Séverin took a step toward it. Something inside him hummed. The scar on his hand tingled.
“Thirty minutes!” echoed Enrique’s voice from far away.
This was it.
Séverin felt as though he were in a dream. That book called to him. Strange paraphernalia littered the surface of the altar. The book itself was as Enrique had described: huge and darkened, the leather eaten away on the sides. Old blood spattered the stone. A knife, now rusted, had fallen to the floor. There was a page of hymns, litanies in different languages and a small, strange harp pushed to the side; some of its strings glittered as if they had been strung with starlight.
In that second, Séverin felt as if he’d caught the tempo of the universe’s pulse, as if he stood on the verge of an apotheosis. He reached for the book. When he touched it, he thought he heard Tristan’s laugh echoing in his ears. He felt the pressure of horns, Roux-Joubert’s voice whispering to him:We can be gods.
He flipped open the book—
And then paused. It was impossible. And yet, the truth slammed into him with all the force of a bludgeon.
26
LAILA
Laila watched as the afternoon light seamed through the cracks of the ice, as if knitting the world back together in gold.
Or perhaps it wasn’t gold at all, but rich ichor, that nectareous blood of the gods that Séverin and Ruslan mentioned at dinner. The thought unnerved her. If she looked at the world that way, it turned the lake from something wondrous to something wounded. She couldn’t bear any more wounds, not from the dead girls and their stolen hands nor from the raw ache behind her chest every time she saw Séverin.
Near the entrance of the Sleeping Palace she found a slender gazebo Forged of ice and marble, the pillars twisted round with jasmine and bruise-colored violets to keep away the smell of fish carcasses left out on the ice by the sleek seals that lived in the lake. She breathed deep. Savoring all of it: the smell of life and death. The fetid sweetness of life expired, the unripe bitterness of life cut short. And always, that metal tang of ice.
In the distance, the jagged Ural Mountains appeared mirrored in the lake, as if an identical belt of them existed just beneath the surface of the water.
She hoped it was true.
She hoped there was another world pressed beside their own, a world where she had been born instead of made; a world where the girls bound to the Sleeping Palace had never died. Laila wondered who she might be in that other world. Perhaps she would be a married woman by now, like so many of the girls her age in Pondichéry. Perhaps a boy with skin as dark as hers and eyes that were not the color of sleep would hold her heart in thrall.
Laila twisted her garnet ring until the number blazed:12.
Twelve days left.
Or, depending on how soon Séverin and Hypnos could bring upThe Divine Lyricsfrom the leviathan, hundreds of days to spare.
Laila’s throat tightened, and she gripped the gazebo’s railing, avoiding any sight of her reflection when a sudden crunch of snow made her look up. There, bundled against the cold, stood Enrique. He was dressed in a long trench coat, the chill wind mussing his hair.
“Can I join you?” he asked.
Laila smiled. “Of course.”
She made room for him on the bench, and the two of them sat looking out at the endless stretch and prisms of ice and light. He fiddled with the edges of his coat. He opened his mouth, then clamped it shut.
“Spit it out, Enrique.”
“You know how you can read objects with a touch?” asked Enrique in a breathless rush.
Laila feigned shock. “I can?”
“I’m being serious!”
“What of it?”
Enrique flipped over his notebook of ideas and research. He seemed agitated. In the past, he might have leaned against her, limp as a puppy angling for someone to scratch his head or, as Enrique used to say:Annoy the ideas under my skull. Something held him back now, and only then did Laila see part of the script written on the notebook:
TO PLAY AT GOD’S INSTRUMENT
WILL SUMMON THE UNMAKING
