A single tattooed finger.
She yelped, and kicked it away, watching in horror as the woman’s severed digit rolled beneath a table. Tes sat, chest heaving, for several seconds, every foul word she knew in any language now pouring from her lips. Finally she calmed, her attention going to the place where she’d conjured the door. It was gone, back into its box, but the air where it had been still looked wrong.
The burning edge of the doorway lingered, and Tes squeezed her eyes shut, thinking it must be an echo—she saw them, sometimes, after working too long, the tendrils of magic branded against her eyelids—but no matter how many times she blinked, the lines in the air remained, like a scar.
Her gaze dropped to the doormaker, which now sat, unassuming and closed, on the floor. Something had gone wrong. The magic in the device was meant to create shortcuts, to collapse the distance between two places—and then Tes realized her mistake.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she hissed aloud.
A door was only a door if it went somewhere, and how would it know where to go? There should have been a terminus, a key, a piece of the device that marked the destination. But there hadn’t been.
“Is this everything?” she’d asked, as the man with the dying magic had stared at her, then said, “Everything you need.”
Everything she needed, perhaps, to repair the doormaker, but not to use it.
He’d obviously kept the terminus—and Tes, not understanding what she was fixing, hadn’t thought to leave space for it in her repair, or shape a new one. She had just put the spellwork back together without that vital part, mended it as if it were whole, and so instead of creating a door that led somewhere else within this world, she’d made one that carved right through it.
Into another world entirely.
Tes drove her fingers into her hair as the force of the error hit her.
She knew the history, of course, though it was old enough to have the taste of legend.
There had been a pair of drawings in her father’s store, the four worlds depicted as books stacked one atop another. In the first drawing, the books burned, as if on fire, the bottom one engulfed in a light that stretched up and curled around the pages of the next, and the next, its blaze dimming faintly the farther it reached. In the second image, the bottom book was charred and black, the light replaced by lines of smoke. A single word was printed on the frame below the drawings.
Ruin.
When Tes was little, she used to run her fingers through the air over those drawings, counting up one, two, three, to the book that stood for her world. She’d never bothered giving the other three much thought. What was the point, when she would never see them? Worlds you could not touch became ones that lived in stories, and nowhere else.
But Tes knew—there had been a time when anyone with enough magic could step from one world into the next. There had been a time, but it had ended centuries ago, with the fall of Black London, with the worlds being severed, and the doors locked shut, to keep the poisoned magic out. After that, unless you were Antari—and by the time Tes was born, there were so few left—there was no way to move between those different worlds.
Until now.
She had just made one.
Tes rushed over to the doormaker. No longer held down by the force of the active spell, it weighed nothing more than what it seemed: a small wooden box. She carried it to the counter.
Sometimes Tes fixed things.
Now and then, she even made them better.
But she knew, better than most: anything that could be fixed could be broken again.
Part Five
THE QUEEN, THE SAINT, AND THE SOUND OF DRUMS
I
WHITE LONDON
The drums began at dawn.
Duh-dum. Duh-dum. Duh-dum, they sounded across the air, strong and steady as a heartbeat, as if to remind the entire city it was alive, alive, alive. The sound spread from each of the nine walls that ran like arteries through the body of London. Once those walls had cleaved the city, carved it up. These days, the pale stone was studded with archways, hundreds of open channels that let life flow, uninterrupted, through the city.
Kosika stood at her bedroom window, eyes closed, and listened to the pulse of the drums while Nasi and the servants flocked around, braiding her hair into a crown and binding her body into layer after layer of ritual white.
She had refused to wear a dress, opting instead for a tunic and a pair of fitted trousers, but she let them settle the long white cloak over her shoulders, and pin it with the Saint’s seal. Kosika brought her fingers to the silver sigil, touching it lightly, as she always did. A reminder that she was not alone. That every step she took was in a legend’s wake.