It was still strange to walk through the high halls of the Spire. It felt wrong. Menes wasn’t sure it would ever feel right.
He had no memory of a time when he wasn’t aware of the slender tower that sat beside the mouth of the harbor. He’d grown up in the Mother’s City, after all. The Spire was as natural to his world as Myst Wera’s mountains, its surrounding sea, its docks, and its domed palace of the Stone.
He just never dreamed he’d go there.
The evokers kept men as guards, of course. They did it for the same reason that men like him filled the ranks of the Stoneguard: men were weak of mind but strong of back. But even the guards of the evokers were never allowed beyond the first level of the magickers’ high tower.
Yet here he was: Menes, captain of the Stoneguard, walking down a hallway close to the top of the Spire, where its beacon of fire seemed to feed the very clouds.
One of his most trusted men stood before the door ahead of him, a golden cloak draped over his shoulder, starkly contrasting against his gray tunic. He had his long spear standing upright in his other arm—or as upright as any of them could manage in the tight corridors of the evokers. Casting with Char, Menes had noted, apparently didn’t need the room that spear fighting required.
The man’s eyes widened a little to see his captain approaching.
“The room has not been entered since I left?” Menes asked.
The man’s helm moved in a crisp nod. “This man assures you it has not.”
“Good,” Menes said. “See to it that I’m not disturbed.”
The man saluted, then rotated aside to allow Menes to unlock the door and step into the room. Once inside, the captain carefully closed the door behind him.
The room was a mess, the kind of disorder that would have seen a man in the Stoneguard flogged. But this room hadn’t belonged to a true man, much less a member of his beloved Stoneguard. This was the room of a scholar, one of the cut-men.
As a young man, long before he was captain of the Stoneguard, Menes had gotten into an argument in a dockside bar over whether a cut-man was really a man. Over ale, a dockworker had insisted that a man born a man was a man whether or not he still had his eggs. Menes had disagreed, and the fact that a cut-man had been allowed a room so far up within the secretive Spire seemed now to prove his point—men weren’t allowed up in the Spire, but a scholar like Tewrick was.
Menes removed his helmet and set it on one of the stacks of papers beside the door. He smoothed his hair, then his brown beard. He sniffed at the air inside.
Fire.
It was a distant smell, but he could still sense it. It had been an evoker’s fire, he was told—a fire created three months earlier, on the very night that the Windborn had attacked the Spire and murdered his High Matron.
None of it made sense, but then, he hadn’t been here that terrible night to make sense of it. Against his advice, the High Matron had chosen to meet the Windborn emissary in the Spire—the one place that he and the men of his Stoneguard could not protect her. That an evoker’s fire had burned part of a scholar’s room seemed one of the least strange things about what had happened.
And yet it was the scholar who’d been on his mind ever since. A little man, as most of the cut-men were. A man of books and letters. Insignificant in the scheme of the world. But he’d left with the Hero of the Harbor, Belakané, after a new High Matron had been chosen—one to replace her dead mother.
Strange and strange again.
“Tewrick,” he said, repeating the scholar’s name to himself as he started making his way through the shelves of papers and books. “What part did you play?”
Menes instinctively didn’t trust scholars. So while it had bothered him that Bela had left the city so soon after the death of her mother, it had bothered him far more that the little cut-man had gone with her—on a mission in search of a myth.
The captain stopped at a shelf, frowned as he idly thumbed through the papers there.
They’d find Ealond, Bela had said. They’d undo the magick that kept the fabled alumen alive.
The alumen. The mechanical men who’d nearly destroyed their ancestors back on the First Isle. The mechanical men who, even now—so Bela said—attacked the Windborn, who then attacked the Seaborn in turn.
It was like the blocks that Menes used to line up when he was a child: push the first one, and it would tip into the next, which would tip into the next and the next, and soon they’d all be falling.
The alumen were the first block. Stop them, and Bela would stop the Windborn and Seaborn from going to war.
Except the alumen were a myth. Or at least he’d always thought so.
Menes walked to the balcony at the end of the room. Its doors were shut, so he pushed them open to the midday light.
The Mother’s City stretched out below him, bundled up against its crescent-moon bay. On the opposite side of the waters, the Stone sat calm and resolute. His home.
It all looked different from such a height. Everything seemed so much smaller—everything, that is, except the growing fleet of ships that filled the bay. Its size, he was certain, could only be appreciated from on high like this. Hundreds of masts crowded the harbor, drawn from every Seaborn port.
Belakané meant to stop a war with the Windborn. A fine plan if it worked. But the new High Matron wasn’t waiting to find out if it did. She meant to win the war by striking first.
All they needed to know was where to go. Where did the airships come from? Where was the Windborn home?
Menes inhaled the high, clean air, then turned back toward the room. The last time he’d been there, he’d thrown a sheet over the hulking mass just inside the balcony. He pulled it away now.
The aluman was broken in two at the waist, its lower half nothing but a tangled mess of cables. Even so, it was nearly his own height—a broad-shouldered wedge of metal plates whose silver finishes were scorched with black burns. One arm was gone, the other folded out so that its clawed hand could tap and scratch upon the stone floor. Moving that one hand was all it could do now, and although it disgusted him to speak with such an unnatural thing, Menes had learned to communicate with it. A click for a yes. A scratch for a no. It was simple.
“Hello, Asryth,” he said.
Its neckless head was badly cracked, making its skeletal visage more frightening. But one glass eye still worked. It flickered to life, a pale blue of powers that he did not understand. Its one hand flexed as it awoke, clawing across the stone.
The scholar had kept a table in this part of the room, and Menes pulled out a chair to sit behind it, facing the metal thing that shouldn’t have been real. He took a deep breath, collecting his thoughts. It had taken time to get the information that the High Matron required, but he’d been a patient man.
“You’ve told me so much, Asryth,” he said. “We know where the land of the Windborn is now. I suppose I should thank you.”
The light in the aluman’s eye burned steady. A razor-tipped finger lifted and tapped down to the ground.
Click.
Yes.
Outside, white clouds drifted eastward. Below them, the sails of a growing fleet waited to follow.
“I think you know we mean to invade, to defeat them. In weeks, we will set sail.”
Click.
Yes.
He stared at the unblinking eye. “I feel I owe you one final thing more,” he said. “A final truth. You are an abomination. You should not be. And if Belakané fails to close the portal—if she fails to end the magick that gives you life—we will send another. After the Windborn fall, we’ll use their captured airships if need be. I don’t know if you feel, but if you do, I hope you are afraid. Because we will not rest until the power that drives you and your kind is cut off once and for all.”
He stopped speaking. Asryth’s dim blue eye seemed to glow brighter for a moment. And then that single finger moved across the ground, scraping against the stone.
No, it said.
No.