Mal Kekapania’s Story So Far
Some of this is adapted from other essays, some is brand new. Enjoy!
Mal starts the series as Caleb’s manic pixie dream girl, tries to destroy Dresediel Lex, appears to die but does not, and ends up as a far more rounded and sympathetic character, recontextualising everything we saw of her before. We last see her as a prisoner of the King in Red, but I doubt other characters will be satisfied for her to stay that way.
As we approach the publication of Dead Hand Rule, let’s take a look at Mal Kekapania’s story so far.
Note: I have recently talked about Mal in depth in this essay here, but decided to include her in this series with a different focus because she’s clearly going to be pretty important in the next two books, and that’s the whole point of this little series of mine.
Mal before the series
Mal was an only child, raised by loving parents Bill and Kapania Kemal, who appear to have either been cooks or at least skilled enough to prepare food for a massive protest camp. We see them in Last First Snow, though Mal herself is not present. They seem like grounded, reasonable people; they aren’t at the front of the rabble rousers, nor are they true believers in the bloody old religion. They’re practical sorts, the kind of people you need to keep a movement going beyond the initial momentum.
They agree to join the negotiating group to meet with the King in Red. We read that Bill was eager but Kapania was not. In the first meeting, Kapania says that they want to forge a compromise if there is one to forge, but won’t just roll over for whatever the powers that be want. Kapania is clearly knowledgeable and confident, providing counterexamples to those given by Tan Batac and the King in Red (who is a terrifying figure, remember). Bill seems willing to sit back through much of the detail, but is an excellent storyteller, able to put across the protesters’ position in a different way.
They seem a formidable team.
But we all know Last First Snow ends in tragedy. The Kemals choose not to leave Chakal Square when given the option, knowing there is a very good chance they will die and leave their 12-year-old daughter Malina orphaned. Mal is outside the city staying with relatives during the Rising. She knows her parents died horribly, burning for days with flames that would not go out. She describes them as good people, faithful and angry, but good.
We don’t actually see much of this faith, or even anger, from the Kemals in Last First Snow. They’re as angry as any of the protesters at the inequality of what’s going on in the city, but they seem some of the least riled up. They also don’t appear to be especially religious, at least at first. Unlike the Major, they aren’t calling for a return to the old ways - though they also don’t leave the Square after Temoc reverts to blood sacrifice.
Perhaps they were indeed more faithful than they seem in the Skittersill Rising. Or perhaps Mal has been told a false tale.
Because after her parents died, Mal ended up under the thumb of Kal Alaxic, an Eagle Knight turned Craftsman, working on a long term plan to bring down the King in Red. The events of Two Serpents Rise are the culmination of this plan, and very nearly work. We don’t know that Alaxic became Mal’s foster father in Two Serpents Rise, but we also don’t get Mal’s real story, as she’s playing Caleb throughout. We get much more reflection on Mal’s life in Wicked Problems.
Alaxic took Mal in, along with another girl, Allesandre Olim, and raised the two as weapons against the King in Red. They were indoctrinated into the bloodier parts of the old religion, with regular punishments and bloodletting. Mal implies in Two Serpents Rise that her parents would have wanted this from her, but I think that is entirely Alaxic. He was a strict taskmaster, as Mal relates to Dawn:
“I was raised to own my mistakes. The old man, I guess you could call him my foster father, he had a particular approach to responsibility. Miss a syllable of your litany, and spend a half hour kneeling on the sharp reed mat, drawing blood in penance.”
“That’s awful.”
“But you learn fast. He raised us as weapons, Allie and me. His instruments of revenge against the King in Red.”
Lots of people thought they knew Mal, but nobody really did - nobody except Alaxic, and Allie, the foster sister she constantly competed with, and whom she eventually had to kill as part of the revenge plan.
No wonder Mal is fucked up by the time the story starts.
She and Allie work at Heartstone under Alaxic, acting like normal corporate folk. Alaxic has finally got the last few pieces of the plan into position, getting the King in Red to buy Heartstone. To get a crucial clause in the merger contract, he sends Mal to poison Bright Mirror Reservoir.
And that’s where we find her in Two Serpents Rise.
Two Serpents Rise
We meet Mal being EXTREMELY suspicious, hanging around the scene of a crime wearing an amulet that is supposed to protect her from being seen. She is quite clearly responsible for said crime, but as Caleb thinks with his dick rather than his brain, he is convinced she is there by sheer coincidence.
Caleb chooses not to tell the authorities or his superiors about her presence but instead hunt her down in secret. He correctly surmises that she is an adrenaline junkie cliff runner, and finds some of her fellow runners, who end up telling him her first name and a race she is likely to run.
He literally chases her down, which she seems to view as romantic. She later says that Caleb intrigued her because nobody else had cared enough to try and see the real her beneath the mask. They run and fly around Dresediel Lex, and she is shocked when he is able to keep up.
