Book One – Chapter 1

The heat was devastating. His skin was a sheen of salt and grit and long-crusted blood. The burns across his face pulled every time he clenched his jaw or narrowed his eyes. His eyes burned constantly, but there were no tears left to soothe them. Yves pressed his scarf and the sleeve of his coat over his mouth and nose, though the cloth did little beyond catching the largest particles suspended in the air. Everything finer came through. The air was stale and heavy, saturated with minuscule fragments of glass and metal and the bitter stench of scorched minerals. Every breath scraped. It felt as though the splinters had torn his throat open all the way down, and then the sand had stuffed itself into the wounds and clogged everything from bleeding out. Yves wished there was blood. Blood would have been something wet to swallow. Instead, there was only grit against his tongue, more splinters and more sand. He felt all of it, deeper too, accumulated somewhere inside him where weeks of breathing and swallowing had carried the desert. His stomach would not stop clenching. Yves wanted to vomit, desperately; yes, so, so badly, just to get it over with, just to make the sickness release him for a few seconds. But he could not. Whatever desert he had swallowed had settled too deep to be brought back, too heavy to expel, too thoroughly incorporated into the misery of his body to ever leave him again. All that remained was the reflex, tightening uselessly inside him every time he tried to breathe.

The Witch Mother’s pendulum seemed just as upset. Its vibration had intensified so severely that Yves could no longer bear the artefact against his palm. He held it in his free hand, by the chain and at arm’s length, while the weighted end fought through a chaos of quivering arcs and truncated swings. Every attempted direction was interrupted by another. The pendulum jerked sideways, recoiled, twitched forwards again, then dragged itself into tight, agitated circles that collapsed before completing even a single revolution. Every impulse contradicted as soon as it began. It was an utter mess of twisting, trembling oscillation.

Yves was fairly certain that, if his own feelings could be rendered as a physical object, it would be this. It was a very weird thought. But also oddly comforting. In a deeply disturbing way.

He looked at Midnight.