed. Yet such are the tools we must use, and such are the men we must be.” He touched three fingers to three points around his heart—a triangle pointing up. “My thoughts tend this way when I find myself mourning the state of the world and the weakness its inhabitants, ourselves included.”

Abelard took a long, slow drag on his cigarette. God was in the smoke, and God was in his heart, and God was in the blood that burned through his veins and the air into which he exhaled, and others too, all through the city, a constant heartbeat. To live was to be loved was to burn. —the world, o monks— He remembered how cold he had been without that fire.

Tara held the star. It danced as it burned. She didn’t know her mother’s story then, didn’t know about Alt Selene and the siege from which Ma’s people fled, didn’t know that to her mother the fire Tara held was a weed with roots in the guts of their history. Tara only knew that the light sang, and made her blood sing too.

“Because Aev didn’t want me to,” she said. “And because it’s so easy for me to catch people, to force them. Too easy for me to think it’s right. But I’m still not certain I made the right decision. You’ve brought us to a dangerous pass.”

I got used to being right, or thinking I was, because if I doubted myself I’d break. And rightness always felt like this all-or-nothing thing. It’s much easier to think everything I’ve done is justified than that I’ve done wrong things for right reasons. I don’t regret what I did. But I apologize for it.”

Fine, she thought up to the immense cold silver web. Fine, she screamed at the moon. You want me to let you in. Take me, then. I’ve worked and worked, and here I am back where I started. My room’s a cot and a dresser and a mess. You want worship? Take it all. Take everything I have. Drag me back to where I was before: at least in you I had a space where I was gone. Peel me out of me. She reached the broad ring road at the Quarter’s edge. She couldn’t jump that distance. She gathered herself and spread wings from her back and flew. At the apex of her arc she realized she was falling. Her wings slipped on the wind. She tumbled, mouth open beneath the silver mask, screaming through the sky to land and skid on a roof. The force of her fall blinked off the world. When she came back to herself, she hurt. She lay, human again, in torn clothes at the end of a furrow her fall had plowed through gravel. Gasping. Salt tears wet her face. She hadn’t cried in a while. She became aware, later, of a shape crouching over her, massive and stone. Aev settled beside her. Cat lay still, not knowing whether she was dreaming. “I’m here,” Aev said, soft as an avalanche. “I fell.” Her touch on Cat’s arm was firm and light. She used the pads of her fingers, not her talons. “It’s hard to fly,” she said. “But you can learn.”

“So why haven’t they woken up?” “Because that room technically isn’t part of Alt Coulumb. It’s Kavekanese territory; the whole place is a chapel to one of their idols.” Cat frowned. “To a fake god? Can they do that?” “Sure. Kos is bound to recognize the Kavekanese pantheon, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to do business with Concerns based in Kavekana, which is most of them. So he can’t overrule the circle.”

“The two entities aren’t necessarily the same,” Tara said. “And even if they were, there’s no dependency. Kos and Seril ruled together before her death, but their operations were distinct, as should be obvious from Seril’s participation and death in the Wars, and Kos’s neutrality. If she’s back—or another entity has assumed her mythological role—that entity would have the same relationship to Kos. Again, hardly an undisclosed risk.” These words were courtesies, outlines of attack and defense, salutes and overtures, acknowledgments of strength and weakness outlining one direction their battle might run in court.

Matt’s mother had not known where or who she was when she died. There had been love in the room, but bile and blood, too. It was a bad echo of birth, her eyes dark as the inside of her mouth. She did not understand what was happening. For Matt, the memory was one more weight to carry, and there was no place in him where it could rest easy, this ungainly thing that clunked and rattled but would not break. “I’ll wait,” he said.

What was Gustave’s fault? Pride, in thinking himself wiser than his fellow priests, wiser even, at the end, than God? But pride stemmed from a deeper source. If pride was flame, what was fuel? Fear. Fear Kos would reject him. Fear his iron would rust from within. In the end, it had.

