The time for faith has passed.

May heretics rule the ashes.

Oliver reluctantly rolled from his mountain of blankets. Even two sets of socks wouldn’t dampen the cold in the floorboards, and icy air nipped at his exposed elbows at the edge of the cot.

Turns out warehouses have terrible insulation.

“Spring is almost here. Spring is almost here,” he muttered, shivering. “…though maybe I should consider an apartment for next year.”

He could afford the expense, but some part of him tarried in a world where every silver note was a precious resource. Thus, he slept on a cot in a corner of a wharf warehouse and woke to the smell of the winter sea.

Still, if he found an apartment, how would he explain his roommate?

Phi trilled from within the kiln.

“Coming,” he called, shambling around his half-built airship frame to the humming furnace. He rubbed his cold fingers and held his hands out before the hatch. “At least someone here is warm.”

Phi waited patiently for him to throw the hatch. Once free, she waddled to the edge and leaped to his shoulder in a yawning rush of orange wings.

“Sleep well?” he asked.

In response, she trilled, sharing heat, and his frozen limbs warmed.

“Good.”

He shuffled to the kitchenette to cut bread and dice ham. He stuffed half the meat into his roll and flicked the other to his waiting bird. The Inventor couldn’t say if Phi actually needed to eat – after all, she slept for several weeks straight in the kiln – but she enjoyed the tidbits regardless.

If he threw the meat high, she would breathe fire and then snap the crisped meat as it fell.

“Instant bacon!” Oliver laughed.

Retrieving the paper, he sank to his chair, skimmed the headlines, and held a one-sided conversation with his elemental beast.

“Father Lucas cleared by the Inquisitors. Officially. Hells, that’s nasty. Can’t wait for this whole business to end. What good is absolution in the papers when Lucas’ candidacy died in the cradle?”

Phi nuzzled his cheek and stole a bit more ham.

“No worries, Phi,” he reassured. “This election is a done deal. Reed can’t lose. I hope he regrets it when he realizes every House for two hundred miles has a target on his arse.”

Once all this is done with, I should take a trip. See some of those heathen nations everybody loves to hate. I bet Tura could give me a good in.

The postman hammered on the door. “Packages!”

“I’ll get them in a minute. Thanks!” Oliver hollered back. Phi shifted her perch on his shoulder, talons plucking at his shirt.

Leaning back, he imagined a future traveling with Tura. They could bring the storm alarms and the moving picture to anyone with the will to listen. They would circle the world: Whistlers to Wave’s Lament; Deepbloom to the far distant eastern tribes. They would be free of elections and demons both.

Another knock on the door, this time soft and polite.

Phi hissed and launched herself into the rafters like a bolt of lightning. Her talons raked his shoulder, carving gouges in his clavicle.

He swore, groping at his bleeding shoulder with his blanket. “Hells, Phi! I’m not made of metal!”

The visitor outside muttered something to herself. She then applied an old chisel and hammer to the door.

The frame exploded into matchsticks.

Lace stepped over the wreckage, slipping the ancient tools back into her satchel, and raised in her left hand a trembling black scale. The artifact squirmed against the air, vibrating in wordless command.

Bow. Grovel. Weep. Beg.

To no avail.

“Good morning, Oliver,” the Redeemer chirped. “I hope you haven’t missed me too much.”

The scale’s demands crashed into Oliver like the harbor breakwater, and he staggered against an immense gravity.

I should be on my knees. Why aren’t I on my knees?

“I apologize if I’ve neglected you,” she continued. “I was quite sad to hear that you stopped attending services.”

You are too weak to stand.

Too scared to become.

Oliver clenched his fists, leaning into the push of that scale like a heavy wind.

“I called the flock for a meeting today – just like the good old days. Still, I thought it best to let you sleep in. You see, something rather peculiar happened a few weeks ago.”

He had thought Mirielle overbearing, but she was the fey breeze compared to this force!

