Shae stood on a wide stone wall between worlds. The sun was setting down the long valley that stretched behind her to the west—back down the road they’d come—and it cast the black line of the wall’s shadow across the valley that stretched forward to the east, toward the wide lands where only wild beasts lived with the alumen.
The chill of the mountain night was growing with the darkness. A wind rolled down off the icy cliffs, pushing snow dust along the paving stones at her feet. Shae pulled her furs closer to her body, but she didn’t leave. Not yet. She couldn’t stop staring at the foot of the wall, at the graveyard of metal men, washed in eerie blue light.
Aro had said that the lumick works were impressive on this side of the Blue Keep, but she was still stunned by what lay before her. Cables, humming with pale blue light, were bolted across the face of the wall. Still more ran between poles rooted across the ground, a maze of lumicklines above a crisscrossed tangle of trenches whose waters were frozen into flat vines fingering across the valley floor. And everywhere—slumped in the trenches, awkwardly caught in the web of cables at the base of the wall, or rising higher upon it where piles of the dead had been used as steps—the metal shells of monsters gleamed in a blue light that seemed to grow brighter as darkness fell.
“Quite something,” a voice said.
Shae shook her eyes away from the valley and turned to see the captain of the guard, Oth Marek, stepping out from the door of the rising keep itself. On foot, he somehow seemed even taller than he’d been on horseback. His white hair, which had been tied back, was now loose around his shoulders. When he joined her at the wall, he set his black-gloved hands to it and looked out over the scene. The pale blue reflecting up from the frozen alumen made the lines of his face look like black canyons.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she admitted.
“Few have.”
“Not a lot of visitors? I’m surprised, given the scenic view.”
Marek grinned. “You can come to enjoy it.”
“How long have you been here, Captain?”
“Three decades and more.” He seemed to take a sniff of the cold air as it breezed by. “I came here young.”
Shae looked around at the high walls of the peaks around them. “A hard place to grow up.”
“Same could be said of any place,” he said. “This one is just a place where you die if you don’t. And sometimes you die even if you do. The Blue Keep isn’t for the weak.”
Something about his tone made her look back at him. “You’re worried about me?”
“You? No, I think you can handle yourself.” He shook his head, then looked back down across the detritus below the wall. After a moment, he pointed a long finger toward an aluman that was splayed face up across a patch of snow, its chest ripped open. “See that one? It came about a month ago. Sometimes they come in twos or threes. Years ago, there was a swarm of them, a dozen, climbing over each other as they came at the wall, ripping through the lines with their dying breaths—or whatever the accursed things have for breath. That one there, though, it came alone. It wasn’t like a lot of the others, which blunder along to their death. This one was careful. It watched where it went. It seemed aware, and that made it the most frightening thing I’d ever seen.”
“But you killed it.”
Marek reached into the pocket of his cloak and pulled out a crystal of soulglass. “Lanser isn’t the only one who carries a charm like this,” he said. For a moment, he sounded boastful, but his remaining eye was dark, his face grim. “This one came at a heavy price, though. It got close enough we mounted boltguns to the wall. Shot it. Tried to pin it down or knock it off into the wires or the water. Eventually it fell, went down and didn’t move. A few of us went out to pillage it. Our latest lowland lord went with us. But the aluman wasn’t dead. When we got close, it attacked. Killed my men. Ripped the lord in two.”
“You’re worried about Kayden, then?”
He shrugged and slipped the soulglass back into its pocket. “I know a proud man when I see him, my lady. Tell him his pride will get him killed here.”
“He’s a good man, Marek.”
“That may be, but he’s no good to anyone dead. And you least of all.”
“Me?”
“My men are good fighters,” he said. “They know their place. But there’s not been a woman at the Blue Keep since before my time. If Lord Kayden were to fall—”
“You’re worried about some cock getting between my legs?”
The old man’s jaw dropped. However he expected her to respond, it clearly wasn’t with such direct speech. “My lady, I—”
“Look, Captain, you don’t need to worry about me if it comes to that. One of your boys comes after me, and it’s him you’ll need to worry about.”
Marek looked at her, Shae thought, with something like respect. “I’ll be leading a short hike tomorrow,” he said. He nodded north, toward the icy mountains. “A check of the lines around the northern reach. I’ll be asking Lord Kayden to join me. We’d welcome you coming, too, if you’d like.”
Shae looked up at the cold cliffs in the dark. Kayden couldn’t walk the length of the wall in his current condition. There was no way he could make a climb up into the peaks, but she was beginning to get a feel for how wrong it was to show weakness among these men of battle. It felt surprisingly like home to her. “I’d like that, Captain. Thank you.”
