The story so far... Two Serpents Rise
Last time on ‘Craft Sequence Story So Far’… there were gods! Necromancers! Wars between gods and necromancers! Then 40 years of peace (?) before the first book in the Craft Sequence LAST FIRST SNOW when wars almost reignited in Dresediel Lex. Read the article here, and then join us for TWO SERPENTS RISE.
This post contains extensive spoilers for Two Serpents Rise, some spoilers for the rest of the series, and expects the reader to have already read all currently published Craft Sequence books.
Two Serpents Rise
“You’re my son. I love you. You work for godless sorcerors who I’d happily gut on the altar of that pyramid, and you are part of a system that will one day destroy our city and our planet, but I still love you.”
“Thanks, I suppose,” Caleb said. “You realise that if you actually killed the King in Red, this place would be a desert in days. Water isn’t free.”
“It used to rain here more often.”
“Because you sacrificed people to the rain gods.”
“Your system kills too. You’ve not eliminated sacrifices, you’ve democratised them—everyone dies a little every day, and the poor and desperate are the worst injured.”
“If being sacrificed was such an honour, tell me: how many priests died on the altar?”
Dramatis Personae
Our Leads
CALEB ALTEMOC - Risk manager at Red King Consolidated, part-time gambler, son of infamous fugitive Temoc Almotil. Covered in religious glyphs that allow manipulation of the Craft and Applied Theology but he doesn’t use them much (at least, prior to this book).
MAL KEKAPANIA - Craftswoman for Heartstone. Cliffrunner and adrenaline junkie. Daughter of two people who were killed in the Skittersill Rising. Motives and loyalties mysterious.
Major Players
TEO BATAN - Caleb’s best friend who will call him out on his shit (though he never listens). Contract manager at Red King Consolidated. Rich slumlord parents she’s mostly estranged from (see: Tan Batac in Last First Snow). Queer.
TEMOC ALMOTIL - Fugitive, father, freedom fighter - or terrorist, depending on your point of view. Last Eagle Knight who tried to take a peaceful route and has turned to violence.
KOPIL, THE KING IN RED - Deathless King of Dresediel Lex and Chief Executive of Red King Consolidated. A Craftsman who has gone full skeleton but not managed to rid himself of his PTSD or his drama queen tendencies. He has a bad history with Temoc
KAL ALAXIC - Priest turned Craftsman, CEO of Heartstone - and thorn in Kopil’s side. Found and used the Serpents. Clearly evil plans even if Caleb’s POV is too narrow to point it out.
AQUEL AND ACHAL, THE TWIN SERPENTS - Ancient giant magical beings hungering for hearts and souls. Truly giant, a myth come to life (or true story turned myth?)
Assorted Others
ALLESANDRE OLIM - Employee of Heartstone and friend of Mal’s who goes (quite literally) power mad.
FOUR - Anonymous Warden who accomplanies Caleb and Mal to Seven Leaf Lake. One of several such Wardens, but Four is the important one.
SAM - Teo’s temperamental artist girlfriend.
BALAM - Cliffrunner and protestor, friend of Mal’s.
TOLLAN - Caleb’s long-suffering boss.
What Happens in Two Serpents Rise?
It’s seventeen years since the Skittersill Uprising. Seventeen years since THE KING IN RED rained down gripfire on protestors in the Skittersill. Seventeen years since TEMOC ALMOTIL abandoned his family to go on the run with his gods, fighting back at the King in Red from the shadows. Seventeen years since CALEB ALTEMOC woke, drugged and scarred and bleeding, with the power to redirect both the Craft and Applied Theology.
In TWO SERPENTS RISE, Caleb is now an adult, working for the King in Red with his best friend TEO BATAN. He plays poker by night, risking soul and sanity, but by day he is a risk manager working in a grey cubicle. He’s floating through life and doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life - except to not follow in his father’s footsteps. Temoc, still on the run, is blamed for any and all attacks in Dresediel Lex, and Caleb has to deal with questioning each and every time. He sees his father when Temoc breaks into his house occasionally, but they have no real relationship.