In the midst of their weird near death flirting, Heartstone and RKC merge. Caleb didn’t actually know Mal worked for Heartstone, discovering it at the merger itself, and they start a fling.
Mal finds herself falling for Caleb, against her instincts. Allie teases her for it, and Alaxic thinks she should drop him, but she can’t. He’s seeing her, the first person to do so in years. He even makes her start to doubt herself, doubt the plan.
But it’s not quite enough.
As part of the plan, Allie goes a bit magic-mad at Seven Leaf Lake to give Mal the opportunity to connect the water system directly to the Serpents - they couldn’t do it before the merger without risking being caught. Mal kills her only friend. She can’t publicly mourn her, but bloodlets as self-punishment. Caleb discovers her and reacts poorly (he has religious trauma too). Mal storms off, and it seems they are broken up buuuuut Caleb makes a Grand Romantic Gesture and Mal forgives him.
She says later that on the final night she was about to tell him everything and cancel the plan, but she decides against it. Caleb takes Mal into a secret facility that lets her shut down the city. She wakes the Twin Serpents and rains fire and destruction down on Dresediel Lex.
At this point, she isn’t really in her right mind. The Serpents are ancient powers, nothing like the Craft she has handled before. She struggles to control them or keep control of herself.
At the climax of Two Serpents Rise, Mal is aloft leading the Twin Serpents to 667 Sansilva, the King in Red’s headquarters, where Temoc, Teo and Caleb are attempting rituals to send the Serpents back to their slumber. Caleb, channelling an incredible amount of soulstuff, rises to fight her.
“Mal had changed.
Her dusky skin was molten stone, her hair a field of ebon flame. Her eyes were radiant jet.
“You don’t have to go through with this.”
“I’m an arrow in flight.”
“Arrows don’t have a choice. People do.”
“What choice?” She smiled, sad, distant. “My choices were made twenty years ago, when my parents died. Or sixty years ago, at Liberation. Or earlier than that.”
Caleb sends thousands of years worth of souls through Mal to the Serpents and, in doing so, shows her sides of the city and its people she was cut off from by her fanaticism. Ultimately, she chooses to end the fight, and seems to fall to her death. Caleb suspects she is still alive but doesn’t go after her.
Between the books
Mal may have survived her fall and the Serpents’ fire, but she is badly injured. She wakes up “in a back-alley chop shop” missing several limbs and with burns twisting her skin. Once she recovers, with a clockwork and silver arm and prosthetic leg without description, she becomes a mercenary for hire. She ends up working for a nondescript seeming man, whom she calls by a generic pseudonym, Mr Brown. She knew he wasn’t exactly a good guy, but she had no idea the extent of things (tl;dr - he’s made of skazzerai metal, connected to an ancient powerful vampire trying to bring on the skazzerai apocalypse, and possibly funded by Eberhardt Jax).
All we know about this part of her life is:
“I don’t know who Brown was,” she went on. “I don’t know who he worked for. That’s not uncommon in our business. When we met I was in a bad place. I wanted to hurt Deathless Kings. I needed backing. Brown, his people, they needed someone like me. They wanted artifacts, joss, bits of dead gods, bits of live ones. They wanted to sow havoc in the markets, take a lot of soul from a lot of rich assholes. I was okay with that, even if it meant some other assholes making more.”
Over the ten to fifteen years between books, this is Mal’s life. She’s a great fighter, and remains an adrenaline junkie, making her pretty perfect for the mercenary life.
And then she meets Dawn.
Wicked Problems
Mal shows up again at the spirecliff site to steal a skazzerai shard embedded in the goddess Ajaia’s heart. When Dawn grabs the shard before Mal can, Mal rescues-slash-kidnaps Dawn instead.
With Dawn unconscious, Mal puts an enchanted ankle cuff on her to stop her using Craft, and locks in her a cell in the bowels of a ship. The ship is then attacked by a kraken, and Mal escape with Dawn in a rowboat (sans cuff, now). Mal can’t quite sea Dawn’s split personality snake Sybil, but is aware something is there; when Dawn realises this, Sybil tries to eat Mal, but the rose/shard thing in Dawn’s palm tries to eat Dawn in return. There’s a lot of trying to eat people and their souls going on.
Mal uses a magical bag, which was meant to transport the rose/shard safely, as a glove to protect Dawn. She rows them to the Arsenal, an old mining facility (mining the remains of a dead god, Ixzayotl, who is still visible under the sea) that is now a place for mercenaries for hire to hang out. She reunites with some fellow mercenaries, wins a bet she placed on her own survival, and goes to meet her client, known as Mr Brown. Mr Brown, naturally, springs a trap of Dawn and Mal. He - or whatever weird spiralling steel creature inhabits his meatsuit - paid Mal for the rose / shard, which is now in Dawn’s hand. A fight breaks out, and Dawn manages to raise the dead god Ixzayotl to defeat Mr Brown.
