Mesarthium was no ordinary metal. It was perfectly adamant: impenetrable, unassailable. It could not be cut or pierced; no one had ever succeeded in making so much as a scratch in it. Nor did it melt. The hottest forge fire and the strongest blacksmith could make not the slightest dent in it. Even Ruby’s fire had no effect on it. At Skathis’s will, however, it had rippled, shifted, reshaping itself into new configurations with the fluidity of mercury. Hard and cool to the touch, it had, nevertheless, been molten to his mind, and the creatures who gave him his title—“god of beasts” instead of merely “god of metal”—had been, for all intents and purposes, living things.

They were four mesarthium monsters, one to each of the huge metal blocks positioned at the perimeter of the city. Rasalas had been his favorite, and though the citizens of Weep had understood that the beast was only metal animated by Skathis’s mind, the understanding was buried under their terror. Their fear of him was its own entity, and Sarai understood why. Thousands upon thousands of times she’d seen him in their dreams, and it was hard even for her not to believe he had been alive. The citadel in the sky had seemed alive, too. Back then, anyone looking up at it was likely to find it looking back with its immense, inscrutable eyes.

Such had been Skathis’s gift. If they’d had it, then the doors would be an afterthought. They could bring the whole citadel back to life and move it anywhere they wanted—though Sarai didn’t imagine there was anywhere in the world that would want them.

“Well, we can’t, can we?” said Sparrow. “And we can’t fight—”

“You can’t,” agreed Minya with scorn, as though Sparrow’s gift, which had kept them fed for years, had no worth because it had no dimension for violence. “And you,” she said to Feral with equal scorn. “If we wanted to frighten them with thunder, then you might be useful.” She had goaded him for years to learn to summon and aim lightning, with dismal results. It was beyond his control, and though this was due to the natural parameters of his gift and no personal failing, it didn’t spare him Minya’s judgment. Her eyes flicked to Sarai next, and here her gaze went beyond scorn to something more combative. Spite, frustration, venom. Sarai knew it all. She’d endured its sting ever since she stopped blindly doing everything Minya told her to do.

“And then there’s Bonfire,” Minya said, moving on to Ruby without scorn so much as cool consideration.

“What about me?” asked Ruby, wary.

Minya’s gaze focused in on her. “Well, I suppose you might do more with your gift than heat bathwater and burn up your clothes.”

Ruby paled to a bloodless cerulean. “You mean . . . burn people?”

Minya let out a little laugh. “You’re the only one of the five of us who’s actually a weapon and you’ve never even considered—”

Ruby cut her off. “I’m not a weapon.”

Minya’s mirth vanished. She said coolly, “When it comes to the defense of the citadel and our five lives . . . yes, you are.”

Sometimes you can glimpse a person’s soul in just a flicker of expression, and Sarai glimpsed Ruby’s then: the longing that was the core of her. Yesterday she’d had the thought that Ruby’s gift expressed her nature, and it did, but not the way Minya wanted it to. Ruby was heat and volatility, she was passion, but not violence. She wanted to kiss, not kill. It sounded silly but it wasn’t. She was fifteen years old and furiously alive, and in a glimmer of a moment, Sarai saw her hopes both exposed and destroyed, and felt in them the echo of her own. To be someone else.

To not be . . . this.

“Come on,” said Feral. “If it comes to fighting, what chance do you think we have? The Godslayer slew the Mesarthim, and they were far more powerful than we are.”

“He had the advantage of surprise,” said Minya, all but baring her teeth. “He had the advantage of treachery. Now we have it.”

A little sob escaped from Sparrow. Whatever calm they’d been pretending, it was slipping away. No, Minya was tearing it away deliberately. What’s wrong with you? Sarai wanted to demand, but she knew she would get no satisfaction. Instead, she said, with all the authority she could muster, “We don’t know anything yet. Feral’s right. It’s too soon to worry. I’ll find out what I can tonight, and tomorrow we’ll know if we need to have this conversation or not. For now, it’s dinnertime.”

“I’m not hungry,” said Ruby.

Neither was Sarai, but she thought if they could act normal, they might feel normal. A little bit, anyway. Though it was hard to feel normal with a ghost glaring at you from the head of the table. “Minya . . .” she said. It pained her to be gracious, but she forced herself. “Would you please send Ari-Eil away so that we can eat in peace?” She didn’t ask her to release him. She understood that Minya meant to keep him around, if only to torment Sarai.

“Certainly I will, since you ask so nicely,” said Minya, matching her gracious tone with just an edge of mockery. She gave no visible signal, but in the dining room, the ghost unfroze and pivoted toward the interior door. Minya was done toying with him, apparently, because he didn’t shuffle his steps or fight against her now, but virtually glided from their sight.

