Bela and Tew stood on a bridge at the edge of a bay, staring out on an ancient city that felt like a dream.
For all that the place was in ruins—the scars of the distant war frozen in time—it was still a beautiful sight. It was haunting. It was what Oni had died for. What they all had died for.
Guilt and elation wrestled in Bela’s mind, twisting at her gut. She took deep breaths to steady the pounding beat of her heart.
“The city,” Tew said.
The reader’s voice distracted her from the weight of memories, allowing her to push it all down and focus on the task at hand.
“Is it the right city?” she asked.
“The city where the portal was had towers. From the poem, remember? ‘Thirteen are its towers, watching over the western sea.’”
“‘The city lies in silence,’” Bela remembered. “‘Frozen when families fly.’”
“Good memory, shipmistress Bela.” The reader smiled approvingly, then gazed around the bay, counting off the towers that ringed it. Some were more whole than others, but there were indeed thirteen of them. All of them, like the city and the wide bridge beneath their feet, were fashioned from cut blocks of grey-white stone, the color of dusty pearls, tinged with light flecks of pink and green, roofs tiled in a sheathing of flat red and black rock. Even from here, Bela could imagine that a main avenue connected them, a ring of paved road, cratered in places, that ran over their bridge, spreading out of sight to the left and right like a great crescent. Soaring arches, many now broken by decay or forgotten fires, spread from building to building across the avenue and the smaller, narrow paths that branched off from it, leading to structures closer in against the landscape or farther out onto local quays and stone piers that jutted into the foggy waters of the bay.
“Why doesn’t it freeze?” she asked, looking out over the glassy surface of the sea.
“Hot springs under the bay,” Tew replied. “The old books talk about them. I think they’re all over this area.”
It was certainly true that the river they’d been following had grown less frozen as they’d followed it. Here, where it opened itself up to the bay around which the city was built, the river’s surface was loose slush. And the bay itself was free of solid pack altogether, scattered with only a few lonely bergs that drifted away from the incoming river of ice or the outgoing frozen sea in the distance. The shrinking chunks of ice floated like little white isles amid steamy wisps that danced like ghosts across the bay’s surface.
There were fish rising on the open water, and birds were soaring out from nests on the towers or in the crumbling roofs, turning in reels above the sea as they looked to feed.
In the distance, in a haze of swirling fog and snow, they could see where the arms of the city ended in great, skeletal towers that might once have been lighthouses marking the way home. Beyond them was the world of snow and ice—her ship somewhere beneath it.
“So,” Bela said, trying to focus herself, “where’s the portal?”
Tew pulled a small book from his bag and opened it. His mouth moved as he silently read a few pages. “South side, I think. It’ll be a big building. We have the Spire for our High Sybyl and the Stone for our High Matron: one place for magickers, and one place for mundanes. They had one place for both. They called it the Citadel.”
“So an evoker could lead them?” The idea worried her.
“I guess so.”
Bela shook her head and began following the road to the south. “Glad we changed that. Magick unchecked is exactly what Mabaya was after: one woman to rule everything.”
Tew kept pace beside her. “Though it’s worth remembering that she nearly got it. If not for Shae and Kayden …”
He was right. Bela had been there. She tried not to think about what she’d done in those moments. The blood on her hands. “Yes.”
“I wonder where they are?”
“Who?”
“Kayden and Shae.”
“She was almost dead when he took her on the airship. If she lived, I guess she’s with him. Somewhere across the sea, where the Windborn live. Unless he helped her get back to her pirates.”
“Why would he do that?”
Bela actually smiled at the question, remembering all the times she’d caught Kayden looking at the pirate while they’d all sailed together to Myst Wera. “Because he liked her.”
Confused for a moment, Tew suddenly opened his eyes wide in shock. “Liked her?”
Bela shrugged. “It would be normal where he came from.”
“And what about her?”
“Not much place for men among the pirates. I doubt she’d ever seen a man she hadn’t killed before Kayden.”
“Fascinating,” Tew said, and then he was staring ahead as they walked down the street.
Bela didn’t think it was that interesting. Not in comparison to the city through which they walked. The ancient war against the alumen had been horrifying. She’d known that. Its terrible magicks had somehow left this land in winter. Its terrible destructions had broken the people into Seaborn and Windborn, sent them fleeing for other homes. She’d known this as well, but it had all been distant. Stories. She accepted that it had been so; she’d bet her life upon the truth of the awful portal that had set it all in motion. But even so, she was realizing that she hadn’t thought of it as a physical reality.