At the foot of the throne she hesitated, and looked away. Tara saw a bright wet line on Jones’s cheek. Tara knew the feeling. She’d felt that way herself last year when the gargoyles introduced her to their Lady. Cynical analysis: gods prompted this neurochemical reaction as a form of self-defense. Awe each human you encounter. Seduce them with ultimacy. If she examined herself the way the schools taught her, she could see classic signs of subversion—a drastic change of behavior upon exposure to a divine being. Broken by blessing. The libraries of the Hidden Schools held volumes about conversion, indoctrination, torture. She remembered the woodcuts of rats in mazes and babies raised in boxes. Priestess. But the scholastic method was a conditioning all its own. Any break in the pattern of thought she’d learned was a moral failing, an intrusion of dark powers to be met with suspicion and fear.

“I was not dead. I was dismembered. Parts of me were stolen. But I lived, reduced, with and through my children. Fallen, I went mad. So did they. It took us a long time to learn to think again.”

Demons (Professor Halcyon had said, pacing before class with pointer tapping against her palm) hail from continuity neighboring our own, and as a result when brought into our realm possess whatever properties they have been assigned by negotiation. Unbound, they’re undefined—conscious singularities that warp the world until the pressure of paradox grows too great and they collapse, destroying territory they’ve tainted in the process. And that, class, is why we triple-check our summoning contracts.

The demons attacked Her children. Seril sustained the gargoyles as they fought, and She fought on their behalf: moonlight trapped one demon-bug in silvery crystal, and time slowed for another. But there were so many, and as the gargoyles fell, the demons drank, and Seril weakened. This was how you fought a goddess: tore her between obligations until She spent herself in Her people’s service. You built unwinnable scenarios and forced her into zero-sum games. The gargoyles fell.

She owed the Hidden Schools ten souls of tuition, which made it just the low end of worthwhile to keep her—alive might be a stretch, but at least roughly compos mortis. There were, of course, consequences to being bound to unlife by a single obligation. It distorted the psyche, discarded bits of consciousness irrelevant to the bond. Craftsmen who kept their bodies into old age had stolen—or borrowed—enough from the universe that the universe wanted a return on its investment. Reinforce those obligations with extensive personal leveraging, premortem prep, and the creation of phylacteric trusts, and an individual could endure the flesh-bone transition mentally intact, depending of course on one’s philosophy of consciousness. Die in overwhelming debt to a single provider, though, and less freedom remained to you. A Tara resurrected to repay her student loans would not remain interested in Alt Coulumb. There were stories of dead indebted Craftswomen processing contracts in beehive crypts beneath the Badlands, reviewing foundational wards in sleepless monotony. She’d never heard anyone confirm these rumors. Nor had anyone denied them.

Then, on the rooftop, there was light. More than light. Fire. She smiled as the demons burned.

“My Lord showed Himself to me, though I did not see Him at first.” Tara stopped moving. He didn’t know how to read what he saw in her. “Last night, by asking my advice, by giving me a chance to choose, He led me to understand Himself: Lord Kos loves, and He must fight to defend those He loves. He would not be Himself if He let Seril fall, any more than I would be myself if I abandoned my friends, or my church. To turn from that truth is to turn from Him, as did Cardinal Gustave—to deny our living God and satisfy ourselves with the worship of His dead image, of a picture on a wall that does not change or ask us to change. We must accept that He needs Her, that He was less in Her absence. In Her return, we come to know a face of Him hidden for fifty years. You say I have endangered our God. I say I have grown to know Him, and the greater danger that lies in deafening ourselves to His purpose, in abandoning His truth for a version of Him that may seem comfortable. Faith is a state of constant examination and openness. In faith we must be vulnerable. Only in this seeming weakness do we live with God.”

Only in this seeming weakness do we live with God. Tara prepared the heart attack. Before she could act, Bede spoke. “Our Lord and His Lady have endured a thousand years. For us to sign that document would be to fail in our faith.” Tara kept her jaw from dropping. “Very well,” Ramp said. The red envelope burned. The stink of hot wire filled the conference room. In seconds only ash remained on the undamaged tabletop, beside the bone-white envelope. “A pleasure as always, Your Excellencies. We’ll see you in court.”