Marek pushed himself off the wall. “Ah, anyway, I’d forgotten what I came out to tell you. Aro Lanser was asking for you. He’s taken up shop down by the courtyard. Should be easy to find: just keep taking the stairs down, and you’ll get there.” He turned and started to walk away. “But if you do get lost, ask anyone you run into, and they’ll point you the way.”
*
Shae had known few buildings before Kayden brought her to Aionia. What time she hadn’t passed on ship she’d spent in the cave-like rooms cut into the sheer walls of the Bay of Bones. Finding one’s way there wasn’t hard—if it wasn’t on one level, a girl took the lift beside the waterfall to the next one.
Aionia’s buildings were, in contrast, a jumble of rooms and halls and stairs. Perhaps not too different from the Seaborn buildings in places like the Merchanter’s Maze on Myst Wera, but she hadn’t really known such places as a pirate.
Oth Marek was nevertheless right that the Blue Keep was simple enough to navigate. The levels of the building were separated by stairs that doubled back on themselves—one set to the north and one to the south. And the levels themselves seemed sensibly organized: barracks and baths above a hall, and kitchens for eating atop storerooms and work rooms. It wasn’t hard at all for Shae to find her way down to the open courtyard—a square space surrounded by stables and workshops. From there, the familiar sight of the lumicker’s wagon showed her the way.
Opening the door to the shop beside the wagon, Shae was met with a wash of welcome warmth. It was a large room, deep and wide, packed with shelves and tables that were jumbled with the metal pieces of alumen—far, far more than she’d seen tucked away in the wagon. In the back, against the rear of the space, a ready forge glowed with heat.
“Close the door!” Aro called out.
Shae startled at the sound, but she closed the door against the cold. Walking around a particularly crowded shelf, she saw the lumicker hunched over the dismantled remains of an aluman’s head. His hat and coat were nowhere to be seen. Despite the night air outside, the forge had the shop warm enough that Aro was wearing only a worn leather tool apron over his short-sleeved tunic and pants. At the moment, he had a couple of his strange metal tools in his hands, and he appeared to be focused on prying off one of the monster’s eyes.
“Aro?”
He looked up, and his mustache went lopsided in his welcoming grin. “Glad you could make it, Shae.”
The aluman’s head, she could see, had wires and cables hanging out from its neck. It seemed almost obscene. “Where’d all this come from?”
“From the attacks.” He spread his arms at the abundance of parts. “The keeps are a fine place to try new things.”
“So all this belongs to you?”
“In a manner of speaking. Alumen, by law, belong to the lumickers guild. And by guild law, we can, each of us, only carry what our wagons will hold. The rest is left in places like this, waiting for the next wagon to come along, the next lumicker to fiddle with it all and then take what he can carry when he leaves.”
“We had something similar. We called it a cache,” Shae said. “If we couldn’t carry everything back to the Bay, we’d stash it somewhere on some deserted islet. It was there for us to come back to, but anyone else could’ve taken it too.”
“A cache.” Aro nodded. He brought his tools back down at the glass eye and began straining. “I like that.”
“You should build a bigger wagon,” Shae said, looking around.
The eye finally popped loose. Aro pulled it away from the head, his tools separating a bundle of wires behind it. “What’s that?”
“A bigger wagon. You could carry more things away, keep more of the best parts for yourself. Not let Rumin Perle at any of it.” She grinned, knowing the hatred he had for his lumicker rival in King Mark’s court.
Aro paused what he was doing and looked up at her. He wiped his brow. “A fine suggestion,” he said. “Making life harder for the high and mighty Perle sounds splendid, to say the least. But I’m afraid the guild has thought about that. There are rules about wagon sizes. And I’m not one to break the rules.”
“I thought it was a rule not to let non-lumickers in your wagon.”
He shrugged. “Perhaps that was more of a suggestion.”
Shae laughed a little at that, then stood back as the lumicker slipped his tools into the slots of his apron, picked up the eye, and stood. “So why did you send for me?” she asked.
Aro walked across the room to a large table near the forge. There were other parts already there: tubes, gears, another eye. Two stools were set beside the table. The lumicker sat down at one. “I’ve been thinking about something you told me. About the … Spire, was it?”
Shae nodded as she took the other chair. “That’s right. The home of the evokers on Myst Wera.”
“As lumickers, we knew about Asryth, of course. An aluman that wasn’t mad, that didn’t kill. An aluman that could speak through the Stream that binds the soulglass crystals together. The Stream that binds us all together, I suppose.”