“I met Alisandra Mishkan at the wharf, not all that far away.” She rapped the heel of a familiar pair of boots against the floor. “And you know what she called me? ‘Lace’.” The Redeemer faked a moue. “I thought that was our pet name, Oliver. I thought that this all was between us.”

The scale roared for him to submit.

Instead he heard a music, born somewhere in between Mirielle’s seductive lilt and a whisper deep in his gut, whisper, Never to lay dead undying in the cold stone graves of the stars.

One finger at a time, he deliberately clenched his fist.

Never to obey the songs of hypocrites and never to bow before false Thrones.

Lace frowned in puzzlement and raised the black scale higher.

Her lips upon me. Her breath inside me. The taste of submission on my tongue.

“Oliver, dear, don’t you want to look at the scale?”

To stare blinded like a moth before the flame?

Between his gritted teeth, he growled, “I have had just about enough of bowing before heavenly light!”

Lace processed his defiant slowly, one hand drifting down to her satchel. “Then you are Mishkan’s slave in more ways than I imagined.”

“I am none but my own!”

He took one step forward, fighting the tide. The first step weighed mountains, but the next came easier.

“I confess to a certain disappointment,” Lace admitted. She tossed the stone to the air, and there it hung suspended. “I thought our confession together was so productive. I thought you understood.”

She reached for her tools, still confident in her magics.

After all, the scale would slow the boy long enough.

But not his phoenix.

Phi dove from the ceiling, a meteorite of fire and fury, and smashed against the black scale. Its hellish cold and her burning wings met, and the phoenix won.

Through the scale, Lace felt blistering pain flare across her neck – fresh pain where there had only been numbness for years. She stumbled, swinging the chisel wide in blind panic.

Phi cried out, and Oliver leaped back by raw instinct.

The floor in a semicircle before Lace shattered to pulp.

“Bastard child of demons!” she hissed, all pretense of elegance dropped.

The phoenix twirled midair, trailing a wake of fire.

Lace whimpered deep in her throat, snatched the black scale from the broken ground, and fled.

The phoenix screamed, ready to chase, but Oliver shouted. “No! Phi! The city has had enough fires!”

His partner instantly calmed, and her pinions quenched to a reasonable temperature.

Wincing, Oliver hopped over the shattered floor and peered out the door. He caught the tail end of a black car blasting through the gate to the Inventor’s wharf, but no guards fired shots at its tail.

He really hoped that the gatemen were bribed and not dead.

Casting a glance back, he muttered, “Even more magic junk…does this at least mean she finally exhausted her supply of elemental beasts?”

He thought of the kennels at the Dreamer’s Den.

He thought of Lace’s arrogant words: the flock for a meeting.

Swearing, Oliver rushed for his clothes.

His phoenix followed, landing on his shoulders and ready to go.

“I can’t take you in public, Phi!”

She thrummed, growing uncomfortably warm.

Oliver grimaced, shoving his feet into boots. “Fine. Fine! Fly on your own and meet me there.”

And please let me find nothing but empty pews.

Grabbing his coat, he rushed out the door.

He ignored the parcel still on his doorstep. The package, courtesy of Alva the Inventor, invited Oliver to see the triumph of a true genius and the birth of the age of aeronautics this very afternoon.

***

Guildsmaster Reed watched the morning traffic from his office, swishing brandy and nursing worries.

Lace had slipped her guards and vanished with the dawn. She had not stolen any money nor killed the men assigned to her detail.

If she had fled, then the clock began to tick.

Reed would win this farce of an election in forty days, witch or no witch. There was no real opposition, and he already fielded inquiries from the merchants who wanted to bend his impending powers to their end…

He slammed his brandy on the table.

What good was winning an election?! Guildsmaster Reed, the noble patsy, ripe to suffer the abuse of an ignorant public! Worse yet, once he won, he would have to account for his many extravagant promises!

The dark men from Moros promised chaos and strife, but they delivered snowballs and seditious letters to the papers!

