SESHAT’S RETURN
1904—St. Louis
Esta was offering the tray of canapés to Teddy Roosevelt himself when the first of Maggie’s devices popped, showering sparks over the entire rotunda and spewing forth a fog that wove through the air like a living snake. The security pulled Roosevelt away, making a solid wall between him and any of the other attendees. A woman in the crowd screamed, and the crowd in the rotunda began a panicked stampede toward the doors.
Esta ran in the other direction. She’d heard the crash of shattering glass from the distant hallway, where she’d left Harte, and she’d known somehow that something had gone wrong. But she hadn’t expected anything like what she saw when she arrived. Jack Grew was there, and Harte was speaking to him, but their voices were off, eerily inhuman. And Harte’s eyes were completely black, with not even the whites showing.
“You had everything,” Jack said in that strange, otherworldly voice. “You had the key to all power at your fingertips, the heart of magic at your command. It was yours to control—and instead you tried to destroy it.”
“I tried to save it,” Harte shrieked, his face contorted. “I created the words and the writing of them because I thought it would be enough to stop the eventual death of magic. But I was wrong. The Book was a mistake.”
“The Book was a gift,” Jack said, stepping toward Harte.
“You had no right to it,” Harte spat. “You stole what was not yours to take. I counted you as a friend, and you betrayed me. I revealed my failures to you, and you abused my trust by giving power—broken and debased as it was—to the undeserving who could not appreciate it—all for something as vulgar as fame.”
“Why should magic have belonged only to those like you?” Jack asked. “Once, all people could touch the power that threads itself through all of creation. Who were you to keep it from them?”
“Who were you to give it only to the sycophants who favored you?” Harte threw back. “You don’t think I know what was behind your rise?” Harte laughed, and it was the high, manic laugh of a woman who had come unhinged. “You don’t think I know how you stole the secrets I inscribed and doled them out only to those who could pay, those who could bestow power upon you?”
“I gave them to the worthy,” Jack said. “And I was rewarded. You . . . You were forgotten.”
“Because of you,” Harte spat. “Because of how you tried to destroy me. But you failed in that, didn’t you? You didn’t expect that, did you? If you had realized how I had been bound to the Book, you would have destroyed it—and me. But you didn’t, and because of your shortsightedness, I bided my time, waiting for someone to release me. Waiting for this moment.”
Harte lunged at Jack, pushing him backward into the rotunda. Above them, the air was filled with the living plumes of dark smoke caused by Maggie’s devices—the distraction she’d promised. Within the depths of it, lights flickered like lightning flashing. Esta could feel the rumble of cold power mixing with the warmth of the old magic, the two battling and warring overhead like some alchemical thunderstorm about to break.
Beneath it, Harte and Jack were grappling with each other, their hands clawing and punching as they rolled across the ground. And the power that came off them was overwhelming, hot as the flames that had consumed the brewery and icy as the Brink all at once, clashing and warring as the two fought. For a moment Esta was sure that Harte would win. But then something shifted inside Jack and roared up, pinning Harte to the floor. Harte had gone limp beneath him, like he’d lost consciousness completely.
Esta acted on instinct, pulling her affinity close and making time go still as she sprinted to where the two of them were. Shoving Jack off Harte with the bottom of her shoe, she went to Harte and placed her hands on his face. “Wake up,” she pleaded. “Come on . . .” She tapped at his cheeks and urged him again.
Without warning, his eyes flew open. But before she could feel the shudder of relief, she realized that it wasn’t Harte looking out at her. It was something dark and ancient peering from the coal-black depths of his eyes.
Harte’s hand snaked out and gripped her by the wrist before she could even think to back away, and the intensity of the power she felt rise between them shook her so profoundly that she lost hold of her affinity. The world spun back into motion, and Jack moaned softly from where he’d toppled over on the floor.
But Esta didn’t notice. The moment Harte had touched her, the moment the power within him had connected with hers, she’d been overwhelmed. And then, the world fell away. . . .
There was a chamber made of stone and clay and the sand of the desert. And there was a woman with eyes of amber, just like her own, and the woman had made a mistake. She leaned over an altar that held the open pages of a book, and her pain and frustration hung heavy in the air. But the woman looked up suddenly and her eyes met Esta’s.
