Two Serpents Rise is set in the same world as Three Parts Dead, but doesn’t follow the same characters: it isn’t even set in the same city. While Three Parts Dead centered on the city of Alt Coulumb, an old city still powered by an old god, Two Serpents Rise is set in Dresediel Lex, a desert city that was on the other side of the god wars, and is now run by the King in Red, a formerly-human Craftsman turned skeletal by his use of Craft, which is to say, magic. As Alt Coulumb did in Three Parts Dead, Dresediel Lex has a problem, and the protagonist of the book (Tara Abernathy in that one, Caleb Altemoc in this one) is tasked with solving it. It works pretty well as the structure of a story, and I liked this book a bit more than I liked Three Parts Dead: the writing felt less showy, and the things I liked about that book (plots and intrigues!) were present in this one, too.
When the book opens, Caleb, a risk manager at Red King Consolidated, is summoned to one of the company’s reservoirs in the middle of the night: a guard has been killed, and the murderer is a kind of water-demon. The reservoir is contaminated: Caleb has to contain the problem and figure out how RKC will provide clean water to the city’s seventeen-million inhabitants. Meanwhile, though the King in Red won control of the city in the god wars, some of the city’s residents, including Caleb’s father (a former priest) would prefer the old ways, with the city provided for by the gods and by two enormous serpents who took the hearts of the sun-god’s daughters as a sacrifice, and who were kept quiet with further human sacrifice over the centuries. Was the water contaminated by religious terrorists trying to undermine the King in Red?
As he’s investigating at the reservoir, Caleb meets a mysterious woman, Mal, who’s a cliff runner (that’s this world’s version of parkour, apparently): he doesn’t think she poisoned the water, but was she there only by chance? And is it coincidence that the reservoir was poisoned just as RKC is making a deal to acquire Heartstone, another company with its own reservoirs and waterworks?
This book was a lot of fun, though some of the plot points are obvious, and some of the dialogue is cliched (e.g. Mal saying to Caleb, “I destroy everything I touch”). Still, once I got into the story, I found this book pretty hard to put down.
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