Page 45 of The City of Stardust

He laughs. God, how she’s missed that laugh.

“I’ll hold you to that promise, Violet Everly,” he says.

She watches as he walks into the city, swallowed by the night.

CHAPTER

Twenty-Two

IN MOSCOW, Aman is weeping silently in his flat.

Yury is thin and getting thinner; his throat is agony from drinking boiling water, and now he almost can’t bear to eat anything at all. Blisters ooze on his hands, necrosis creeping up his arms in scaly black. Every dial on his heaters is turned up as high as they’ll go. The air shimmers with heat.

But he is still cold, so cold.

With trembling hands, he opens his fridge and stares at the contents: a packet of beef that expired three weeks ago, a mostly empty bottle of milk furred with mould—and a single vial of golden liquid. The liquid within seems to swirl of its own accord, emitting a light that dances against the white walls of the fridge.

For a long time, Yury stares at the precious vial, shivering, his mouth parted with want. Then he presses down on his forearm, right on the remnants of a key tattoo, and he screams. Agony yanks through him, sharp enough to edge past the cold. A clear-headed kind of pain. He slams the fridge shut, breathing hard.

It was not always like this, pain and willpower and cold.

Once, Yury was a gifted scholar, specialising in the history of the lost scholar-city, and the origins of the reveurite keys. Such a limited method of travel to him, even then. He had dreamed ofmore.

But that was before the experiments, the weeks of sitting in a frigid room—or was it warm, and he was already beginning to feel the effects, even then?—as he choked down raw reveurite. Before heinjected its white-hot liquid counterpart into his veins, screaming then blacking out.

This is how Illios made his Hands, the first true scholars to set foot upon other worlds, he was told again and again.Glory and reveurite, and yes, blood, too.

You want to see Elandriel, don’t you, Yury? To walk across worlds unfettered by keys, to reignite the hearts of those who would doubt our brilliance. First of your kind, first after a millennia of nothing.

Then you must embrace pain.

Even in the midst of his screaming, what a seductive voice that was.

The cold crept in the way pneumonia starts, with a slight cough, a touch of dizziness. At first it was just his fingers, so he carried around a pair of gloves. Then it was a few extra layers, even though outside was warm sunshine. A shiver he couldn’t shake off, or him shuffling closer and closer to the fire, ready for the blazing glow against his face and feeling nothing.

More injections, more pain, even as others died around him, imperfect vessels for godhood. Waiting for the miracle of reveurite to burst through his skin and remake him into someone more powerful.

All athercommand.

And when it didn’t work—exile.

“I need you out here. If you cannot be a Hand of Illios, then you must find me the key to Elandriel,” Penelope said. “Whatever it takes.”

By this time his fingers were turning black; not the lustrous velvet of reveurite, but a necrotic, poisonous black that exposed flesh and yellow fat, then grey bone. Scholars were beginning to whisper. Six months later, the first fingertip would go, leaving him with a permanent phantom itch on the tip of his left ring finger.

Now, his pain has crystallised into a glacier that erodes mountains in his mind. There are days when he wakes and he cannot remember his own name.

The vials are supposed to be a stopgap, a way to slow the process of losing his body, piece by piece. Only blood of the gods can save him now. Blood of an astral. And for as long as an hour, he may feel the faint flickers of warmth again.

There is only one vial left. Only one more respite before the pain continues to saw away at his mind.

Astrals may no longer walk this world freely, but there is another where they retain godhood, where their veins run with the liquid miracle that will cure him. Elandriel.

Whatever it takes, Penelope had said.

He opens the fridge again, snatches up the vial, and drinks.

Johannes Braun is a man of many regrets. Regret for the way he’s conducted himself in life, for all the times he was complicit in someone else’s devastation. Regret, too, for all those missed opportunities, for every no that should have been a yes. He should have returned to Fidelis to teach, even if it was beneath him, and built a devoted group of young scholars to wield. He should have picked fewer fights with the Hadleys, or at least made the effort to befriend a more powerful family—though it had never occurred to him to see the other scholars as anything but competition. He should have watched his back just a little more carefully. At every crossroad in his life, he seems to have picked the wrong path.

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