4

The banquet hall was the size of a small city.

A wall of unbroken glass overlooked the primordial mass of the Storm Below. Countless stars glittered above the thunderheads, infinitely more brilliant than the stone-bound imitations of the Domes Luminous. Airships traversed that tranquil space in between, their searchlights canvassing the clouds, signalling low-pressure vortices that would induce a violent death for crew and cargo.

The walls opposite were crowded with faces. Hundreds of stern-looking men with the same too-fair skin, the same receding hairline, the same double jowls, gazed down imperiously from their canvases of varying shades of brown. The bigger frames were arrayed just below the gallery, decreasing in size until the bottommost few were no wider than a hand.

The biggest portrait of all loomed behind the hosts’ dais, a hundred feet tall. A young man with hair like charcoal needles and a knife-edge jaw glared at the little people beneath him. His pupils were dark blue and speckled with Green. Jackson Finley, First of His Name, the plaque said simply.

Beneath the lush glow of a hundred chandeliers were a thousand tables draped in orange-on-orange. Those closest to the dais were bedecked with banners denoting the colours of notable Houses and guilds, islands in an orange sea. The black-and-gold of the House of Dawn was front row, centre left; James sat alone behind a gargantuan table. At the opposite end of the hall, near the kitchens, Sam found her name spelled incorrectly on a tag alongside the names of two dozen apprentice and aides.

They have all brought their own plague masks and put them next to their plates like trophies. Those from the Necromantic Houses took up two thirds of the land mass, leaving the rest – the pyros, the alks, and a lost-looking intern from the Lower Courts – crowded to one side, bumping elbows.

In the absence of Finleys at their table, a hierarchy of sorts had been established. No one spoke to the wannabe lawyer; the metallurgy guilders pandered to the alchemists; the alks chatted up the pyros; the pyros grazed at the minor Houses; who in turn competed to chat up one of Ingel’s, a young man in the yellow-on-grey; who, understandably, could not stop gawking at the girl from the House of Porphyry, bejeweled in fifty varieties of gemstones. All avoided looking at Sam.

The isolation did not bother her as much as the absence of food. They have been idling for thirty minutes, and guests were still filing in; the Finleys were yet to show up, and the plate of assorted cheeses had long been demolished.

She let her eyes wander, seeking a distraction. The gallery above was filling up with amblers. Almost all were women festooned in outrageous gowns. One had a taxidermized peacock as a headdress. Another wore a spiralling dress stitched from fresh roses that looked like it could fall apart at the slightest touch. Their perfect, porcelain-like faces transcended beauty yet looked identical. Their bodies were uniformly voluptuous, with wide hips and jutting breasts, as befit the current fad. On the Floor of Nineteen, there was a whole street of guilds specializing in the transmogrification of the human body. Sam had seen their prices. Most of these creatures would cost more than a mansion.

There was Lucia, a black inkdot amidst a garish rainbow. The other amblers, perhaps by design, gave her a wide berth. Sam tried to picture having her own showpiece up there, decked out in the finest silk for the singular purpose of showing off in front of other rich people who were also showing off, and all she could conjure up was a cloak of midnight, and a blindfold glittering with stars.

A side door opened, and dozens of apprentices in orange spilled into the hall. They went from table to table, shaking hands and smiling. The encoder, Joran Guiyu, was surrounded, while the two dozen others at his table sat awkwardly, approached by no one.

Slowly, the orange wave filtered to their end. Most have already sat down, having gotten whatever they needed from whomever they needed. A few were going around the apprentice tables. A young man with fuzzy hair wandered over to theirs and looked around uncertainly.

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Sam felt the pressure of twenty pairs of imploring eyes. Suddenly exhausted, she stood up and put on her best smile. “Hi, I’m –”

“Sorry, just looking for a friend,” said the Finley apprentice, barely sparing her a glance before stalking away.

Sam sat down. The pyro to her right smiled at her meekly, as if expecting embarrassment. Sam felt nothing. “Pass me the water, please,” she said. The pyro filled her glass, and the others relaxed. The girl from the House of Porphyry cleared her throat prettily. “Hi, um, Samantha, is it?”

“Sam,” said Sam.

