BOOK II — THE RISING SICKNESS
Of all plagues, fear only the one that does not end at the grave. Kingdoms have burned their own villages on the rumour of it. There has never, in the annals of the New Kingdoms, been more than a rumour.
— A Physician’s Almanac of Contagions, Otal, twelfth printing
Chapter One
The Curer’s shield bears a woman’s face, her left eye hidden behind her hand. Guard what is well, runs the prayer of the shield. See late what is ill.
— catechism of Aalokye, first teaching
Afterwards, Alina Ainsworth would understand that the world had ended politely, in stages, the way worlds do — and that she had been watching every stage and naming none of them.
Stage one was a cough. A grey-haired man at the next table, blue-suited, celebrating something with pump-hall colleagues, coughing into his fist mid-toast and sitting down with an embarrassed wave. She had noticed — she was an apostle of the Curer; she noticed coughs the way smiths notice cracked iron — and diagnosed, across two yards of lantern-light and wine-fume: dry air, long speeches. She had gone back to her sister’s contract.
Stage two was the elegant woman by the roulette wheel — silver-streaked hair, rings worth a farm — folding down out of her chair with no more drama than a dropped shawl.
Even then, the club had held its shape. A ring of onlookers, calls for air and for water — water, gods forgive them all — and Alina had risen, mostly from habit, taking her hammer-callused healer’s hands toward the commotion, when a big dwarf with a short red beard, four tables off, said, in the tone of a man remarking on the weather, “Don’t feel right,” and went face-first through a card table.
Then a voice cut through the rising noise like a bell through fog — a young woman’s voice, trained, enormous, filling the room from carpet to chandelier without effort. “Make room, please. Do not touch the fallen. I am a healer of Aalokye.” And a priestess in a chain shirt was kneeling by the grey-haired man, two fingers at his throat, and Alina, arriving opposite her, saw over the sick man’s chest the exact moment when a colleague’s face stops being professional: the young priestess’s eyes came up, met hers, read the shield-and-face sigil at Alina’s collar, and showed her — one healer to another, in the private language of their trade — not worry. Terror.
“Sister,” the priestess said quietly. “Tell me what you feel.”
Alina laid her palm on the man’s brow and reached, the goddess’s warmth going down through her hand like sun through water — and recoiled, hand and soul both, before she had made any decision to do so.
There was no sickness in him. That was the horror she could never afterwards make anyone understand who had not touched it: sickness is a living thing, a wrongness of life, and life will grip a healer’s warmth like a drowning man. What was in the grey-haired man gripped nothing. It sat in his blood like winter sits in a house with dead hearths — patient, total, and arriving from somewhere else, as though his veins had become windows facing onto a country where nothing had ever been alive.
“I feel a door standing open,” she heard herself say. “Upstream of him. Upstream of — everything.”
“Yes,” said the priestess. “I have been feeling it since this morning, and I called it tiredness.” She stood, chain shirt rustling, and her big voice dropped to something small and quick and utterly without hope of being obeyed: “We should clear the club.”
The grey-haired man died between one word and the next. Alina felt it happen under her hand — the last warmth going out neither slowly nor gently but promptly, like something called away — and she was still forming the words for it when, across the room, the elegant woman by the roulette wheel stood up.
The screaming began properly then. It had been waiting all evening, out in the city, in scraps and distances; now it came home. The elegant woman turned, rings glittering, and her eyes were white as spoiled milk from lid to lid, and she took the nearest onlooker — a boy, a waiter, seventeen at most — by the face, almost tenderly, and bit.
“BACK!” The priestess’s voice again, at full trained volume, a physical force; and half the room obeyed it and half the room became a stampede, and the world’s ending left off being polite.
Alina Ainsworth had stood in plague-wards, battle-camps, and one memorable collapsed mine. She did the arithmetic of catastrophe now without conscious thought, in the goddess’s cold-eyed mercy: three fallen, therefore three rising; two exits, one blocked by panic; my hammer and half my armour in a room two floors up; and the dead do not tire. The grey-haired man’s hand closed on her wrist.
She looked down into eyes gone white as milk, in the face of a man she would learn, days later, had spent forty-one years keeping this city’s water sweet — and did the thing her whole life had been shaped to do, and the last thing anyone watching expected of a healer.
She broke his grip, stepped inside his reach, and put him down with the edge of the goddess’s open hand.
“EDITH!” she called, level and huge, in the voice their father had used over forge-noise. “STEEL!”
Her sister was already moving — had been moving, Alina registered, since the dwarf hit the card table: not toward the fight but away from it, through the stampede, against the current of the terrified, taking the stairs to their rooms four at a time. Which left, in the wrecked lantern-light of the main floor, for the space of the longest two minutes in the world: one apostle without her hammer, one scoundrel with a dress-rapier, one mage in evening clothes, one minstrel, one priestess, and a broad grey-moustached man in a soldier’s off-duty coat who had overturned an oak table with a grunt and was making a fighting corner of it, roaring in a parade-ground bass, “Third Brigade! To me, to the table, wounded behind!”
The dead came on. Six now — the club’s own fallen, milk-eyed, unhurried, appallingly whole; nothing in their gait explained why the eye refused them so violently, until you understood that the refusal was exactly this: they moved like puppets worked from a distance by something that had studied walking but never once cared for it.
Theodore Amias fought the way he did everything, sideways. The rapier was a joke against bodies that did not flinch — so he stopped aiming at bodies. He took ankles, hamstrings, the backs of knees; he turned dead weight into fallen weight and left what fell for the soldier’s boots and the table-edge. “Structural work!” he called across the chaos, parrying a milk-eyed clerk into a roulette wheel. “Bring ‘em to the floor, the floor’s on our side—”
The priestess Leah worked the line like a second wall: mace in one hand, her other blazing with a clean gold light that struck the risen where blades did not — each flare buying a heartbeat in which dead limbs forgot their instructions. Beside her the mage, Verendis, had gone pale and businesslike, one hand weaving small precise shapes: no fire — a packed room, he was already husbanding disaster like the professional he was — but short invisible hammers of force, Iron-Thread work, cracked out with a duellist’s economy, taking the risen at the joint of the neck, one, assess, two.
And Gabriel Vance stood at the stage’s edge with his lute still strapped across his back, doing, to any watching eye, nothing at all.