“You’ve come.” The woman’s voice echoed through the chamber in a language Esta did not know but could understand even so. And though she could hear the woman speaking, her mouth never moved. “The one who can release me. The one who can fulfill my destiny. I knew you would come. I knew you would give yourself over to me.”
Esta was frozen in place, moored in time and Aether. She could not move as the woman looked into her very heart.
“I see you so clearly. I see what you desire. The end of this pain and struggle.”
Esta wanted to deny it, but she could not so much as shake her head. No, she thought. I don’t want this.
“I tried to save it. Magic. Power. The energy that flows between all things. It was dying. It was fading even in my time, as people forgot, divided themselves from each other and from the unity of all things. So I tried to preserve what I could by creating the writing. I thought I could save the heart of magic within the permanence of words.” The woman’s eyes flashed with fury. “But I was wrong. Creating the power of ritual through writing only weakened magic further. Magic isn’t order—it’s the possibility held within chaos. Ritual limited the wild freedom inherent in power, broke it apart and kept it fractured. But it also made it controllable, even for those who were without an affinity for it.
“I shared what I’d done with Thoth, because I believed him to be a friend. But he never was. He’d been born weak, and he wanted the power I was fated with. He saw what I’d done, and instead of helping me try to fix my errors, as he’d promised, he took the power for his own. He made a devil’s bargain, trading everything we could have been for everything he wanted to be.
“When I realized, I made the stones. I broke magic apart to protect the last pure bit of it. To form a barrier against any who would try to take it.
“But Thoth was never an ibis. He was always a snake, stealing other people’s eggs.”
Esta saw then everything that happened—the way Thoth had trapped Seshat and then destroyed the stones. He took the Book, but he was a vain and fearful man, so he never stopped running. He never ceased collecting more and more power. More souls and more secrets.
“I put myself in the pages he wanted so badly, but I was trapped by the parchment and vellum I’d written upon in my attempt to preserve magic’s true power. Once, I was almost freed again. A man . . . a great magician tried. But he was a coward, unable to contain my power. Now . . . Now I walk in a new body. Now you have come for me, and together we will end him.”
How? Esta wanted to ask, but her mouth would not form the words.
“With you, my dear child. With the power inside you, we will end everything.”
No . . . Frozen though she was, the word echoed in her mind. No. No. No.
But Seshat only laughed, the rich rolling sound echoing around the chamber. “What did you think you were, child?
“They hunted your kind—our kind—across eons. Across continents and centuries. They tried to wipe us from the world because they feared us. They were right to. You can touch the strands of time—the very material that carves order from chaos—just as I once could. And like I once could, you can tear them apart.
“Come—” The woman at the altar held out her hand. “Join me. Release me.”
Looking into the woman’s eyes as she pleaded, Esta realized that Harte had been wrong. Seshat wasn’t a monster. She wasn’t a demon, either. She was just a woman. A woman, like Esta, who had power. A woman who had believed in the possibility of the world and had been betrayed by it . . . And now she wanted revenge for that betrayal. The hurt inside of her, the pain of it was like the same flint that sparked inside Esta. She understood. It burned inside of her, how deeply she understood.
Why not burn it all down and begin again?
Because innocent people would die. She knew it as well as she knew that Seshat had started just as innocent. She knew too, because she herself had been taken in by the anger and vengeance of the Antistasi. It wasn’t a mistake she would make again. Esta recoiled at the idea of accepting, even as she felt herself stepping toward the woman.
“Thoth cannot be allowed to continue,” the woman said.
Seshat would unmake the world to destroy Thoth. She would sacrifice everyone—everything—to ensure that Thoth, the true Devil’s Thief, would die.
“Don’t act as though you’re so righteous,” Seshat chided her. “You forget that I have already seen the truth of your heart. I have already seen the yearning for retribution. The desire for revenge. The hate that burns brightly inside you can remake the world, my child.”
Yes, Esta had wanted revenge. She’d wanted to make so many pay. But she’d been wrong.
It was too late. Seshat was already pulling her forward, and Esta felt her affinity drawn toward the ancient priestess. She felt Seshat’s power vining around her, but this time it was purer than it had been in the station or in the hotel. This time there was no fighting.
The world felt like it would fly apart. The darkness, Esta realized, wasn’t something that had appeared in the world. It was the world. It was the spaces between, opening and flooding. It was the unmaking of reality.
And there was nothing Esta could do to stop it.