But it was. Looking around as they walked, Bela saw the war truly frozen in time. Here in black scars of fire on a wall. There in the front of a house blasted out across the street. Doors caved in. Piles of rubble. Wagons stacked in broken barricades. Windows to flame-eaten rooms. And among it all, the little signs of human life that made it all the more tragic, all the more real. A child’s toy. A splintered spear. A chair inexplicably standing alone in the middle of a square.
As a Seaborn child, Bela had been taught that the dead took the ghost boat to Ealond, the home of their ancestors. Witnessing this scarred city upon it—imagining the same violence and destruction being played out across city after city in this shattered land—Bela began to understand how such stories could come to be. It was, she thought, a city of ghosts.
Tew was likewise struck to silence at the sights, only occasionally pointing to some strange thing that caught the eye. A sign outside a building that announced a brothel. A garden of dead trees. A boat still moored at a dock.
Nearly half an hour had passed when the reader suddenly broke the quiet with a sharp gasp.
Bela, startled, followed his gaze up along the stretch of road ahead and saw, in the distance before them, a building larger than the rest. It had the same light stone walls, but it had a dome for a roof, tiled in crimson, and fronted by a colonnade of black pillars. A brilliant white tower, perhaps taller than the others around the bay—it was hard to tell from the ground—rose behind and above it, looking over the city like a sentinel.
And floating beside the tower, hanging in the air, was a black ship beneath a bulbous gray mass that looked for all the world like a spineless pufferfish.
Bela stood in shock and horror. Her heart skipped a beat. “Windborn,” she whispered. By the Mother, had they come all this way only to have their enemies arrive before them?
Tew had stopped walking as well. Gazing up into the sky, he shielded his eyes with his hand. “Can’t be,” he said.
There were multiple docks—she had no other word for them—atop the tower. The airship was fitted into one. The others were empty. The wind was rippling the bag above the ship, but nothing else was moving.
“No,” Tew said, and his tone was confident. He took a few steps forward. “That’s not a Windborn airship.”
Bela shook her head. It was true that it didn’t look quite like one of the crafts she saw raining fire on the harbor in her nightmares, but what else could it be?
“Centuries,” Tew said. His voice was almost reverential. “It’s been there for centuries.”
“Centuries? Are you saying that’s … from the war?”
Tew nodded. “I think so.”
He looked back at her, and he was smiling—but then his smile froze. His eyes fixed on something behind her. His face shook.
Bela turned.
An aluman was behind them. Twice Bela’s height. Broad shouldered. Plated with metal.
It had come out from one of the buildings, and it had stopped in the middle of the street. Neckless, its upper body twisted until it was looking down the battered paving stones of the road—down at them. Its eyes were pale blue. The claws on its long arms flexed. In and out. In and out.
The aluman’s legs turned now, facing them. It made a whirring sound and took a step.
Bela thought she could feel the street tremble.
She took a step back. Her one arm reached behind her, as if it would protect the reader. “Run,” she said.
“Mother,” Tew whispered.
It took another step. Bela saw its wide hips flexing, like a wild cat preparing to charge. “Run!”
Bela grabbed hold of Tew as she turned. She pulled him into motion.
They were running blind, but they were near a side street. Bela sprinted for it, anxious to at least put a building between them and the horrifying thing. It was coming after them, she was sure. She felt its footsteps heavy on the road.
They rounded the corner onto the smaller street. It was littered with blocks of stone from the buildings to either side. Bela jumped and swerved through them, Tew close behind, searching for someplace to hide.
The aluman made a sound like a scream or an angry roar through clenched teeth. To Bela’s horror, it was echoed back. From their left. From their right.
And from ahead. Around the corner of another street, a second aluman appeared. It turned to look at them. It, too, screamed.
Bela skidded to a stop, started to back away. But then the first aluman was behind them, and they were trapped.
The alumen, as if they were of one mind, stepped forward at the same time. Tew made a sound like he was weeping.
“No,” she said. “No. No.”
There was a thunderous, quaking sound. The remains of a shop across the street from them shook, then broke as a third aluman burst through its wall, shattering stones like thin glass on its impact. It turned to face them, to see them, and Bela saw that it had a satchel at its side, like a larger version of the reader’s book bag. It had a leather scabbard strapped around its back as well, though it was empty. The sword—as long as Tew was tall, Bela thought—was gripped in one clawed hand. Blue fire rippled along the edges of the blade, crackling and sparking like lines of lightning.
“Hide,” it said.
Its voice was deep, the sound of mountains moving, and though neither Bela nor Tew understood how the monster could talk, they did not argue. They backed into an open doorway. Crouching, they hid behind the debris inside.
And there they watched, in fascination and in horror, as the first two alumen turned toward the new one. They roared. They attacked. And the third one, raising its sword, roared back.