That word very much meant something: the world. Zeru was the world.

Tzara didn’t look sleepy anymore. She sat up cat-fast, and all the little sections of hair tugged free from Calixte’s fingers to spill in wisps over her smooth brown scalp. The two warriors spoke together, rapid-fire, in their own language, and Thyon felt as though he’d been shoved out a door. Something in his chest that had begun to uncoil seized up again, and the tightness spread. He felt his face tighten, too, and only realized then that it had relaxed and he’d hardly noticed. He re-collected himself and schooled his emotions, casting off his curiosity about the book and its diagrams. He glanced at Calixte. Her brows had knit together. She was deep in concentration, following along with whatever they were saying.

The more fool him, to think he was part of this group. He pushed back from the table to stand, but before he could, Ruza’s hand closed on his. He still wasn’t looking at him, but he had caught his hand so he couldn’t walk away. Thyon stared at his fingers enclosed in Ruza’s as though they belonged to some stranger. He hardly even registered the feeling. It was too alien. No one had ever held his hand.

Not that Ruza was holding his hand. He was only touching it. It was nothing. When he let go, though, and drew his hand away, Thyon felt its absence keenly. He coiled his own into a fist, and he might still have left, turmoil bubbling up through the tightness in his chest, but Ruza started talking—in Common Tongue, which could only be meant for him—and he forgot all about walking away as he was reeled into the book’s mystery.

“You know the story of the seraphim?” asked Ruza.

“More or less,” Thyon answered.

“Probably less,” said Ruza.

“Probably,” agreed Thyon, who knew no more than what Strange had told by firelight in the desert. “What of it?”

“There were twelve of them,” said Ruza, either not noticing, or choosing to ignore the snap in the alchemist’s voice. “Chosen of all the best and brightest of their race to voyage outward from their world and ‘stitch all the worlds of the Continuum together with their light.’ ”

Poetry, thought Thyon, dismissive. “So they came from the stars,” he said.

“No,” said Ruza. “Not the stars. They came from the sky.”

Thyon thought he was just being pedantic. “How is that different?”

“Well, I’ll tell you how. The sky is right there.” He pointed up at it. “Whereas the stars, you may be aware, are very far away. You’ve heard of astronomy?”

Thyon’s eyes turned to slits. “No,” he intoned, unamused. “What is this ‘astronomy’ of which you speak?”

“Anyway, stars are far. Space is big. And you could keep going out there forever and ever and you’d never get to another world.”

Thyon’s brow creased. He had accepted, in some way, that seraphim had been real, but when it came to the particulars, it all sounded like myth. “Then how are the seraphim supposed to have gotten here?”

Tzara took over the explaining. “The worlds lie together like the pages of a book,” she said, brushing her fingers over the Thakranaxet’s gold-edged pages. “Layered. All right? Only, imagine each page is infinite, stretching in all directions forever. If you were somehow to travel through space, you’d be going along the endless plane of a single page, do you see? You would never come to another page.”

“All right,” said Thyon. “So to get to another world, you...what? Turn the page?”

“Wrong,” said Ruza with relish. “You pierce it. At least, the seraphim did.”

You pierce it.

A tingling began to spread over Thyon’s scalp. He’d had the feeling before—the first time he transmuted lead into gold, and when he stood on the Cusp and saw the floating citadel, and when Strange’s alkahest, which shouldn’t have worked, did, and cut a shard of mesarthium off the north anchor, unfurling implications that he had yet to trace. This was big. This was very big. “You mean they cut through,” he said as once again his mind pushed at the limits of understanding to encompass the concept of worlds layered like pages, and angels slicing through them.

“Right through the sky,” said Ruza. “The twelve were called the Faerers. Six went one way, and six the other, cutting doors from world to world. Thakra was the commander of the Six that came this way.” He laid his hand on the book. “This is her testament.” Lifting his hand, he pointed to the first disc of the diagram. “Meliz,” he said again. His eyes were bright. “That’s the seraph home world. It’s where they began.” He read off the next several: “ ‘Eretz. Earth. Kyzoi. Lir.’ ” They all sounded mythological to Thyon. Ruza traced his fingertip over all the rest, turning the pages and tracing the worlds until he came to the last, and pronounced, “‘Zeru.’”

Which was not so much the world, if the book was to be believed, as this world. One of many.

“It’s a map, faranji,” said Ruza, in case Thyon had missed the point.

A thrill sparked through him. He could feel the blood moving in his brain. A map. Worlds. Cuts in the sky.

