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

by Max Gladstone

“Try me.” The skeleton sounded bored. “Get this over with. I’ve killed so many of you before, in very many ways.” His voice went singsong for that last bit, then lost all humor. “I tore your goddess open and ripped her heart and lungs from the ruin of her chest. Break yourself on me, if you like. You’re not the hundredth or even the thousandth to try. And when I’m done with you, I’ll go back to my drink.”

“Where does it end? You’ve killed my client, and your own gods, and your own people. You just tried to goad Shale into suicide by Craftsman. How long can you keep this up?” The glass settled in his hand. “I’m a Deathless King. I can keep this up forever. Sort of in the job description.” “Why don’t your old friends visit you anymore?” The sky cracked and blackened and split with lightning. The earth opened, and fangs of fire jutted up. Black thorn-vines curled around Tara’s limbs, growing as they pierced clothes and skin and meat. Far away, everyone screamed. Then she stood unharmed on the white beach beneath the blue sky as the sun crept to apex. Waves rolled. The world endured. She remembered it ending. It had, a second ago.

The point is, you don’t see as many, ah, people like me around, not anywhere near as many as you’d expect given how easily kid leeches lose control.” “We kill them when they slip up.” Them, not you. She wasn’t sure how she felt about making that distinction. “You don’t kill everyone,” he replied. “And the Iskari and Schwarzwaldens and the angels of Alikand didn’t kill the Imperials—not all of them. What’s good for the temple’s good for the cultist. You remember back in your apartment, when I mentioned walking into the ocean?” The night grew brighter as her eyes widened. “It’s a good life down there, if you don’t need this one. Dark and cool, with like-minded company. And there’s plenty in the sea that bleeds. I stay clear; to them I’m the one that got away. I should have been a fresh father for a new line. The way they tell it, I should join their congregation, settle down, start a colony of my own. Stop rambling. A life for which, as you can imagine, I have little taste.” He unbuttoned his shirt. Age-paled scars hatched skin the color of rosewood. “But you need help, Seril needs allies, and desperation makes strange bedfellows. They want me. If I can use that to help you, I will.” “I was joking,” she said, “about vampire gods.” “I wasn’t.”

Cat followed that taste back and in, to a network of which the priestess was but a piece—the blood of all assembled here in the sea’s night ran through her, and hers through them, joined to a throbbing heartbeat greater than any one alone and wiser, a mind that shook her to ecstasy with its faintest touch. She could offer herself to that hunger, fall into its perfection, let herself be hollowed out and worn as a glove by God— No, she told the hunger.

Rising, she heard the music again: a choir of superhuman voices howling praise in the abyss, their meld an imperfect reflection of the living web she tasted through the priestess. It echoed undersea. No, she realized as they rose, those were not echoes but other songs, the ocean chanting glory and blood through eternal night.

“You shouldn’t be here, kid. I’ve seen people side with gods against Craftsmen. That doesn’t end well.”

She remembered Aev in the alleyway: moonlit talons and jewellike glittering eyes. And she remembered fire falling in Dresediel Lex, a long time gone.

But she had started all this, in the small way a teller starts a tale. And if they died and she didn’t, she could forge of their story a weapon to throw against the wizards in their glass towers. To fight back, as she hadn’t fought twenty years ago.

“It’s their blood,” he said. “Their family. Two thousand years and more of not-quite-life, feeding off the great monsters of the deep. Two thousand years of recruiting sucker refugees kicked out of their homes by torchbearing lifers, two millennia of converts and dark miracles. All that power, all that hunger in a single package.” “It’s a drug.” “It’s a religion. It’s more than a religion.” “You take it, and they own you. Like the dreamdust.” “They don’t own me,” he said. “When I take this, I can use their power. All the family’s hunger is mine, as I need it. And when I’m done, when the power recedes, the dregs of my soul drain out into the ocean with theirs. I’ll have to go there to fill myself. And what I get back won’t be me. It’ll be one drop of my blood to a million of theirs. I’ll be a faint flavor. Most of what’s left will be them.”

