There were still a few Aventum stragglers on Perdition Street, but most had drunk their fill and found their beds. Clouds had moved in to blanket the mountains in a gloom, and the wind blew black ash down from the mine processing plants like tarnished snowfall. It made the air smell sweet, but it would eventually clog the roads and pile up on windowsills and rooftops, staining the city black until the next rain.

Detritus from last night’s festivities littered the streets. Clumps of parade confetti and torn-down bunting from storefronts clogged the gutters, all of it quickly blackening with ash. Celeste spotted discarded paper handbills from the exhibition hall advertising strange new wonders made possible by divinity. Mechanical creatures of various shapes and sizes, giant clockwork claws meant to make the mines more efficient, even a newer and faster flying machine of some kind purported to cut the travel from Goetia to the capital by half.

She spied Taborite automatons sweeping the streets, uncanny golden skin and faceless heads gleaming in the lamplight. A gunshot sounded from behind, and she jumped, anxious as a hen. Some drunk was shooting at one of the mechanical sweepers, laughing as he peppered its gilded frame with bullets.

“Fool,” she muttered, and hurried her pace.

The corner where Hypatia said the demon lord would meet her was deserted. To her right was the itinerant mining camp, no more than a cleared field where miners who could not afford four walls and a roof pitched their tents. It was a warren of twisting footpaths with no rhyme or reason, a dangerous sort of place populated by rough scrappers and heeled men looking for a fight. But now it slumbered, the workers given a day’s reprieve on account of the Aventum holiday.

Celeste shivered and huddled deeper in her coat, black ash falling around her. Perhaps Abraxas wouldn’t come, she thought, and she would be spared the torment of seeing him again. But that was a selfish desire, and one that brought on a mix of conflicting emotions. She reminded herself that she was here not for herself but for Mariel, so how she felt didn’t matter.

There was a wooden post to her right with all manner of handbills nailed to its front. She read over them absently until one caught her eye. It was a solicitation for houses in the Drench, bought for cash and quickly. The purchasing party was to be contacted at the Tabor mine. Intrigued, she tore the bill from the post, reading more closely. She wondered what had happened to her childhood home in the Drench, the place where she’d spent her early years. She had never gone back—too many unpleasant memories lurked there—and surely another family had claimed it by now.