“Hi Sam, I’m –”

“There you are.”

Sam turned around and saw rust-red hair. She tried to remember his name, then remembered that she never asked. Like the others, he wore an orange dinner jacket, but his bowtie was a faded green, the only item of its colour in this never-ending palette. He was holding out his hand.

Sam shook it while seated. “Hi.”

The apprentice looked over her table. “Why are you all the way down here? Sorry – Kevin’s the one who arranged the seating. He’s not…uh…” he jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Want to sit with us?”

Sam followed his direction and saw a table of Finley apprentices, laughing over some distant joke.

Her expression must have slipped. “I know it’s not your thing, but I just…thought I’d ask.” He scratched absently at the scar on his neck. “Um…there’s going to be steak.”

“I like steak,” said Sam.

“Look, I should…”

“You go ahead, it’s good to see you.”

“No, no I meant – I’m glad to see you’ve worked things out with Robert.”

Sam shivered before she could control herself. “Can we talk later?”

“Of course. Where are you –” he shook his head as if to clear it. “I’m the room coordinator for day two. Suppose you’ll be with Maestro Cowen?”

Sam nodded.

“Then I will see you the day after tomorrow.” He nodded as if to reassure himself, then walked off.

Sam picked up her glass and noticed the others staring at her. “You know Eric Finley?!” Ingel’s apprentice exclaimed, eyes wide.

“Of course she does,” the girl from the House of Porphyry batted her eyelashes. “She’s with Maestro Cowen.”

“Do you know all the Finleys?” the pyro whispered in awe. “What are they like?”

Sam shrugged. “Stiff,” she said. They were looking at her expectantly, so she added. “I like their little pins. The skeleton thing. It’s cute.”

“Do you know how much they make?” the metallurgy apprentice blurted out, to sudden silence.

“More than you, probably,” said Sam, and everyone laughed.

The pyro puffed out his chest. “I need to apologize in advance, I know this isn’t the best time but, I-I never get to meet anyone from the Upper Houses and I don’t think I ever will again, I don’t even know how I got here, honestly –” He gave a shrill laugh, then quickly sobered. “Sorry. Um. I was just wondering – we,” he looked around the table, seeking approval, “- were wondering, because we saw your-your name, and I was – we were wondering if you are, um, your House, is, you know, hiring.”

“You want to be a necromancer?”

“Who doesn’t?”

All around the table nodded eagerly. Sam wanted to ignore him, but then she saw Ingel’s apprentice rolling his eyes, and a swell of rage put words into her mouth. “The House of Solutions is always hiring, I think,” she said.

The pyro cringed as if physically struck. “Don’t think I’m good enough for them. I’ve applied fifty times. Never heard a word back.”

“And…you think you are good enough for…”

“No-No! I didn’t mean it like that! I –” he frantically looked around for help, and everyone was busy not listening. “I-I just feel like, with them I’ll never get a chance, but with you I…I might. Sorry, that sounds like I’m ungrateful.”

“You can try,” said Sam, thinking of the hundreds of applications stashed in her bottom drawer.

“If I may, how…how did you get this position?”

Everyone was suddenly attentive, and Sam almost laughed. “I got lucky,” she said.

“Well…. well, there must be more to it than that, right?”

“Someone helped me. A…not even a friend. Someone I didn’t know helped me.”

The pyro looked confused. “Why would they do that?”

She slept in a field of corpses; she laid among the dead as the Green spun day into night, and day, and night again.

Her head was on fire. The migraine made the task sheet a blur. The Command Rings she wore, three, four, five of them, looked like a hundred. She pointed, this way and that, and Finley’s amblers moved. They were heavy, heavier than any physical weight, as if with every motion she was attempting to split the world and her mind with it. But she had to succeed. Maestro Cowen was watching from the palisade, watching her, and thirty other final-round candidates, all chasing the career of their dreams.

Stab, she told them, over and over, and the amblers did what they were told. The candidates fell out, one after another, exhausted or driven mad by the weight, the heat, the smell, until only she and one other were left.

“I’m sorry,” the boy said. He was just a kid, younger than her. He was not apologizing to her, but to the harvest.

“They couldn’t handle the work,” said Sam.