Alina, pivoting between the fallen and the fight, caught only fragments of it, and assembled them later the way one assembles a dream: the minstrel’s lips moving; a single held tone under the din, less heard than leaned on; and the great front doors — which Mathew Write and two waiters were fighting to close against the crush of panic from the street — swinging suddenly shut with a boom, as though the night outside had inhaled. The proprietor threw the bar down and stared at his own hands, amazed by their strength. The minstrel adjusted a tuning peg.
Then Edith was back.
She came down the staircase like weather, half into a breastplate she hadn’t buckled, their father’s greatsword already clearing its scabbard, and what remained of the fight stopped being arithmetic. The blade took the first of the risen at the waist as she reached the floor, without breaking stride, and Alina — sending the goddess’s gold in a scouring wave through the last three, watching dead limbs blacken and fold in the light of a power that predated every door in every wall of the world — had time for one profoundly unpriestly thought:
That is what the forge was for. All those years. It was for her.
Silence, then, of the ringing kind. Smoke, spilt wine, a piano leaning on three legs. The barred doors shuddering, softly and without rhythm, under fists from outside — some living, pleading to be let in; and some, already, not.
The soldier lowered his notched cavalry sabre and looked around the wreckage — at the priestess, the apostle, the swordswoman, the scoundrel, the mage, the minstrel — with a veteran’s frank astonishment.
“Well,” said Tobias Stamford of the Third Brigade. “Whoever you people are, I’m glad you drink here.”
Chapter Two
Doctrine of quarantine, first article: the city that closes its gates in time saves itself. Second article: no city has ever closed its gates in time.
— field manual of the Legendary Guard
They barred the club and counted the cost. Eleven dead who had stayed dead, put beyond rising by blade or by the priestess’s murmured seal over each brow. Four bitten, feverish within the hour. Two-score survivors — waiters, gamblers, a piano-man, the proprietor — in the wreckage of the finest common room in Grimstree, listening to the city.
That was the worst of that night, all of them agreed afterward: the listening. The Red Pepper Club had thick walls and thick carpets, and Skylorn came through them anyway, hour upon hour, in layers — bells, whistles, the collapsing-scaffold clatter of a mob somewhere, single screams that stopped with terrible administrative suddenness, and beneath everything, constant as tide, a low citywide murmur of doors being nailed.
The two priestesses turned the card-room into a ward and worked. Alina learned her colleague’s name between patients — Leah Griffin, of the Grimstree temple, six years on the sick-ward, betrothed as good as, to an inspector of the Guard — and learned the shape of her worth in the way that matters, watching her ration a failing gift: which prayers she spent, which she withheld, and how she lied to the bitten with her voice while her hands, honest, told Alina everything. The bitten were not stabilizing. Whatever the fallen had drunk arrived finished — but the bite was a seed, and it grew.
“Slowed is all I do,” Leah said, low, over the fourth patient. “The full rite would clear it — I feel the sickness yield — and I have perhaps two full rites left in me tonight, and there are four of them, and by dawn in this city there will be four thousand. Sister, arithmetic like this is supposed to be the Corporation’s trade, not ours.”
“Then we treat the arithmetic.” Alina wrung out a cloth. “Find what all four thousand drank from.”
They found it before midnight, and it cost only a jug. Leah stood at the bar with the club’s good crystal pitcher and passed her light through it, and the water went grey in the goddess’s sight — not fouled, not poisoned: occupied, a lodger’s cold coat hung in every drop — and the two healers looked at each other over the truth of it and did not, for a long moment, have anything priestly to say.
“The mains,” said Verendis Artem, who had been listening with his elbows on the bar and his mind visibly running like an engine. “Not a well, not a cistern — this vintage is city water, Grimstree pressure, which means the failure is upstream of the whole grid.” He stopped. Retreated, visibly, from the edge of his own conclusion, the way men retreat from a ledge they had walked to in the dark. “Upstream of the grid is nothing. Upstream of the grid is the intake, and the intake is clean river — it’s been clean river for two hundred years, ever since—”
He did not finish. Politeness, Alina thought at the time. It was not politeness.
Theodore prowled — checked the doors on the quarter hour, made an inventory of the club’s wine, bullied the shocked into carrying blankets, and settled at last onto the stage-edge beside Gabriel, the two of them talking low the way men do when six years need refilling in one night. Fragments reached her: names of towns; a laugh cut off out of respect for the room; and once, from Theodore, “—and I saw the doors close, is the thing. Bar’s oak. Took three of us at noon just to swing them.”
“Wind off the river,” said the minstrel, restringing.
“Gabriel. There is no wind tonight.”
“Extraordinary,” said the minstrel, “the tricks weather plays,” and struck up, very softly, an old Scotchmire lullaby — and though Alina would have sworn no lullaby on earth had power over that night, she watched it move through the wrecked room like warmth through cold hands: the bitten easing, the widow by the hearth unclenching, her own spine letting down some cargo she had not known it carried. Calm, she thought, drifting, in the last minutes before Leah shook her awake into the grey of morning. Calm like water. Where does an elmaer street-singer learn to pour calm like water—
“Sister.” Leah’s face, close, carved with a night’s work and something newer. “He’s come. He’s alive, and he’s come — and he says the word I promised you he’d say.”
At the barred door of the Red Pepper Club, flanked by two grey-caped guardsmen who had the eyes of men that had crossed the city on foot, stood a lean elmaer in an inspector’s coat, rain-black, iron-grey at the temples, with a face made entirely of insomnia and cheekbones. He put back his hood, looked once around the wreckage — cataloguing, Alina saw, pricing the night in a single sweep, doors, bodies, barricade, defenders — and then had eyes for exactly one thing in the room, and held her, hard, chain shirt and all, in front of everyone.
“You’re not dead,” Milo Julian said, into Leah’s hair, in the voice of a man reporting a miracle to a superior he does not trust.
“You lost men coming here,” she said. It was not a question; she was looking over his shoulder at the two guards, at the arithmetic of two.
“Three.” The word came out on the flat tone Alina would learn was how he carried things. He straightened, and the inspector resumed possession of the face. “And the word, since I promised it through the stone: quarantine. As of the fourth bell, by royal decree — no soul enters or leaves Skylorn. So.” He turned to the room, to the six of them the night had assembled, and produced, with the weary courtesy of a man dealing the only good cards he had left, a thin smile. “Which of you do I have to thank, and what will it cost me to make the arrangement permanent?”
Chapter Three
An inspector is a man paid to assume the worst of everyone, and forgiven, eventually, because he was right.
— Grimstree saying
Crossing Skylorn that night had cost Milo Julian three men and one belief, and of the two losses he knew already which would keep him from sleeping.