Someone is poisoning the water of Dresediel Lex with TZIMET, demon-like creatures, and Caleb is called by nightmare to solve the problem. He meets a mysterious cliff runner, MAL KEKAPANIA, and quickly falls in lust with her. He doesn’t include her in his report of the incident - much to Teo’s disgust. She’s innocent, he’s sure of it, and he’s thinking with his dick rather than his head.
[Editor’s note: I’m sorry, I can’t be objective on Caleb in Two Serpents Rise. As Teo says multiple times, he’s an idiot. More of my thoughts on Two Serpents Rise here.]
RKC is about to merge with Heartstone, led by KAL ALAXIC, an old enemy of the King in Red; Heartstone is naturally concerned about the demons in the water. Caleb is sent to assuage Alaxic’s concerns, and learns that the merger will bring THE TWIN SERPENTS, AQUEL AND ACHAL under the King in Red’s control. The Serpents are ancient, giant creatures that were part of the old Quechal religion - not quite gods, but given the hearts of sacrifice victims to keep them sated and asleep. They slumber beneath the ground in uneasy sleep.
Alaxic requires a new condition to the merger: RKC will keep the Serpents asleep above all other priorities, even Kopil’s own life. RKC agrees.
Meanwhile, Caleb is chasing Mal. He uses the sacred scars his father carved into him as a child to take hold of the Craft that now runs Dresediel Lex and fly as he literally chases her. It’s a thing, let’s move on. More attacks happen across Dresediel Lex; Temoc claims he isn’t to blame but Caleb doesn’t know whether or not to believe him.
At the Heartstone-RKC merger Caleb learns that Mal is a Craftswoman working for Alaxic’s company. He once again chases after her, and they start dating, for a given value of dating.
Seven Leaf Lake, a reservoir that was brought over to RKC through the merger is attacked, and Mal is sent to fix it along with some Wardens and Caleb. They battle against Mal’s old friend and colleague ALLESANDRE OLIM, ultimately killing her and rebuilding the broken station at the reservoir together. That evening, Caleb finds Mal bloodletting as a sacrifice and they argue before they part.
Caleb, of course, goes back to Mal before long. They don’t agree, but they can live with their disagreement on the fundamental matter of religious sacrifice.
As an eclipse approaches, across the city madness takes flight. Nightmares infest the city, dreams of Aquel and Achal, snakes of flame, the end of the world. On the day of the eclipse itself, Caleb decides to show Mal an RKC secret about how the city functions: the corpse of the old Quechal god QET SEA-LORD, his heart desalinating sea water in a Craft bastardisation of his old godly powers to bring the rains. Caleb may disagree with Mal’s bloodletting, he says, but he understands sacrifice. Everyone in the city is part of this sacrifice to keep the modern world turning.
In a totally unforeseeable turn of events, Mal betrays Caleb’s trust in the middle of the night, steals Qet’s heart and breaks the city. Meanwhile, Alaxic tries to kill Temoc in a murder-suicide but Temoc escapes. The water runs black with tzimet. Dresediel Lex is in chaos. Protestors descend on RKC, which is now locked behind a Craft barrier.
Somehow still not seeing that Mal has betrayed him, Caleb finds her at a bar they visited once. She reveals she stole Qet’s heart as part of a plan to bring down RKC and the King in Red - and that this was the plan the whole time. She and Alaxic worked with Allesandre Olim before and after the Heartstone-RKC merger to tie Kopil to the Twin Serpents and ultimately kill him.
Finally coming to his senses, Caleb fights Mal and steals back Qet’s heart. He escapes to Teo’s house and is surprisingly joined by Temoc - who is, to Caleb’s shock, NOT behind the attack. The three of them go to RKC and, using Temoc’s gods, manage to get through the Craft barrier and fight their way up to where the King in Red lies unconscious in his offices. Meanwhile, Mal awakens the Twin Serpents. Caleb and Teo are planning to rip up the Heartstone contract to wake Kopil, but Temoc has other plans and at the last minute knocks out his son in order to use Teo as a sacrifice to the Serpents. He comes close to succeeding before Caleb and Teo manage to foil his plans and awaken the King in Red.