Fractal silver schema rushed toward her, the bone-thing a story told by the mountain’s need. Tara’s first aesthetic reaction was contempt. If she had submitted such sloppy work at the Schools, she’d have spent a week helping golems dig up corpses to remind her the costs of brute force. Her second aesthetic reaction, though, was pleasure. Such baroque profusion of power! The bone-thing was so dense she could barely see its individual strands. Crufty dynamism at its best. No calculating mind would make something so excessive. But the bone-thing was made, for a purpose, which you could see if you knew where to look—

Glyphs burned crimson on the man’s skin, sharper and cruder and more extensive than she’d ever seen. His entire body was a single system designed by some twisted thaumaturge—no patterns, no machine tooling, just pictograms carved into his flesh by hand. She tried to imagine the pain of such work, the distortion of the mind, the risk of soul-rot from so much Craft. Who would dare?

“Down there, under our feet, you’ve trapped a raw demon, one that entered this world through a crack, unsummoned, without limits on its power. I didn’t know that was possible in the pre-Craft era, but if you made me guess I’d say it came through during a war between gods, a few thousand years ago. About right?” Gods/serpents/thosebeyond/outspiders/skazzerai/

The spires were weapons built to break cities, but even the fiercest weapons were only tools. About the spires, before them—so small they should have been invisible at this distance but were not, were instead singular points radiating darkness—hovered Craftsmen. Their fingers rested on rune-marked triggers.

With those words, the cold behind Daphne’s heart turned. She thrilled to the sensation of herself unlocking, of long-dormant glyphs drawing light from the sky and power from the army arrayed behind her. The tight-wound trap of her mind sprung. Somewhere in the unfolding, a girl screamed with her voice. She ignored the scream.

No one watched the sky. Jones had seen all this before, back in Dresediel Lex, as the gods woke in the Skittersill Rising. She’d walked among the crowd before the riots started; later, she watched from afar as the fire fell. She wanted to run. She stayed.

“You’ve met Her children.” “The gargoyles.” She remembered Aev’s rumbling voice, the certainty with which she spoke before her Goddess’s wrecked throne. “Yes.” “You talked with them—and with Her. You’ve heard Her voice, written songs to praise Her, and worked miracles in Her aid. You’re part of us. It’s okay to be afraid.” The girl’s face was very pale. Jones remembered the smell of burning flesh and singed hair in a square much larger than this one, a long time ago. She looked away.

Innermost observer-Daphne, walled off from body and endocrine emotion, wondered how this trial would appear from the ground. The shell surrounding that innermost watcher was not Daphne Mains at all, but a substitute made of tense strong worm-flesh and gnawing teeth. One layer closer to the surface, there was another piece of Daphne again, screaming. She had been screaming for a long time.

Some part of Daphne Mains was always screaming. But her innermost core, which felt nothing at all, still wondered at their form and strength.

I’m just going to watch, Jones told herself. That’s all. Watch, and listen. Like last time, before the fire. But the sky broke, and burned, and froze. Craftsmen fought gods for the city’s future. In Dresediel Lex, she’d watched, and after the slaughter she left—crossed a continent to flee the memory of crisped skin and seared flesh and the chemical stink of gripfire. In twenty years she’d made this city her own, fought for its people with the only weapons she knew, with voice and pen and conductor’s baton. If Seril lost, the city would break. The voices would stop—the God-sent dreams, the brief intimations of a city striving toward justice. Chains would bite the gods’ flesh, and bind. Gabby was afraid.

Priests throughout Alt Coulumb chanted these words, in this time. They entered God’s presence. They gave themselves to Kos, felt His pain as the Craftsmen struck and tested Him. And they felt a different sort of pain as He watched the battle in the air, and did nothing. The altar fire burned hot, and they knelt and prayed.

Fire flared on the sanctum altar. Nestor fell. Bede knelt by his side and cradled the old man’s head. Rage swelled in Abelard. He smelled blood, and Craft, and blasphemy. He’d spent a day opening his mind to God, and now felt His fury.

“The Craft recognizes noncontractual relationships between competitors only. As Justice Iron Hand affirmed in the Antitrust Cases, thaumaturgical dynamism requires the existence of free entities in competition. There is no direct competition between Kos and Seril. The equipoise of opposites leads to stagnation. Nor does this theological juxtaposition even qualify as equipoise, for the positions of these opposites are not equal. Kos shelters this moon goddess, this memory of a dead age, in her weakness.