The men — Corporal Vasses, young Edrin, old Harl the pensioner who should never have been on the roster at all — had died between the New Legend square and the river, in the ordinary courageous ways: holding a stair while civilians fled up it, going back for a dropped child, being slower than a thing that does not tire. Milo had written their names in his notebook, in the rain, in the field-shorthand of a man who has learned that grief postponed must at least be filed. That was the Guard’s arithmetic and he had done it before.
The belief had died on Coppergate Row, where he had watched a burning pharmacy light up a crowd of looters and a crowd of rescuers working shoulder to shoulder, indistinguishable, both harvesting the same shelves — and understood, with the suddenness of a stair missing in the dark, that the city he had spent sixteen years holding together had been, all along, exactly one bad night deep. Civilization was a crust. He had known it the way everyone knows it, as a phrase. Now he knew it as an inventory.
So when he came at last to the Red Pepper Club — following Leah’s voice down the miracle of the sending stone, alive, barred in, six strangers held the floor — and found the barricade competent, the wounded triaged, the dead sealed brow by brow, and the six strangers themselves neither drunk, nor hysterical, nor pillaging the bar, the inspector in him performed its cold habitual act of appraisal even as the man in him was crossing the room to Leah. And what the inspector said, unsentimentally, was: assets.
They gave him the club’s last good table and the night’s story, each supplying the parts the others downplayed, which told him more about them than the story did. He listened without interrupting — the elder Ainsworth’s account precise as a ward-report; the younger’s all load-bearing verbs; the scoundrel’s version funnier than the facts and quietly exact about timing and doors; the Corporation mage’s addendum about pressure grids delivered like testimony he expected to be arrested for; the minstrel contributing nothing but a question so well-placed it reorganized everyone else’s telling. Then he laid his notebook on the table, squared it with the edge, and paid them the only compliment in his gift, which was the truth.
“The city is dying,” Milo said. “Here is the shape of it. The sickness is in the water — you found that yourselves, and you are half a day ahead of the crown’s own physicians, which should frighten you. It kills in between half a day and three, and what it kills, rises. The temples can cure it one soul at a time; there are eight hundred thousand souls behind these walls. The army holds the gates and burns its own checkpoints behind it. And the day after tomorrow, unless the water is proven clean and the tide of risen turned, the king’s council will vote on what the staff colleges politely call total restoration.” He let the phrase sit. “The Third Brigade, the guns of Wefaco, and fire, ward by ward. They will begin with Scotchmire, because they always begin with Scotchmire, and they will call it mercy, and the obscenity of it is that by then it may be.”
“And the crown’s investigation,” said Theodore, “is you.”
“The crown’s investigation is several hundred men, most of whom I trained with, any of whom may be bought, and one of whom — statistically — was.” The flat tone again. “Someone reconnected a piece of infrastructure that has been severed for two centuries. Someone knew the junction galleries of a sealed royal waterworks the way I know my own stairs. That is not zealotry, whatever emblems get found lying about. That is access — and access, in this city, wears a company seal or a Guard cape or both. So no: I will not be handing my only honest thread to my colleagues.” He looked around the table, taking them one by one. “I need eyes that arrived in Skylorn nine days ago with tomb-dust still on their boots. Strangers. Unbuyable for the excellent reason that nobody knows yet that you’re for sale.”
“We’re not,” said Edith.
“One thousand gold crowns,” said Milo, “each.”
“We might be,” said Theodore.
“Theo.”
“Negotiating, Edith. It’s like fighting, but the wounds are figurative and you can drink during.”
Alina leaned forward. “Say the task, Inspector.”
“Two tasks, in sequence.” He drew from his satchel a device the size of a cigar-box — steamtech, brass-cornered, a printing-frame whose seal-die bore the royal cipher — and began, while he talked, to take their particulars with a clerk’s speed. “First: the waterworks. The Colossal Cogwheel, in Brockpine parkland, five miles north — the old purifier. It answers to my map of every fact we have, and the garrison quartered there has been silent for three days, and I am the only officer in this city who finds that louder than all the bells in Grimstree. You will go and see, and you will send me the truth of it. Second — on your road out, you will call at the headquarters of VitaMed.”
The Corporation mage went, very slightly, still.
“They hold the city’s contracts for plague-work,” Milo continued. “Their directress has the crown’s ear this week, and her technicians know the Cogwheel — her own subsidiary built it, though I find that not one man in ten thousand remembers so. You will present yourselves as what you are — capable, discreet, and hired by an officer of the crown to inspect the waterworks — and you will listen, and note what you are told, and note more carefully what you are not.” He clicked the printing-frame shut; it exhaled a curl of steam, and dealt onto the table, one by one, six warm documents bearing their own names, the royal cipher, and a seal that shimmered faintly, ink woven with a hair-fine thread of magery. “Passage papers, under the king’s arcane seal. They will open every gate, checkpoint, and government door in Braora, and they will open them politely. Do not sell them; the buyer would hang, and so, more promptly, would you.”
Last, from the satchel, a pair of dull river-grey stones on cords. “Twin-stones. Wefaco make, old pattern, off the books. Speak to one holding it, the other hears — twice a day each way, then they sulk till dawn. I hold the sister.” He slid them across. “I am at the Guard house on New Legend square after midnight. You work for me, you report only to me, and to the rest of Braora you are six provincials with a taste for sightseeing in a plague. Terms?”
Milo watched the look go around their table — the swift silent parliament of people who had known each other, most of them, for nine days, and had already, in the manner of companies, stopped needing the show of hands. It closed on the minstrel, who had been silent all through; and the minstrel, who alone among them had been watching not the papers, nor the stones, but Milo’s face, said, gently:
“You didn’t mention her name. The directress. Your voice walks around it the way a man walks around a loose stair-board.”
The inspector held the elmaer’s gaze for a moment. That one, he thought, filing it, is not a minstrel.
“Electra Hawkes,” said Milo Julian. “And I have no reason in the world to doubt her, and I will pay a seventh share to anyone who brings me one.”
Chapter Four
Extract of the Decree of Quarantine, first morning: “…and the populace is enjoined to CALM. The water is under examination. The dead are under guard. The Crown is under no illusions.”
— proclamation posted at the Steamgate, 43 IIIE; final clause struck out by the censor before printing
The word arrived at VitaMed headquarters an hour before dawn, carried by a runner from the Northbridge clinic whose face had outrun his vocabulary, and it was not any of the words Electra Hawkes had planned for.