Wardens attempt to fight Mal from the air as she sails through the city with the Serpents, sending waves of fiery destruction across the city. Caleb has a new idea - to use his scarred glyphs to channel soulstuff as a faux-sacrifice to send the Serpents back to sleep. Kopil provides the souls. He funnels the souls to the Serpents, Mal’s control breaks and she burns out, and Caleb falls unconscious.
Several weeks later, semi-recovered, Caleb pitches a new venture to the King in Red and Teo: a new organisation, a sort of non-profit, to fix God Wars damage and act as a conduit between the Craft and religion, using Caleb’s scars. They co-found the TWO SERPENTS GROUP.
“The old ways are gone, but we need peace with the gods. Their powers don’t drain and break the land. They can fulfill their function, and let the world of Craft fulfill its own. A partnership. The pantheons regain power and respectability. The city, the world, gets a new lease on life. People like Mal, like my father, like Alaxic and the True Quechal, lose the authority that fear and oppression gives them.
“The risks are too high for you to turn me away. We survived this battle, barely, but there’s always another. We can’t just crush every rebel who wants to sacrifice someone on that altar. We need to build a world where nobody needs to sacrifice.”
The importance of Two Serpents Rise
I find Two Serpents Rise an immensely frustrating book. I haven’t been especially shy about saying it’s my least favourite of the series - I’ve even advised against reading it in some of my reading order articles - but there is a LOT to like here. I’d love for Gladstone to have a go at a rewrite now that he’s a more experienced writer with his style and craft better developed. But that’s unlikely, so we have the Two Serpents Rise that we have.
However, I will try to put my personal feelings aside. This isn’t a review. And despite my frustrations, Two Serpents Rise introduces and develops some really important themes.
Most people will read this after Three Parts Dead, which gave a very different view on the Craft, on gods, and on the Domain as a whole. In Three Parts Dead we largely see things from Tara’s POV, and therefore get somewhat rose-tinted glasses towards the Craft. She mentions the destruction it can cause, but it’s an afterthought, a footnote. The Craft is obviously the future, and obviously better than what came before. The gods are also mellower. Kos is generally as good a god as you’ll get, and Seril is seen mostly through her most ardent supporters. She died in the Wars, but came back.
In Two Serpents Rise, however, we see that bad side of both. We see the destruction the Craft can cause, how it drains the land and tortures the few remaining gods. Caleb, fully on the side of RKC, is horrified by the sight of Seven Leaf Lake’s godlings screaming. The reveal of Qet Sea-Lord is devastating, horrifying both in-world and to the reader. Yet, the pantheon of Dresediel Lex was far bloodier than Kos or Seril. Can one blame Kopil and other Craftsfolk for rising up against a system that sacrificed innocents to feed bloodthirsty gods and ancient beasts?
But if the old system didn’t work, and the new one is breaking the world, what can you do?
“The Craft is built on exchange. We give, and receive something in return. That’s the reason we can’t just magic ourselves food or water: use the Craft to force a field to grow, and you’ll wear the earth to desert in a year. If we funneled souls into the Serpents, their power would flow back into us, and they’d get hungrier. All we can do is keep them sleeping, and that’s only if we’re careful.”
Caleb, while slow to the uptake on Mal and her plans, is in a fairly unique position to see the good and the bad of both ways. As the son of the last Eagle Knight and employee of RKC, he has intimate knowledge of both. He isn’t naive. And with the scars bestowed upon him by his father, he has a unique ability to channel and use both the Craft and Applied Theology without the kind of exchange or sacrifice the two systems require.
The Domain needs to find a third way. A way for gods and Deathless Kings to work if not together than along parallel paths. A way to save the world. A way to keep the best of what the Craft gives us, without the destruction that goes along with it. A way for gods and their followers to use their power for good, without conflict.
It might sound like an optimistic rainbows and sunshine idea, but it’s the only one they have.
Outwith the thematic importance of the book, we also do get some cool worldbuilding and character work. Kopil is cool and weird and fantastical, and I love seeing a sprawling modern city with modern concerns headed by a skeleton with a red cloak and penchant for drama. The King in Red represents the best of what the Craft Sequence does: reflecting our world with a twist of weird.
Right, that’s it’s for Two Serpents Rise.
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