“A vision granted to the Blessed, so that we might understand our sacred duty,” said her mother. “We have other names, I am told, for our family scattered long ago. We are the Lost Muses, the Norns, the Daughters of Bathala, the Silent Apsaras. That instrument you saw holds many names in many tongues, but its function is always the same… when played, it disrupts the divine.”
“The divine,” repeated Kahina.
It felt too small a word given what she had seen.
“My mother spoke of a place built from the ruins of a land whose sacred group misused its power. Played outside the confines of that stained temple, the instrument will unleash a destruction that levels the world,” said Kahina’s mother. “Playedwithinthe temple, it is said to join together all those slivers of divinity you glimpsed. Some say that it can be raised into a tower, which one may scale like a building and claim godhood for themselves. It is not for us to know. Our duty is laid out in one command…”
Her mother held out her hand, hoisting Kahina to her feet.
“In your hands lie the gates of godhood. Let none pass.”
NOW, KAHINA BENTover her son. She turned over his pudgy hand, tracing the delicate blue veins of his wrist. She kissed his knuckles, then kissed each finger and folded it to his palm. She wished she could live in this moment forever—her son, warm and sleeping at her side; the sun glaring elsewhere; the moon keeping watch; this corner of time hemmed in by nothing but the sounds of their breathing.
But that was not how the world worked.
She had seen its fangs and run from its shadow.
Kahina tried to imagine bringing her son to that sacred well, but the image would not hold. It was that fear that had driven her to tell Delphine Desrosiers, matriarch of House Kore, the truth. The other woman would watch over him. She understood what was at stake, and she knew where he must go, should the worst befall them.
Though years had passed, Kahina had not forgotten what she’d glimpsed that day in the broken courtyard. The world beneath her, the lines of power scrawled unintelligibly over jagged mountains and crystalline lakes, vast deserts and steaming jungles.
At one sound of the instrument… it could all vanish.
“In your hands lie the gates of godhood,” she whispered to her son. “Let none pass.”
PART I
1
SÉVERIN
Venice, February 1890
Séverin Montagnet-Alarie stared down at the man kneeling before him.
At his back, a cold wind wrinkled the surface of the dark, lacquered lagoons of Venice, and the prow of a gondola beat mournfully against the shadowy dock. About thirty meters away stood a plain and pale wooden door, its entrance flanked on both sides by a dozen members of the Fallen House. They regarded Séverin in silence, their hands clasped before them, their faces obscured by whitevoltomasks that covered everything but their eyes. Over their lips sat Mnemo bugs in the shape of golden honeybees, their metal wings whirring as they documented Séverin’s every move.
Ruslan, patriarch of the Fallen House, stood beside the kneeling man. He patted the man’s head as if he were a dog, and tugged playfully at the bindings gagging his mouth.
“You”—he said to the man, tapping the side of his head with hisgolden Midas knife—“are the key to my apotheosis! Well, not the main key, but a necessary step. You see, I can’t get my front door open without you…” Ruslan stroked the man’s hair, the gleaming gold skin of his hand catching in the torchlight. “You should be flattered. How many can say they have paved the way to godhood for others, hmm?”
The kneeling man whimpered. Ruslan’s grin widened. Days ago, Séverin would have said the Midas Knife was the most fascinating object he had ever come across. It could rearrange human matter through an alchemy that seemed divine in its making, though—as Ruslan had proved—its use came at the price of sanity. It was rumored that the blade itself had been hewn from the topmost bricks of the Tower of Babel, whose fallen pieces had powered the art of Forging across the world.
But compared to the divine lyre clutched in Séverin’s hand, the Midas Knife was nothing.
“What do you think, Monsieur Montagnet-Alarie?” asked Ruslan. “Don’t you agree this man should feel nothing but flattered? Awed, even?”
Beside the lined-up members of the Fallen House, Eva Yefremovna, the blood and ice Forging artist, stiffened noticeably. Her wide, green eyes had not lost their feverish sheen in the twelve hours since they had left behind the Sleeping Palace on the frozen waters of Lake Baikal.
You must tread carefully.
Séverin’s last conversation with Delphine, the matriarch of House Kore, reared up in his thoughts. They had been crouched in the metal belly of a mechanical leviathan. On the hidden Mnemo panel, Séverin had watched as Ruslan advanced on his friends, slapping Laila across the face, cutting off Enrique’s ear. Ruslan was after something only Séverin could give: control overthe lyre. Played outside of its sacred temple, the lyre only brought ruin. Played within the sacred grounds… the lyre could tap into the powers of godhood.
By then, Séverin knew exactly where he needed to go to play the lyre: Poveglia. Plague Island.
He had heard of the island near Venice years ago. In the fifteenth century, the island had built a hospital for those who fell ill during the plague epidemics, and it was said the ground was more skeleton than soil. Years ago, Séverin had nearly accepted an acquisition project on the island before Enrique had objected.
“The temple’s entrance is well hidden beneath Poveglia,” the matriarch had said to him the last, and final, time they had been together in the belly of the metal leviathan. “There are other entrances to the temple scattered throughout the world, but their maps have been destroyed. Only this one remains, and Ruslan will know where to look for it.”
