What? demanded Liraz. Why are you laughing?
Because lifes a bastard, was all Akiva could say.
Well then, was his sisters flat reply. I guess we fit right in.
19
THE HUNT
Across Eretz, a pulse of magic surged. There was no Wind to presage it this time, no sound or stir, so nearly everyone who felt itand everyone felt itbelieved it theirs alone, their own despair. It was a wave of raw emotion so potent that, for an instant, it carved out every other feeling and took its place, in its brief passage colonizing every thinking creatureevery feeling creaturewith the absolute conviction of the end .
Its passage was swift and bleak; it raced across land and sky and sea, and no creature was immune to it, and no material nor mineral barrier to it.
Far faster than wings could have carried it there, it swept through Astrae, the capital of the Empire of Seraphim, and just as fast was gone again. In its silent aftermath, no citizen connected it with the shattering of their great Tower of Conquest.
But at the site of the Towers husk, inside the vast and twisted metal skeleton that was all that remained of it, there stood five angels who did. Seraphim they were, but not citizens of the Empire. Theyd come from afar, hunting hunting hunting hunting and now, in unison, like compass needles spun by the same magnet, they turned south and east. This overwhelming despair was trespass and violation; they knew it was not their own, and each paused just long enough to sound the depths of its appalling power before thrusting it away. Another taste from the unknown magus who plucked at the strings of the world.
Beasts Bane, theyd heard him called in the harsh rumor-whispers of this craven city. Murderer and traitor, chimaera-killer, bastard and father-slayer. He had done this.
Now, with eyes the color of fire, the five Stelians fixed on the distant Adelphas Mountains.
And Scarab, their queen, spread
her wings and said, with perfect wrath, through sharpened teeth, On with the hunt.
20
WARP
In the Far Isles it was night, and the new bruise that blossomed in the sky would not be visible till dawn. It wasnt like the others. Indeed, it soon engulfed the othersall of them lost in its dark sprawl. From horizon to horizon it spread, deeper than indigo, nearly as black as the night sky itself. It was more than color, this bruise. It was warp, it was suction. It was concavity and distortion. Eidolon of the dancing eyes had said the sky was tired, and ached. She had downplayed the matter.
The sky was failing. The stormhunters didnt need to see it blacken. They felt it.
And started to scream.
21
NITIDS HANDS
The Kirin caves werent so much a village within a mountain as a series of them, connected by a network of passages radiating out from a massive communal space. A collaboration between nature, time, and hands, the space was raw and flowing, unplanned and improbable. A wonder. Overall, the impression was of a miraculous accident of geology, but in truth it was a miraculous accident of geology that had been shaped over hundreds of years by generations of Kirin adhering to a simple aesthetic: Nitids hands. They were the tools of the goddess, and their duty, as they saw it, was not to stand out or aggrandize themselves, but to copyas it wereher style.
Scarcely a detail anywhere announced itself as made. There were no corners, and even the stairs could almost have been naturally occurringasymmetrical and imprecise.
It was dark, but not perfectly. Light wells admitted sunshine and moonlight, amplified by hidden hematite mirrors and crystal lenses. And it was never silent. Intricate channels conducted the wind throughout, carrying fresh air and making an eerie, ever-present ambient sound that was part dark and stormy night and part whalesong.
Walking through, Karou experienced it all in a rush of old and new experience that was like the convergence of two swift rivers: Madrigals memory and Karous marvel, merging at every step. Entering the grand central cavern, she at once remembered it and was struck breathless by the sight of it, stopping dead to throw back her head and stare.
She remembered the swoop of Kirin wings overhead, the calls and laughter and music, the flurry of festivals and the ordinariness of everyday life. She had learned to fly in this cavern.
It was immense, several hundred feet in height, so vast that echoes got lost and only sometimes found their way back. Screens of stalagmites stood up from the floor in undulating wallsdozens of feet high, hundreds of thousands of years forming, but it would be millions before they ever joined with their counterparts high overhead. The walls were veined with ore, glinting with gold, and terraced in places into niches that reminded her of honeycomb, or the balconies in an opera house. This was where the seraph soldiers had made their camps, looking down on the central space where orderly fire rings showed signs of recent use.
Wow, she heard Zuzana murmur behind her, and when she turned to glance back, she glimpsed the Wolfs face as he swallowed hard, struggling against overwhelming emotion. There was no one to see; all the host came behind them, so only Karou witnessed the look of yearning and loss that briefly overtook his features.