Fever, she had planned for. Deaths, she had planned for — had budgeted, mourned in advance, amortized across the future like any other capital cost. The word the boy brought, standing in her lamplit office with his cap wrung to a rag in his fists, was walking.
“Say it again,” she said.
“They get up, Directress.” A swallow. “The ones that die of it. My — we barred the ward doors at the second bell. The night sister is still in there. We can hear her—” and there the vocabulary ended for good, and Electra gave him coin and a cot and stood a long while at her tall window, watching the city’s lamps gutter out ward by ward as the gas-crews fled their posts, while inside her, with the smooth horrible efficiency of the well-trained, her mind revised every model she had.
The sphere is Pale, Balarn had said. What your engine will pour — are your machines certain of the cure?
She had priced everything but the one item.
Understand — she would say it years later, to the only listener left to her, in a room without windows — understand that there was a quarter of an hour, that first morning, in which everything might have gone otherwise. The confession drafted itself in her head unbidden, complete, actuarially exact: a runner to the palace, the intake wheels stopped by noon, the sphere named and damned, herself with it. She stood at the window and read the draft through twice, and she was not, whatever the ballads say now, incapable of it. She costed it. Confession: the water clean by nightfall, the risen finite, herself hanged within the quarter, the machines confiscated into Overy’s inventory, and the next plague — there is always a next plague — met by priests with alms-boxes, forever. Silence: three days of horror, and then a cure that would remake the world’s whole relation to death, and the hand that held it beyond any tower’s reach.
She had built her life on the discipline of never confusing what is felt with what serves. She filed the confession where she filed everything that was true and useless, and rang for Curtis.
By the third bell she had a war-room running: VitaMed’s clinics thrown open citywide, gratis — note the gratis, she told Curtis, the chroniclers will — her physicians issued the herb-protocols that slowed the sickness without curing a single case, her name moving through the panicking wards attached to the only institution in Skylorn that seemed to be doing anything. By the fourth bell she had sent the crown’s council her formal assessment — cause unknown, inquiry urged into sabotage of the water-grid, VitaMed’s every resource at the city’s disposal — three truths arranged into a lie, her particular art. And by the fifth bell, Balarn.
He came in travel-stained and smelling of woodsmoke, and told her what she had already deduced and needed, with a need that disgusted her, to hear witnessed: the mill taken, the sphere seated, the wheel turning; the garrison dead; the tableau arranged. He told it all in the voice of a man reading a bill of lading, and then, only then, in the same voice exactly:
“The garrison did not stay dead, Directress. I barred the doors from without. Whoever your inspector’s office sends to that mill will find a locked box of risen men and your evidence inside it.”
“You saw them rise.” Not a question. “Before you sealed it. And sealed it anyway.”
“You are asking whether it can be quiet,” Balarn said. “Nothing about it will be quiet, now. That is different from untraceable.” A pause; the only one she ever heard him take. “I have buried what I think of it. I ask once, professionally, because the answer governs my work: do the machines cure this? The rising, not the fever. Can your white engines call a man back down?”
And Electra Hawkes, who had spent the night with Gilivan’s trial-ledgers and knew the honest answer was the machines were built for the living, and I do not know, looked her huntsman in the eye and gave him the answer that served.
“They will cure what I designed them to cure,” she said, “and the world will watch them do it. Your six hours are paid for, Balarn. Now buy me three days.”
When he had gone, she stood at the window again. Below, along the grand curve of Upper Garden’s avenue, her clinics’ white banners were going up one by one, serpent-and-vial over doorways filling with the frightened — and the crowds beneath them, she noted, were already saying her name; the runners reported it hourly; the name was working. Three days. The presentation moved up; the theatre booked; the Rosseta signalled. Three days, and the horror itself — this she had revised into the model by dawn, with the smooth horrible efficiency of the well-trained — the horror itself was an asset now. The greater the night, the greater the dawn she sold them.
On the desk behind her, forgotten, the runner’s report from Northbridge sat open at its final line, in a clinic clerk’s shaking hand: the night sister has stopped screaming and begun knocking.
Chapter Five
The Springberry has three bridges within the walls, and the folk of Skylorn have long said that each carries a different cargo: the Steamgate bridge carries trade, the Garden bridge carries money, and the Fog bridge carries whatever the other two refused.
— almanac of the capital
They went out into the morning after the world ended, and found it grey, and quiet, and lying.
That was what struck Gabriel Vance hardest, crossing Grimstree in the fog — not the wreckage, not the smoke-taste, but the hush. Skylorn did not know how to be silent; he had performed against its roar for weeks, that ceaseless under-music of wheels and looms and voices which the locals no longer heard. Now the music had stopped, and the city stood around them holding its breath behind nailed shutters, and every small sound arrived naked: their own boots; rain-drip from broken gutters; somewhere north, a steam-whistle jammed open, keening on one thin inexhaustible note like a mourner who has forgotten what for.
Milo had gone at first light, Leah with him, bound for the temple and then the Guard house — report by stone at dusk, and a hand-clasp for each of them, and one look back at the priestess walking in his shadow that told Gabriel more about the inspector than the whole night’s talk had. Tobias Stamford had stayed at the club, promoted by acclamation to castellan of the Red Pepper, with a bar for a rampart and a piano-man for a garrison. Which left six, on the long fog-drowned diagonal toward Upper Garden and the north — six, and the things the fog kept proposing.
Twice before the river it was the dead. Small bands of them, drifting in the white — a milk-eyed dustman still harnessed to his cart; three chandlers’ girls in matching aprons, terribly together even now — and the company learned fast what the night had only sketched: keep moving, keep silent, kill only what blocks the road, for the sound of a fight was a dinner-bell heard four streets off. Edith’s greatsword did the necessary arithmetic; Verendis’s small iron hammers of force did the sums she missed; nobody spoke for a while afterward, and Gabriel let the silence stand. There are silences music should have the manners not to touch.
Once, in the burnt-out mouth of a chandlery, it was the living: five ragged figures rising from a plundered cellar with knives and a crossbow and hunger doing their arithmetic for them. Their leader — a thin quick man with a clerk’s spectacles and a looter’s new coat — took in Edith, the sword, the mage, the priestess’s mace, and performed, visibly, the only wise calculation of his career.
“Wrong shop,” Theodore agreed pleasantly, hands empty and open. “You want the wine-merchant on Coley Row. Cellar’s flooded, mind, but it’s flooded with wine.” And to the spectacled man alone, low, as the band slid past along the wall: “Feed the little one first, friend. A conscience is cheap today. Price goes up after.”
