Nia Patel was tired.

  She hadn’t been sleeping well. She didn’t know anyone who was. The fallout from the news, from President Bannister’s announcement, was still ongoing.

  People wanted answers. There weren’t any. The government, in its massive yearning to pretend otherwise, bombarded every scrap of media with talking heads and high production value infographics. Military task forces had been deployed along every border.

  Everyone reacted in their own way. Many sought out the comfort of normalcy and routines, focused on what was right in front of them instead of the big picture. Others…dealt with it less constructively.

  The hospital had seen a dramatic spike in cases of alcohol poisoning, drug use and overdoses, suicide attempts, domestic violence. The ER was now a revolving door for the casualties of panic, as if the city were an organism beset by some sudden, systemic malaise. Too many patients, not enough staff, and every shift stretched out like an endurance trial.

  The twelfth overdose of the morning was a man younger than her, rail-thin, the creases around his lips and eyes not yet deep enough to look permanent. He had a poorly inked tattoo on his forearm, a word she couldn’t read, and a half-healed cigarette burn on the back of his hand. She’d seen others like him already. Like too many of her other patients, he just couldn’t handle it.

  And Nia didn’t blame him.

  How could she? It was impossible.

  The whole country…transported. It was almost easier to believe the world had ended. That the universe—sick of humanity’s nonsense—had snapped its cosmic fingers and snuffed them into oblivion.

  Those who didn’t have relatives abroad were the lucky ones, she thought. Nia’s whole extended family was back in India, and it hurt so much to think she would never see them in person again, never watch her cousins duel with their grandmother for the larger piece of burfi, never hug her uncle when they all got too loud and sentimental at New Year’s.

  Nia took a shuddery breath and closed her eyes tightly. She couldn’t cry. Not now. She’d spent too much time crying already.

  Her work helped. As a third-year medical student, Nia had more than enough to keep her busy and sleep deprivation had a way of making everything feel far away. Her attending, Dr. Lancaster, had noticed, and instead of scolding her (as he would have for, say, a misplaced suture or an incomplete chart), he had simply clapped her on the back and told her to go take a walk. Nia hadn’t done it. The last thing she needed was to be alone with her thoughts.

  The hospital was abuzz. Aside from the spike of cases after the Event, it appeared, on the outside at least, unchanged. The ambulances still showed up with battered bodies and panicked families, the white noise of intercoms and heart monitors still echoed down linoleum halls, the vending machines still refused to take crumpled bills.

  Nia clung to the procedural certainty, the swaddling purpose of protocols. The hospital had rules—too many, maybe—but those rules helped give her something with which to make order of the insanity. And she needed it, because she was terrified.

  Nia was a student of science. Before the Event, she’d believed that the universe made sense, that it operated on a set of clearly-defined, rational, ironclad rules.

  The Event had shattered that worldview so fundamentally she was still having trouble processing it. This wasn’t some prank, or a mass delusion, or some sort of psy-op by the Chinese or North Koreans. It was as real as an earthquake, and in a way, it had the potential to kill way more people.

  Dr. Lancaster and the other doctors hadn’t said it aloud because they didn’t want to distress their patients, but the sudden severing of the supply chain of pharmaceuticals and other things the hospital depended on would have catastrophic consequences if something didn’t happen quickly. There was a pall of silent dread over inventory rounds: bags of saline, benzodiazepines, insulin, lidocaine—supplies once so taken for granted their routine restocking bordered on thoughtless, were now counted and recounted with the somber arithmetic of doomsday cultists. Dr. Lancaster had told her in private that after another week, perhaps two, they’d have to start rationing. Nia didn’t even want to think about what would happen after they ran out completely.

  Parents would watch children die who would otherwise live. Loved ones would sit at bedsides powerless to stop the terminal cascade of otherwise mundane illnesses. Nia imagined the despairing cries of parents and shuddered. Nausea roiled her stomach. She’d gotten into medicine to help people, not watch them die.

  She rounded the nurses’ station, dodging a patient transport cart that rattled too noisily for its own good, and found herself arresting her steps at one of the windows facing the city. It looked so normal from this vantage point. The lights…the traffic…if she stayed here, and didn’t think too much, she could almost imagine it was just a normal day.

