the third was just the pumping of his heart—as he raced through the alleys and side streets. He didn’t stop, didn’t breathe, not until he reached the Ruby Fields. Fauna met his gaze as he passed within, her grey brow furrowing—he almost never came by the front door—but she didn’t stop him, didn’t ask. The footsteps had fallen away a few blocks back, but he still checked the markings on the stairs as he climbed toward the room at the top, and on the room’s door—charms bound to the building itself, to wood and stone, designed to keep the room hidden from all eyes but his.
Kell shut the door and sagged back against the wood as candles flickered to life around the narrow room.
He’d been set up, but by who? And for what?
He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, but he needed to, and so he dragged the stolen parcel from his pocket. It was wrapped in a swatch of faded grey fabric, and when he unfolded the cloth, a rough-cut stone tumbled out into his palm.
It was small enough to nest in a closed fist, and as black as Kell’s right eye, and it sang in his hand, a low, deep vibration that called on his own power like a tuning fork. Like to like. Resonating. Amplifying. His pulse quickened.
Part of him wanted to drop the stone. The other part wanted to grip it tighter.
When Kell held it up to the candlelight, he saw that one side was jagged, as if broken, but the other was smooth, and on that smooth face a symbol glowed faintly.
Kell’s heart lurched when he saw it.
He’d never seen the stone before, but he recognized the mark.
It was written in a language few could speak and fewer still could use. A language that ran through his veins with his blood and pulsed in his black eye.
A language he had come to think of simply as Antari.
But the language of magic hadn’t always belonged to Antari alone. No, there were stories. Of a time when others could speak directly to magic (even if they couldn’t command it by blood). Of a world so bonded to power that every man, woman, and child became fluent in its tongue.
Black London. The language of magic had belonged to them.
But after the city fell, every relic had been destroyed, every remnant in every world forcibly erased as part of a cleansing, a purge—a way to ward against the plague of power that had devoured it.
That was the reason there were no books written in Antari. What few texts existed now were piecemeal, the spells collected and transcribed phonetically and passed down, the original language eradicated.
It made him shiver now, to see it drawn as it was meant to be, not in letters, but in rune.
The only rune he knew.
Kell possessed a single book on the Antari tongue, entrusted to him by his tutor, Tieren. It was a leather journal filled with blood commands—spells that summoned light or darkness, encouraged growth, broke enchantments—all of them sounded out and explained, but on its cover, there was a symbol.
“What does it mean?” he’d asked the tutor.
“It’s a word,” explained Tieren. “One that belongs to every world and none. It is the word for ‘magic.’ It refers to its existence, and its creation. …” Tieren brought a finger to the rune. “If magic had a name, it would be this,” he said, tracing the symbol’s lines. “Vitari.”
Now Kell ran his thumb over the stone’s rune, the word echoing in his head.
Vitari.
Just then, footsteps fell on the stairs, and Kell stiffened. No one should be able to see those stairs, let alone use them, but he could hear the boots. How had they followed him here?
And that’s when Kell saw the pattern on the swatch of pale fabric that had once been wrapped around the stone and now lay unfolded on his bed. There were symbols scrawled across it. A tracing spell.
Sanct.
Kell shoved the stone in his pocket and lunged for the window as the small door behind him burst open violently. He mounted the sill and jumped out, and down, hitting the street below hard and rolling to his feet as the intruders came crashing into his room.
Someone had set him up. Someone wanted him to bring a forbidden relic out of White London and into his city.
A figure leaped through the window in his wake, and Kell spun to face the shadows on his heels. He expected two of them, but found