The Gilded Wolves (The Gilded Wolves #1)(14)

“What’s the other theory?” asked Laila.

“Napoleon thought all the Horus Eyes were looking at him funny and so he had them destroyed,” said Tristan.

Enrique laughed.

“But then why have a Horus Eye on an I Ching diagram?” pressed Zofia. “If it’s a calculus of zeroes and ones, what would it even see?”

Enrique went still. “See.” His eyes widened. “Zero and one … and seeing. Zofia, you’re a genius.”

She raised her shoulder. “I know.”

Enrique reached for the Bible he’d left on the coffee table and started flipping through the pages.

“I was reading this earlier for a translation I’m working on, but Zofia’s mathematical connection is perfect,” he said. He stopped flipping. “Ah. Here we are. Genesis 11:4-9, also known as the Tower of Babel passage. We all know it. It’s an etiological tale not just meant to explain why people speak different languages, but also to explain the presence of Forging in our world. The basic story is that people tried to build a tower to heaven, God didn’t want that, so He made new languages, and the confusion of tongues prevented the building’s completion. But He didn’t just strike down the building,” he said, before reading aloud: “‘… and they ceased building the city. Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth, but the Lord delighted in His creation’s ingenuity and deposited upon the land the bricks of the tower. Each brick bore his touch, and thus left an impression of the power of God to create something from nothing.’”

Something from nothing.

She’d heard that phrase before …

“Ex nihilo,” said Séverin, smiling widely. “Latin for ‘out of nothing.’ What’s the mathematical representation of nothing?”

“Zero,” said Zofia.

“Thus, the movement of zero to one is the power of God, because out of nothing, something is created. The Babel Fragments are considered slivers of God’s powers. They bring things to life, excluding, of course, the power to bring back the dead and create actual life,” said Enrique.

Across from her, Zofia noticed that Laila’s smile fell.

Enrique leaned out of his chair, his eyes uncannily bright.

“If that’s what the diagram is really about, then what does that mean about the Horus Eye?”

Laila let out a long breath. “You said looking through the Horus Eye revealed something … whatever it could see had to be dangerous enough that the instrument couldn’t be kept in existence. What would be dangerous enough to threaten an entire empire? Something that has to do with the power of God? Because only one thing comes to my mind.”

Séverin sank into his chair. Zofia felt a numb buzzing at the edge of her thoughts. She felt as if she’d leaned over a vast precipice. As if the next words would change her life.

“In other words,” said Séverin slowly, “you think this might be telling us that looking through a Horus Eye reveals a Babel Fragment.”





5





SéVERIN


Séverin stared at the luminous dark of the Eye of Horus. In that second, the air smelled metallic. He could almost see it. Gray rippling the sky as if it were hectic with fever. Fanged teeth of light flashing in the clouds—a taunt to snap. This realization felt like watching a storm. He couldn’t stop what would come next.

And he didn’t want to.

When he first heard about the compass, he imagined it would lead them to the lost treasure of the Fallen House, the only cache of treasure that the Order would do anything to possess. But this … this was like reaching for a match only to come out holding a torch. The Order had covered up their hunt for Horus Eyes, and now he knew why. If someone found the West’s Fragment, they could disrupt all Forging not just in France, but Europe, for without a Fragment to power the art of Forging, civilizations died. And while the Order might know the Horus Eye’s secret, the rest of the world didn’t. Including many colonial guilds that had been forced into hiding by the Order. Guilds whose knowledge of the Babel Fragments’ inner workings rivaled the Order’s. Séverin could only imagine what they’d do to get their hands on this information, and what the Order would do to keep it from them.

“We’re not…” Enrique couldn’t finish his sentence. “Right?”

“You can’t be serious,” said Laila. She was pinching the tips of her fingers repeatedly, a nervous habit of hers. When she was unhappily distracted, she couldn’t touch an object without accidentally reading it and the whole world became dangerously visible to her. When she was blissfully distracted, though, the rest of the world disappeared. Something he couldn’t quite forget. “This could kill us.”

Séverin didn’t meet Laila’s gaze, but he could feel her dark eyes pinning him. He looked only to Tristan, his brother in everything but blood. In the dark, he seemed younger than his sixteen years. Memory bit into Séverin. The two of them crouched behind a rosebush, thorns ripping at the soft skin of their necks, their hands clutching each other’s while the father they called Wrath screamed their names. Séverin opened and closed his hand. A long, silver scar ran down his right palm and caught the light. Tristan had a matching one.