She drew in a breath and turned to face him. “Show me.”

• • •

He had carved out an entire city beneath the mountains. More immaculate laboratories, staffed by white-robed angelic scholars and lined with metal tables, racks of wicked-looking tools, rows of stoppered vials. Mines and forges that burned day and night. Barracks for legions of mute, gray-eyed soldiers that Corien called adatrox.

“They’re human,” Rielle said quietly as Corien escorted her through a massive stone hall. On either side, lines of adatrox ran the room’s length. They were dark and pale, fat and thin. Borsvallic men, Kirvayan women. Mazabatians. Celdarians. They stood like dolls arranged by a child—rigid, slightly awkward, slightly askew.

As Rielle passed, their clouded eyes did not follow her.

“They will be our first wave of terror,” Corien said. “Stupid brutes. Not very creative, but certainly effective.”

“How many are there?”

“Seven thousand. In two months’ time, I will have ten.”

A shiver of fear ran through Rielle as she began to comprehend the scope of his work. She remembered the Sauvillier soldiers at the fire trial—their gray eyes, their muteness, how they had turned on their own neighbors without warning.

Then, there had been dozens of soldiers. Here, there were thousands. Thousands of people ripped from their homes, possessed by angels.

“And you inhabit all of their minds?” Rielle whispered.

“Most. Each of my commanders controls a few squadrons.” He glanced her way. Amusement lit up his thoughts. “This frightens you.”

“It impresses me. And yes, it frightens me.”

He lifted her hand to his lips. “I like impressing you. And I confess, I also like frightening you. It pleases me to imagine you shaking in awe of me, as I have so often done in awe of you. Ah. Here.”

He did not give her a chance to respond. She sensed him registering her discomfort, how utterly he had unnerved her, and yet he pushed on gleefully. It was a game between them, a push and tug. She had bested him in the laboratory, and now he was gaining ground.

A game in which the objective is not to win, he thought to her, but to emerge as equal victors.

Rielle kept her gaze trained on the path before them. And if I decide I no longer wish to play?

Corien did not answer, instead leading her down a series of dimly lit corridors. The air grew hotter and fouler as they walked, and when they emerged into a cavernous room lit from above by an iron gridwork of torches, the stench nearly knocked Rielle off her feet—but she was glad for it. The distraction was welcome, evaporating the tension between them.

“Look,” Corien whispered, gesturing grandly. “Little works of art, are they not? The dragons have been particularly helpful to us. Their genetics are robust and versatile.”

Rielle didn’t know what he meant by that, but she nevertheless approached the edge of a pit carved out of the ground, hot ropes of fear tightening her throat. The pit itself was massive, perhaps three hundred yards square, with a thick iron grating bolted across the top. Around the edge were children, and none of them could have been older than ten. They too had veiled gray eyes, but there was a power to them, as there had not been with the adatrox. Some stood, some crouched. All of them stared down into the pit.

And all of them wore castings.

They were all identical—twin gold bands around the wrists and a gold collar about the neck. Floating through the air, piercing the stink, were familiar scents. Damp earth. Sun-baked stone. Rainwater, smoke, alpine wind. The acrid bite of shadows and the bitter tang of metal.

Rielle stared, her revulsion a swift cascade.

These children were elementals, far too young to be using castings. Her own experience with magic, and Audric’s too, had been exceptional; ordinarily, a child might start studying elemental power when they were quite young, but would not forge their casting until at least early adolescence.

“Did they forge their castings here?” Rielle asked faintly.

“They did.” Corien’s quiet delight kissed her thoughts. “Some took to it better than others.”

“And if they refused?”

“I convinced them.”

Robbed of speech, Rielle chose to approach the pit and knelt to peer inside.

Beneath the grating, snapping and pawing at one another, were creatures—reminiscent of the cruciata corpse, but ghastlier. Rielle gazed breathlessly upon their beastliness: hulking shoulders, ropy with muscle; stubby wings of flesh and feathers; shaggy dark pelts and scaled hides; beaks and claws. Heads as blunt and huge as anvils. Horns that clacked against the grating and sparked like flint. They gnashed their teeth and swung their heads, moaning as if in furious agony.

And though they were malformed and distorted, each a patchwork of horrors, they all shared certain distinctive features. The tails, for one, and the wings, and the rough, furred hides.

“They’re dragons,” she whispered. “You’ve changed them.”

“Improvement by way of the grotesque.” Kneeling beside her, Corien looked thoughtfully at his creations. “One of my generals started calling them crawlers, as you can’t really say that they’re dragons anymore, can you? The name has rather caught on. Though so far I’ve found it impossible to completely control the mind of a godsbeast, our treatments keep them docile, and beyond that, the children’s castings bind them like a harness does a horse. And of course, I control the children. Watch this.”

He snapped his fingers—for the show of it, Rielle knew. His abilities needed no outward trigger.

Surrounding the pit, the elemental children snapped to attention. Echoes of their hoarse cries rang in the silence. Corien reached for a mechanism attached to the grating, pressed a catch. A door in the grating flew open.

“Show her,” Corien commanded, his voice brimming with excitement. As soon as the word left his mouth, one of the children—a young boy, fair of skin and hair, gray-eyed and round-cheeked—raised his banded wrists.

A crawler leapt up from the pit to latch on with cracked claws. Hanging there, it opened its wide mouth and howled.

Every torch suspended from the grid overhead exploded to life. Roaring pendants of flame spewed from their brackets, filling the cavern with blazing light and heat. Metal plates molded around the beast’s chest, belly, and shoulders shone liquid with fire, matching the brilliance of the boy’s castings.

Rielle stepped back from the inferno, her heart pounding as the truth became clear to her.

The crawler’s armor was part of the child’s casting, binding them together. A pair of killers, pliable and pitiless. And whatever power lived in a godsbeast was no doubt enhancing the elemental magic the child already possessed.