The demon world — did she expect it to be scary? Or did she expect it to have some resemblance to her human world?
Clara did not know what she had expected.
The illustrations in the Old Covenant texts, perhaps. Horns and darkness and the conventional machinery of things meant to frighten.
What she found instead was something her mind took a moment to process correctly, because the first thing she registered was not threat but beauty — a strange, magnificent beauty.
And the beauty was wrong in the way that very dangerous things are wrong, which is to say that the wrongness was part of what made it beautiful.
They were tall. Taller than men, most of them — not grotesquely, but like a man made of rubber and then stretched too long. Their skin ran through shades of blue and grey-blue and something almost silver, cool-toned in the way that marble is cool-toned, lit from within by something that was not warmth.
Their eyes — the ones she could see from this distance — caught the UV-scattered light and returned it in reds and greens so saturated they seemed to pulse.
They stood without moving.
Ten thousand of them, absolutely still, watching a boat approach with a girl sitting up among dead roses, and the hum rising from all of them simultaneously like something the air itself was doing rather than anything so deliberate as singing.
Were they men or women? It's hard to distinguish as the hum intensified.
Clara's hand found her mother's ruby.
It was there. Warm in a way nothing else was warm here — the warmth of the human world, carried across the sea, still present at her throat like a held breath.
She closed her fingers around it and tried to face the shore, but her strength had not returned yet.
Clara breathed and did not let herself think about Anthony standing at the harbour gate in his ordinary coat. She filed that away in the careful place where she put things she could not afford to feel yet.
She had arrived.
Whatever came next, she had arrived.
The boat slowed as the eels released it.
She saw them briefly — immense, dark, moving just below the emerald surface on either side of the hull, their bodies thick as tree trunks, their skin absorbing the light rather than reflecting it. They did not surface. They simply — ceased, withdrawing back into whatever deep they had come from, their work apparently complete.
The boat touched the shore with a sound that was less like impact and more like arrival — a soft, settled thing, as though it had found the place it had always been going.
The hum stopped.
The silence that replaced it was total and immediate and enormously loud.
Two figures came forward from the assembled thousands — leaner and taller than anything she had ever seen, moving with an authority that separated them from the crowd the way water separates from oil.
They wore dark coats that moved strangely in the non-wind, and their faces, as they came within range, were — she had been right. Beautiful. Sharp. Unnervingly, uncomplicatedly beautiful, in the way that certain things in nature are beautiful.
They reached the boat.
One of them — white-haired, with eyes the colour of deep green moss and a face that gave nothing away — looked at her directly. Not at the boat, not at the roses, not at the platform they were preparing. At her. For exactly the length of time it took to assess something and arrive at a conclusion.
Then he looked away and said something to the other in a language she did not understand and had the immediate, instinctive sense she was not meant to.
The platform was brought forward — enormous, ornate, carried on the backs of invisible creatures she could not see yet because her mind was still working through the translucent mushroom-trees and the still emerald sea and the ten thousand voices.
After all, she had a limited budget of impossible things she could process per second.
She would look at the creatures in a moment.
She would do a great many things in a moment.
For now, she sat among her white roses on the shore of the demon world and let her heartbeat find its proper rhythm and looked at a sky full of colours that had no names and thought: Mama was right. I could not have imagined this.
They lifted her chamber.
She did not protest. She could not. Her body had not yet fully renegotiated with gravity and protesting would have required standing, which remained aspirational. She laid with her back straight and let herself be carried.
The crowd stopped following her after a point.
The hum did not return, but something replaced it. The corridors were lined by massive vermilion-painted walls, and on them were a thousand pairs of eyes tracking her movement as they carried her through.
She stared back.
She looked at every pair as she was carried through, the way she had always looked at faces — not because she was performing courage, but simply because she was unwilling to look away from things that were peeking into her soul.
Some of them were expressionless. Some carried something that might have been curiosity.
The palace started to come into view, and Clara understood, for the first time, what hauntingly beautiful actually meant.