Now, remember Mal was indoctrinated into the old school Quechal religion. One of her gods, killed decades ago, is now back, and bows to Dawn. Of course Mal is first in line to join Dawn’s new congregation. Other mercenaries decide to sign up too.
They need an expert in gods to help deal with the rose/shard situation - Mal says she knows a guy. With Ixzayotl’s corpse as their vehicle, they fly off to the Shining Empire.
Shenshan prison is built into a god-mountain, and its captives imprisoned in living rock. Who are they trying to rescue? Why, of course, it’s Temoc Almotil. Realising Mal is his saviour, he immediately tries to kill her until she tells him the stars are wrong, an old Quechal prophecy. They snark back and forth, before having to work together to get the hell out - the escape has gone wrong, and the alarm has been raised. Despite an epic battle, they are still very nearly caught - until Dawn flies in on Ixzayotl to save them. All seems well until the clouds part, and the moon emerges, bringing Seril’s wrath upon Dawn. Temoc prays and saves her just in time. They need to get her more power, and do so at an extremely horrific Craft facility in this world’s version of the Himalayas.
On a lighter note, Mal and Temoc discuss The-Whole-Serpents-Over-Dresediel-Lex-Thing, and Temoc reveals that Mal and Caleb are religiously married. Mal is kind of horrified, and kind of amused.
The souls in the facility aren’t enough to fully heal Dawn or allow her to overpower the shard. Where to get more power than the Serpents? Shockingly this is Temoc’s idea, and Mal is the one arguing against it. She tried this before, after all, and it went world-endingly wrong. But Temoc says they don’t need to approach Aquel and Achal themselves, however. Blood from the Serpents is stored in a research facility called Tlaloc Observatory. There’s no way this can go wrong, right?
After some undercover international travel, they get to the Observatory outside Dresediel Lex. Temoc will need around 30 minutes to sing some prayers, at which point Dawn will enter the dream of gods, face foes there and defeat them. They are not planning on a fight.
Of course there is a fight.
Various religio-magic things happen to get them in to where the Serpents’ blood is held, and it all goes fine at first. Dawn is about to enter the dream of gods when a Mr Brown appears and attacks. She seizes the power of the blood to fight, and sets the Observatory on fire. Many Arsenals, including Mal, are injured. Dawn channels power via Temoc to heal them, and does it so intensely Mal thinks she might accidentally regrow Mal’s lost limbs.
But the Serpent blood wasn’t enough. Dawn must wake the actual Serpents and not just take some of their blood. They need to go to Heartstone.
To wake the Serpents, deep in the tunnels under Heartstone, Temoc and Mal pray so Dawn can enter the Serpents’ dreams and speak with them. They claim Mal as their own - she promised herself to them all those years ago.
While Dawn is doing her dream thing, the King in Red arrives and shit starts to go down, because of course it does. Mal and the Arsenals fight to protect Dawn, while Temoc directly confronts the King in Red. Dawn is losing her spiritual battle, and Mal offers herself to the Serpents as a sacrifice to allow Dawn to enter the time of gods.
With the Serpents powering her, Mal rises to fight the King in Red one-to-one. She does manage to injure him, but to be honest he wins the whole exchange (edited for this essay’s purposes, go read the whole thing from page 393):
“You killed my family, Craftsman. They burned in Chakal Square.”
“Look,” he said, one hand out. “Just give me a moment here.”
“Why should I wait?” she hissed. “Why listen? Have you ever, even once?”
“I made an awful mistake, in the Rising. An awful, stupid mistake. The same one you’re making now. I let myself fight the God Wars again, rather than dealing with the peopl ein front of me. I wanted to feel good and mighty and righteous.”
…
“You are failing now.”
“Am I?”
“I have broken three of your bones. I could break more.”
“Please. You have broken two of my bones, in three PLACES total.”
“You mean to get technical with me?”
“You have to ‘get technical’, you C-student excuse for a revolutionary. If you don’t get technical you make MISTAKES.”
…
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re trying—”
“What am I trying, exactly? What strategy could hinge on my letting you hit me? You blood-mad weirdos, I am trying to talk with you.”
And then the grey men attack the Serpents and the Arsenals, and the fight changes. Caleb shows up, flying on fiery wings, and the two of them finally reunite with the classic exchange, “I love you.” “I want a divorce.”
Poor Caleb didn’t even know they were married.
They fight side by side and seem to win - until the Serpents retreat into their dreams, taking Mal with them. She sacrificed herself to them, after all. Dawn tries to stop it, and seems to succeed when she melds with the dying goddess Ajaia. She raises all the Arsenals and they start to fly with Ixzayotl-
-but the King in Red is not done with Mal. He captures her in a demonglass marble. Dawn fights to keep her, but Mal knows that doing so will risk killing Dawn - and she loves Dawn, worships this new proto-goddess. So she takes out her old Craftswoman’s blade, and cuts the tie between them.
Mal ends the story trapped in a marble, prisoner of the King in Red.
And that is Mal’s story so far.
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