He signed on the dotted line. Tara’s glyphs’ light swelled. The boat did not sway, but the world beneath the boat swayed, and settled into a deeper trough.

Raz wrung the scroll closed and tossed her the pen. She caught it by reflex.

“There,” he said. “That’s done.”

She opened her mouth, unsure what to say.

*   *   *

The echoes of the sunset song stayed with Tara through their cab ride to the Ash, which was all to the good, because Jones was no conversationalist. She watched out the window and made notes in her book.

“You’ve never been here before?”

“Of course I have,” Jones said. “But you see something new each visit.”

“Just you wait.”

When they reached the broken tower, the sky was the blue of blood seen through skin, and pierced with bright stars. Jones followed Tara through the rubble, stepping where she stepped, touching what she touched. “Nice place.”

“A fixer-upper.” Tara parted the curtain of creepers that lay across the stairwell opening. “Don’t touch the walls. I’ll keep back anything that could hurt you. And watch your step.”

“Can’t you”—Jones wiggled her fingers—“make light?”

“You don’t want to see what lives on these walls.”

They climbed. Jones did not question the few sharp decisive sounds Tara made, or the occasional flash that ensued when she killed something vicious. Tara reminded herself to speak with the goddess—firmly—about the general unsuitability of temple traps and rat kings and hand-size poisonous spiders to modern temples.

As they neared the twelfth floor, Tara found that she could see. The darkness silvered, less cavelike and closer to the dark of starlit cornfield night, swelling with form, navigable despite obscurity.

“I thought you wouldn’t make light. Powers man was not meant to know and so on.”

“This light isn’t mine,” Tara said. “It’s the courtesy of our host.”

Silver chiseled geometry from the dark. They ascended steep stairs. Ahead, the tunnel ended.

Tara expected the roof of the day before, the broken dome and stone-strewn platform beneath the wrecked orrery. What she found was different.

Solid moonlight completed the broken arches and patched and polished the pitted metal. The roof was clean. In its center rose a granite throne flanked by curving horns claw-carved from the rubble that once littered the platform. The carving lacked mortar: gravity locked each piece in place. The work would have taken a human sculptor months without magic or machines, but Seril’s children were their own magic, and their own machines.

Gargoyles awaited them.