The Garden bridge rose out of the fog ahead of them at midmorning — lamps still burning along its balustrade in pale haloed rows, gas ghosting up into the white, the river running black and swollen beneath — and it was there, at the mid-span where the fog stood thickest, that Gabriel heard the singing.
He stopped dead. The others heard it a heartbeat later — a low chant, a woman’s timbre, in no tongue any of them owned: harsh, spare, patterned, old. Alina’s hand went to her shield. Verendis whispered a word and his eyes silvered faintly, reading the currents. But Gabriel stood transfixed by something none of them could share, because under the alien syllables, in the structure of them, he recognized the shape of his own most secret art — and it was wrong, inverted, a mirror met in a dark corridor. He sang to essences: names of the living Fabric, coaxed to come apart into wind and flame. The voice in the fog was singing instructions — names of stillness, names of obedience, a grammar with every warm word removed — and the world was answering it the way his answered him.
“Someone’s speaking to the dead,” he said quietly. “Not raising a mood. Giving orders.”
Purple light bloomed in the fog, thirty yards on — dim, joyless, the colour of a bruise at its oldest — and by it they saw her for the first time: a slender silhouette, black-robed, still as furniture, hands faintly luminous over the bridge’s litter of shrouded shapes that the burial-crews had abandoned at the panic. And around her, with a sound like wet wood splitting in a frost, the shrouds began to move. Not the shambling of the risen. Something drier, quicker, more economical: bone folding out of ruined cloth, a dozen figures assembling themselves upright in the fog with the horrid neatness of instruments being unpacked.
Edith’s sword cleared leather. “No,” said Alina and Gabriel together — the priestess because she had touched, across sixty yards of fog, the cold pouring off that still figure and known it instantly for a deeper well than every risen thing in Skylorn stacked together; the minstrel because the chant had paused.
The silhouette turned. Eyes found them through fog that should have made it impossible — passed over sword, mace, mage, and priestess with the indifference of a customs officer waving through the unremarkable — and stopped, with a long tilt of the head, on Gabriel Vance.
The moment held. Later he would try to render it in music, fail, and burn the pages.
Then the woman spoke one further phrase in the grey grammar — unhurried, courteous, final, a hostess ending an audience — and stepped sideways into a shadow that had no business being deep enough, and was gone. And her twelve dry servants walked, in perfect file, to the bridge’s parapet, and stepped off it, one by one, into the black water, like a sentence being deleted word by word.
Fog closed over the plunge-sounds. The river ran on. Somewhere north the jammed whistle keened.
“Well,” said Theodore, into the ringing quiet, “I’m going to say what the rest of you are being too educated to say. That is who poisoned the water, yes? Dark robes, dead servants, secret bone-language — we find the inspector, we point, we collect a thousand crowns apiece, we retire to Merryrose and drink beer with roses in it.”
“No,” said Gabriel and Verendis, in accidental chorus; and the mage, ceding the floor with a courteous gesture, let the minstrel say the half he himself had no words for. “She wasn’t working,” Gabriel said slowly, watching the shadow that had swallowed her. “The chant, the servants — that was housekeeping. She’s looking for something.” He touched, without noticing he did it, the tuning-peg at his lute’s head. “And whatever it is — she heard it this morning the way we heard that whistle. Somewhere north of here, something is singing to her kind, and it hasn’t stopped since the wheel started turning.”
On the far bank, in the dark of a warehouse arch, Vyisla Dorak’Elar stood a while, considering.
The trail-knot of Upper Garden could wait an hour. The pull from the north could wait for dusk; the Undying’s will had waited two centuries in a library, and whatever iron body it now wore, it was not going anywhere — that was, indeed, the whole of the horror, and the substance of the report she owed the Pillars. What could not wait — what her order wasted nothing on and therefore recorded at once, in the small black book, in ink mixed by moonlight — was the fourth omen, resolved.
A candle-flame walking on two legs, singing into a storm. She had taken it for cipher. It was census. An elmaer with a lute on his back and, folded inside him where only the grey sight reached, a furnace — twin chambers of banked fire, and around them, faint as breath on glass, the resonance of one who had heard the Fabric’s own naming-voice and lived.
The Hidden’s daughters do not believe in coincidence. They believe in composition.
“So,” she said to the dark, and the dark, as always, kept its counsel. She wrote three lines, closed the book, and went to find what the buyer’s buyer had left of his scent in Upper Garden, while overhead the fog began, indifferently, to thin.
Chapter Six
The serpent-and-vial of VitaMed is displayed on white. This is policy. Colours show blood; white shows intention.
— internal style-manual, Vita Institutes & Medicals
Verendis Artem had entered the headquarters of VitaMed twice before in his life — once for a licensing seminar, once to argue about a misdelivered crate of chambers — and on neither occasion had the lobby contained soldiers.
It contained them now in layers, like sediment: six VitaMed house-mercenaries in company grey at the doors; two regulars of the Third Brigade on the steps, hollow-eyed, rifles slung; a brace of Legendary Guards flanking the reception arch, and behind them, on the white marble where normally a fountain played, sandbags. The fountain had been drained. Someone had thought about sightlines. Above it all, serene on its white field, the serpent-and-vial looked down, and the queue of the frightened wound out the doors and along the avenue under the white banners, shuffling forward toward the free clinics with the terrible patience of people who have already tried everything else.
The royal papers passed them through the layers one by one — each checkpoint’s officer reading, straightening, going polite in the particular way the king’s cipher made people polite — and Verendis, third in line behind Edith’s armoured shoulders, employed the waiting as he employed everything: he read the building.
He read it in the service corridor they were led along, where the message-tubes ran overhead in brass bundles, and one bundle — the pneumatic trunk-line north, coded blue-on-white for intake, aqueduct — showed bright unweathered solder at every joint. Recent work. Weeks old, no more. He read it in the goods-lift they passed, still cradling a crate whose stencilled routing had been painted over but not deeply enough: beneath the grey he could pick out, letter-ghost by letter-ghost, a two-word name that meant a lump of gull-rock south of the delta. And he read it, most of all, in the laboratory they were finally shown into — first floor, cold light, the corridor’s last door — where his professional life and his present errand met at last, shook hands, and quietly showed each other their knives.
On a wheeled tool-cradle in the room’s centre, disassembled with the loving precision of a surgery, lay a machine.
A white spheroid the size of a curled child, its panels opened like petals; articulated arms folded back; and at its heart, cushioned in cork and flannel, components that Verendis Artem could have drawn blindfolded, because he had signed the discrepancy-sheet that mourned their disappearance: superior-grade chamber. Regulator coils. And crowning the array, unmistakable, matte-silver, sustaining — a condenser crown.