There is no drug in all the worlds like a goddess’s taste: an all-body high, a skin-crawling vein-throbbing rush richer for its transgression. Soulstuff not drawn from the natural world, not borrowed or traded from human minds, but raw meaning, ontological satisfaction heated ’til it bubbles in a spoon and shot into the arm with a needle lathed from a child’s fingerbone. Even Daphne-beneath-shells, Daphne-observer, felt that, lapped at it even as she hated the hunger each taste instilled in her. Daphne-outside, though, the fighter, the monster built to win—she loved this. Power surged through the engines that comprised her. Maestre Gerhardt had written: gods are beings with which human communities exist in relationship. Fine. One relationship was that of diner to meal.

The God raged. A day of stings, tests, and violation, of questions posed by gnats to His own person, all reached a head in this pustule of indignity. He had ignored the Craftsmen as they broke the world, for there were crimes on all sides of the Wars. He had not joined Seril in battle, for She endangered Their people by fighting. When She died, He wept. He would not lose Her again. Not here, in His own city, when all He had do was close his hand and crush— No, Abelard prayed. No, my Lord. There was a timeless pause through the city. The Goddess screamed, and Abelard knew Her voice. Cat was in that scream, and Aev, and his mother, and Tara, and they were dying, they were being pulled to the edge, they would break— Wait, he prayed. They need us. They do. But if we go to them, we surrender the cause they suffer for. She hurts. Trust Her, though. Trust Tara.

Little was left of Daphne Mains. The machine built inside her defended itself. Wheels and wards, enchantments and escarpments and demonic intelligences spun against the Blacksuits who swept through the sky, and against one of them in specific, the claw-fingered angel who tore Daphne and was torn in turn. The machine needed more power, more speed, and it burned through Daphne’s shells, recruiting shards of her annexed soul for the war effort. Dreams, nightmares, fantasies, mirror-memories, all melted for the sake of speed.

“Your Honor,” Tara said, “those assets represent airspace rights over Alt Coulumb, which have been the subject of tangled courtroom challenges for fifty years. You see, the sky above Alt Coulumb belongs to Seril. Kos claimed it after She died, but the King in Red of Dresediel Lex registered a competing claim based on salvage rights from Seril’s presumed corpse. With this transfer, that salvage claim has been formally relinquished; the King in Red’s airspace rights devolve to Seril. And now”—and the grin Daphne knew Tara thought she was hiding grew wider—“now Kos has dropped his competing claim.”

“Your Honor, Seril Undying owns these skies, and She doesn’t care for your presence here—or the spires’ either.” Light trailed Tara’s finger as she gestured toward the crystal towers. “Are you threatening the court, Ms. Abernathy?” The Judge’s voice was the voice of ages.

Daphne’s lips peeled back, and back, and back. The corners of her mouth split to show fangs. In those fangs Tara thought she saw Daphne’s face, or her own, or both their faces melded and forever screaming. A choir sang music no human throats could make.

The demon that came through Daphne’s mind was not protected by the Court of Craft. It crushed court wards and burst the guardian circle. Kos could engage it directly, now, and Seril, but unbound demons moved faster than faith. They might last mere seconds in real time, but in those seconds they could rewrite the world from underneath the gods. As the demon grew it would kill and convert, and as their faithful died or were swallowed by the glass, Kos and Seril would falter, weaken, change to demon-things themselves.

A cage of her hair. A lake of her blood. A mountain of her bone. A maze of her mind. Invite the demon into the terror palace of her dreams, and, before it could break free—fall. There were wards around a Craftswoman’s dreams, glyph walls to prevent intrusion, subroutines to scrub parasites away. She turned them off. She opened her gates. The demon swelled above her, a spider taller than buildings. A chain around your neck, a skull’s imagined voice whispered in her ear. I was right. No. “Come on,” Tara said, and bared her teeth, and let the demon in.

Raz put the blood jade between his teeth, bit, and drank. It tasted sharp. All of a sudden even the demon in the sky seemed slow. He put his hands into his pockets. This wasn’t what he’d imagined at all, but it made a kind of sense. He walked up into the air, humming softly to himself.

