Cruel Beauty (Cruel Beauty Universe #1)(54)

The house would gladly render up breakfast, but it would not help Ignifex collect candles to keep himself from being eaten alive by darkness every night. I pondered that a few moments, then decided it was one more sign of the Kindly Ones’ capricious nature, and laid into the breakfast.

Ignifex trailed into the room, rubbing his head, when I was halfway finished. “You seem to be recovered,” he said.

“I hope you aren’t planning to order me back to bed.”

“No, you have far too much crockery at your disposal.” He sat down at the table, got up again, and wandered to my side. I raised my eyebrows, but he said nothing; instead he sat down beside me and started piling apples into a tower.

“You are losing your ability to terrify me,” I observed after his apple tower had fallen twice.

“That is the problem with a wife who survives so long.”

“Have I set some sort of record?”

“Two of them lasted longer. But not by much.” He stared at the far end of the table a moment; then he stood abruptly. “Are you done with your breakfast?”

“Yes,” I said, eyeing him suspiciously.

“Good. I want to take you somewhere.”

“I haven’t got any keys for you to steal,” I said, rising.

“Not every one of my actions has an ulterior motive.” He took my hand. “If I pick you up, will you hit me?”

“What are you planning to do?”

“Take you to a garden.” He scooped me up into his arms and strode toward the open end of the hall that looked out on the sky. I realized what he was planning and swallowed.

“I thought I was never to leave this house,” I said, looking back over his shoulder so that I wouldn’t have to see the edge approach. Instead I saw his wings appear. First they were no more than indentations in the air itself; then they thickened into shadow or perhaps smoke, and then they were solid: great arching wings with soot-black feathers.

“Oh, this place counts as part of it.” His wings pumped once and I threw my arms around his neck, squeezing my eyes shut as I hunched against his shoulder; then he leapt into the air.

For one agonizing moment we fell; then his wings pushed us up, and up, and with a strangled gasp I managed to look down. The house was already well below us: from above, as from the hill outside, it looked like a solitary tower standing among ruins. There was no sign of the great open hall from which we had launched, and I wondered what I would have seen if I’d kept my eyes open in those first moments. Would the world have twisted, the lines and corners of the building bending as space curled in on itself?

I realized that I was imagining this transformation happening to a great pillared throne room, and the image felt familiar, like a half-forgotten memory. Was it something I had seen in the Heart of Fire?

We kept flying upward, the landscape shrinking away beneath us. I saw the houses of the village grow tiny, until they were no more than dots on the ground, while the land itself became hazy with distance. We were level with a great bank of clouds to the left, huge white structures that billowed and rolled and sent out translucent tendrils.

And then we were above the clouds. The very surface of the sky loomed close to us, its parchment patterning as huge as if it were stolen from the writing desk of the Titans. And horribly close to us yawned the ragged gaps in the sky through which the Children of Typhon could any moment swarm out and devour—

Pain lanced through my head. I gasped, again dizzy with the fleeting sense of phantom recognition.

“Don’t worry,” said Ignifex. “I’m the demon lord, remember? They cannot seize you against my will.”

“They managed it quite well a few nights ago.”

“Yes, but now you’re in my arms.”

“So already seized by a demon,” I muttered. “Hardly an improvement.” But I still relaxed in his embrace.

Then a shadow fell across my face. I looked up, and caught my breath in wonder. The latticework of the Demon’s Eye loomed overhead, but what I—along with everyone else in Arcadia—had always taken to be a figure painted on the parchment sky was in fact the framework of a vast garden hanging in the air. What from the ground looked like a thin strands of knotwork were actually broad walkways sixty feet across, covered in grass and snowdrops. Marble statues of young women, their face worn half away, stood at the points of the design as if they were caryatids supporting the sky. At the center was a round pool of water with benches beside it, and as we swooped past, I saw great gold-and-silver-splotched carp swimming in lazy circles.

A huge iron chain, its links as thick as a man was tall, hung down from the dome. It seemed to hold up the Eye: but thirty feet above the pool, it faded into thin air, and we flew under it without a whisper of resistance.

Ignifex landed on the far side of the pool and set me down. I took a wobbling step, still a little dizzy; I expected the ground to sway beneath my feet, but it was firm as a rock. If I ignored the vastness on every side and looked at the grass between my toes, I could pretend that I was safely on the ground.

Pretending, though, would have been a waste. I didn’t quite dare to stand on the edge, but I walked as close as I dared, then spun myself in delight, because there was wind on my face and grass beneath my feet, and I had never thought to feel either one again.

When I halted, I saw Ignifex sitting sideways on one of the benches, leaning back on his hands, one knee pulled up. The wind ruffled his hair; he looked faintly amused.