Flag it to Division, he had said, prudent and clever, and the sheet had gone into committee to drown. And here stood the drowned thing, opened on a cradle, in a plague, in the one building in Skylorn that the crown was thanking on its knees.
“Don’t touch the array, please.” A woman had entered behind them, and Verendis turned, and the room reorganized itself around her the way rooms did around very senior people — technicians straightening, the armed unkempt man in the corner by the specimen-gurney lifting his eyes once and lowering them. “It’s calibrated, and it is, at present, rather more important than any of us.”
Electra Hawkes was smaller than her legend and more tired than her portraits, and neither thing reduced her by a hair. Verendis catalogued the surfaces first, out of training: elmaer, exquisite tailoring under a working-coat, the bruise-dark rings of the genuinely sleepless, a steadiness that arrived a half-second late and stayed a half-second too long — maintained, that steadiness, the way an arch is maintained. Then she was welcoming them, unhurried, exact — the king’s papers acknowledged with one glance, the inspector’s name received with one courteous nod, sympathy for their night dispensed in a sentence that managed to be both warm and fully costed — and asking, already crossing to the wall-charts, what the crown’s irregulars wished to know.
She answered their questions for a quarter of an hour, and it was, Verendis admitted later, a virtuoso performance — the more so because at least half of it was true. The sickness: a contagion of the water, magical, unprecedented; her clinics could slow it, gods willing the temples could clear scattered cases, but a mass cure wanted machinery, and her teams were remaking medical engines day and night — a hand, here, indicating the opened spheroid, frank as sunlight, hiding its stolen components in the one place no one hides anything, plain view. The water: “the grid cannot be scrubbed pipe by pipe; it must be cleansed at the source, and the source, gentles, has a name.” And there, watching their faces, she said it before they could: “The Colossal Cogwheel. My subsidiary built it, two centuries and a half ago. If your inspector is sending you north — and he is; he is the only man in that Guard house worth his coat — then you will let me help you do it properly.”
She gave them the junction-gallery schematics, crisp new copies. She gave them a masterwork toolkit in a leather roll. She gave them, in words of admirable clarity, the procedure for re-coupling the intake lines “should the saboteurs have severed anything,” and a promise that made even Edith blink: “As for fuel — the wheel needs quintessence of mature depth, and there is exactly one such sphere in this kingdom, and the Consortium is saving it for their flying toy. By tonight I will have pried it loose. The king is disposed to listen to me this week.” A thin smile. “Plagues are clarifying.”
It was masterful. It was helpful. It was — Verendis kept arriving at the word and kept setting it down again, the way one sets down another man’s blade — rehearsed. Every question they asked had an answer waiting with its coat already on. And twice, at the mention of the silent garrison, her gaze had gone — a flick, a nothing, a tenth of a second — to the corner, to the unkempt armed man on his stool beside the sheeted gurney, who sat cleaning his nails with a horn-handled knife amid the white sterility like a wolf drowsing in a chapel; and whose boots, Verendis observed in the last moments, as Theodore drifted with purest idleness between the gurney and the door, were crusted to the ankle with mud.
Woodland mud, drying rust-brown. There was no woodland within the walls of Skylorn. There had been rain, two nights past, on the parkland north.
And it was Alina — silent through the entire audience, watching the directress with the fixed courteous attention she otherwise reserved for the dying — who asked, as they gathered to leave, the only question that had no coat ready.
“Directress. On the Garden bridge this morning we crossed a woman raising the dead out of their shrouds — robed, southern, speaking a tongue like breaking ice. She commanded them into the river and vanished.” A pause, mild as milk. “Do you know her?”
For the first time in a quarter of an hour, the room’s arch had to hold itself.
It held. “No,” said Electra Hawkes, gently, into the silence. “But this city is drawing every carrion-bird on the continent this week. I’d keep clear of her, whoever she is.” And she wished them the goddess’s speed to Brockpine, and turned back to her opened machine — and Verendis Artem, filing out last past the sandbagged fountain into the noise of the gathering crowd, walked with the particular lightness of a man carrying, very carefully, a full glass: three solder-bright message joints, one painted-out islet, one condenser crown, two muddy boots, and a single flicker of a directress’s eyes, going where eyes go when a name they know has been spoken by someone who should not know it.
He said nothing yet. It was not prudence this time. It was arithmetic: the glass was not yet full enough to spill in front of, and outside the tall windows, the crowd-noise had stopped sounding like a queue.
It had started sounding like weather.
Chapter Seven
A crowd is a creature with a thousand hearts and one thought, and the thought is always the same thought: we were promised.
— attributed to Oswalar Tremaine, first king of Braora
They came out of VitaMed’s doors onto the top of the steps, and Alina Ainsworth looked down into the face of the thing her whole vocation existed to keep from being born.
The queue was gone. In its place, filling the white avenue from railing to railing beneath the clinic banners, stood perhaps four hundred citizens of Skylorn — and the sickness stood among them, visible now to her trained eye at a glance: the grey shine of fevered skin, the particular stillness of those hoarding their strength, mothers carrying children who had stopped crying, which is worse than crying. At the foot of the steps, a thin line of house-mercenaries and Guard held pikes reversed, hafts out — someone had given the no-steel order, and someone had been right — and the crowd leaned against that line the way floodwater leans on a door, not striking yet, only arriving, more of itself every minute, while a single voice near the front — a woman’s, cracked with grief — carried the creature’s one thought up the steps like a thrown torch:
“You have it in there! You’re choosing! The Corporation heals its own and the crown seals the gates and we are left to turn — my son is left to turn — you have it in there!”
The line swayed. A bottle came over it and burst on the marble a yard from Edith, who did not move, which was its own kind of language. Above the doors, Alina heard the mechanical clack of shutters closing — the white building lowering its eyelids — and from the young Guard officer at the line’s end, voice cracking, the beginning of the order that would turn four hundred frightened sick people into a massacre with one word.
Alina stepped down into the space between.
She did not shout. That was the trick her years had taught her that no seminary teaches: a crowd is deaf to volume, which it reads as fear, but a crowd is a creature of the sickroom, and it knows the sickroom voice — the voice that has sat with death a thousand nights and is not sitting with it now, the voice that says there is a procedure and you are in it. She pitched for the front rank and let the creature’s own silence carry her back.
