The far eastern stretch of the wall was built right into the mountainside, and the trees thinned as the wall climbed, built no longer on soil but on solid bedrock. The moon was showing through high clouds, incised down the center, a perfect half-cut of dark and light. A low rumble began to grow, and I felt a soft vibration in the stone beneath my feet.
“What’s that sound?” I asked.
“Take a look for yourself.” He leaned over the edge of the inside battlement and pointed down.
For a twenty-foot stretch, the wall lined up perfectly with the sheer cliff’s edge to create a dizzying height. Directly below us a torrent of water was roaring down the side of the rock and disappearing into the dark swath of woods at the base. The soft lights of the city twinkled beyond. The only thing that stood taller than us was the bleak and lonesome tower. I felt my heart quicken.
“Achlev knew that building the wall would keep out the rain, but he didn’t want to completely deprive us of fresh runoff. And the gates had to remain the only entrances, so . . . he bored into the rock itself. Holes large enough to let the water through but too small to compromise the sturdiness of the mountain or allow for human trespassers to get by. So, what do you think?”
We’d decided it was too dangerous to do such a big spell under High Gate itself, with so many people around, and I suggested that we use the portion of the wall least likely to have any witnesses. But now, looking down from the harrowing height, I wondered if I would have been better off braving an audience.
I gulped and nodded. “It will have to do.”
Zan shrugged off his pack and took out the ingredients for the spell: chalk. A bowl. A lantern. And last, a lock of Falada’s mane, silver-white again now that it had been excised from the rest of her and my spell of disguise.
Zan took up the chalk and began drawing the three-pointed knot—?a triquetra, I now knew, courtesy of the complete Compendium—?on the stone with a quick, confident hand. When he was done, I slipped off my shoes and stepped into the center barefoot, careful not to scuff his lines.
Taking a deep breath, I said, “I’ll need a knife.”
“I’ve got that taken care of.” Zan extracted what looked like a miniature dagger from his breastcoat pocket; from pommel to point, the knife was exactly the length of my hand. The inscriptions on the sheath were indecipherable, but I recognized another triquetra in the center of the patterns. He pulled back the sheath, and I was surprised to find that it was a glass blade, not a metal one.
“It’s luneocite,” Zan explained. “Ground into sand and heated like glass. Unlike glass, however”—?he took the blade and struck it against the stone wall with a resonant ting!—?“once cooled, luneocite can’t be broken.” He handed it back to me. “They used to be given to the Assembly’s triumvirate. This one belonged to Achlev himself. I thought that, if we’re going to reinforce his spells, it couldn’t hurt to use his knife to do it.”
“It’s sharp,” I said, touching my finger to the point. A pinprick of blood beaded up from the surface. “Very sharp.”
“It is,” he said, taking a handkerchief out to dab at my fingertip. “So be careful.”
“Careful?” I scoffed. “In a few minutes I’m going to draw a lot more blood than that.”
“Exactly.” He smirked. “We need your blood. Try not to waste it. Here. Let me.”
He took the knife and held it longways across my palm, the clear blade glinting in the spare moonlight, scattering bits of light across my skin like a constellation. “You’ve been doing this wrong,” he said. “You’re cutting too deep, too wide, and in places more likely to scar, or reopen. Do it like this instead.”
He made a quick flicking motion, to demonstrate, before giving the knife back to me. Looking up from behind his hair, he said, “I grew up watching Simon do it.” He paused. “It’s painful, what you do. I know it. Believe me when I say, I would never ask it of you if I didn’t think it was worth it. You’re saving lives, Emilie. My people’s lives.”
Our eyes met. “I understand,” I answered honestly. “I understand completely.” Then I made the cut, lightly and care
fully, just as Zan had shown me, feeling the pain and power grow as the blood welled up and drowned the light from the knife.
Zan gently removed the knife from my right hand and replaced it with the bowl, guiding my bleeding fist over it. When the first drop struck the metal, it reverberated inside me like the clang of a bell. At the second, the sound became a wail. At the third, it became a screaming pitch so high and so piercing that I thought my cells might burst from it. But through the knifing pain, Zan’s voice was clear and cool. “Last chance to back out. Are you certain you’re ready? That you’ve got this right?”
“I scoured those books. This is how Achlev did it. I’m certain of it.”
He nodded. “How’s it feel to save the world?”
Nervously, I said, “I’ll let you know. Read the incantation I gave you word for word, pausing so I can repeat each line.” Wilstine may not have needed incantations, but I didn’t want to take any chances. “At the end, light the blood and hair in the bowl.”
He lit a match and read the first line. “‘Divinum empyrea deducet me.’” Divine Empyrea, guide me.
“‘Divinum empyrea deducet me.’”
He hovered the match over the bowl. “‘Hic unionem terram caelum mare.’” Here at the union of land, sky, and sea.
“‘Hic unionem terram caelum mare.’” Heat was spreading from the bowl into my fingertips, where it morphed into pinpricks scouring the underside of my skin. Inside the bowl, the blood had begun to form a circle around the lock of Falada’s mane.
“Keep going,” Zan said. “‘Nos venimus ad te dedi te in similitudinem.’” We come to thee with an offer in thy likeness.
“‘Nos venimus ad te dedi te in similitudinem.’” The pinpricks were like sharp pieces of glass hurtling through my veins, around and around in my head, down my throat, in and out of the valves of my heart before screaming down my legs and out the bottoms of my feet, into the wall. And then, expansion. It was like I grew outside of my skin and bones and existed instead as a circle of light.