They had raised the auction house in a single season, and standing at the foot of it, Evelyn still did not believe it.
She had grown up under the Sapphire Castle and thought she understood what tall meant. This was something else. It went straight up, sheer, a cliff of pale stone and glass with no seam she could find, floor stacked on floor past counting, until the top of it held a light that never reached the street. Nothing braced it. No column, no buttress, no flying arch explained how it stood. It simply stood, higher than anything in the city, and laid a cold flat shadow across the whole district, the building looked alien next to the architecture around it.
Utopian work. The thought came with an edge. The same realm that had bought her mother's murderers their immortality had sent its engineers to build Malthane a tower, because this season Utopia and the Kingdom of Light called each other friends. Everything in the new city that was too straight, too high, too perfectly joined had their hands on it somewhere.
Inside, the wrongness went quiet. The halls ran wide and cold and empty, the ceilings lost in dimness overhead, the floors so smooth her boots made no sound. Master Kurogane would hate this place, she thought.
They were taken up, and up, and brought at last into a room near the top with a floor of black stone and one wall she could not stop looking at: a safe the size of a gatehouse set flush into it, a single black keyhole in a door of a purple crystallized material she didn’t recognize. Whatever the auction's crown proved to be worth, it would sleep the night behind that.
Malthane stood in front of it with his hands behind his back, and he had arranged the people before him the way a man arranges tools on a bench.
Seven of them. Evelyn made seven.
She did what her master had drilled into her over a hundred wordless mornings, and read the room for the weapon in it.
Five of them she filed in a glance and never reached for a name: a shaven giant with a stonemason's hands; a lean woman already counting the exits; a grey-bearded soldier at parade rest; a small freckled woman chewing behind a half-smile; a gaunt man in a black coat, something black dried into his fingers.
And, a little apart from the rest, a thin man with sunken, black-ringed eyes and a sallow, unslept face, who did not weigh the others the way every soul in the room was weighing them, who looked at nothing and stood very still, slim, tall, with heavy dark circles under his eyes, he was none other than Samuelle Bane. Evelyn's eye slid past him and then, for no reason she could name, came back. There was nothing to catch on. That, somehow, was the thing that caught her attention.
Seven. And Malthane, and the safe, and the alien tower holding them all up over the city.
"You know one another's faces now," Malthane said. "That is enough. "In less than a week this house holds the largest auction the world has convened in a generation. Every family that matters will pass through these doors, and half of what they come to buy cannot be replaced if it is lost. Some of it cannot even be replaced if it is broken."
He turned his head, and his eyes went along the line of them, and did not linger on his daughter any longer than on anyone else.
"You are what stands between a usurper’s hand and the lot. That is the whole of your work, and I will pay for it better than anything else in this city pays for anything."
His hands came out from behind his back, he looked at the seven of them, and Evelyn felt her right hand begin to close at her side, and she opened it again, finger by finger.
"Are you ready?" Malthane said.
At the palace.
The Royal Palace received them at the great south stair, with banners out and an honor line of forty guards, because there are guests, and there are Guests.
Two of them came up the stair past the bowing steward: a man of about fifty, straight-backed, gold threading his temples, robes of a cut no tailor on this continent had made, and a boy of perhaps fifteen, half a step behind him and to his left.
"My lords Zarakim." The steward bowed again. "The City of Gold is honored beyond its walls' worth. We had not looked for your house until the week's end, your enthusiasm for the auction does us…"
"We are early," the old man said, "because the auction is not why we've come."
The steward straightened, his smile catching up a beat late.
"I must meet with Malthane," the old man said. "Tonight, if his health allows it. Tomorrow at the latest."
"Of course, my lord. May I carry a word to him, some matter of the catalog, perhaps, or…"
"Tell him," he paused, "that something dangerous is happening in the south."
Yamatai, one day later.
For the first night in a season, the ledger stayed shut in the customs house, and Midori let herself be dragged down to the sand.
The wagon had left for the capital yesterday morning. The four of them had waved it out the north gate, and Xiao had sulked about saying goodbye to the Noah group, and then the festival had eaten the whole city and there was no room left in Yamatai for sulking.
The beach below the sea wall was one long field of light. Stalls down the length of it, drums somewhere, fried fish smell on the air, half the city barefoot in the cold sand and not caring. The tide was going out, and the lanterns went with it, hundreds at first, then thousands, little paper lights set down on the water by careful hands, drifting out into the dark in slow crowds until the sea had more stars than the sky did.
The chorus that had been practicing on the harbor road for weeks finally sang the whole song, all of it, the one about the lanterns going out to sea. It was better than Midori had imagined it. She'd only ever heard it through shutters.
Xiao was terrible at the ring toss. He was terrible loudly, at length, with commentary, and the stall keeper was in visible pain by the sixth throw, and then the seventh throw came down clean over the peg and Xiao roared as if he'd taken a city, and half the beach roared with him without knowing why.
He gave the prize to Midori. A little glass fish on a cord, worth less than the throws had cost.
"Smile, this is a once in a year event." he said.
