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into the cool morning air. She tried not to breathe it, but she’d been startled and took in a lungful of the tainted air. As she spun away, its scent and taste invaded her senses—fresh figs mixed with something acrid, like lemons going to rot.
    Ã‡eda turned to run, but she’d not gone five strides before the ground tilted up and struck her like a maul. The world swam in her eyes as she managed with great effort to roll over. Blinking to clear her eyes of their sudden tears, she stared up at the blue sky peeking between the shoulders of the encroaching mudbrick homes. In thewindows, old women and a smattering of children watched, but when they recognized the woman approaching Çeda, they ducked their heads back inside and shuttered their windows.
    Ã‡eda’s kenshar was gone, fallen in the dusty street two paces away, though it might as well have been two leagues for all her leaden limbs would obey her. She’d somehow managed to keep Ashwandi’s finger, though; its leather cord had surely prevented it from flying away like her knife. Her throat convulsed. Her tongue was numb, but she chanted while gripping the finger as tightly as her rapidly weakening muscles would allow. “Release me, Hidi . . . Release me, Makuo . . . release me, Onondu . . .”
    The only answer she received was the vision of the beautiful woman coming to stand over her, staring down with bright eyes and a wicked demon grin.

    Ã‡eda woke staring at the ceiling of a dimly lit room.
    She was lying on something cold and hard. She tried to sit up, tried to
move
but was unable to. Her legs felt as though the entire world were pressing down on them. Her arms were little better. Even her eyes moved with a strange listlessness, brought on, no doubt, by the powder that had erupted when the sling stone had struck.
    The light in the room flickered strangely.
    No.
    The ceiling itself . . .
    It was covered in some strange cloth, undulating like the fur-covered skin of some curious beast.
    No.
    Not cloth . . .
    Wings.
By the gods who breathe, they were
wings
.
    She was lying in a room, and above her, covering the ceiling as far as the lamplight revealed, moths blanketed its surface, their wings folding slowly in and out, flashing their bright, cresset-shaped flames over and over and over. They did so in concert such that waves appeared to roll across their surface, as if they were not thousands upon thousands of individuals at all, but a collective that together formed some larger, unknowable consciousness. She couldn’t take her eyes from them, so hypnotic were they, not even when she heard footsteps approaching, the sound of them strangely deadened.
    It was cool here. And humid. She was underground, then, in a cellar, perhaps, or one of the many caverns that could be found beneath the surface of Sharakhai.
    The footsteps came nearer. “Do you like them?”
    Rümayesh.
    Soon the tall woman was standing over Çeda, staring down with an expression not so different from what a caring mother might share with her sick daughter. Theurge to reject the very notion that this woman held any similarities whatsoever to Çeda’s mother, Ahya, manifested in a lifting of Çeda’s arm in an attempt to slap the look away. Her right arm shifted, but no more, leaving Çeda to fume as Rümayesh reached down and brushed Çeda’s hair from her forehead.
    â€œThey’re wondrous things,” she said, looking up to the ceiling, to the walls around them, every surface awash in a landscape of slowly beating wings. “Do you know what they do?”
    Ã‡eda tried to respond, but her mouth and tongue felt thick and rigid, like hardening clay.
    Rümayesh went on, apparently unfazed by Çeda’s silence. “They are taken by the mouth, eaten, in a manner of speaking, and when one does, she is changed, drawn into the whole of the irindai, drawn into a dream of