On her third circuit of the floor, she found, behind a pile of rubble, a hole in the wall—and beyond that hole a steep and narrow stair. Maybe they hired cathedral architects for this building. Old habits died hard.

She climbed for a long time in silence and the dark. A fat spider landed on her shoulder, skittered down her jacket sleeve, and brushed the back of her hand with feathery legs; she cupped it in her fingers and returned it to its wall and webs. The spider’s poison tickled through her veins, a pleasant tension like an electric shock or the way the throat seized after chewing betel nut. A rat king lived in the tower walls, but it knew better than to send its rat knights against a Craftswoman. They knelt as she passed.

Twenty minutes later she reached the top.

Daylight blinded her after the long climb. She stepped out into shadowless noon. Clutching fingers of the spire’s unfinished dome curved above her. Blocks of fallen stone littered the roof. Iron arches swooped at odd angles overhead, stamped with runes and ornaments of weather-beaten enamel.

She turned a slow circle, saw no one, heard only wind. She slid her hands into her pockets and approached the root of one arch. It was not anchored in the stone, but beneath it, through a gap in the masonry, as if the arch had been designed to tilt or spin. She recognized the runes’ style, though she couldn’t read them. And the enameled ornaments, one for each of the many interlocking arches—

“It’s an orrery,” she said. “An orrery in your script.”

“Well spotted,” a stone voice replied.

She turned from the arch. Aev stood barely a body’s length away, head and shoulders and wings taller than Tara. Her silver circlet’s sheen had nothing to do with the sun. Tara had not heard her approach. She wasn’t meant to. “I knew you lived here. I didn’t realize it was your place, technically.”

“It isn’t,” Aev said. “Not anymore. When Our Lady fell in the God Wars, much was stolen from her, including this building.”

“I thought temples weren’t your style.”

“We are temples in ourselves. But the world was changing then, even here. We thought to change with it.” She reached overhead—far overhead—and scraped a flake of rust from the iron. “Even your heathen astronomy admits that the rock-which-circles-as-the-moon is the closest of any celestial body to our world. We thought to cultivate Our Lady’s glory through awe and understanding.”

“And then the God Wars came.”

Aev nodded. “Your once human Craftsmen, who style themselves masters of the universe, have slim regard for awe or wonder, for anything they cannot buy and sell. So deadly are they, even hope becomes a tool in their grip.”

“I’m not here to have that argument,” Tara said.