He understood now that he relied too heavily on the faint promises of spies and witches. The former only cared for chaos in their enemy’s land; the latter spent a fortune in elemental beasts and failed to even kill the Mishkan witch!

Neither would bring him to victory.

“If I want my night of fire and blood,” Reed mused, “I will have to do it myself.”

Just like the good old days.

Guildsmaster Reed, hero of the people, knows how to dirty his own hands. Any pretext will do.

Time to spark my revolution.

***

The Inventor Alva intentionally delayed the invitations to certain parties until the very morning of his triumph. Ambushed by propriety, those fools would have to rush if they wanted to see him master the skies. If they ignored the request, then they slighted him for all to see.

Today, he was the star.

The Inventor surveyed the crowd, arms crossed over his paunch, from the vantage of a six-story building. His silver airship bobbed overhead, straining against its tethers. It struggled for freedom like a frenzied beast, and the metaphor appealed to the Inventor.

Raw power, soon to yield to my fingers. I will not be cowed by the jostling wind!

His revolutionary design used a mixture of gas bladders and sails to lift the ship into the sky. Three rudders drooped from its rotund body, providing unparalleled stability and maneuverability.

Flat, thick clouds lay in a smooth blanket across the sky, and the occasional whisk of snow reminded all present that winter persisted. Despite that, two or three thousand people milled in the streets to marvel at the Invention.

“Not a bad crowd, not a bad crowd,” Alva rumbled to himself.

“Aye,” agreed his foreman. “Right smart of Tura to popularize his works. Everybody wants to see the next thing now!”

Alva glowered. “Check the mooring already!”

Tura couldn’t popularize a turkey sandwich! This is no children’s moving picture show!

The Inventor’s men long ago learned better than to voice their concerns, especially when Alva muttered into his beard. They bent their heads to keeping the tethers from ripping free.

A moment later, Mirielle Visage emerged from the stairwell, trailing her little spy. She wore a sleek white coat over her blood red dress, and she smiled full of teeth. “Alva, my dear, you have finished your wonder of the skies at last!”

“Of course! I don’t know why it took me so long to realize the obvious, really.”

The maid arched one dainty eyebrow behind Mirielle’s back.

He ignored her. Let the Livery spies pry at the corners like rats. He was the man who made history; they merely stole it.

People can’t be trusted. Thieves and cheats, the lot of them.

Mirielle glanced skyward. “Low cloud ceiling today.”

“Ah? Yes, the weather may not cooperate, but I have factored those requirements in as well.”

“Oh?” Mirielle hummed. “As long as you have factored in every possible circumstance.”

“Every last one!” he said with a smile, though privately he seethed. Easy enough to spy her doubt, filtered through that sweet, noble mien. “Today marks the dawn of the era of flight!”

“Excluding air balloons?” Mirielle teased.

“And gliders,” the maid added.

“Plus I’ve heard some rather interesting experiments with combustion rocketry coming out of Resting Dragon…”

Alva spat. “House Visage can scoff from the ground.”

The Inventor stomped away to berate his workers for perceived slights.

Behind him, the demons glanced at the rattling skyship.

“Could he have bolted on more junk?” Mirielle muttered.

“Surely,” Thea agreed. “I spot an empty stretch of hull by the second mast.”

“Would you take a bet, my dear?”

“No.”

Mirielle rolled her eyes. “Low clouds, stiff breeze, whitecaps on the sea. Five hundred feet above our head, the sky seethes.”

“If Alva understood half of what he stole, he wouldn’t have to steal.”

The Lady Visage considered. “Should we grant him fresh inspiration?”

Thea shrugged. “If he asks.”

Alva stumbled over a loose tool and unleashed a shower of invectives.

Mirielle hummed. “If he asks nicely.”

The criers began to goad the crowd with tales of technology, progress, and ships to sail the skies. Unlike certain Inventors and their flashy toys, this would change the world!

His musicians began to play on the streets below.

