“Zoya, stop this,” Nikolai hissed.
The pilgrims shouted to one another, taking shelter, huddling together. She liked their fear. She let the sand form shapes, a shining sun, the face of a woman—Liliyana’s face, though no one there would know it. The wind screamed and the sands rose in a tidal wave, blocking out the sun and plunging the camp into darkness.
The pilgrims scattered and ran.
“There’s your Saint,” she said with grim satisfaction.
“Enough, Zoya,” said Nikolai in the deep shadow her power had cast. “That is an order.”
She let the sands drop. A wave of dizziness struck her, and for a moment the world seemed to flicker and warp. Her knees buckled and she fell hard to the deck of the skiff, frightened by the surge of nausea that had overcome her.
Nikolai seized her arm. “Are you—?” And then he seemed to stumble too, his eyes rolling back in his head.
“Nikolai?”
Yuri vomited over the railing.
“What just happened?” she said, pushing to her feet. “Why—” But the words died on her lips.
Zoya turned in a slow circle. The pilgrim camp was gone, the tents, the gleaming stone. The blue sky had bled away to a gray twilight.
“Where are Tolya and Tamar?” said Nikolai.
Tolya, Tamar, the Squallers, everyone who had been standing near the skiff was gone too.
“Where are they?” Yuri said. “What happened to them? What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything!” Zoya protested. “It was a little storm. No one was in any danger.”
“Am I having some kind of episode?” said Nikolai, staring into the distance. “Or are you seeing this too?”
Zoya turned to the west. Above them loomed a palace wrought from the same bone-colored sand as the Fold. But it was less a palace than a city, a massive structure that rose in arches and peaks, clouds roiling around its highest spires. There was something in its construction, in its sweeping scale, that reminded her of the bridge at Ivets.
A shriek sounded from somewhere in the distance. Volcra, Zoya thought, though she knew that couldn’t be.
“It’s a miracle,” said Yuri, falling to his knees.
Another shriek sounded, then another, and a rumble of thunder followed as dark shapes seemed to break from the palace, moving toward them at incredible speed.
“It’s not a miracle,” said Nikolai, reaching for his revolvers. “It’s a trap.”
NIKOLAI HAD SEEN MANY ASTONISHING things—the fog ponies of the Zemeni frontier, said to be so fast that when they ran they became invisible; a sea serpent thrashing its way through the northern ice; the world unspooling before him as he rode the winds with the wings of a monster at his back—but his eyes could not make sense of what he saw swooping toward him in the sky.
Yuri was on his knees, praying. Zoya had her arms raised, and Nikolai could already feel the sand whipping around the skiff as she summoned the wind to their defense.
As soon as he’d heard that shriek in the air, Nikolai had drawn his revolvers and prepared to face the volcra. He had expected shadow monsters or some new embodiment of the Darkling’s power. Hell, maybe some part of him had expected the Darkling himself, the Starless Saint resurrected, come to plague them all with charisma and ill intent.
Instead he saw … bees, a vast swath of them, moving through a sky the color of porridge, shifting and clustering into what might have been the shape of a woman. Behind the swarm, a grotesque loped over the sand, a massive body that kept forming and re-forming—two heads, then three; a thousand arms; a humped back with a spine that twisted in sinuous ridges; ten, twenty, thirty long, spindly legs moving in tandem. The forms were human one moment, animal the next—thick with fur and gnashing teeth. And there, circling high above, a third monstrosity, wings wide and scales gleaming …
“Zoya, say something spiteful.”
“Why?” she asked faintly.
“Because I’m fairly certain I’m hallucinating, and in my dreams you’re much nicer.”
“You’re an idiot, Nikolai.”
“Not your best work.”
“I’m sorry I can’t deliver better wordplay right now. I seem to be paralyzed with fear.”
Her voice was trembling—and if ruthless, unshakable Zoya was that frightened, then everything he was seeing was real: the bees, the grotesque, and yes, impossible but there nonetheless, the dragon, vast in size, its arching wings leathery, its scales glinting black, green, blue, gold in the flat gray light.
“Zoya, whatever you did to bring us here, this would be the time to undo it.”
“If I could, I would,” she growled, then hurled a wall of wind upward.
The bees struck it, like water parting around a rock in a stream, their loud buzz filling Nikolai’s ears.
“Do something!” said Zoya.
“Like what?”
“You have guns!”
“I’m not going to shoot at bees.”
“Then shoot at that thing.”
Nikolai opened fire at the grotesque. His bullets struck its shifting body—a head, an arm, another arm, a distended chest. Now that the thing was closer, he glimpsed claws, jaws thick with canines, the dense brown pelt of what looked like a bear. All of his bullets were absorbed in the grotesque’s body, then emerged a second later as if the writhing flesh had simply spat them out.
High above, the dragon roared and spread its enormous wings. A fountain of flame erupted from the beast’s mouth and blasted toward them.
Zoya’s hands shot upward, and a dome of air formed over their heads. The flames beat at the barrier. Nikolai could feel the heat singeing his brows.
The blast relented and the dragon shrieked again, wheeling above them.
“I think it’s fair to say we’re outgunned,” said Nikolai.
“Lay down your arms,” the grotesque said in a chorus of voices from a hundred mouths.
“In a moment,” replied Nikolai. “I’m finding them very reassuring right now. Yuri, get off of your damned knees and at least try to look like you can fight.”
“You don’t understand,” said Yuri, his eyes full of tears.
“That is entirely correct.”
“I’m going to raise the sands again,” said Zoya. “If I bring a big enough storm, we’ll have cover to get … somewhere. You’ll need to work the sails; I won’t be able to control the storm and direct the skiff.”
“Do it,” said Nikolai, eyeing the lines. They were primitive at best, but he had managed rockier seas than these.
He opened fire, trying to lend Zoya cover as she swept her arms forward and the sands of the Fold—or wherever they were—rose with a whoosh. There was no subtlety now, no need to mask her actions to fool the pilgrims. Instead the storm came to life with a start like a man waking from a bad dream, a sudden wall of force that thrust the creatures back, the sands forming a whirling wall to hide the skiff’s escape.
Nikolai holstered his revolvers and seized the lines, releasing the sail. The canvas snapped, filling with air, driving them east and back toward what he hoped were still the borders of the Fold. Whatever these creatures were, their power had to be tied to this place.