it faster, feeling the gears within the machine tick over, building up momentum as a soft purr began to emit from the tin box.
With a sudden flash, lights within the temple came alive. Some of the elders exclaimed in wonder while others screamed and covered their heads. High up in the vaulted ceiling, light they had never known existed flared after five thousand and seven hundred years of dormancy, lighting the temple with a bright orange radiance.
The brave continued to turn, as if he had known all along what to do. The purr become a loud, steady hum. Acoustic resonance thrummed the air, shivering the skin with its building 23
pressure. In the back of the assembly, someone begged the brave to stop turning the handle but the Kosi could not stop turning even if he had wanted to; the cranking wheel was now spinning on its own, moving so fast the man could not lift his fingers away.
Then it stopped turning with a click. The temperature in the temple plunged. The breath of the elders plumed white as they waited in expectation. Even the alarmed ones who had screamed were now still. Frost did not exist on Hauts Bassiq, except for when mind‐witches used their mind powers. But frost now coated the temple, a thin furry sheet that covered the walls and even the wool of the elders’ shukas.
But nothing happened. Except for the winking sequence of lights that played across the machine’s press pad, nothing happened. The Kosi brave backed out of the circle and the elders leaned forwards, eager to get a closer look now that the work was done.
That was when a seismic rumble flattened the entire congregation. A wall of energy pushed them down and the machine rose up into the air, suspended for a blink before it clattered back down. This time, everyone shouted in fright. The lights winked out and the temple dimmed, as if a shadow had passed overhead. The elders felt exhausted as they tried to claw their way upright, groping lamely in the darkness.
All of them, even the most dim and psychically inert, could instinctively feel what had happened. Although they could not truly understand it, they knew that the power from the little tin machine had been real.
‘I think I have summoned them,’ the Kosi brave said, staring at his own hands as if they were sacred objects.
THE SLAVE SCRATCHED at the scar on his cheek without thinking. It was a habit he had developed without ever realising. The small incision, shaped like a ringworm, had been cut below his cheekbone. Every slave bore the same mark as a sign of servitude.
Although he had been a slave for many years he had never become accustomed to that scar. It worried him. He could feel a lump in his face, if he dug his fingers in and felt past the skin, fat and flesh. Inside, the Blood Gorgons had buried a small larva, a thread of white worm no bigger than a fingernail.
For now the larva was inert, hibernating within his flesh. The slave was not sure how it worked, for it was not his place to know such things, but he knew that each larva was genetically coded to a particular Blood Gorgon, so that if a slave ever strayed too far from his master, the larva would hatch.
What occurred thereafter was the stuff of speculation. Slaves did not wish to talk of such unfortunate things.
Their masters told them often that it would take many hours for the larva to reach the pupal stage, but from there, growth to the final stage was instantaneous. Self‐destructive death and engorging of human flesh was its final stage of development but by then, as far as any slave was concerned, escape would be impossible.
It meant he was bound to Master Muhr. Even when he was more than a sub‐deck away from his master, the beetle often itched, a sign that the creature was waking and growing hungry.
He scratched again and quickened his pace.
The slave climbed the stairs from the Cauldron Born’s cavernous lower decks and began the long trek towards the upper galleries. The ship’s size was immense and even after nineteen years of servitude, the slave still found himself lost if he did not leave glowing 24
guide markers to retrace his passage. Some of the passages had been disused for so long that they had developed their own ecology. Softly glowing patches of bacterial flora crept up the walls, while shelled molluscs