The Bronzed Beasts

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For my friends, who didn’t stop me when I said I wanted to write something like National Treasure meets Faust with a dash of existential crises … but make it sexy.

Y’all owe me drinks. And therapy.

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?

—BOOK OF JOB

PROLOGUE

Kahina sang to the boy as he slept.

She sat at the edge of his bed, smoothing away the nightmares that crinkled his brow. Séverin sighed a little, turning against her hand, and Kahina felt her heart tighten. It was only here, thieved from the moments when night slowly melted into day and all the world lay sleeping, that she could call him her son.

“Ya omri,” she said softly.

My life.

“Habib albi,” she said, a little louder this time.

Love of my heart.

Séverin blinked, then gazed up at her. He smiled sleepily and held out his arms. “Ummi.”

Kahina folded him to her, holding still as he fell back asleep. She touched his hair, dark as a crow’s wing and curled just at the ends. She smelled the faint menthol on his skin from the branches of eucalyptus she insisted on putting into his evening baths. Sometimes, she hated how little of her showed up on her son’s features. With his eyes closed, he was a miniature of his father, and already Kahina could see how it would mold his future. Her son’s smiling mouth would soon hold the shape of a smirk too well. His rosy, full cheeks would sharpen like a blade. Even his demeanor would change. For now, he was shy and observant, but Kahina had noticed him copying his father’s elegant cruelty. It frightened her sometimes, but perhaps that was merely her son’s instinct for survival. There was power in knowing not just how to move through the world, but how to make the world move around you.

Kahina ran her fingers over his eyelashes, weighing whether she should wake him. It was selfish, she knew, but she could not help herself. Only in her son’s eyes did Kahina find the one part of herself that had not been erased. Séverin’s eyes were the color of secrets—a shade of dusk shot through with silver. They were the same color as her own eyes, and her mother’s eyes, and her grandfather’s eyes before them.

It was the eye color of all the Blessed, those marked by the Unworshipped Sisters: Al-Lat, Al-‘Uzza, Manat. Ancient goddesses whose broken temples now paved roads of industry. Their myths had been scrubbed clean. Their faces all but lost. Only one commandment had slipped unnoticed through time, held close by the lineage once blessed by the goddesses.

In your hands lies the gate of godhood—let none pass.

As a child, when her mother had told her of their duty to uphold this commandment, Kahina had not believed it. She had laughed, thinking it was nothing more than her mother’s fanciful imagination. But on her thirteenth birthday, her mother brought her to an abandoned courtyard in the desert long since left to the goats and vagrants. At the center of the courtyard lay the remains of what looked to be a well, but it held no water. Instead, it overflowed with dusty palm fronds and sand.

“Give it your blood,” demanded her mother.

Kahina had refused. This fancy had gone too far. But her mother was determined. She yanked Kahina’s arm to her, drawing a sharp stone across the inside of her elbow. Kahina remembered screaming from the hot sear of pain until her blood hit the old stones.

The world trembled. Blue light—like the sky twisted into a single rope—shot from the stones, then split into glowing strands that caged in the old courtyard.

“Look into the well,” said her mother.

She no longer sounded like herself. Kahina, overcome, peered over the stone lip. Gone was the sand and the dusty palm fronds, replaced instead with a story that poured through her. Her eyes fluttered shut. Her mouth filled with the weight of a hundred languages, her tongue loosened, her teeth ached in her skull. For a second—no longer than a blink—a different consciousness stretched within her, a consciousness that whispered for roots to uncurl and birds to take wing, a consciousness sharp enough to slice intention out of chaos, carve reason from randomness, set stars spinning through the worlds.

Kahina fell to her knees.

As she fell, she felt her perspective jolt skywards so that the world beneath her seemed like something she might cup in her palms. She saw a mere sliver of that uncanny consciousness burning bright and shattering across a young world. She saw power denting the land, saw clusters of people raise their hands to their eyes, as if new colors had exploded into their vision. She saw these slivers of power folded into the earth, each spot blooming with vines of light, so the world looked scrawled over in a poetic language only angels could pronounce. The earth bloomed above that network of light. Plants sprouted. Animals grazed. Communities—small at first, then, ever growing—began to create. A man waved his hand above the grass, and the blades slowly twisted into a flute. A woman draped in beads pressed her fingers to a child’s temples, and the people around her cowered in wonder. Later, Kahina would learn that the Western world called this Forging, both of matter and mind, but the art had more than one name.

Suspended in that eerie consciousness, Kahina felt her perspective shifting again.

In a temple with high walls, threads of the strange light that had spread through the land hovered in the air like hardened sunshine. A group of women gathered the threads. Kahina could see that their eyes had drunk the light and now glowed silver. One by one, the threads were set into an instrument no larger than a child’s head. One woman, curious, strummed the instrument. Time shuddered to a halt, and for a terrible moment, the slivers of power within the earth creaked, that calligraphy of light flashing in warning. The woman flattened her hand, killing the sound instantly.