Alva strode to the edge of the roof, bowed to the crowds, and accepted the wobbling rope ladder from his assistant. He ascended, striving for a noble calm, though he started to sweat profusely in the chill air by the third rung. Even with two men anchoring the rope, it swayed and buckled under his hands.

Wheezing, aching, he crawled into the bottom hatch.

“I will be the first man to fly to Wave’s Lament!” he huffed, clinging to the chassis. The skyship vibrated rather more than his last test flight under calm, clear skies and a full moon.

Alva licked his lips, fighting the desire for a stiff drink.

He wound through the cramped interior, settled into the cockpit, and flashed the mooring lights. This signaled his announcers to bring the music to a crescendo and the workers to release the tethers.

The mooring snapped free, and his skyship surged skyward. The first moments were euphoric, buoyed by the stiff wind at his back. Alva laughed, steering for the open sea with a triumphant grin.

Slowly rising, he approached the flat barrier of clouds.

Lumia would watch him ascend into the heavens like a bird.

His skyship began to tremble as he left the protective shield of the noble hill beneath.

He floated over the harbor, squeezing the controls, driven by visions of stolen glory.

From the city, the demons watched the skyship’s sails begin to whip in separate directions.

“A muddled vision,” Thea mused. “Bloated by pride, given no recourse when the cross wind rises…”

The Inventor rose to brush the clouds, and the airship lurched sideways like a toy. The sails whipped wide open, snapping the automated pulleys that purported to control an entire ship by one man’s hand.

Alva frantically attempted to assert his control, but he was no longer the captain of his fate.

“He really should have asked,” the demon mused.

But a program as ambitious as the Inventors needed the occasional warning, too.

Mirielle quietly slipped her hand into Thea’s, hidden under the folds of her jacket. “I do enjoy our days out.”

Two of the attachments tore from the skyship, leaking ballast sand.

“Do you have anyone in mind next?” the demon of indulgence asked.

Alva leaped from his chair and tore through the cockpit, seeking the parachute he had never thought to need.

“A young Whistler lady attempted to build a pair of wings from scrap metal,” Thea replied.

He screamed oaths against God.

Then again, most people screamed when they finally understood their own mortality.

It was an understandable reaction.

“Oh? How did that work out for her?”

“She fractured her collarbone.”

“The poor dear. Should we pay her a visit to ease her convalescence?”

“Far be it from me to tell you how to run your life,” Thea offered.

Mirielle chuckled, squeezing the doll demon’s cool hand. “Of course not.”

A silver, tattered spot of hubris crashed to the grey waves near the horizon.

It sank quickly.

***

Three times Lynne received mercy. Three times she was spared the consequence of sin.

So too was mercy extended to another. As one man sank beneath the waves, another awoke from the storm’s black grasp before his appointed time.

Donovan burst from a thin pool of grey, polluted water at the edge of the Bones. In his burned left hand, he held the covenant stone. In his maimed right, he clutched at his tattered duster.

He shivered, staring insensate at the stone for a long time.

What day was it?

What month?

Did he even live, or was this merely a product of his fugue?

Slowly, he found his voice.

“I live,” he rasped, ragged beard dripping brackish water. “I live!”

How could his vision have gone so wrong?

Why had this damned covenant stone rebelled?!

The merciless sun beat across the grey Bones, and everything tasted of salt and death. The Tempest storm had scoured all traces of history from the plateaus and valleys; only churned and cracked mud remained.

In time, though, life could grow. Weeds against the barren soil would take root, and the Bones would one day flower…

Donovan, too, might set his roots and grow.

He faced a choice.

Too little power remained in the covenant stone to stand against the Stormmother again. He could spout the words of a Redeemer, but he had no source of power by which to break into the garden for wisdom like a thief in the night. He could enter his own, but that horrible guardian would finish what she began.

He had been a mediocre stonemason with two functioning arms. Maimed and burned, he would have no hope in that profession. Perhaps he could retire to a distant tribe and find a new life, but he would toil for his bread and his bed until his dying day.

Donovan the Redeemer, reduced to a laborer in a foreign land! He would whittle the years until his beard curled to grey and new life took root in his rotten soil!

