Her mother held out her hand, hoisting Kahina to her feet.

“In your hands lie the gates of godhood. Let none pass.”

NOW, KAHINA BENT over her son. She turned over his pudgy hand, tracing the delicate blue veins of his wrist. She kissed his knuckles, then kissed each finger and folded it to his palm. She wished she could live in this moment forever—her son, warm and sleeping at her side; the sun glaring elsewhere; the moon keeping watch; this corner of time hemmed in by nothing but the sounds of their breathing.

But that was not how the world worked.

She had seen its fangs and run from its shadow.

Kahina tried to imagine bringing her son to that sacred well, but the image would not hold. It was that fear that had driven her to tell Delphine Desrosiers, matriarch of House Kore, the truth. The other woman would watch over him. She understood what was at stake, and she knew where he must go, should the worst befall them.

Though years had passed, Kahina had not forgotten what she’d glimpsed that day in the broken courtyard. The world beneath her, the lines of power scrawled unintelligibly over jagged mountains and crystalline lakes, vast deserts and steaming jungles.

At one sound of the instrument … it could all vanish.

“In your hands lie the gates of godhood,” she whispered to her son. “Let none pass.”

PART I

1

SÉVERIN

Venice, February 1890

Séverin Montagnet-Alarie stared down at the man kneeling before him.

At his back, a cold wind wrinkled the surface of the dark, lacquered lagoons of Venice, and the prow of a gondola beat mournfully against the shadowy dock. About thirty meters away stood a plain and pale wooden door, its entrance flanked on both sides by a dozen members of the Fallen House. They regarded Séverin in silence, their hands clasped before them, their faces obscured by white volto masks that covered everything but their eyes. Over their lips sat Mnemo bugs in the shape of golden honeybees, their metal wings whirring as they documented Séverin’s every move.

Ruslan, patriarch of the Fallen House, stood beside the kneeling man. He patted the man’s head as if he were a dog, and tugged playfully at the bindings gagging his mouth.

“You”—he said to the man, tapping the side of his head with his golden Midas knife—“are the key to my apotheosis! Well, not the main key, but a necessary step. You see, I can’t get my front door open without you…” Ruslan stroked the man’s hair, the gleaming gold skin of his hand catching in the torchlight. “You should be flattered. How many can say they have paved the way to godhood for others, hmm?”

The kneeling man whimpered. Ruslan’s grin widened. Days ago, Séverin would have said the Midas Knife was the most fascinating object he had ever come across. It could rearrange human matter through an alchemy that seemed divine in its making, though—as Ruslan had proved—its use came at the price of sanity. It was rumored that the blade itself had been hewn from the topmost bricks of the Tower of Babel, whose fallen pieces had powered the art of Forging across the world.