Ilsa Marchetti woke every morning at the same moment, because a hundred and eleven clocks told her to.
They were all in the Hall. The long gallery on the top floor of her house on the Second Rib, under a vault of dark glass, where the white-gold light of the Head came through dimmed and soft as dusk. A hundred and eleven of them. Some were small enough to fit in her palm and lay on velvet in cases. Some stood taller than a man, in cabinets of dead-world wood, their pendulums swinging behind glass. Brass and silver and enamel and gold. Faces painted with numbers she had spent forty years learning to read. Some had hands. Some had little windows that showed painted suns and painted moons, going round. All of them dead-world. All of them from Outside, from before. All of them hauled up out of the scrap sorts of the Belly over forty years, at enormous expense, by people who had never once wondered what they were.
And sixty-three of them still ran.
She had made them run. That was the thing nobody understood, at the galas. They saw the clock at the end of the Hall — the great one, the tall one, the one she’d unveiled before two hundred of the finest people in the Higher Ribs and listened to them gasp — and they thought she had found it ticking. They thought it had been ticking for a thousand years, in the dark, out there in the dead world, waiting for her.
It hadn’t. It had come up out of a crate in pieces. Rusted. Seized. She had sat at a bench in this Hall for four years with a lens in her eye and tweezers in her fingers and taken it apart, wheel by wheel, spring by spring, and cleaned every one, and put it back. By hand. Her own hands. Not channels. Not a craftsman. Her.
Four years. And then one morning she had wound it, and it had ticked.
She’d sat in front of it for a whole day after that. Not eating. Not speaking. Just listening.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Counting.
She was sixty-seven years old. She had had her face done twice and her heart done once and her eyes replaced with something clear and silver that saw better than any eyes had ever seen. She had a single channel, no more, a fine thread of blue running from her spine to her hands, because she’d wanted her hands to be steady at the bench and for no other reason. Less channel than any Verbous in the Higher Ribs. She was proud of that. It meant that when she held a spring in her tweezers, it was her holding it.
And every morning, a hundred and eleven clocks told her that she was one day closer to the morning they would go on ticking without her.
She got up. She wound the great one first, as always. Twelve turns of the brass key. She listened to it.
Tick.
Then she went down to the Concord.
There had been nine Seniors of the Higher Ribs for as long as anyone had kept records, and there were eight now, and they were all afraid.
She could see it as she came into the chamber. They sat around the long table of black stone in the round room at the heart of her house — she had offered the room, three months ago, when the refinery fell and Kon died and nobody else had stepped forward, and nobody had argued — and they were all trying very hard not to look afraid, and failing.
Benedek Arral, Senior of the First Rib, oldest of them, ninety and looking it despite everything that had been done to him, sat at the head of the table with his hands folded on a cane of white bone. His channels were so many and so fine that his skin glowed faintly blue all over, like a lamp shade. He was an Ascension candidate. Everyone knew it. Everyone knew he’d been one for forty years. He looked tired.
Cassia Lund, Senior of the Fourth Rib, young, forty, sharp-faced, with Catalyst traceries up both arms like vines. She had wanted Kon’s seat. She had not gotten it. She was looking at Ilsa now with an expression like a closed door.
Others. Ottoline Ferne of the Fifth, fat and nervous and fiddling with her rings. The twins from the Sixth, who sat together and spoke together and whose names Ilsa had long ago stopped bothering to tell apart. Old Roderic Pell of the Seventh, who owned half the cable crews on the Mid Ribs and smelled faintly of grease even here. Yevgenia Strand, of the Eighth, who owned the other half.
And the empty chair. The Third. Kon’s.
Ilsa sat down in her own — the Second — and laid her steady hands flat on the black stone.
“The lights,” she said, without preamble, “are going out.”
Nobody said anything.
“The Mid Ribs are at sixty percent of their allocation,” she went on. “The Seventh and Eighth are worse. Halden is at forty. There are districts on Rib Nine that have been dark for nine days. The Tenth Works is running at a quarter of what the Costal Refinery ran at, on drums dropped straight from the Skull, because we have nowhere else to temper. The lower lines in the Belly have had no Somnoline in three months. The galleries are pumping at thirty percent.” She looked around the table. “And four days ago, a tank-run on Terminus Six was taken. On the cable. Over the Tenth Rib. In a sheave-house we didn’t know could be got at.”
“By him,” said Ottoline Ferne. Her rings clicked. “By the Anomaly.”
“By him.”
“Then why,” said Cassia Lund, coolly, “is he still alive?”
