There were four of them: three men and one woman, and they were, indeed, as blue as icebergs. If there had been any wisp of hope that Nyoka might be with them, here it died. Nyoka had been fair-haired like her daughters. This woman had tight black curls. As for the men, one was tall with a shaved head, and one had long white hair that hung in ropes to his waist. As for the last, he was ordinary, apart from the blue skin. Or…he ought to have been ordinary. His hair was brown, his face plain. He was neither tall nor short nor handsome nor ugly, but there was something about him nevertheless that wrested the eye from his comrades. His wide stance, the arrogant angle of his chin? For no clear reason, Kora and Nova were certain that he was the captain, the one who’d shaped godsmetal into a wasp and flown it here. He was the smith.
Of all Mesarthim gifts—and there were too many to count, new mutations all the time in an ever-expanding index of magics—one gift was prime. Every person born in all the world of Mesaret had a dormant ability that would wake at the touch of godsmetal—as they called the rare blue element, mesarthium. But out of millions, only a handful possessed the prime ability: to manipulate the godsmetal itself. These few were called smiths, because they could shape mesarthium as common smiths shaped common metals, though they didn’t use fire, anvils, and hammers, but their minds. Mesarthium was the hardest substance known. It was perfectly impervious to cutting, heat, or acids. It couldn’t even be scratched. But to the mind of a smith, it was infinitely malleable and responsive to mental command. They could mine it, mold it, awaken its astonishing properties. They could build with it, fly in it, bond with it, so that it was something like alive.
This was the gift that children dreamed of, playing Servants in the village, and it was the one they were whispering about now, flushed and eager, saying what their own ships would be when they got their commands: winged sharks and airborne snakes, metal rap-tors and demons and rays. Some named less menacing things: songbirds and dragonflies and mermaids. Aoki, one of Kora and Nova’s little half brothers, declared that his would be a butt.
“The door will be the hole,” he piped, pointing around at his own.
“Dear Thakra, don’t let Aoki be a smith,” whispered Kora, invoking the seraph Faerer to whom they prayed in their little rock church.
Nova muffled a laugh. “A butt warship would be terrifying,” she said. “I might steal that idea if it turns out I’m a smith.”
“No, you won’t,” said Kora. “Our ship will be an uul, in loving memory of our home.”
Their laughter this time was insufficiently muffled, and caught their father’s ear. He silenced them with a look. He was good at that.
They thought that should have been his gift: mirth-queller, enemy of laughter. In fact, he’d tested as elemental. He could turn things to ice, and that was fitting, too. His magnitude was low, though, like Skoy?’s and everyone else’s on Rieva, and really, nearly everyone’s everywhere. Strong gifts were rare. It was why the Servants went out on search like this and tested people all over the world, seeking out those needles in haystacks to join the imperial ranks.
Kora and Nova knew they were needles. They had to be.
Their giddiness faltered, and it wasn’t their father’s look that quelled it, but the Servants’ as they surveyed the gathering women— and smelled them. They couldn’t keep their disgust from showing. One murmured to another, whose answering laugh was as harsh as a cough. Kora and Nova couldn’t blame them. The smell was grotesque even if you were used to it. What must it be like to the uuluninitiated, and those who’d never had to gut or flay anything? It was painful to be part of this milling gruesome crowd and know that to the visitors they were indistinguishable from the rest. They both formed the same desperate plea in their minds. They didn’t know that they thought the same thought at exactly the same moment, but neither would it have surprised them.
See us, they willed the Mesarthim. See us.
And as though they had spoken aloud—as though they had shouted—one of the four stopped talking midsentence and turned to look straight at them.
The sisters froze, clutching each other’s knife-stiff fingers, and shrank back from the stare. It was the tall Servant with the shaved blue pate. He’d heard them. He had to be a telepath. His eyes bored into theirs, and… poured into theirs. They felt him there like a breeze stirring grass, riffling through and seeing, just like they’d wanted to be seen, and then he said something to the woman, who in turn said something to Shergesh.
The village elder pursed his lips, displeased. “Perhaps the boys first…” he ventured, and the woman said, “No. You have Servant blood here. We’ll test them first.”
So Kora and Nova were led inside the wasp ship, and the doors melted closed behind them.
Chapter 2
Fresh Horrors
Sarai had lived and breathed nightmares since she was six years old. For four thousand nights she had explored the dreamscapes of Weep, witnessing horrors and creating them. She was the Muse of Nightmares. Her hundred moth sentinels had perched on every brow. No man, woman, or child had been safe from her. She knew their shames and agonies, their griefs and fears, and she had thought… she had believed…that she knew every horror, and was beyond surprise.
That was before she had to kneel in the blossoms of the citadel garden and prepare her own body for cremation. The poor broken thing. It lay in the white blooms, beautiful and rich with color—blue skin, pink silk, cinnamon hair, red blood.
For seventeen years this had been her. These feet had paced the citadel floors in endless restless circuits. These lips had smiled, and screamed moths at the sky, and sipped rain from chased silver cups.
All that it meant to be Sarai was anchored in the flesh and bones before her. Or it had been. Now she was ripped out of it, unskinned by death, and this body, it was…what? A thing. An artifact of her ended life. And they were going to burn it.
There would always be fresh horrors. She knew that now.
Chapter 3
A Ragged Little Girl with Beetle Shell Eyes
Last night, the citadel of the Mesarthim had almost fallen from the sky. It would have crushed the city of Weep below. If any survived the impact, they would have drowned in the floods as the underground river broke free and swamped the streets. But none of that had happened because someone had stopped it. Never mind that the citadel was hundreds of feet tall, wrought of alien metal, and formed by a god in the shape of an angel. Lazlo had caught it—Lazlo Strange, the faranji dreamer who was somehow a god himself. He’d stopped the citadel from falling, and so instead of everyone dying, only Sarai had.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. The explosionist had died, too, but his death was poetic justice. Sarai’s was just bad luck. She’d been standing on her terrace—right in the open palm of the giant seraph—when the citadel lurched and tilted. There’d been nothing to hold on to. She’d slid, silk on mesarthium, down the slick blue metal hand and right off the edge.
She’d fallen and she’d died, and you’d think that would be the end of terror, but it wasn’t. There was still evanescence, and it was worse. The souls of the dead weren’t snuffed out when the spark of life left the body. They were emptied into the air to be languidly unmade. If you’d lived a long life, if you were tired and ready, then perhaps it felt like peace. But Sarai wasn’t ready and it had felt like dissolving—as though she were a drop of blood in water, or a hailstone on a warm red tongue. The world had tried to dissolve her, to melt her and resorb her.
And…something had stopped it.
That something, of course, was Minya.
The little girl was stronger than the world’s whole sucking mouth. She pulled ghosts right out of its throat while it tried to swallow them whole. She’d pulled Sarai out. She’d saved her. That was Minya’s godspawn gift: to catch the souls of new dead and keep them from melting away. Well, that was half her gift, and in the first heady moments of her salvation, Sarai gave no thought to the rest of it.
She was unraveling, alone and helpless, caught in the tide of evanescence, and then, all at once, she wasn’t. She was herself again, standing in the citadel garden. The first thing she saw with her new eyes was Minya, and the first thing she did with her new arms was hug her. Forgotten, in her relief, was all the strife between them.