  There was the little splash of green where the riverside park clung stubbornly to the concrete, and the squat, onion-shaped dome of the old courthouse, and nearer, the glassy lung of the high-rise that housed the largest insurance company in the city.

  Nothing had changed.

  Everything had changed.

  On some level, she envied the patients who lost themselves to panic. Their terror was kinetic, at least; it screamed. Hers just pooled and curdled and sat there.

  One of the nurses jolted her from her ruminations.

  “Nia!” called a freckled nurse whose badge still read “Sarah.” Her voice was tightly wound, like everything and everyone else in the building. “You’ve got a consult in Psych. Another guy who cracked.”

  Nia nodded—she was already halfway through checking charts, but protocol was protocol—and ducked down the hallway, barely dodging a gurney with a shrieking toddler latched to its rails. She didn’t need confirmation from anyone: the psyche cases had gone from rare to routine, and rumor held that some psychiatric wards around the country had already started to barricade their doors after a string of staff assaults in Portland and Boston.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Another panic case. Guy had a complete nervous breakdown.”

  Nia nodded. “On my way.”

  The Psych ward was quiet in a way that felt like the air before a tornado touches down. The silence wasn’t calm, it was coiled. A security guard hovered near the front desk, hands jammed deep in his belt.

  Nia steeled herself for whatever insanity she was about to witness. She didn’t hold it against the guy. They’d been torn away, all 300 million Americans, from everyone and everything. There were goddamn sea monsters in the waters off the coasts. She’d seen footage of one just that morning—a serpentine creature of colossal size and length swimming lazily under the Golden Gate Bridge. It hadn’t attacked anyone or capsized any boats, but caused pandemonium in the bay all the same.

  A chill crawled down her spine. If such creatures existed here—wherever the hell here was—what else could be out there?

  The patient—her consult—sat cross-legged on the cot in room 16, eyes closed, mouth moving in a tight, mantric mutter. He was young, Asian, with the wire-rimmed glasses and academic pallor of someone more comfortable among textbooks than people. He looked as though he might have once enjoyed a normal geek’s existence: bad posture, laptop calluses, a personality arranged around exceedlingly niche interests. Nia scanned the summary on her tablet: name, age, pharmacy student, brought in by roommate after initial disorientation and attempted self-harm.

  “Hello,” Nia said, forcing professional warmth into her tone as she entered and closed the door behind her, “I’m Nia. I’m part of the team that’s going to help you today.”

  “I’m not crazy,” he mumbled, rather sullenly.

  “It’s all right, you’re safe here. I can talk for both of us if you like. Would you mind telling me your name?”

  He didn’t open his eyes. “Raymond.”

  “Nice to meet you, Raymond.” She sat, careful to keep the room’s one desk between them. Psych patients could sometimes be unpredictable, and training had drilled certain habits deep. “Why don’t we talk about happened?”

  Tears began welling in his eyes. “I just…I can’t take it. My mom was traveling abroad and now I can’t see her. She’s gone. I have no one now…”

  “I’m sorry,” Nia said, and found that she meant it more deeply than she liked.

  She listened to his breath hitch and watched his knuckles whiten against the too-bleached bedsheet. What was there to say? What could she say?

  Nia waited for him to say more, but he only rocked back and forth, clutching his knees tighter and tighter. She tried to sit with his pain, to bear witness, but that was all she could do. No training, no skill set in the world, prepared you for the task of patching a universe ripped loose from itself. Still, she mustered up the best clinical bedside manner she could. “You’re not alone, Raymond. I know it feels that way, but there are a lot of people in this hospital who want to help you.” That was what she’d been taught: offer the promise of connection, however frail.

  “You can’t,” he said with bitter humor. “No one can. Not with this. This is…it’s bigger than any of us. Bigger than all of us.”

  Nia didn’t have an answer. She sat, pen tapping her notepad, uncertain whether the gesture was more to soothe him or herself. At times like this, she half-believed psychiatry was a placebo—an act of mutual hope against the dark. “It is,” she said after a moment. “It’s enormous. It’s world-changing. But people are still here. You’re still here.”

  Raymond looked at her, hollow in the way people were after all their tears had passed. In that silence, the fluorescent lights hummed and something metal clicked distantly.

  “My mother’s alone somewhere in Hong Kong,” he said, voice cracking just enough to betray himself. “She has high blood pressure. She needs her medication. What if she…” He shut down the thought, lips seam-welded in terror.