Ilsa looked at her.
“I have spent three months,” said Cassia, “watching you sit in that chair, Ilsa. In that chair, in your house, as if it were yours by right. And in those three months, a mule from the Belly has killed a Senior, brought down a refinery, cut the Belly loose from the line, and now begun stealing our light.” She leaned forward. “Kon’s company is yours now. Kon’s Gilt. Kon’s holdings. Kon’s city. You’ve had them all for three months. What have you done with them?”
“I have learned,” said Ilsa Marchetti.
She touched a stud on the table. A door opened at the side of the chamber, and a woman came in.
Tall. Narrow. In a long silver coat, plain, over the dark close underclothes that Lancers wore beneath their scale. Her hair was cropped very short, dark, and there was a bruise along one side of her jaw, yellowing. She carried her helm under one arm. Silver, smooth, with a narrow slit.
She stopped at the foot of the table and stood very straight.
“Lancer-observer Isaura Quill,” said Ilsa. “Second Rib. Mine. She was on the tank-run. She is the only person in the Higher Ribs who has stood within three meters of him and walked away. I asked her to tell you what she told me.” She nodded. “Lancer.”
Quill told them.
She told them in a flat, calm, precise voice, like a gauge reading. The brake on the sheave wheel. The capsule slamming to a stop. A man coming down the cable in the dark — sliding, on bare palms, twenty meters — onto the platform. The Gilt. What happened to the first Gilt’s channels when the blade touched them. What happened to the second Gilt when the man’s bare hand touched his breastplate. What happened to the third when the man caught his lance behind the tip.
“He drank it,” said Quill. “Through his hand. Through the haft. The Gilt’s channels went dark from the fingers up. I watched it. Then the man let go, and the Gilt was alive, and empty. Like a cup.”
The chamber was silent.
“I engaged,” said Quill. “Eleven bolts. Full rig. Everything I had.” She paused. “He caught every one on the blade. Edge and flat. Every bolt I fired went into the sword. Into the carvings on it. They turned red, and the light went down the blade into his hand. He was —“ She stopped. For the first time, something moved in her calm face. “He was brighter, after. Every bolt. His scars lit. I could see them through his clothes. By the eleventh bolt he was —“ She searched for the word. “Glowing.”
“Your bolts fed him,” said Cassia Lund.
“Yes, Senior.”
“And you ran.”
“I disengaged, Senior.” Quill’s voice didn’t change. “My rig was empty. I had nothing left to engage with. Remaining would have accomplished nothing except giving him one more Lancer’s channels to drink.” She paused. “I judged that a report was worth more to the Concord than my corpse.”
“And what,” said Benedek Arral, from the head of the table, very quietly, his voice thin as paper, “is your report, Lancer? In one sentence.”
Quill was silent for a moment.
“Every weapon we have,” she said, “is made of what he eats.”
Nobody spoke.
“Thank you, Lancer,” said Ilsa. “That will be all.”
Quill turned to go. At the door, she hesitated. She looked back at the table.
“Senior,” she said. To Ilsa. “One thing more. He let me go.”
“You said you disengaged.”
“I did. But I was empty and he was close. He could have caught me before I reached the rail. He saw me empty. He took a step toward me.” Quill’s eyes were steady. “And then he stopped. He didn’t follow. I don’t know why.” She paused. “I don’t think he wanted to.”
“Noted,” said Ilsa.
Quill bowed, and left.
The word hung in the chamber after the door had closed. Ilsa had said it without thinking. Everyone in the Higher Ribs said it, now and then. It was the Wardens’ word. It was fashionable, the way the Lumen bow was fashionable, the way gold hems were fashionable. She saw two or three of the Seniors glance at each other.
She folded her hands.
“So,” she said. “We cannot fight him with Catalyst. Every channel we send at him, he drinks. Every bolt, he eats. Every Gilt, he empties.” She looked around the table. “Which means we need to fight him with something that is not Catalyst.”
“Such as?” said Cassia.
“Such as himself,” said Ilsa Marchetti, and touched the stud again.
The man who came in through the side door was thin, and grey-haired, and mild, and he walked with the slight stoop of someone who’d spent his life bent over a bench. He wore a plain grey coat, very clean. His hair was cut short and neat.
His right arm ended in a hand of glass.
Ilsa had seen it before. She still looked. Everyone at the table looked. A hand, perfectly shaped, every joint and knuckle and nail, made of something clear and faintly blue, like ice — and inside it, threading through the glass in every finger, Catalyst channels, glowing. When he moved it, the light moved through it like blood. It met his wrist in a band of silver, and above the band the skin was black and puckered and old, a seared stump, healed.
