Isabelle did not venture into the everdream anymore. Perhaps if she’d been brought up a Fenice, or had not ripped her sister’s vitera out of the back of her head, she would have had the wherewithal to construct a useful framework for these memories. As it was, she had no option but to keep them locked away.

She took a silencing draught from her belt pouch, pulled the stopper, and tossed it down before she had a chance to spill it. Warm, slimy, and pungent, it was like slurping a decaying slug. Her stomach rebelled, as it always did. She took slow, steady breaths until the urge to vomit receded.

She pulled out her timepiece, marked the time in her notebook, then hauled herself to her feet. It generally took the stuff about half an hour to make her feel like she was walking through knee-deep water, then another half hour to muffle her ancestors to the point where they sounded like a distant snore.

As soon as she could straighten up, she marched down the stairs. Straight as an arrow or mad as a spoon, she still had work to do.

CHAPTER

Three

To catch up with Quill, Bitterlich the bat dipped and flipped through one of the many holes that ventilated the royal complex’s current wooden infrastructure and flitted out into the ancient space it occupied. Le Ville Céleste was built inside one of five massive quondam spires, tubes of imperious metal that had survived the Breaking of the World. The insides of the tubes were not exactly hollow, the space being impinged by great buttresses of odd material and crisscrossed by cables and beams at angles that suggested no structural purpose.

More than anything else, the void between all these things was filled with darkness, old shadows that had witnessed the passing of centuries undisturbed, growing deeper with time until they seemed to stretch out of this world entirely.

Bitterlich kept up a string of clicks and chirps that ricocheted off the structures and painted for him a map of sound. It wasn’t like sight exactly, coming in rapid bursts, with no sense of color but providing enough tactile acuity to guess if something was hard or soft.

Pipes, coils, and struts of strange materials spanned the void, some going nowhere, some twining together, a few sporting quondam artifacts like the fruit of some insane tree.

Most of the artifacts had long since died, killed in the Breaker’s cataclysm or dying afterward like delicate plants in an untended garden. Still, a few hardy specimens remained, thriving like weeds, or maybe mushrooms in this old tomb. There were metals that throbbed with a dull inner light when seen from the corner of one’s eyes, crystals that seemed to be constantly growing at their edges whilst shrinking into their own centers. There were fluids that clung to some surfaces and passed through all others, rippling to the rhythm of forces unseen.