She couldn’t breathe. Her head felt heavy and blurred as she let Nikolai pull her onto the skiff. The junior Squallers had already left their post to get a better look at the black stone. No discipline at all.
Nikolai signaled to the twins. “Tolya, Tamar, corral those Squallers and get them back here. Then take opposite sides of this big shiny eyesore and walk the perimeter. Find out what you can about when it appeared and how many people come to the site every day. We’ll need to deal with them if we actually want to dig nearby. Zoya and I will take the skiff farther west with Yuri. We’ll reconvene to decide next steps in an hour’s time.”
“I can help,” Yuri protested, watching Tolya and Tamar leap down to the sands. “I can talk to the pilgrims—”
“You’ll remain with us. We’ll travel a little farther on and decide what to do. I don’t know how we’re going to dig here without these people getting involved.”
Yuri pushed his spectacles up his long nose, and Zoya wanted to break them in two. “Perhaps we should get them involved,” he said. “Or we could claim we’re searching for relics from the battle for a museum—”
“That may only incense them,” said Nikolai. “They’ll claim the site is holy and can’t be touched, or they’ll want to dig themselves to locate objects for their altars.”
Zoya didn’t care what the pilgrims wanted. If she had to look at them and their black banners another minute, she thought she might well lose her mind.
She pushed up her sleeves, feeling the weight of the amplifier at her wrist. “Enough politicking. Enough diplomacy. They want darkness? I’ll give it to them.”
“Zoya—” warned Nikolai.
But her anger had slipped its leash, and she could feel the storm rise. All it took was the barest twist of her wrists and the sands shifted, forming ripples, then dunes, rising higher and higher. She saw Genya huddled in her black shawl, her arms thick with scars. She saw Harshaw dead in the sand, his red hair like a fallen flag. Zoya’s nostrils were full of the scent of bergamot and blood. The wind howled, as if it were speaking her rage.
“Zoya, stop this,” Nikolai hissed.
The pilgrims shouted to one another, taking shelter, huddling together. She liked their fear. She let the sand form shapes, a shining sun, the face of a woman—Liliyana’s face, though no one there would know it. The wind screamed and the sands rose in a tidal wave, blocking out the sun and plunging the camp into darkness.
The pilgrims scattered and ran.
“There’s your Saint,” she said with grim satisfaction.
“Enough, Zoya,” said Nikolai in the deep shadow her power had cast. “That is an order.”
She let the sands drop. A wave of dizziness struck her, and for a moment the world seemed to flicker and warp. Her knees buckled and she fell hard to the deck of the skiff, frightened by the surge of nausea that had overcome her.
Nikolai seized her arm. “Are you—?” And then he seemed to stumble too, his eyes rolling back in his head.
“Nikolai?”
Yuri vomited over the railing.
“What just happened?” she said, pushing to her feet. “Why—” But the words died on her lips.
Zoya turned in a slow circle. The pilgrim camp was gone, the tents, the gleaming stone. The blue sky had bled away to a gray twilight.
“Where are Tolya and Tamar?” said Nikolai.
Tolya, Tamar, the Squallers, everyone who had been standing near the skiff was gone too.
“Where are they?” Yuri said. “What happened to them? What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything!” Zoya protested. “It was a little storm. No one was in any danger.”
“Am I having some kind of episode?” said Nikolai, staring into the distance. “Or are you seeing this too?”
Zoya turned to the west. Above them loomed a palace wrought from the same bone-colored sand as the Fold. But it was less a palace than a city, a massive structure that rose in arches and peaks, clouds roiling around its highest spires. There was something in its construction, in its sweeping scale, that reminded her of the bridge at Ivets.
A shriek sounded from somewhere in the distance. Volcra, Zoya thought, though she knew that couldn’t be.
“It’s a miracle,” said Yuri, falling to his knees.
Another shriek sounded, then another, and a rumble of thunder followed as dark shapes seemed to break from the palace, moving toward them at incredible speed.
“It’s not a miracle,” said Nikolai, reaching for his revolvers. “It’s a trap.”
NIKOLAI HAD SEEN MANY ASTONISHING things—the fog ponies of the Zemeni frontier, said to be so fast that when they ran they became invisible; a sea serpent thrashing its way through the northern ice; the world unspooling before him as he rode the winds with the wings of a monster at his back—but his eyes could not make sense of what he saw swooping toward him in the sky.
Yuri was on his knees, praying. Zoya had her arms raised, and Nikolai could already feel the sand whipping around the skiff as she summoned the wind to their defense.
As soon as he’d heard that shriek in the air, Nikolai had drawn his revolvers and prepared to face the volcra. He had expected shadow monsters or some new embodiment of the Darkling’s power. Hell, maybe some part of him had expected the Darkling himself, the Starless Saint resurrected, come to plague them all with charisma and ill intent.
Instead he saw … bees, a vast swath of them, moving through a sky the color of porridge, shifting and clustering into what might have been the shape of a woman. Behind the swarm, a grotesque loped over the sand, a massive body that kept forming and re-forming—two heads, then three; a thousand arms; a humped back with a spine that twisted in sinuous ridges; ten, twenty, thirty long, spindly legs moving in tandem. The forms were human one moment, animal the next—thick with fur and gnashing teeth. And there, circling high above, a third monstrosity, wings wide and scales gleaming …
“Zoya, say something spiteful.”
“Why?” she asked faintly.
“Because I’m fairly certain I’m hallucinating, and in my dreams you’re much nicer.”
“You’re an idiot, Nikolai.”
“Not your best work.”
“I’m sorry I can’t deliver better wordplay right now. I seem to be paralyzed with fear.”
Her voice was trembling—and if ruthless, unshakable Zoya was that frightened, then everything he was seeing was real: the bees, the grotesque, and yes, impossible but there nonetheless, the dragon, vast in size, its arching wings leathery, its scales glinting black, green, blue, gold in the flat gray light.
“Zoya, whatever you did to bring us here, this would be the time to undo it.”
“If I could, I would,” she growled, then hurled a wall of wind upward.
The bees struck it, like water parting around a rock in a stream, their loud buzz filling Nikolai’s ears.
“Do something!” said Zoya.
“Like what?”
“You have guns!”
“I’m not going to shoot at bees.”