He held it up a little, as he came to the foot of the table. Not showing it off. Just — holding it. The way you’d hold something you were still getting used to.
“Seniors,” he said. Soft. Educated. Reasonable. “Calloway Sere. Formerly of the Costal Refinery, tempering floor. More recently of Vesper Hollow.” A small smile. “I believe some of you have heard of me.”
“The Halo Wardens have a file on you twenty years thick,” said Benedek Arral, from the head of the table. Mild. Not quite unkind. “You fled a Warden’s inquiry. You consorted with bleeders. You stole first-draw from the supply line under your own kitchen.” He tilted his white head. “And by your own account, you made the Anomaly.”
“I did,” said Sere. “Yes.”
“Then why,” said Cassia Lund, “should we not have the Wardens collect you this moment?”
“Because I’m the only person in the Ribs,” said Sere, “who knows what he is.”
He lifted the glass hand.
There was something in it. Ilsa hadn’t seen him take it from his coat; it had simply been in his glass fingers, the way the light was in them. A small vial. Sealed. The size of a finger. And inside it, a few drops of something dark.
Not red. Not quite. Red, with something under the red. A glint. An ember, at the bottom of a cup.
“I took this on the slab,” said Sere. “Before the injection. While he was under. A sample of his blood, the way I took a sample from every courier, to compare against after.” He turned the vial in the glass fingers, and the drops inside caught the chamber’s light, and glowed, very faintly, red-gold. “I kept it when I fled the Hollow. In my coat. It was the only thing I took.” His mild eyes went around the table. “I didn’t know, then, what I had. I thought it was just another failure. Another courier. Another sample.” He smiled, slowly. “And then I watched him get up off the pit floor.”
“What is he?” said Ottoline Ferne. Her rings had stopped clicking. “What is he, man?”
Sere looked at the vial in his glass hand for a long moment.
“He is what we all are,” he said, “with the frost burned off.”
Nobody spoke.
“Every one of you,” said Sere, “carries it. The tempering. The frost. The Head’s sleep. In your channels, in your blood, in the bread you eat and the light you live under. It’s what makes the Catalyst in your arms run tame. It’s what makes you safe.” He tilted his head. “He doesn’t carry it. He burned it out. Or it was burned out of him, the night I put the god’s blood into his veins. And what was under it, in him — what is under it in all of you —“ He held up the vial. “Woke.”
“You’re talking heresy,” said Cassia Lund. Her voice was very cold.
“I’m talking chemistry,” said Sere. “Heresy is what the Wardens call chemistry they don’t want you to understand.” He set the vial down on the black stone of the table, very gently, in front of Ilsa. It sat there, glowing faintly. “I can’t make another one of him. I’ve tried. Fourteen couriers. He was a fluke — a body that happened to have barely any frost to burn, and something else in it, something I still don’t understand, that let it survive the burning. I can’t repeat that. Not from nothing.”
He touched the vial with one glass fingertip.
“But I don’t have to start from nothing anymore. I have this. A few drops of blood that took the god’s blood and lived. Mix one drop of it with stabilized first-draw, and give it to a strong body, a disciplined body, a body that wants it —“ His eyes were shining now. That terrible thing in them. Hope. “— and the first-draw doesn’t kill. It takes. Partly. Imperfectly. But it takes.”
“You’ve done this,” said Benedek Arral. Not a question.
“Twice,” said Sere. “In the last three months. In a workshop Senior Marchetti was kind enough to provide.” He bowed his grey head to Ilsa. “The first subject died. In nine hours. The second subject —“ He stopped. Smiled. “The second subject is waiting outside.”
The woman who came through the side door was not tall, and not narrow, and not silver. She was a Mid. You could see it at once — the clean face, the cropped hair, the plain grey Rib Eight militia uniform with a captain’s bar on the collar. Square-shouldered. Thick-armed. Thirty, perhaps. Her face was plain and hard and set, and she walked into the chamber of the Seniors of the Higher Ribs like a woman walking onto a gallery floor to clear a jam, and she stopped at the foot of the table beside Sere, and looked at them all, and didn’t bow.
Her eyes were wrong.
Ilsa saw it at once, with her silver eyes that saw better than any eyes had ever seen. The woman’s irises were grey. Ordinary. But around them, in the whites, there were threads. Fine, branching, red-gold threads, like the cracks in old porcelain. Glowing. Faintly.
