“Almost only counts with horseshoes and elder gods. He’s grown since you fought. And, honestly, I know you’ve had a rough few decades, but I wish things like don’t attack the immensely powerful necromancer we’ve come to ask for help could go unsaid.”

Streets crazed the irrigated ground like cracks on the scab of an infected wound. Elevated carriageways laced between pyramids—the largest, at 667 Sansilva, eighty stories tall and obsidian sheathed. Black glass grooves cast an illusion of writhing serpents on the pyramid’s steps.

As far as Tara could see, the city bore little damage from the eclipse fiasco a few years back; she’d been at Contracts with her friend Kayla when the news came through, and waited with her in the long line of weeping students at the nightmare telegraph to call her dads. The dreams around Dresediel Lex were so tangled Kayla couldn’t get through for two days, which Tara spent on the couch in Kayla’s dorm, sleeping poorly; she’d told Kayla to wake her if she needed anything, and the girl took her at her word. Kayla’s dads both lived—one broke his leg in the riots and the other spent three days stuck in a collapsed mall—but the waiting, not knowing, hurt.

Rebuilding, the city had turned a quarter mile of Sansilva Boulevard into a memorial walk. Tara decided she would visit if there was time.

For now, they had business at the Grisenbrandt Club.

North of Monicola Pier the beachside shops grew more expensive and elegant until they reached an expense and elegance singularity: the Grisenbrandt, a red-roofed, white-walled palace on the continent’s edge. A ward misted the air above its courtyards and rooftop baths, to keep even the most inquisitive journalist from observing the club’s clientele. The ward might have been opaque, but that wouldn’t have allowed spies and onlookers to envy the rainforest green inside.

Tara and Shale landed on a riverrock path between two lawns that beggared any adjective but “verdant.” The doorman (a Quechal fellow in sunglasses and a funereal suit, whose posture suggested experience as valet, bouncer, and special forces commando) frowned as their optera flew away. People who belonged in the club arrived under their own power. Rentals were for those not rich enough to own.

“Hi,” Tara said with the cheer she always felt when about to ruin a snob’s day, and produced the invitation the porter had delivered to her cabin this morning. “We have an appointment.”

The doorman took the invitation, skepticism evident even through his dark glasses. Tara savored his surprise as he read the document twice, turned it over to check for a watermark, then read it again.