  “I’m sorry,” Nia said. Empty words, empty comfort, but it was all she had. She turned to her notepad. “I’m going to prescribe you some anti-anxiety medication, and I’ll see if our social worker can come talk to you after.” But she knew, and he must have too, that even their most sophisticated pharmaceuticals did little to mend something like this. They might help his mind, but they wouldn’t do a damn thing to heal the pain in his heart. That the hospital’s supply of those same anti-anxiety meds were starting to run low was something she decided not to mention.

  Raymond nodded absently, sinking into a shell of himself, and Nia quietly excused herself.

  The corridor was empty. For a moment, Nia stood by the window at the far end, the sun slanting through reinforced glass that glowed as if nothing had ever happened. Down below, a woman in a fraying coat smoked in the shadow of the ambulance bay while a man in scrubs leaned into a muttered phone call, half-laughing, half-sobbing.

  She checked her phone before returning to the floor. Three unread texts from her father. She’d reply to them later. For now it was on to the next patient, the next tragedy, the next case.

  Nia felt like she was trying to sweep back the ocean with a broom.

  The hospital was starting to run low on those, too.

  Many hundreds of miles away, Ghalrak Dramz was sitting in Lexington’s officers lounge, surrounded by a small mountain of books that Kingley had made available to him. He couldn’t read them yet, but she’d told him some of the titles, and once he returned to the Under-Realm and had them translated into Dwarfish they would provide a great amount of useful information. They would shed more light on who these humans were, and more importantly what they were on about. It was vital that his people know such things about these powerful strangers.

  The book in his hands—US History Since 1800—was a solid, imposing thing. The Under-Folk were known, rightfully, for their skill at working stone and metal, but it was less well-known that they were a quite literate people too. They had to be. A realm as vast and industrialized as the Dwarfs’ empire didn’t run itself—without record-keeping, there would be chaos, and the Under-Realm did not tolerate chaos. Less well-known still was that Thafar-Gathol was home to one of Loriath’s most complete, most extensive libraries about metallurgy, masonry, and all other crafts the Dwarfs held dear. Ghalrak supposed it shouldn’t surprise him that these ‘Americans’ were also fanatics for the written word. Their ship (and what a ship! Four hundred paces long, smoking not from coal but from some secret fire) was dense with books—record books, log books, ledgers, manuals, histories.

  The book he was looking at now covered about 200 years of history—barely the blink of an eye to his people. Their records stretched back more than seven thousand years. But that was nothing compared to the dizzying, fast-paced fever-dream of the Americans’ own documented past. In just their last hundred years, it seemed every season was marked with a new war or a new leader or a new disaster. And that was just what Ghalrak had heard. Ancestors only knew what else he’d find when he finally learned to read their script.

  Ghalrak thumbed through the book and squinted at the foreign text. The lines swam; he had only started learning the humans’ system of writing, and though the letters were crisp and dense, their arrangement was as yet utterly random to his eye. He closed the book with a faint thud and settled it on the heap. The lounge was empty, save for a maintenance man asleep in one of the recliners, snoring through a mustache that drooped over his upper lip like a wet rope. The ship’s PA system gave a soft, pleasant chime every fifteen minutes, and Ghalrak found himself timing his sips of the ship’s coffee to each announcement.

  Of all the new things the strangers brought with them, he decided he liked coffee the most. Now that was a drink to put hair on a Dwarf’s chest and stiffen his beard.

  When Ghalrak had first been offered coffee, he had half-expected it to taste like sludge mixed with engine oil, but instead it was rich, smoky, bitter in a way that was honest and bracing. It was a Dwarf’s drink, and no mistake. More than once, he had watched an argument dissolve simply by pushing a carafe and a few mugs into the middle of the room and waiting while the drink did its work.

  Kingley had told Ghalrak that coffee came from a bean, not altogether unlike the beans humans ate but roasted and ground into a powder. Brewed hot, it was said to inflame the mind, keep a human sharp through endless hours of vigilance, and, Ghalrak had no doubt, send their bowels churning like a millrace. If there was a closer cousin to the Under-Folk’s own cask-brewed dark ales, he had yet to taste it. He slurped from the pale ceramic mug and nodded to himself with satisfaction. If trade there be with these strangers, there’ll be no lack of want for this stuff in the Under-Realm.