“My name is Alina Ainsworth. I serve the Curer. I have been inside that building —” the creature rumbled; she went through it, level as a wall-course, ”— and there is no cure inside that building. Not yet, not hidden, not hoarded. I laid my hands on their engines myself. What there is, is this—”
And she told them. It was not comfort; it was inventory, the sickroom’s mercy: what the sickness was and how it moved; the count of hours — half a day to three, and the difference bought by rest, water boiled with culkas leaf, and the temples’ rites; which three temples had priests still standing, and that the priests were spending themselves one soul at a time, eldest and youngest first, and would not stop while they lived. That the water itself — she felt the company go still behind her — that the source itself was found, and named, and that six of them, under the king’s own seal, were walking north within the hour to cut the sickness off at its root.
“By tomorrow’s dusk,” said Alina Ainsworth, in the voice that had never once in twelve years promised what it could not carry, and heard, far back in her skull, the goddess’s cold still arithmetic say and now it must be true, sister; you have just spent the Curer’s name on it — “by tomorrow’s dusk, the water of this city will run clean. That is the promise. Here is the price of it: I need the strong among you to stop being a crowd, and become a watch. Your streets know you. Go back to them in tens. Bring your sick to the temples while they can still walk — carry those who can’t — bar your doors at dusk, and keep count of your dead, because every name you save us counting is a rite the priests can spend on the living instead—”
The creature stirred, wavered — four hundred hearts hunting for the one thought — and it was then that Alina became aware, at the very floor of her hearing, of the music.
It had been there for some time, she realized. No tune anyone could have named afterward; barely a tune at all — the minstrel had come down two steps behind her and was picking something slow and low and endlessly patient, a figure like water finding its level, around and under her voice — and wherever her words went, the music arrived a half-breath before them, unlocking, gentling, tuning. She understood, with the part of her mind that stood permanently apart taking notes, that she could not have said where her authority ended and the lute’s began; that the crowd’s thousand hearts were settling toward a common slow beat like ships finding a tide; and that the tall elmaer’s face, bent over his strings, wore the closed eyes and absolute interior stillness of a man not performing but praying — if prayer were a thing one did with the fabric of the world directly, and cost the one who prayed.
The crowd became a watch. It happened the way ice becomes water, no seam, no signature — tens forming around parish elders and forge-foremen, names being written on shutters in chalk, the grieving woman from the front rank suddenly organizing three streets’ worth of neighbours with her dead-eyed ferocity turned entirely to logistics — and the young Guard officer stood at his unneeded line watching four hundred people disperse in order, wearing the expression of a man who intends to lie about this in his report because no one will believe him.
Alina climbed the steps back to her company. Her knees informed her, privately, that they were done for the hour; the goddess’s gold, spent to the lees again, would refill by dusk. Gabriel was putting up his lute, eyes still lowered.
“That song,” she said quietly. “I have worked crowds beside singers before. That was not that.”
“No,” Gabriel agreed. There was a pause, of a kind she recognized: the sickroom pause, when the patient decides how much truth the visitor can carry. “Walk with me at the back a while, sister,” said the minstrel at last, “and I will tell you what it was. You of everyone. It’s — germane, now, I think. Something upriver has been singing in the same language all day. And it is so much better at it than I am.”
Chapter Eight
The Steamgate opens for the cipher, the cargo, and the crown — and for nothing else, though it weep on the threshold.
— standing orders, northern gate of Skylorn
Edith Ainsworth had been raised to love the sound of industry — had fallen asleep, whole winters of her childhood, to the psalm of her father’s tilt-hammer through the floorboards — and so it took her a moment, coming up the Yestcog approach, to understand why the sound of the Steamgate at red alert made her hands want a hilt.
It was the forge-sound with the life taken out. The great gate stood in its rampart like an altar of black iron, forty feet of riveted leaves under a crown of pressure-stacks, steam bleeding white against a bruised sky; its magic-driven cogs, big as millstones, turned slow and glinting in their oiled channels, and everything her father had taught her to hear as work-song — rhythm, weight, heat — had been assembled here into something that produced only closure. Before it, in the mud of the staging ground, the Sixth Company of the First Brigade sat in ordered rows around cook-fires that nobody was singing at. She read the parked ranks of steam-wagons, the crated shells stencilled with Wefaco’s cog-and-blade, the fat brass sledges of things that were not, whatever the manifests said, water-pumps. Her family had supplied a navy once; she knew ordnance in its Sunday clothes.
“They’re not garrisoning,” she said. “They’re staging.”
The captain of the Sixth received them under the gate’s shadow — a tall grey man, moustached, scale-armoured, red-caped, with the courteous exhausted manner of the career officer three orders past the last one he’d agreed with. The royal papers made him prompt; something else — she thought perhaps it was Alina’s shield-sigil, or simply the novelty of six people asking to leave — made him, briefly, human.
“Ocelar Torvings,” he offered, walking them personally down the checkpoint line. “You’ll forgive the theatre. As of noon we pass the cipher, the crown, and the dead-carts, and the dead-carts only outbound.” A slantwise look. “Waterworks, is it. Then you’ll be wanting speed, and I’ll be wanting to give it to you, and here is why, off the record and man to man.” He stopped, under the gate’s cold breathing, and said it without drama, which was the worst way it could have been said. “Two days, unless your errand and the temples between them turn this arithmetic. Two days, and the council signs, and the Sixth goes back through this gate with the Third behind us, ward by ward. Restoration, the order will say.” His moustache moved; it was not a smile. “I have burned villages for the crown, in the Praecarian troubles. I had hoped to be too old to be asked again. So whatever is up that river, gentles — kill it quickly.”
“And if two days isn’t enough,” said Theodore, “who countermands the order?”
“Countermands?” Torvings looked at him as at a foreign word. “Boy, they are reinforcing it. There’s a detachment promised out of the Ethercay Citadel — eight of the old horrors, the grafted kind, if you believe the wire — and the Researchers do not lend those out to be countermanded.” He handed back their papers, and his eyes, passing over the company, snagged one instant on Edith’s greatsword, and warmed by a degree, the way a smith’s daughter is used to soldiers’ eyes warming at honest steel among the steamwork. “Northperts pattern. Your father’s?”
“His hands. His forge.”
“Then he’ll forgive mine.” He touched the sworl-stamped pommel of his own steam-sabre with wry apology, and waved them through, under the raised leaf of the gate — and through the other thing, which Verendis had warned them of in an undertone at the checkpoint: a fine cold prickle across the skin, like walking through a curtain of falling silk, as somewhere overhead the gate’s inlaid sigil-lattice took their measure. The Steamgate remembers what passes it, the mage had murmured, for a day and a night — and what it remembers, the Guard can find. Assume we walk the next mile, and every mile after, observed.
