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“Right. And where are your clouds?” asked Osric, because Fairhrim was, obviously, personally responsible for their absence.

“And where is your blackened sun?” asked Fairhrim, as though the fault were his.

A fresh eddy whipped at them as though delivering a smack. Fairhrim’s heavy skirts gusted up past her knees. Osric, seeing a flash of white stockings and, above those, a black garter, learned that Fairhrim wore her garters in the new fashion, at the thigh. A nicely shaped thigh—round, with a delicious little indentation where the garter pressed into soft skin.

Which might’ve been interesting to look at if Osric had a thing for garters, which he didn’t, and if he thought Fairhrim remotely attractive, which he also didn’t. (So he told himself, with great confidence, suppressing any memory of darkly brilliant eyes and a curl of hair across a damp lip.)

Given that the sight was so uninteresting and that he’d rather be looking at anything but Fairhrim’s legs, Osric turned his attention to the sea.

It roiled below them, alive and uneasy. The tide began to rise as the sun began to set. The sky’s relentless blue gave way to deep purple.

There was a creak behind them. The enormous set of bulbs in thelantern room turned on and flashed a first beam across the sea. It caught the agitated waves and tipped them, briefly, in gold.

“Look,” said Fairhrim. The single syllable was stretched and snapped away by the wind.

Beyond the flashing, gold-glossed waves, a mist was building upon the horizon. At least, Osric thought it was mist. But, unlike mist, it moved with volition. It thickened until it became a cloud bank moving towards them—a cloud bank advancing, impossibly, into the wind.

The cloud approached in stutters, visible only when the flashing beam of the lighthouse hit it.

Osric realised at last that it was a single, frothing mass of birds.

“The gannets,” said Osric.

“Sort sol,”gasped Fairhrim. “It’s what they call murmurations in the Danelaw.Sort sol—black sun.”

With a dizzying din, the colony—thousands, hundreds of thousands, of birds—billowed towards the lighthouse in a single, seething entity.

Osric took a step back, as did Fairhrim. The light flashed again; they saw their own silhouettes flicker against the advancing wall of birds. The beat of wings and hearts without number churned the air until it thrummed. The thrum went through Osric, filled him, reverberated in his bones.

The lighthouse flashed its luminous pulse against the multitude. Osric saw things in it as it swept to and fro above—now a tree line, now cascades, now waves smashing upon rock. Things dim, things shimmering, things Awake.

He felt disoriented and ill. He wanted to touch something solid.

He went for Fairhrim’s hand just as she went for his. She clutched at his gloved fingers; his thumb pressed hers.

The maelstrom whirled overhead. They were the only fixed point in the universe; everything else spun around it.

The maelstrom was on them.

It erased the world.

11

Transcendence Fleeting

Aurienne

There was no sea, no sky, no lighthouse. Only air shattered by wings, only the squeeze of Mordaunt’s glove against her fingers.

Black-fringed white filled Aurienne’s eyes, pleated upon itself, fell, lurched. Light fractured in chinks between wings and through feathers, light from a golden world where an unceasing sun shone.

There was something at work in the celestial clamour—something half-conscious, something not good and yet not evil. Aurienne felt a loosening. The rules became less rigid. Things wouldn’t withstand; things wouldn’t say no.

She hesitated. Air trembled at her cheek. A window had opened.

Could she do it?

The lighthouse flashed. A hundred thousand bright eyes were on her.