“Thank you,” said Sarai, and they went inside.

Dinner was not kimril soup, though Sarai doubted Ruby would have voiced any objection to it tonight. She was uncharacteristically silent, and Sarai could imagine the tenor of her thoughts. Her own were grim enough, and she wasn’t faced with the notion of burning people alive. What Feral said was true. They could never win a battle. Once they were discovered, there simply was no scenario in which life went on.

She didn’t linger in the gallery after dinner, but asked Ruby to heat a bath for her.

Their suites all had bathrooms with deep mesarthium pools in them, but water no longer came from the pipes, so they used a copper tub in the rain room instead. The “rain room” was the chamber off the kitchens they’d designated for Feral’s cloud summoning. They’d fitted it with barrels, and a channel in the floor caught runoff and funneled it out to the gardens. Kem, the ghost footman, said it had been the butchering room before, and the channel was for blood and the big hooks on the ceiling were for hanging meat. No trace of blood remained, though, just as none remained in the nursery or the corridors. One of Minya’s first commands to the ghosts in the aftermath of the Carnage had been to clean up all the blood.

Sarai scooped water into the tub with a bucket, and Ruby put her hands on the side and ignited them. Just her hands, like she was holding fireballs. The copper conducted the heat beautifully, and soon the water was steaming and Ruby left. Sarai submerged herself and soaked, and washed her hair with the soap Great Ellen made them from the herbs in the garden, and all the while she had the peculiar sense that she was preparing herself—as though her body would be going out from the citadel and not merely her senses. She was even nervous, as if she were about to meet new people. Meet them, ha. She was about to spy on new people and violate their minds. What did it matter if her hair was clean? They wouldn’t see her, or have any awareness of her presence. They never did. In Weep it was she who was the ghost, and an unbound one, invisible, incorporeal, insubstantial as a murmur.

Back in her dressing room, she put on a slip. Staring at herself in the mirror, she found that she’d lost the ability to see herself through her own eyes. She saw only what humans would see. Not a girl or a woman or someone in between. They wouldn’t see her loneliness or fear or courage, let alone her humanity. They would see only obscenity. Calamity.

Godspawn.

Something took hold of her. A surge of defiance. Her eyes swept the dressing room. Past the slips to the terrible gowns, the headdresses and fans and pots of her mother’s face paint and all the macabre accoutrements of the goddess of despair. And when she emerged, Less Ellen, who had brought her tea, did a double take and nearly dropped her tray. “Oh, Sarai, you gave me a fright.”

“It’s just me,” said Sarai, though she didn’t feel quite herself. She’d never desired to be anything like her mother before, but tonight she craved a little goddess ferocity, so she’d painted Isagol’s black band across her eyes from temple to temple and mussed her cinnamon-red hair as wild as she could make it.

She turned to the terrace—which was the outstretched right hand of the huge metal seraph—and went out to meet the night and the newcomers.

25

The Night and the Newcomers

Sarai screamed her moths at Weep, and down and down they whirled. On a normal night they would split up and divide the city a hundred ways between them, but not tonight. She needed all her focus on the newcomers. Tonight, the citizens of Weep would not weep because of her.

The ghost Ari-Eil had told them—or been compelled by Minya to tell them—that the faranji were to be housed at the Merchants’ Guildhall, where a wing had been outfitted as a hostelry just for them. Sarai had never gone there before. It wasn’t a residence, so she’d never looked there for sleepers, and it took her a few minutes to locate the right wing. The place was palatial, with a large central structure topped with a golden dome, and walls of the native honey stone. All was carved in the traditional style. Weep wasn’t a city that feared ornamentation. Centuries of carvers had embellished every stone surface with patterns and creatures and seraphim.

Graceful open pavilions were connected by covered walkways to outbuildings capped in smaller domes. There were fountains, and once upon a time there had been gardens full of fruit and flowers, but those had all withered in the accursed shade.

The whole city had been a garden once. Not anymore. Orchid Witch, Sarai thought in passing, could do a sight of good down here.

If not for the fact that she would be murdered on sight.

The moths tested the terrace doors first, but found most of them closed, and far too well made for any cracks that might admit them, so they flew down the chimneys instead. Inside, the rooms were sumptuous, as befitted the first foreign delegation ever welcomed beyond the Cusp. For centuries, the city had been famed the world over for its craftsmanship, and these chambers might have served as a showplace: the finest of carpets laid over floors of mosaic gold and lys, with embroidered bedcovers, frescoed walls, carved ceiling timbers, and marvelous objects on shelves and walls, every one a masterpiece.