“I only know so much theory, but here it is. When you take the curse, it seals your soul and self. The curse stops change. That’s why my hair grows back if it’s burned off, why my muscles don’t tire. But the seal makes it hard to take soulstuff in. Humans, you get paid or eat a good meal or meditate and you draw the world into yourself. We don’t. This is how we refill.” He pointed to his mouth. “The curse is thousands of years older than Craftwork, but the idea’s the same. Imagine if the only way you could connect with the world was to steal it from someone else.”

“Because chess is a bad analogy for an argument. We don’t start with an array of forces and remove them from the board one after another. We start with a blank board and build our position in the context of theirs. They’ll expect us to defend Kos so fiercely we’ll ignore Seril.”

“Tara Abernathy can’t defend Seril. She faces a long grinding battle with defeat at the end. And nothing is more alien to Tara Abernathy. She is brilliant, talented, and fierce. She came from a podunk farm town near the Badlands and worked caravans studying with hedge witches for seven years before she reached the Hidden Schools. The schools kicked her out a thousand feet in the air above the Crack in the World, and she crawled home across a desert surviving on cactus flesh and vulture blood. This is not a woman who knows her limits. Back her into a corner, and she will seek a long-shot solution—or invent one. It’s a big world. Plenty of long-shot solutions out there. Deals with old slumbering powers. Pacts with the Golden Horde. Demon mortgages. Lost grails and hidden powers in all their forms. Brilliance can’t bear the prospect of futile struggle. So she’ll go for an edge play.”

“Grimwald Savings.” Cat kept her poker face, barely. The Grimwald Concerns dotted the world, shadowy presences with massive holding networks and questionable morality. She’d never heard of a Grimwald convicted of anything, but they hovered in the background when you read about Craftsmen going down in flames. Legitimate businessmen, people called them, with an emphasis on the first word that no one ever used when talking about, say, a bakery.

The last time I rode to war, I trusted my city to my children. When I died, they went mad, and their madness left scars. If I broke Justice, I could use its power, but then Justice would be no more. And She has Her cold uses. She protects my city, even against me. You might die. This reply too was a long time coming. I was born to protect Alt Coulumb. I failed it in my death. These people once feared me as the rabbit fears the hunter, though the hunter comes not for the rabbit but for the fox. Now they fear me as children fear those who strike them. I will not be that Lady again. If you don’t win, we all lose. But Justice will remain.

—Are you interested in the particulars of my case, or in general philosophy? She did not know how to answer, so she said nothing. —You wonder at power yoked to service. You wonder because you have come into power young and are learning that power comes through the acceptance of a bond. But if to have power is to be bound, then what is power?

—I bear these people because Craftsmen, broadly speaking, do not love what they cannot use, and destroy what they do not love. So I make myself useful in some minimal way, as do others of my kind. “Because you’re afraid of us?” —No. Because I enjoy flying far and fast, and I find this work more pleasant. “Than what?” —War.

—I find it funny. “What?” —We are what we ever were: huge, strong, and ancient beyond your reckoning. We have crossed vast gulfs of time and space. And you think (the subsonic dread returned in sharp pulses rather than the earlier sustained note, and her mind named the dread pattern laughter) you think because looking at us you can say that one draws a salary, this one bears us from place to place, that your limited comprehension gives you any measure of safety or control.

“The God Wars lasted a hundred years give or take. Imagine fighting your own people for a century.” “I don’t have to imagine,” Shale said. “Fair enough.” Almost outside. Free air melted on the tongue like spun sugar. “Gods owned the earth and hated us, so we built our nations in the sky. By the time the wars crossed from the Old World to the New, both sides were exhausted, desperate, mean. Dresediel Lex was our great victory. Once these gods fell, Liberation cascaded through the continent. For the first time in history, there was a city where the dead walked, and we could fly.”

The part of Tara that would always hail from a farming village on the edge of a desert pondered the expense of the shifting marble, the plants, the wards, the water, the band, the silver, the price of Antonia and the front-door jerkface and their comrades, carried the three to the ten million’s place—then abandoned the exercise. In a way, this kind of wealth was easier to accept than the ease with which Daphne picked up their check at lunch. Even if Tara made partner at Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, she wouldn’t have lived in this world. You earned this power by stealing continents and breaking nations; this was wealth you tore from dying gods.