The demon grew so fast it seemed to be exploding: glass pierced Alt Coulumb pavement into bedrock, and more glass spread from the wound. A tendril darted left, impaled a nearby skyspire and began to suck. Crystal broke, and flight Craft failed, as the demon asserted new reality. It belonged here. Here belonged to it. Flyspeck Craftsmen fell screaming toward the city. Crystal shards rained down.

Bleeding, burned, caught in thorns, Tara imposed shapes and rules on the demon, but they slipped—it moved too fast for her to trap. Her shields broke. She made new ones. Her skin ripped.

Within her she felt Seril, and with her Kos, the silver light and the deep flame, and both were afraid.

The city began to die.

Time ran slow, because there was not much left.

Many thoughts dovetailed in Tara’s head at once.

The demon that came through Daphne’s mind was not protected by the Court of Craft. It crushed court wards and burst the guardian circle. Kos could engage it directly, now, and Seril, but unbound demons moved faster than faith. They might last mere seconds in real time, but in those seconds they could rewrite the world from underneath the gods. As the demon grew it would kill and convert, and as their faithful died or were swallowed by the glass, Kos and Seril would falter, weaken, change to demon-things themselves.

Glass closed her around, reflected her against herself, remade.

Tara remembered the Keeper in the mountain, her fear, her triumph in torment. She could do the same. Give this demon something to eat instead of Alt Coulumb and its gods, instead of Abelard and Cat and Aev and Raz and Bede. Something still mostly human. Something that could die.

Something like her.

She’d walked within the Keeper, seen her heart. She thought she knew the trick of it.

A cage of her hair. A lake of her blood. A mountain of her bone. A maze of her mind.

Invite the demon into the terror palace of her dreams, and, before it could break free—fall.

There were wards around a Craftswoman’s dreams, glyph walls to prevent intrusion, subroutines to scrub parasites away. She turned them off. She opened her gates.

The demon swelled above her, a spider taller than buildings.

A chain around your neck, a skull’s imagined voice whispered in her ear. I was right.

No.

“Come on,” Tara said, and bared her teeth, and let the demon in.

*   *   *

Raz saw Cat fall. Her wings caught air, slowed her, but she crashed onto a neighboring rooftop. He smelled her blood through silver.

Above him a demon blossomed. He’d seen these before, or things like them. City smashers. Undefined, indefinable. Craftsmen had used them as weapons when the Wars turned bad.

Cat lay still.

Raz put the blood jade between his teeth, bit, and drank.

It tasted sharp.

All of a sudden even the demon in the sky seemed slow.