“I’m no good at this sort of thing,” he said. “Want an explanation, you’d be better off asking Tara, or Lady K.” He was very close to her now. “You’re dangerous because you’re undefined, because the world doesn’t know what limits to place on you. Now, the thing to which I just joined myself—it’s very old. Older than gods. Nothing lasts this long unless it’s quite simple.” He sounded sad. “You know the joke, that there are two kinds of people in the world, the ones who think there are two kinds of people and the ones who don’t? This is the former. As far as it’s concerned the whole world’s made of things it’s eaten, and things it hasn’t yet.” He bared his teeth. “As far as it’s concerned, you’re not undefined at all. It knows just what to do with you.” His fangs went in. Glass cracked around her. We can choke him, the demon said, and Daphne realized it was talking to her. He can eat us, but he does not know if we can die. You’re the only part of us that can. Endure, and we can clog him with ourselves, we can sate even this hunger. Stay strong. Work with me, and we’ll have glory you cannot imagine. And the pain will stop. Daphne’s broken memories held a man in suspenders with a pleasant smile, who cupped her cheek and said the same words to her in a voice so sweet and steady she could not help but listen. This time, she turned away.

Demonglass cooled and hardened. Weaker pieces shattered—boiled off to unreality and tumbled to the pavement as drops of wet confusion. A three-legged arch remained, towering above Alt Coulumb. It caught the moon, and shone rainbows on the earth. Gargoyles and Blacksuits flew; the Judge let her diamond shield dissolve. Ramp was gone. At its apex, the glass arch held a single flaw. Tara could not look on it directly—the light it shed hit her eyes wrong. She thought it was a woman’s silhouette.

The eyes were Raz’s, and not. A new emptiness at their pits made their colors turn, like ruddy whirlpools. He seemed to be drawing inward toward a point not present in any physical geometry.

“I offer you asylum,” she said, not knowing how the words or gesture came to her, “under the protection of Seril Undying. The Lady will answer any liens against your soul. I give you back yourself.”

“You said you wouldn’t stop me from doing something stupid to save you.” “I did.” She nodded. “But I never said I wouldn’t do something stupid to save you back.” “I accept.” His teeth receded. The whirl in his eyes stilled. Far away, something ancient screamed. He exhaled, and some of the animal left him, and some of a man she’d not yet come to know returned.

“Did you attack Kos just to cover up your theft?” “I brought suit,” Ramp said, “because Seril is a weakness at a time we can afford none. Kos and the Iskari are bad enough: gods and their servants prating on as if the Wars never happened, binding simpletons to their service. They’re brake pads on the troika of history. But at least the Craft binds them. With Seril’s return Kos gains new freedom, which slows progress. These gods of yours are a dead end for life on this planet: a disgusting self-centered inversion, music played on the deck of a sinking ship when we should be saving ourselves.” She shrugged. “More to the point, I brought suit because my clients asked me to. You do remember clients? Or has your time among god-botherers replaced fiduciary duty with faith?”

“Why waste our time? There are no Judges here.” Ramp sipped wine. “Because I’ve worked against people like you before,” she said. “Like me.” “Jumped-up junior Craftswomen with a swollen sense of their superiority to the morally compromised elder generation. You mistake the ability to walk without a parent’s aid for competence. In your world everything has an explanation, an ultimate motive, and all you have to do is dissect and diagram these for a Judge, as if the court were a nanny who could ease your pain.

“Ms. Mains,” she said, “was a tragic loss, but don’t dare talk to me about her as if you understand. Did you seek her out? I did, after Alexander’s death. She lay in a bed, dreaming horrors. Her family kept her in a tower room, surrounded by the stuffed toys of her childhood, tended by a live-in nurse. Unable to care for herself in the most basic ways, at twenty-two. And she was still inside that wasted meat, do you understand? Suffering. Broken. A mind in pieces. I fixed her. I offered her a path out, and I made her take it. The pieces of her that were gone, I rebuilt. I filled her hollows with demonglass. I summoned and bound beings into her body. In the end she was almost herself again.” “And you talk about the man who broke her as if he was some kind of saint.” “He was a genius, which is something other than a saint.

Ramp took her silence as license to continue. “The world is breaking. The Wars made cracks, and we have broken it further. Our work turns soil to ash and water to poison. Even as we push ourselves to the brink of doom, beings of a size you cannot comprehend watch us with many eyes across vast gulfs of space. The universe is larger than this petty island of rock. As if we needed an external threat: this planet will not last forever, and when it dies we must be elsewhere. We have not done the work we need. Gods slow us with compromise. Small minds see only small context: local politics and squabbles of history. It takes genius to see large enough to build the tools to break the world, not like a man breaks a mirror, but like a chick breaks an eggshell. And great minds keep their secrets close.”