Free Two Serpents Rise by Max Gladstone

orange and brown and splashes of blue. A city rose, or fell, from the angry brushstrokes—a city suspended between two hells. “Would you rather I fold?”
    She crossed her arms and reclined in her chair. Leather creaked to cradle her. “That isn’t fair.”
    “I’m not blaming you. You’re right. I never would have let that hand pass four years ago. I got scared, got tight. I’m afraid of losing my job, my house, the shreds of soulstuff I’ve squirreled together. But this woman doesn’t deserve to be handed over to the Wardens just because she doesn’t listen when the world tells her where she can and can’t go.”
    “She’s dangerous.”
    “She’s amazing,” he agreed.
    “I don’t think you get my point.”
    “I don’t think I care.”
    Teo leaned forward. Caleb steeled himself against whatever she was about to say.
    A bell rang, interrupting them both. She grimaced and pressed a button on her desk. A tiny door opened in the baseboard behind her wastebasket. Two hesitant red eyes peered out from the shadows.
    The white rat stepped cautiously into the room, nostrils flaring. Satisfied of its immediate safety, the rat darted up Teo’s desk and sat atop her paperwork. It wore black velvet barding blazoned with a silver spiderweb; a leather scroll case the size of a cigarette hung around its neck. Teo opened the case with a flick of her forefinger, and tapped a parchment scroll into her palm.
    The rat accepted a few thaums of her soul in payment for the delivery, sketched a mechanical bow, and darted back through its hidden door, which snapped closed. Teo unrolled the scroll, read the message there, and swore.
    “Heartstone?”
    “Heartstone,” she confirmed. “This deal will kill me, or else I will kill every single person involved in it.”
    “Please don’t. That would include me.”
    “I might kill you anyway,” she said. “They want all our customer complaints for the last year, to prove some damn thing or other about our service. As if I didn’t have enough on my mind.”
    “I have five days to figure out how to run faster than the best cliff runner in the city.”
    “Practice.” Teo grabbed a pen and scrawled a list on a spare palimpsest.
    “Their practice almost killed me.”
    “Then cheat.”
    He raised one finger and opened his mouth. Ten seconds passed, twenty, and no words came out. A sun rose in his mind.
    “Teo, you’re a genius,” he said, and left.
    *   *   *
    Caleb couldn’t beat Mal if he played by her rules. He was neither Craftsman nor athlete. His skills lay at the card table.
    But Mal had challenged him to catch her, not to win. If he cheated, she might not talk, but since he couldn’t win by playing fair, he would lose nothing by stretching the rules. Balam would not approve, but Caleb didn’t need his approval.
    Cheating at a footrace was difficult. There were no cards he could hide in his sleeve, no tricks of shuffling or sleights-of-hand. Fortunately, Caleb had other alternatives.
    He descended winding stairs into RKC’s basement library, a labyrinth of twisting paths built centuries before as a ritual maze for the priests of Aquel and Achal. After the God Wars, the King in Red used the paths and dead-end chambers to store the millions of contracts by which the city maintained itself in the absence of divine grace.
    This library held no Iskari romances, no histories of the Atavasin Empire or treatises on gardening or the cultivation of dreamweed. Shelves strained to support ledgers, pacts, scrolls, codices of souls collected and paid. These documents, and the Craft they anchored, were RKC’s meat and blood.
    No windows opened onto the library. No candles burned. Ghostlamps offered the only light. Attendants wandered branching paths between high walls lined with forbidden tomes.
    After a half hour’s search Caleb found the Sub-Basement of Honorable Confusion and Folly, which held the industrial contracts. From the third oversized shelf in the fourth