And on the backs of her hands — square, scarred, a soldier’s hands — the same. A fine web of red-gold lines, under the skin. Not channels. Not cyberware. There was no metal in her at all. Ilsa could see that too. No rig, no implant, not a single thread of tempered blue.
Just the lines. In her blood.
“Captain Ilka Dorne,” said Sere, softly. “Rib Eight militia. Eleven years. She volunteered.”
“Why?” said Cassia Lund.
Ilka Dorne looked at her.
“Because he’s coming to Rib Eight,” she said. Her voice was flat. A militia voice, used to shouting over noise. “Everybody on the Eighth knows it. The Belly’s waking up and he’s at the front of it and the first rib he’ll hit is mine. Mine has nine thousand people on it. My mother’s on it. My crew’s families. And when he comes, the Gilt you’ve sent us are going to run, the way they ran at the refinery, and the Lancers are going to fire their pretty staves at him and feed him, and my people are going to be standing in the street with nothing.” She looked at the Seniors, one by one. “So I went to the man who made him, and asked him to make me something that could stand in the street.”
Nobody spoke.
“It hurt,” Ilka Dorne added, after a moment. “If you want to know.”
“How much?” said Ottoline Ferne, faintly.
“More than anything.” Dorne’s face didn’t change. “Nine hours. Like being boiled from the inside. The first one died. I listened to him do it, through the wall.” She paused. “I didn’t.”
Sere touched her arm, lightly, with his glass hand. She didn’t look at him. She didn’t move away either.
“Captain Dorne,” he said, “is the first stable one. Her blood took the mixture and held. She doesn’t drink Catalyst, the way he does — the way he does it is his, it came from whatever was in him before — but she doesn’t need channels, either. Her blood does what channels do. Faster. Harder.” He looked at the Seniors. “She is stronger than any Gilt. Faster than any Lancer. She heals. Not as fast as he does. But she heals.” A pause. “And because there is no Catalyst in her channels — because she has no channels — there is nothing in her for him to drink.”
The chamber was very quiet.
“With more of his blood,” said Sere, “I could make more of her. Many more. Stable ones. A whole company.” He looked down at the vial on the table in front of Ilsa. At the few drops. “But this is all I have. Enough for perhaps three more. Four, if I’m careful.”
“And to make more than four?” said Benedek Arral.
Sere smiled.
“I’d need more of him,” he said.
That was when the light came.
Not through the door. Down. From the ceiling of the round chamber, from the dome of dark glass above the black stone table, where the white-gold light of the Head always came in soft and dim. It came in bright. All at once. A shaft of it, white, blinding, falling straight down into the center of the table — and the Seniors flinched back in their chairs, and Ottoline Ferne cried out, and Cassia Lund was on her feet, and old Benedek Arral did not move at all, only bowed his white head over his bone cane until his forehead touched his hands.
Ilsa bowed too. She did it without deciding to. Everyone in the Higher Ribs knew how. Head down. Eyes down. The Head sees.
But she watched. She’d always watched. Through her lashes, with her silver eyes.
Down the shaft of light, out of the white, something came.
It descended standing. Upright, feet together, arms at its sides. Tall — taller than anything in the room — in seamless white armor, poured, jointless. A ring of pale light floating a hand’s width behind its head, humming that thin high glass tone.
And it had a face.
She’d heard. Everyone in the Higher Ribs had heard, in the last three months. Rumors from the Third Rib, from what was left of Kon’s household. That the envoy who’d come down to the Costal Refinery to receive Nathaniel Kon’s great gift had worn a face. A woman’s face. Beautiful, still, preserved, set into the helm like a picture in a frame.
Ilsa looked at it through her lashes, and her steady hands, flat on the black stone, went very still.
It was beautiful. High cheekbones, a long straight nose, a mouth that didn’t move. Fine lines at the corners of the eyes, as if from smiling, long ago. A small pale scar on the upper lip.
She knew it.
She knew it from a painting. A portrait in the Lumen on the Second Rib, in a gallery of past Seniors of the Second Rib that everyone born on the Higher Ribs was walked through, once, on the Day of Remembrance. She’d stood in front of it when she was young. She’d looked at the small pale scar on the upper lip and wondered how a Senior had come to have a scar. The plaque under the portrait had said: Senior Adelind Marchetti. Second Rib. Ascended, Year 287.
Her great-great-grandmother.
The envoy’s white shell-eyes opened. They turned, smooth, slow, and settled on Ilsa Marchetti, through her lashes.