Ling was standing with a skewer in one hand, watching the water, and she had brought her halberd to a festival, and it leaned against the sea wall behind her within reach of her arm.
"It's worth seeing," Midori said to her, in a fair imitation of her flattest voice.
"It is,".
Hana knelt at the waterline a long time with her lantern before she let it go.
She wasn't the only one. Up and down the beach, here and there among the festival lights, went lanterns with names painted down their sides. Denzo's. Aiko's. All of them, Midori knew each name without needing to read it; she knew every one of those thirty-one names better than she knew her own handwriting. They weren't grave-lights. The garrison had told the families the truth, and so the families painted the names and set them on the tide like letters. Come home. We're still here. Come home.
Midori watched them join the others, one light in ten thousand, all of them going out with the tide, and her chest hurt in a way that wasn't entirely bad, and that was the last good minute.
Because she was the one who noticed first.
Far out, at the thin edge of the lantern field, lights were going out.
Not scattered, not the way a wave swamps one lantern here and another there. In a line. A straight lane of dark, opening through hundreds of lights, and coming toward the beach.
Midori stood very still with the glass fish in her fist and watched it come, frozen.
She pulled Ling's sleeve. She couldn't make words. She pointed.
Ling looked. The skewer dropped out of her hand.
"CLEAR THE WATER!" Ling's voice went down the beach like a whip-crack. "OUT OF THE WATER — NOW—"
The chorus died mid-line. And the sea stood up.
It came out of the shallows the way a tree would walk if a tree could, a trunk of bumpy grey wood about five meters tall, shards of rock jutting out of its body like a reef that had grown into it, a ragged crown of green leaves shaking on its back. It had no head. There was nowhere a head should be. The trunk of it simply bent forward at the top and ended in a mouth, round, enormous, ringed all the way around with teeth, dark slime roping off it and slapping into the surf. Its arms were as long as its whole body, thick as masts, and their knuckles dragged two furrows up the wet sand as it came.
The first ones it reached were the lantern-floaters at the waterline.
It picked a man up the way a farmer picks a root, lifted him up, and its top mouth bit his head off. The headless body dropped to the sand. It had already turned. It was already reaching for the next one.
One, went Midori's mind, from very far away, doing its job, doing the only thing it knew how to do. Two.
The beach broke all at once. A thousand people turned from the water at the same moment and became a single animal, screaming, shoving, stalls going over, cook-fires spilling into the sand, paper lanterns torn off their lines and burning where they fell.
The thing waded up out of the surf and fed along the waterline, unhurried, and every time that mouth came down, Midori's mind counted, and she could not make it stop.
Ling grabbed her weapon and attacked the monster's leg with all her strength. The blade barely scratched the wood. The monster didn't even notice. Xiao blasted the monster with his fire spray, burning some of its wood, but it kept eating people without caring.
Xiao's spray hit it next, a hissing arc up its flank that blackened wood and shriveled a swath of the green crown, and the thing fed again, and the body dropped, and it did not care. Midori saw the understanding go through both of them, through Ling mid-swing, through Xiao mid-spray, saw the two of them come running back after realizing they stood no chance at beating this eldritch, choosing to evacuate as many people as possible.
"THE STAIRS!" Ling roared. "GET THEM UP THE STAIRS!"
Hana was helping the fallen out from under the stampede, hauling them up, shoving them toward the north stair. Ling fell back to the stair's foot and made herself a gate, funneling people past her. Midori was in the crush with the glass fish cutting into her palm, and hundreds of people were trapped, pushing each other, with nowhere to go as the monster moved closer.
Then Xiao made a choice.
He didn't say anything to them. He just walked out wide across the empty sand, alone, between the burning stalls and the bodies, the spray roaring out of both hands into the dark above him.
The thing stopped.
"HEY!" Xiao was walking, away from the stairs, away from everyone, drawing a line of fire across the sand between himself and the sea. "That's it. Over here. Look at me. LOOK AT ME."
It went for him.
"XIAO!" Ling's voice cracked on it, cracked in a way Midori had never heard from her, would not have believed her voice could do.
He kept backing, kept burning, kept pulling the mountain of it further from the stair with every step, and he shouted his answer over his shoulder, and it was almost cheerful, and it was the worst thing Midori ever heard.
Xiao managed to win them a mere two minutes, but it was enough to get everyone past the see wall, he fought the monster relentlessly, but it finally overpowered him.
The arm caught him at the top of a step-back, mid-spray. It swept him up off the sand, and the trunk bent as the mouth came down over him.
Xiao didn't turn around.
"Promise me you'll take Noah fishing next year!"
And for one unbearable heartbeat the spray was still going, spilling sideways out of the closing dark, throwing one last mad wash of light down the beach.
Then the light cut out. And the body dropped to the sand. And the mouth came up.
Midori's mind, which counted everything, stopped counting, Ling dropped to her knees as the scene was too gruesome to even describe.
The Eldritch beast then launched it mouth at Xiao’s chest, and pulled his heart away, it then swallowed it, and after that, it grabbed his headless body with its mouth, and took back to the sea.