The covenant stone thrummed in his hands, approving. It would be a hard path, hard as farming in cracked soil, but it would bring him at last to peace.

No!

He was the bearer of truth! The appointed priest of Verdandi! A warrior against great demons! He would not waste his life scrabbling in the dirt like a peasant!

The Tempest would pay for what she wrought. It was her sin that brought him low! Her fault!

All her fault. Every last bit of it.

Donovan wobbled to his feet in the puddle. Clutching the dimmed covenant stone jealously, he limped through the mud towards Wave’s Lament.

***

Oliver spotted Alva’s skyship on its maiden, final voyage from the back of his Livery taxi. He squinted at the monstrosity, mouth slowly falling open as he absorbed the essence of the drunk Inventor’s modifications.

It was impressive in a way. Alva had found and magnified Oliver’s every mistake.

“Is he headed out to sea?!” the young man muttered. “Is he daft?!”

The Livery driver glanced back. “Oh, yes, the skyship demonstration.”

“Just drive!” Oliver snapped.

They wove through the tenements at top speed, and Oliver wonder how many people marked his passage. Reed’s goons, certainly, but most of the peasants would still be asleep under threadbare blankets or hard at work in those sweatshops that operated through the winter.

This was no longer Oliver’s world.

And I once slept in a hall with fifty men, he thought with distant wonder, on a street no better than this.

Not that he escaped that poverty by honest effort.

The Livery driver parked before the Dreamer’s Den.

“Just send me an invoice for however much it takes to shut you up,” the young Inventor growled, slipping free of the car.

“Very good, sir.” The car spun away.

Oliver hesitated before the quiet storefront. The worn curtains hung placid and dull; the lights were off; the air smelled of tenement trash instead of cheap incense.

Phi dived from the clouds and alighted to his shoulder.

“Please let me be wrong about this,” Oliver whispered to her. Grimacing, he strode forward.

The door swung open at his touch.

The snap of a trip wire, and the world exploded into fire.

By the time his consciousness processed the trap, he should have been a charred corpse.

Instead, Phi burped, gleaming brilliantly with the fire of her fresh meal.

Around them, the store’s façade smoldered. The windows lay scattered across the sidewalk, the door cracked and burned across the entryway, and the second floor sagged under groaning wood. The guts of the building lay exposed to the wind, dark and empty.

Oliver suppressed a giddy squeak. Then he reached up to pet his phoenix. “That’s twice in one day. You’re earning your keep, Phi…”

Phi preened. She knew.

He tried very hard to ignore what would remain of him without his elemental beast.

How very fragile this mortal shell.

“A present from Lace for whoever comes poking, I guess.”

Alisandra would scowl faintly at such tricks, and Sebastian would see them from around the block. How easy for immortal beings to laugh it all off…

“Do me a favor and chirp if you see any more surprises.”

Phi pressed her wing against his cheek, peering into the dark.

Hesitantly, he waded through the wreckage into the den itself. The séance table lay toppled and the carpet blackened. Beyond that…

Well, beyond that was exactly what he expected and feared.

Corpses, dead where they prayed. They bowed towards the center of the Redeemer chapel, hands clasped in reverence and faces frozen in awe. Some were dead by heavy blows to the head. Others had strangled themselves, expressions contorted into parody of joy.

Must we bow before Light?

“Hells,” he swore softly. “Nobody deserves this.”

He stepped over the corpses of the men that Alisandra had hired to spy on this place. Their faces were still frozen in paroxysm of joy.

Are we just vessels waiting to be filled by whichever music rushes in first?

The pulpit was doused in blood, thick as paint, except for a circular depression at the center. Six men ringed the stand, their throats slit like cattle.

Stepping closer, he noted the grooves cut into the podium – channels for blood. Except here, the blood ran upwards, defying gravity to seep towards the depression. Despite all the stains along the podium, the central depression was utterly clean.

The blood devoured, then, to fuel this profane work.