She stopped breathing.
The preserved lips didn’t move. The voice came from the halo. Thin, high, pure, like a struck glass. Not Noted. More. Ilsa would learn later that in the whole recorded history of the Concord, a Warden had never said more than Noted in that chamber. Never.
“The Anomaly,” said the voice from the halo. “Alive.”
Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.
“Deliver him,” said the halo, “alive. To the Skull.”
The white eyes stayed on Ilsa. On her.
“Ascension,” said the halo.
Then the envoy rose. Upright, feet together, arms at its sides, back up the shaft of white light, and the light went out, and the dome of dark glass was dim again, and the white-gold of the Head came through it soft as dusk, the way it always did.
For a long time, nobody said anything.
Then Benedek Arral, at the head of the table, very slowly, lifted his white head from his hands. He looked down the table at Ilsa Marchetti. His faintly glowing face was very old and very tired, and something had gone out of it.
“Forty years,” he said. Quietly. To nobody. “Forty years, I have been a candidate.”
He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t need to.
Cassia Lund sat back down, slowly. She was looking at Ilsa with an expression that was no longer a closed door. It was something worse. It was respect, and hatred, and a kind of hunger, all at once.
“It looked at you,” she said.
“Yes,” said Ilsa.
“It spoke to you.”
“Yes.”
“Then I suppose,” said Cassia Lund, very evenly, “the Concord is yours.”
Nobody argued.
Ilsa Marchetti looked down at her hands on the black stone. Steady. Her own. She looked at the vial in front of her, with its few dark glowing drops. She looked at Sere, at the foot of the table, with his glass hand and his shining eyes. At Ilka Dorne, square and hard and silent, with red-gold threads in the whites of her eyes.
Ascension.
To never stop. To never be the morning the clocks went on ticking without her.
“Prior,” she said.
“Senior.”
“Make me four.”
Sere bowed. Low.
“And then,” said Ilsa Marchetti, “go and get me more of him.”
She went to Kon’s house that night. Alone. She didn’t know why.
It was hers now. All of it. The Glasshouse, the city, the company, the Gilt. She had signed for them three months ago, in the round chamber, with nobody arguing. She had not been inside since.
The servants had gone. Most of them. A few still came in the mornings, she’d been told, out of habit or fear, and moved through the empty glass halls with their white masks on, dusting the cases. Nobody had told them to stop.
She walked through the halls with her own steady footsteps echoing off the glass floors over the gulf. Past the shoe. The wheel. The enamel sign. The stopped gold watch in its case — she paused at that one, and looked at it, and thought that she could make it run again, given a year, and then thought that she would never have a year, now, for anything but this.
Past the painting of a blue sky.
Past the horse.
She came to the garden. Under the great dome, in the middle of the house.
It was dying.
Not dead. Not yet. But dying. The ferns had gone brown at the edges. The broad leaves had yellowed and curled. The climbing things on their wires had let go, some of them, and hung down limp. Nobody had watered them. Nobody had known how. Kon had had a man for it, and the man had been one of the first to leave.
She stood at the edge of the garden in the dim light and looked at it for a long time.
On the long glass table at the far side, where Kon must have sat, there was something. She went to it.
An empty silver birdcage. Tarnished black in the crevices, bright on the high places. Its little silver vines bent, and straightened, and bent again. No glass. Nothing inside it.
She’d heard about it. Everyone had. The Lantern of Saint Aurel, that Kon had sent fifteen couriers to fetch, and that the fifteenth had brought back — an empty cage — along with the key. Kon had told half the Third Rib he would have it melted.
He hadn’t. It was still here. On his table, among his dying plants.
Ilsa Marchetti picked it up.
It was light. Lighter than she’d thought. She turned it in her steady hands, and the white-gold light from the dome ran over the silver vines, the little silver leaves, the little silver flowers. Fine work. Dead-world work. Somebody, a very long time ago, had sat at a bench with tweezers and a lens, the way she sat, and made every leaf of this by hand.
She thought about her great-great-grandmother’s face, with its small pale scar, looking at her out of a white helm.
Ascended. Year 287.
She thought: I have wanted this my whole life.
She thought: It did not look like her. It looked like her face.
She stood among the dying plants for a long time, holding the empty cage.
Then she carried it home with her to the Second Rib, and set it on the bench in the Hall, among the clocks. And she sat down in front of it with her lens in her eye and her tweezers in her fingers, and began, very carefully, to straighten the little silver vines.
Around her, a hundred and eleven clocks went on counting.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.