But the damage was done.

Across the world, Kahina saw fires erupting, newborn cities crumbling, people crushed beneath them. Kahina could no longer see her own body, but she felt her soul shuddering in horror. That instrument was not to be played.

In the visions, Time spun forward.

Kahina saw the women’s descendants spread across the world. She could always recognize them by the unearthly hue to their eyes, which was just uncanny enough to draw attention, but not enough to arouse suspicion. The strange instrument passed between them, smuggled through portals that pinched time and space, whirling through the ages while empires fought their wars and hungry gods demanded blood and hungrier priests demanded sacrifice, and all the while, the sun fell and the moon rose, and the instrument lay wondrously silent.

Abruptly, the visions released her.

Kahina fell, and it was a fall that seemed to pass through lifetimes. She felt the scrape of ancient ziggurats against her cheeks, tasted cold coins on her tongue, felt the pelt of extinct animals ripple beneath her feet. Abruptly, she found herself on the ground and staring up at her mother. The vastness that once stretched her soul had fled, and she had never felt so small or cold.

“I know,” said her mother, not unkindly.

When Kahina could trust herself to speak—and it took longer than she thought, for it seemed the Arabic she knew kept slipping off her tongue—she croaked: “What was that?”

“A vision granted to the Blessed, so that we might understand our sacred duty,” said her mother. “We have other names, I am told, for our family scattered long ago. We are the Lost Muses, the Norns, the Daughters of Bathala, the Silent Apsaras. That instrument you saw holds many names in many tongues, but its function is always the same … when played, it disrupts the divine.”

“The divine,” repeated Kahina.

It felt too small a word given what she had seen.

“My mother spoke of a place built from the ruins of a land whose sacred group misused its power. Played outside the confines of that stained temple, the instrument will unleash a destruction that levels the world,” said Kahina’s mother. “Played within the temple, it is said to join together all those slivers of divinity you glimpsed. Some say that it can be raised into a tower, which one may scale like a building and claim godhood for themselves. It is not for us to know. Our duty is laid out in one command…”

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.

But compared to the divine lyre clutched in Séverin’s hand, the Midas Knife was nothing.

“What do you think, Monsieur Montagnet-Alarie?” asked Ruslan. “Don’t you agree this man should feel nothing but flattered? Awed, even?”

Beside the lined-up members of the Fallen House, Eva Yefremovna, the blood and ice Forging artist, stiffened noticeably. Her wide, green eyes had not lost their feverish sheen in the twelve hours since they had left behind the Sleeping Palace on the frozen waters of Lake Baikal.

You must tread carefully.

Séverin’s last conversation with Delphine, the matriarch of House Kore, reared up in his thoughts. They had been crouched in the metal belly of a mechanical leviathan. On the hidden Mnemo panel, Séverin had watched as Ruslan advanced on his friends, slapping Laila across the face, cutting off Enrique’s ear. Ruslan was after something only Séverin could give: control over the lyre. Played outside of its sacred temple, the lyre only brought ruin. Played within the sacred grounds … the lyre could tap into the powers of godhood.

By then, Séverin knew exactly where he needed to go to play the lyre: Poveglia. Plague Island.

He had heard of the island near Venice years ago. In the fifteenth century, the island had built a hospital for those who fell ill during the plague epidemics, and it was said the ground was more skeleton than soil. Years ago, Séverin had nearly accepted an acquisition project on the island before Enrique had objected.

“The temple’s entrance is well hidden beneath Poveglia,” the matriarch had said to him the last, and final, time they had been together in the belly of the metal leviathan. “There are other entrances to the temple scattered throughout the world, but their maps have been destroyed. Only this one remains, and Ruslan will know where to look for it.”

“My friends—” said Séverin, unable to tear his eyes from the screen.

“I will send them after you,” said the matriarch, grabbing his shoulders. “I have been planning for this ever since your mother begged me to protect you. They will have everything they need to come find you.”

It had taken Séverin a moment to understand.

“You know,” he’d said angrily. “You know where the map is to reach the temple beneath Poveglia, and you won’t tell me—”

“I can’t. It is too dangerous to speak aloud, and I have camouflaged it even from the safe house,” said the matriarch. “If the others fail, you must find the answer from Ruslan. And once you do, you must find a way to be rid of him. He will do everything in his power to keep track of you.”

“I—”

The matriarch had grabbed his chin, directing his gaze to the screen. Laila had crumpled to her knees, her hair falling across her face. Enrique lay sprawled out, bleeding on the ice. Zofia’s hands clutched at her dress, her grip white-knuckled. Even Hypnos, lying unconscious behind Séverin, would be destroyed if Ruslan succeeded. Something cold and inhuman coiled in Séverin’s stomach.