And then the feeling vanished like vapor.
The invader, wet-sleek, with icy rain rolling down her face and her fair hair slick to her skull, lifted her arms from her sides and made a show of her stolen powers.
In her open hands, fireballs flared, hissing and dancing under the pelting rain. And they weren’t just balls. They were blooms. They were flowers sculpted of fire. They began as buds and opened, unfurling petals of living orange flame, blue at the center and paling to white at the ruffled fringes of their petals.
Ruby’s breath caught. She’d never made anything half so beautiful, and envy infused her outrage.
Sparrow made no move with her gift. Minya had always scorned her for her uselessness in a fight, and she had never minded, but now she did. She felt small and helpless as the thunderhead roiled and crackled overhead, glowing with its bounty of lightning. Then it split open and three bolts shot out, white and fast, right at the walkway. They had to hurl themselves down, and only the railing Lazlo had made kept them from falling off. The smell of ozone settled around them, clean and sharp, and they huddled there, all watching, awestruck and afraid, as the frozen mesarthium geyser turned molten once more. It didn’t erupt or engulf the woman—at least, not as Lazlo had intended. Instead, it flowed with slow grace up her legs, over her torso, and out along her arms, shaping itself into plates of armor. They were nothing like the heavy bronze plates the Tizerkane wore, held in place with buckles and thick leather straps. These were as smooth as poured water, and so fine they were virtually weightless. They added no bulk, and they moved with her body, and still they were stronger than anything in this world. They wove themselves into the black fabric of her costume, and shone mirror-bright: on her shins, up her thighs, in an elegant fanfold over her knees. A breastplate formed, worked in a pattern of an eagle with its wings spread. She still held the fire flowers in her open palms, even as the metal flowed out and wrapped her arms in pauldrons and vambraces more elegant than any ever wrought with anvil and hammer.
She floated in the air before them, eyes glowing red, flames blooming in her hands, wearing mesarthium armor and wielding lightning like spears, and the godspawn and humans were humbled and appalled.
“Who are you?” asked Feral, his voice shaking.
“What do you want?” Sarai demanded, afraid of the answer.
“How is she doing that?” asked Ruby, overwrought. “I want my fire back!”
With a sudden motion, the woman dashed the fire flowers toward the floor far below, where they sizzled into sparks and died. An impatient jerk of her arm, and the thunderhead vanished, too, taking the rain and the lightning with it. There was still a muted patter of drips sluicing off the invaders’ soaked forms, but the air cleared, and the thunder faded. Ruby and Feral both groped for their gifts, hoping they had them back, but they didn’t. The invader still held their powers, and Lazlo’s, too—as he was reminded when she raised her arm, fingers flexed, and summoned a ball of mesarthium down from the ceiling. It flew to her hand faster than falling, meeting her palm with a smack. She clasped it and spun it around her fingers, weightless as a magic trick. The flames died out of her eyes. They were brown and livid and fixed on Lazlo. She spoke to him in a language they couldn’t understand. It was harsh to their ears as rusted hinges and crows.
. . .
“Do you remember me?” was what Nova asked.
She perceived her foe through the haze of her hatred, and if he didn’t look quite as she remembered, it had been more than two hundred years. Who else could he be? Those were his gray eyes, and this was his ship, and the world he had chosen.
Skathis, after all this time. She felt his power surge through her, as it had long ago. She said, “You feared me once, but not enough to kill me, and I have crushed your throat in a godsmetal collar in a thousand glad murderous dreams. You called me a pirate when I was no such thing. Now, though. You have no idea.”
She threw the ball, just as he had thrown one to her, and to Kora. She whispered, “Catch.”
. . .
Lazlo did. It was reflex. But as soon as it touched his hand, there was nothing left to catch. It splashed over his arm and rolled up it, blue metal shining in motion. As he recoiled, arm outheld, the metal sluiced up his shoulder, coalescing as it moved into a sinuous streak. It elongated and shaped itself into a serpent, and wound itself around his neck. This was all inside a second, and before he quite knew what was happening, it opened its mouth and gulped down its own tail.
Lazlo grabbed it. It writhed under his hands, and he felt it alive in the same way that Rasalas was alive, or the songbird he’d detached from the wall—no longer dumb metal but a creature, animated by a will.
But it was not his will, and as he grasped the writhing-alive metal snake in his hands, it cinched tight, devouring itself, and his neck was caught in its noose.