A realization sliced through his thrill. His blood stilled. His head quieted. Last night he’d wondered at the coincidence of seraphim and Mesarthim both coming here, thousands of years apart—right here and nowhere else on Zeru. Now he understood: It wasn’t a coincidence. If indeed there were worlds, and seraphim had cut doorways, what was to stop... anyone from using them?

He tipped back his head, looked up at the citadel, and asked, “What if there’s a cut? Right. Up. There.”

. . .

Why flying ships? Why cages? Why here?

Lazlo surveyed the chamber with new eyes, and his gaze was drawn straight to the floating orb. He paced along the walkway, fixed on it. It was some forty feet away, and the same distance above the floor. If he wanted to get a closer look...

Mesarthium rearranged itself, and the length of walkway upon which they all stood disengaged from the wall to swing outward and form a bridge to the orb. He crossed it. The others followed. There was no railing. He made one. The span grew ahead of him, and broadened, so that at the end they could all stand abreast. Though it had seemed small, dwarfed by the chamber, once they reached it, it no longer did. It was twenty feet in diameter, its surface egg-smooth, unadorned.

“There’s a door,” said Lazlo, sensing it.

“Maybe we should leave it alone,” said Azareen.

Sarai was thinking of Minya, who would have been the next child taken. And if Eril-Fane hadn’t risen up and killed the gods, eventually all of them would have met this fate, whatever this fate was. “Open it,” she said. She couldn’t stand not knowing.

“Yes,” added Suheyla, who was thinking of another child—boy or girl, she didn’t know. A phantom child born a long time ago. Her hand brushing unconsciously over her belly, she said, “Open it.”

So Lazlo did. A hair-fine line appeared on its surface like a single line of longitude on a globe. It split and melted apart, opening the orb. It was hollow, and it was empty.

A confusion of disappointment and relief washed over them all. They’d been braced for answers, and expecting them to be wrenching, but here was...“Nothing,” said Sarai.

“Nothing,” echoed Lazlo.

“Wait.” Suheyla was squinting, leaning forward and looking up, her brow creased with confusion. “What is that?”

It was over their heads. Their feet were level with the bottom of the orb. In the middle, some ten feet up, was a kind of warp. It took them a moment to catch sight of it. They all shared the same impulse to blink, as though it were only a disturbance in their vision. It reminded Sarai of the anomaly in Minya’s dream—a place where something was hidden.

It looked like a wrinkle, or a seam in the air, extending the width of the orb. They all leaned forward, squinting up at it.

“What is it?” asked Sparrow.

Lazlo raised the walkway to bring them up even with it. Then he reached out to it, and the hairs on the backs of his fingers stirred. “There’s a breeze,” he said.

“A breeze?” repeated Feral. “How can there be? From where?”

Lazlo stretched his hand closer.

“Don’t,” said Sarai.

But he did, and they all gasped as his hand... vanished, right off the end of his wrist. He yanked his arm back and his hand reappeared, whole and unharmed. They all stared at it, then at one another, trying to grasp what they’d just seen.

Lazlo was transfixed. There had been no pain, just the breeze, and a feeling like cobwebs brushing over his skin. He reached out again, only this time, instead of simply thrusting his hand forward, he felt along the gossamer edge of the seam, inserting his fingers so they winked out of sight, and then he grasped the invisible edge and lifted it.

An impossible aperture opened in the air. They all saw through it, and what was there was not the curved inner surface of the orb, or the heart of the citadel, and it was not Weep or the Uzumark canyon, or anywhere else in all of Zeru. You didn’t have to have seen the whole world to know that this wasn’t in it.

They couldn’t process it, this landscape. It was an ocean, but it bore little resemblance to the sea Lazlo had crossed with Eril-Fane and Azareen. That had been gray-green and mild, with glassy swells and a shimmer like foil. This was red.

It lay far below them. They were peering through a slash in the sky at a rampant crimson sea. It was brighter than fresh blood, livid pink where it churned and frothed. And rising out of it, as far as the eye could see, were huge white... things. They looked like stalks, like the stems of vast pale flowers, or else like pigmentless hairs seen magnified. They appeared to grow out of the wild red sea, each one as great in breadth as the whole of the citadel, their tops lost from sight in a brew of dark mist that concealed the sky.

In their shock they all stood gaping, unable to grasp what they were seeing through this small window that Lazlo held open with one hand. If, after the sight of Weep’s floating metal angel, he had believed himself gone beyond shock, he’d been wrong. This was a whole new level of shock.