He noted sharp divots and chips across the pulpit. Carpentry by one unskilled in its applications.

That chisel and hammer of hers. Is this the only use she can find for those tools?

“She’s looking for power in blood,” he guessed.

Phi warbled in agreement.

“We need to contact Alisandra.”

After all, she was the expert on runes and magic.

It was a bitter pill to flee to the angels like a child for his mother’s skirts, but now was not the time for pride. We cannot let Lace roam free. Not after this.

Aure above, he would never have thought her capable of…

In the end, he was still a young man, and he didn’t want to envision a pretty young woman splitting a defenseless man’s head like a melon.

His stomach turned, and he turned to the ruined façade to take his leave.

One of Guildsmaster Reed’s lackeys waited for him there. The goon regarded the Inventor with cool, even eyes, chewing tobacco like a donkey.

“It was like this when I got here,” Oliver offered. Which one of the gangsters is this one again? “Thomas, right?”

“That’s what they call me,” the goon responded with the faintest hint of mockery. He tucked his hands into his pockets, peaceful enough for the moment.

Oliver maintained a healthy distance, picking across the remains of the entryway. A little tussling in the street wouldn’t do him in, but Thomas was a favored hound. Rumors spoke of Reed’s lieutenants, and they were not kind. Better to break for the intersection and win by fleet of foot.

Phi trilled, oddly passive.

Then again, Oliver did have a preening fireball on his shoulder.

“Is the witch there?” the goon asked, ignoring the phoenix.

“No. She culled the herd and took her fill. Walked down the line, cracking their brains. She meant to put that chisel to me, too.”

Thomas tilted his head in an oddly familiar gesture. “Chisel?”

“Old, rusty carpentry tool.”

A glint of interest sparked in his eyes. Why would a Guild goon care about carpentry or murder weapons? “You saw it?”

“Yeah.”

“How old? How worn? Was the metal clean?”

“How the hells would I know?” Oliver demanded. “Older than anything my grandpa ever used.”

“She killed with it. Was there any blood on the instrument itself?”

“What?” He paused, taken aback. What if Thomas isn’t just one of Reed’s hounds? “No. No blood.”

An artifact, then. Like Alisandra’s boots or that damned black scale. What angel would have crafted a carpentry tool, though?

“Oh, Aure above,” Oliver swore, late to the party as always.

Thomas nodded, tantalizing Oliver with a cool familiar confidence that his mind would not quite place. “Scram, kid. This is not your fight, and it should stay that way.”

A strange generosity from a man whispered to enjoy visceral, dangerous pleasures…

Still, Oliver wouldn’t pick a fight, not even with one of Reed’s hounds. He nodded in thanks, slipped past the thug, and fled from the scene at top speed.

He needed to convene with angels.

***

Thea in the guise of Thomas watched Oliver race away. A devoted and honest boy, he followed his mission with singular and honest purpose.

It was enough to inspire a woman.

Do not think you are free of us yet, the demon thought to herself. You may serve the program yet in other ways.

For the moment, she returned her attention to the Dreamer’s Den. She stepped over bodies, tracing the patterns of blood and bone.

Any normal murder weapon would spatter blood in a simple application of physics – but not Aure’s creations. Like the Cathedral of Fire and the Conclave, these tools were attuned to greater things. They would leave subtle, powerful traces.

She allowed many of her Livery selves to lapse into a gentle nap, and she began to search the rubble. Hours slipped by in a blink, and she began to discern a pattern, wondrous in its subtlety…

Then Mirielle nudged her. “Thea!”

The demon of indulgence’s voice cut through the threads, drawing Thea from a lonely place.

Shaking her head, Thea focused on her partner in the House Visage receiving room.

“I was occupied,” the demon doll explained.

“I know. I’m sorry. This can’t wait.”

Mirielle offered a copy of the afternoon papers, so fresh the ink smeared at the touch.

Thea skimmed the cover story in two blinks and swore.

“Pull yourself together. Reed is making his play.”