Prologue
On the second sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl
fell from the sky.
Her skin was blue, her blood was red.
She broke over an iron gate, crimping it on impact, and there she
hung, impossibly arched, graceful as a temple dancer swooning on a lover’s arm.
One slick finial anchored her in place. Its point, protruding from her sternum, glittered like a brooch. She fluttered briefly as
her ghost shook loose, and then her hands relaxed, shedding fistfuls of freshly
picked torch ginger buds.
Later, they would say these had been hummingbird hearts and not
blossoms at all.
They would say she hadn’t shed blood but wept
it. That she was lewd, tonguing her teeth at them, upside down and dying, that
she vomited a serpent that turned to smoke when it hit the ground. They would
say a flock of moths had come, frantic, and tried to lift her away.
That was true. Only that.
They hadn’t a prayer, though. The moths were no bigger than the
startled mouths of children, and even dozens together could only pluck at the
strands of her darkening hair until their wings sagged, sodden with her blood.
They were purled away with the blossoms as a grit-choked gust came blasting
down the street. The earth heaved underfoot. The sky spun on its axis. A queer
brilliance lanced through billowing smoke, and the people of Weep had to squint
against it. Blowing grit and hot light and the stink of saltpeter. There had
been an explosion. They might have died, all and easily, but only this girl
had, shaken from some pocket of the sky.
Her feet were bare, her mouth stained damson. Her pockets were all
full of plums. She was young and lovely and surprised and dead.
She was also blue.
Blue as opals, pale blue. Blue as cornflowers, or dragonfly wings,
or a spring—not summer—sky.
Someone screamed. The scream drew others. The others screamed, too,
not because a girl was dead, but because the girl was blue, and this meant
something in the city of Weep. Even after the sky stopped reeling, and the
earth settled, and the last fume spluttered from the blast site and dispersed,
the screams went on, feeding themselves from voice to voice, a virus of the
air.
The blue girl’s ghost gathered itself and perched, bereft, upon the
spearpoint-tip of the projecting finial, just an inch above her own still
chest. Gasping in shock, she tilted back her invisible head and gazed,
mournfully, up.
The screams went on and on.
And across the city, atop a monolithic wedge of seamless,
mirror-smooth metal, a statue stirred, as though awakened by the tumult, and
slowly lifted its great horned head.