Beyond the wall, the Beaumont ran north, wide, paved, lamplit for its first mile and utterly empty — a triumphal road with nobody left to triumph — through checkpoints where priests of Aalokye moved along lines of detained travellers with lanterns and grey faces, hunting the sickness among those who had fled the city before the gates shut. Alina slowed at each; at each, a priest met her eyes and shook their head slightly — held, for now — and each small headshake went onto the scale Edith could see her sister carrying, the one with a promise on the other pan.
Then the checkpoints were behind them and the land went quiet — true quiet, the first in two days: hedgerows, rain-ditches, the river running silver-grey on their right beyond the poplars, and the six of them walking north into it at campaign pace with the city’s murmur sinking away behind. No one spoke for the first mile. It was Gabriel — walking at the rear beside Alina, the two of them wrapped in some low conversation begun on the VitaMed steps that had left the priestess’s face very still — who finally lifted his head, looked long at the river gleaming through the trees, and said, to nobody in particular:
“It’s louder.”
“What is?” said Edith.
“The singing.” His face, in the failing light, was the face of a man listening to something arrive. “We’re walking toward the choir.”
Ahead, where the road bent with the river, a painted sign on a leaning post said BROCKPINE PARKLAND, and behind the sign the ordered conifers of the crown’s tame little forest stood black against the last of the sky, silent, at attention, like ushers.
Chapter Nine
To Frederick Perry, architect: whose day of life arrived one heavy winter, and whose death came on a night of bitterness. He loved the divine as much as the sciences. This wheel is his prayer. May it never cease turning.
— plaque, statue of Frederick Perry, Frederick Perry park
The parkland was wrong in the way Theodore liked least, which was tidily.
He had been reading rooms since before he could read letters — it was the alley-child’s first alphabet, the difference between a street that is quiet and a street that has been quieted — and Brockpine, as they climbed its groomed gravel paths in the dusk, spelled itself out to him one letter at a time. No birds; not fled — silent, roosting overhead in the black pines in unmoving rows, feathered stones. No small rustle of the grass-things that own every wood at nightfall. The stream beside the path chattering too loudly in all that hush, like a hired mourner. And over everything, growing as they climbed, a sound he felt in his molars before his ears admitted it: a vast, patient, mineral turning. Stone-on-water. Iron-on-years.
They crested the hill into Frederick Perry park, and the Colossal Cogwheel stood against the last grey band of sky, and even Theodore Amias, connoisseur of the unimpressible, stopped walking.
Pictures did not carry it. The wheel was a cliff that moved — a riveted iron round higher than the temple domes of the capital, black with two centuries and streaked green like verdigris tears, turning with unhurried enormity in its stone races while the tamed river poured through the sluices beneath. Behind it the mill-house rose in three storeys of dark metal, and along its face, in ordered rows, yellow steamlight burned behind the windows — every lamp lit, hall upon hall, warm as festival — and nothing moved across any of them, and the two facts together were worse than any ruin.
“It’s running,” said Verendis. He had his silvered look on, reading. “Full intake. Full flow to the — ” a pause, a swallow; the engineer in him bowing to something and stepping back to let the man speak — “to the aqueduct. It’s been running for days.”
The statue met them at the gate of the summit enclosure: old Perry in weathered bronze, gaunt and kind, compass in one hand, the other resting on a model of his wheel, with the dedication plaque beneath and, cut small below it, his years — a winter’s child, a bitter night’s leaving. Alina read the plaque aloud, softly, to the darkening park: He loved the divine as much as the sciences. Below the statue’s gaze, the enclosure’s wire gate stood locked — a good Guard padlock, month-old scratches, entirely respectable — and Theodore had it open in forty seconds, and that was the last respectable thing the hilltop offered.
Because the mill-house doors were chained.
All of them. He walked the building’s face in the deepening dark with his hooded lantern while the others watched the windows, and the letters spelled themselves, cold and clear, the alley-alphabet at its plainest. Main doors: chained, twice wrapped, padlocked. Side sally-door: chained. River-stair door: chained, the links run through both handles and a driven staple. New chain — flecked with bright at every kink where the black enamel hadn’t taken; oiled; bought for the job. Every lock facing outward.
“Somebody left this building,” Theodore said, coming back to them in the lantern-ring, and hearing his own voice arrive at the sum a half-step ahead of him, “and locked it behind them. Not to keep us out. You chain a door twice and staple it when—” and the building itself finished his sentence.
From behind the great main doors, clear in the mineral hush between two beats of the turning wheel, came a knock. Then another, lower down, soft, like knuckles asking. Then, along the whole dark face of the mill-house, at door after door after door, patiently, without rhythm, without anger, without end, the sound of many hands that had been men three days ago, remembering doors.
The company stood very still in the little light. Above them the wheel turned, and turned, and turned, and from every lit and empty window the yellow steamlight fell warmly down, and the river went on drinking through the sluices with a sound like the world swallowing.
Edith broke the silence, in the flat voice of the forge. “Milo said send the truth at dusk.” It was dusk. Nobody moved for a moment; then Theodore drew out the twin-stone, and it woke cold against his palm, and he told the distant Guard house, in six flat sentences, what the crown’s museum had become. The stone sat silent long enough that the knocking had time to be the only sound in the world.
Then Milo’s voice, small and iron-grim in the dark between them: “Understood. Nothing in that building is still my garrison — grieve later, verify everything. The water dies tonight, whatever else lives. Go in.”
Theodore put the stone away. He looked at Edith, at the bolt-cutters already coming off her pack; at Alina, shield up, the goddess’s first gold gathering along its rim like dawn on a hill-line; at Verendis flexing his fingers, at Gabriel with his eyes shut, listening — he knew now to what — at the pale singing thing seated in the iron heart above them all; and, being Theodore Amias of Scotchmire, he said the eulogy the moment deserved.
“Museum hours,” he said, “are over.”
The cutters closed. The chain sang, parted, ran ringing to the stones — and the great doors of the Colossal Cogwheel swung slowly outward under their own patient weight, and the warm yellow light of the hall fell out across the company’s faces, and the cold came out with it, and the smell; and in the depth of the bright doorway, in ordered ranks down the blood-black marble of the entrance hall, the garrison of Brockpine turned its milk-white eyes toward the night air, and began, unhurried, to come and be let out.
End of Book II. The tale continues in Book III — The Untangling.