Sarai seized it and tried to pry its jaws off its tail, but she couldn’t shift it. It constricted, and her fingers were captured between the collar and Lazlo’s throat. She had to turn them incorporeal—make her ghostflesh like air—to pull free. But she couldn’t do the same for Lazlo. She couldn’t turn him incorporeal, and she saw the panic in his eyes as the snake tightened, cutting off his air. His mouth opened in a ragged gasp, and Sarai whirled to face his attacker. “Let him go!” she cried.
What she saw in the eyes of the Korako apparition was a mania veering between victory and rage. It was a killing mania, make no mistake. She had stormed in here to do harm, and she was savage.
Everything had happened so fast. Just a moment ago they’d been staring through the slit in the air at the impossible landscape. Now they were invaded, their magic stolen. Eril-Fane and Azareen stood helpless at the edge of the bridge, the enemies out of reach of their blades. Ruby and Feral were stripped of their magic, and Minya wasn’t even here. The absurdity struck Sarai like a blow. Minya, their protector—always their protector, since before they could even remember, Minya who had saved them and spent her life building an army to keep on saving them—was lying on her floor in a gray, drugged slumber, defenseless and also useless, and it was all their fault.
And now Lazlo was choking, and if he died, Minya wasn’t here to catch his soul. With a sob of rage, Sarai launched herself at the enemy.
She leapt. She flew. She attacked.
And if the enemy was savage, she was better, because she was not constrained by being alive, with all its fixity. When her lips skinned back from her teeth in a snarl, she was more vicious than this foe could ever hope to look, because her mouth widened to become a maw straight out of her nightmare arsenal. Her teeth grew long and sharp, like the spines of some venomous sea-thing. Her eyes went blood-red from the whites to the irises—solid, shining, ghastly red— and her hooked fingers became talons to rival Wraith’s. She locked eyes with Nova as she hurtled toward her, and she saw the way the woman’s gaze narrowed, intent but unworried as she snatched Sarai’s gift just as she’d snatched away the others’.
Sarai felt it, but barely. Her fear and fury muted everything. Her godspawn gift was stolen? So what. It wasn’t her gift that let her fly and grow fangs. This was just the upside of being dead. When she didn’t falter, much less fall, Nova’s face went slack with surprise. Sarai experienced her own dark satisfaction.
And then she was on her.
Chapter 41
Only Everything
Nova thought the girl’s gift must be flight, because she was flying, and with no gravity boots such as she herself wore. Then she thought she must be a shape-shifter, because her face changed. It went from pretty to horrible in an instant, her mouth splaying impossibly wide, teeth bristling out like needles. Could she have two gifts? Nova had never heard of such a thing, and when she reached out with her mind to seize them, she felt only one. She couldn’t even tell what it was. Sometimes it was obvious, but this was obscure, no gift she’d ever encountered. Regardless, she ripped it away.
The girl ought to have plummeted. Those terrible teeth should have shrunk and vanished, to say nothing of the claws. But none of that happened. She didn’t fall. She didn’t change back. She hit Nova full force and they went sprawling—back into the open half shell of the orb, beneath the gash of the portal. They smashed into the metal. Nova’s shoulders bore the brunt, but her head was not spared. Her vision blurred, and a ringing filled her ears. The girl’s voice fought through it. She was screaming something at her, but Nova couldn’t understand her language. The girl was gripping her shoulders, her weight pressing down. Her talons skree’d over the godsmetal plates Nova had just armored herself with. If she hadn’t, those claws would be sunk in her flesh.
Nova’s wrath exploded. Was the girl stupid? Did she think she could best her, and with all this metal just waiting to be quickened? She felt its energy all around. It seemed to vibrate with an urgency to become. But become what?
More strangling serpent collars? A thousand biting spiders shining like evil gemstones? No sooner did Nova think it than they were. As the two women grappled in the hollow of the orb, its curve gave birth to an arachnid swarm. The smooth surface dappled with sudden texture. Then the texture disengaged, grew legs, and crawled free. Hundreds of spiders surged up. Nova was on her back, pinned down. The spiders climbed over her shoulders onto the girl’s hands, then swarmed up her arms into her dark red hair. She let go then. Nova shoved her off, right into the swarming mass. They skittered over her and in seconds she was cloaked in living metal—a thousand spiders, eight thousand legs, and how many teeth between them? Just before the girl was submerged by seething, multitudinous spiders, Nova saw her eyes—her shining, full-red eyes—flare wide with horror. She felt a distant stab of the same horror for what her mind had birthed with a mere skim of her will. But it was smothered by triumph.
She’d dreamed of the day she’d steal Skathis’s gift. It had taken the place of her earliest dream—the one she’d shared with Kora, in which Servants came to Rieva and chose them. She had dreamed that dream for sixteen years, and this one for more than two centuries.