Would make them sorry.
The sound that interrupted her was as shining and beautiful as her thoughts were dark and discordant. A surging, chiming rush, as from thousands of bells struck all at once. Abi’s eardrums tingled.
Then the effect was spoiled by a woman’s terrified cry. People were pointing upward, so Abi looked. This night had already birthed more horrors than her brain could process. What was one more?
The black sky was studded with stars of glass. They hung overhead, unimaginably sharp and deadly. From jagged blades – some still edged with blood – to tiny shards and sparkling dust. Abi had read that once, thousands of years ago, people believed the heavens to be a crystalline sphere surrounding the Earth. The night sky above Kyneston now was what that might look like smashed into millions of tiny pieces, the moment before they all fell.
But they didn’t fall. Instead, the galaxy of glass rotated slowly. More chimes shivered in the cold air as shards struck each other, but not a sliver broke off. Then the glittering mass curved down to the ground, encircling them all.
Abi looked at Silyen. He stood in the centre of the space, arms upraised and face rapturous, like some musical prodigy conducting an orchestra only he could see.
Every piece of metal, from vast girders to lace-like ornamental tracework, rose slowly into the air. Those slaves who had been trapped beneath them and still lived groaned and sobbed. Abi flinched as a side strut lifted past her, hovered at head height, and continued its ascent.
In mid-air the pieces of metal melded as smoothly as Heir Ravenna’s body knitting itself together. The ironwork locked like an immense skeleton, all backbone and draping wings: a roof ridge, columns and beams, rivets. The suspended glass shards contracted inwards, moulding to the frame.
The East Wing raised itself over them like a great metal monster with a flayed and shining hide, Equals and slaves alike swallowed in its belly.
The whole structure flared like magnesium, too bright to bear. And when Abi had blinked away the shapes seared into her retinas, she saw that the vast ballroom stood intact once more. It was as if the evening’s disaster had never happened.
Silyen hadn’t finished just yet. Lumps of masonry were flying back up towards the shattered stone mansion, dropping into place like some giant’s version of a stacking brick game. Kyneston’s sheared-off wall rose layer by layer, the people inside gradually disappearing from view as if the Young Master was walling up his family alive.
‘Abigail!’
Arms seized her roughly from behind and spun her round. It was Jenner, his face so begrimed his freckles could barely be seen.
‘Thank goodness you’re all right.’ His hands cupped her face carefully as if she, too, was made of glass and had only just been glued back together.
Then he kissed her.
And for a moment she was soaring with the stars in the crystalline sphere, dizzyingly high and perfect.
She forgot her brother. Forgot Silyen. Forgot Dog making a garrotte of his leash. Forgot the marshal’s broken body, and Chancellor Zelston in a pool of gore. Nothing existed apart from the urgency of that mouth against hers.
Then she was pushing Jenner away. Because although this was what she wanted – more than anything – it was too late. It was all too late. Luke was a murderer. Lord Jardine was in power. Euterpe Parva had torn open the sky. And Silyen Jardine was rebuilding Kyneston with nothing but Skill.
‘It’s the Great Demonstration,’ she said, filled with awful understanding. She pushed at Jenner even as he tried to enfold her more tightly.
‘What?’
Jenner was uncomprehending. His blackened palm caressed her neck and made her shiver, and she ducked away from his hand. Couldn’t he see it?
‘The Great Demonstration. When Cadmus built the House of Light using nothing but Skill.’
‘He’s just repairing the damage.’
‘Repairing? This isn’t one of your mother’s ornaments, Jenner. This is Kyneston. Look.’
She pointed to the glass walls that soared above them, restored and flawless, exactly as they had been.
But they weren’t exactly the same, were they? Because what she had at first mistaken for smoke, and then thought was simply shadow, was neither.
It was dim, radiant forms moving to and fro beyond the glass. Just as they did at the House of Light.
Fear filled Abi’s heart. The lesson of the Great Demonstration was one that every child in Britain learned. It was the greatest statement there had ever been of the irresistibility of Skill. More powerful even than the killing of the Last King.
Cadmus’s work that day had ended one world and forged another that was wholly different, in which those without Skill were made slaves. It had ushered in Equal rule.