Shae remembered how Onyeka had combined a soulglass with Char and her own blood to open a portal to that source—how the evoker had nearly killed them all with its power, how she herself was here, in Aionia, only because of that fateful night. “The Stream is dangerous,” she said, unsure what he was thinking.
“I know,” Aro said. He looked around at the parts strewn before him. “Just using the soulglass to run our lumicks, I’ve known I was only brushing the surface of the power they held. And those depths, that power … it should be beyond the reach of men.”
“And women too,” Shae added.
“And women too.”
“And so? What of Asryth?”
“She lives,” he said. “And she’s there, right in the middle of the Fair Isles that King Mark plans to invade. Right in the heart of your Spire.”
It was hardly her Spire, Shae thought, thinking of how out of place she was within a stone tower that was as tall as the Mother’s Mount. Then it occurred to her what he was thinking. “You want to communicate with her.”
“So I do.”
“To do what? Surely you don’t want to warn the Seaborn about the coming invasion. You’re Windborn.”
“Aionian,” the lumicker corrected. “But maybe I do. War will mean the end of your Seaborn. That’s not a path forward. And besides that …”
“Besides that what?”
“Besides that … well, I’ve always been fascinated by her, by the one aluman who wasn’t a killing thing. I did some reading in the guild about her. Old books that most of us ignored. Long ago, she’d talked about another like her, it turned out.”
Shae frowned. “Why didn’t you tell me this when we were sharing our secrets?”
“I did, as a matter of fact. But I’m afraid you were snoring at that point. I spilled my guts long after I laid you down and pulled a blanket over you.”
“You were respectful,” she said. “I am glad for that.”
“I couldn’t do otherwise.”
“I know. It’s why I took the soup.”
“You were also hungry enough to lick a wagon wheel.”
Shae wrinkled her nose. “Ta’koa’s feet!”
Aro chuckled. “That, too, I reckon. Anyway, when she was first found, Asryth talked about another aluman. Kolum.”
“I’ve heard that name before. I think Kayden mentioned him.”
“Surely he did. Kolum was the man who started it all, long ago on the lost isle of Ealond. He opened the portal, made the soulglass, and built the first of the alumen.”
“That’s right,” Shae said, thinking of what Kayden had told her. “‘Doomed to die, we deal out death.’”
“Kolum’s conclusion,” the lumicker said, nodding. “So if he could end death, by putting human souls in metal bodies, he could end suffering. He made himself one of them. And Asryth too.”
Shae remembered her horror at the idea when Kayden had first told her and Bela of it. “A path of madness.”
“True in spirit and true in form as the alumen went mad,” the lumicker said.
“Except Asryth?”
“And, I think, Kolum himself.”
Shae shook her head. “I don’t follow.”
“These old books I was talking about. They said that when she spoke of Kolum, it was as if she could still communicate with him.”
“And no one asked her more of this when she was still here?” Shae asked. “Before she came to the Fair Isles and was broken into pieces?”
He shook his head. “She stopped speaking early on, the books say. Refused to answer questions. No one knew why. But listen, here’s the point: if we could talk to Asryth, we might prevent the war. But what if Asryth wasn’t alone? What if Kolum is still out there somewhere? What could he tell us today? And more than that, what if they aren’t even the only ones? What if there were other alumen, ones who could help us defend ourselves from the others of their kind? For all we know, it may be that an aluman, given time, can recover from its madness and learn to be human again. What then?”
“Then you’ve killed many a soul,” she said.
He blinked at that, and, for the first time, she saw sorrow and regret in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have—”
“No,” he said, “I’m not so much of a fool that I haven’t thought of it. I know what I might’ve done.” He spread his hands over the parts on the table. “I know what it is I might be doing. But it’s worth doing to protect the rest of us today, and to maybe save more of us tomorrow.”
“Maybe,” she said. “So what’s your plan?”
The lumicker pulled out the soulglass that he’d tossed to her on the road. “Well, I want to build an aluman.”
“Sorry?”
“The head and heart of one, anyway. No arms or legs that it can use to rip us apart. But something we can maybe talk to. Something that’ll maybe talk back.”
Shae stared at him for a moment. “In that case, don’t use that crystal. Marek just told me a story about an aluman who seemed more aware than the others. The one who killed the last lord, actually. It seemed to be thinking its way through the keep’s defenses. Maybe it was nothing. But …”
“But maybe he was coming to talk,” the lumicker said.
“I certainly never got the idea that the one we met had anything in mind but death,” Shae said. She picked up the piece of soulglass and put it in her pocket. “I’m in no hurry to meet it again. Arms or not.”