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  All in all he’d been on the Lexington for—was it four days now?—and in that time had learned much. He had learned, for instance, that the ship’s population was like that of a mining colony: it had hierarchies, jobs, disputes and affections. He’d learned that the Americans were a people built for action, quick to anger and quicker to forgive, but above all, they hated being idle. They were the most restless of the human breed he’d ever seen. Even in peace, they were always drilling, cleaning, or repairing something, their downtime a fiction that evaporated whenever boredom threatened to settle in. He respected that. It was a trait, he supposed, that all proper seafarers shared.

  He admired their ingenuity too—not so dissimilar, in a curious way, from his own people’s devotion to craft and cleverness. They were really quite good at jerry-rigging spare parts or equipment to serve as a fix to whatever problem they were confronted with. And like the Dwarfs, the Americans respected the value of a good plan and a better contingency. Most important of all, they honored a leader who didn’t balk from ugly decisions and who led by example. It made them good shipmates, Ghalrak reckoned, if not the most predictable ones.

  He did not like everything about them, of course. For one thing, his time among the strange humans had shown him how carelessly they threw things away. Shipboard garbage was a thing of legend—there were entire rooms dedicated to it. Ghalrak had taken a wrong turn during a self-guided tour and found himself in one such place. The stink nearly knocked him over, row after row of bins stuffed with what looked like half-eaten meals, bruised fruit, and other detritus. If there was anything the Dwarfs disliked more than lack of industriousness—which thankfully the Americans didn’t suffer from—it was any form of inefficiency or wasteful friction. In the realm of the Dwarfs, every resource that wasn’t used up completely was repurposed, recycled, remade or reforged. The Americans, on the other hand, hurled precious food straight into the sea. They called this "scuttling galley waste.” When he asked Kingley whether the humans on land did the same, she shrugged and said most got rid of their waste in giant holes called "landfills."

  The idea appalled him on a nearly spiritual level. He wondered if the Americans realized how much of what they discarded could be put to more productive use.

  The humans also had a tendency to talk, and talk, and talk, instead of listening. Ghalrak sometimes wondered if humans could ever truly be silent together, simply to share in the joint labor of thought. Gabbiness was not something the Dwarfs encouraged.

  They were also simultaneously, maddeningly sentimental and deeply, almost superstitiously, loyal to their own customs. Like the morning and evening muster—an odd, ritualistic gathering where all hands, no matter rank, lined up for the pleasure of being barked at by an officer in a hat. The hats changed, the barking did not. Or the way the mess hall, a bare-brick rectangle with little to recommend it, could fall instantly silent for the presentation of a flag; even the most boisterous sailor stilled his mug and squared his shoulders. They revered their symbols as only a people unsure of their own story could.

  Also of interest was the way these humans regarded their own displacement. He had expected to find them unmoored, wailing for lost kin or for the lands they had left behind. Instead, he found a hard-throated doggedness, a refusal to mourn, even as they recognized their predicament with grim clarity. He heard it in their jokes, in the music (strange and sometimes literally unmusical) that poured from the radio in the galley, in the way they posted old flags in makeshift shrines around the ship.

  But the most concerning trait, at least to Ghalrak’s mind, was how little the humans seemed to understand about the world in which they now found themselves. He’d figured out pretty quickly that the Americans had come from…well, somewhere else, apparently, and had no idea how they got here or why, or even if it was possible to return to wherever they originally came from. Ghalrak had spent several long nights with Kingley detailing his knowledge of the different nations and empires that called Loriath home—sharing such knowledge wasn’t a danger to the Dwarfs—and Kingley’s surprise at much of what she heard still amused him. He remembered the last conversation they’d had, late last night, bent over a map of the world from Ghalrak’s cabin aboard Stonebreaker…

  “Here,” the Dwarf grunted. “Look. This is about as much as we know about just about everywhere. We Dwarfs trade widely, so we’re all over the place.” He stabbed a stubby finger at a large island to the north, about the size of Australia. “Sarnath. Home of the Sar'Kadan.”

  “Who?”

  “The Sar’Kadan. That’s what they call themselves. Means ‘the Children.’ Humans call ‘em a lot of other things, but most of your kind just refer to ‘em as Dark Elves.”

  Kingley’s jaw dropped. “Elves.”

  “No, Dark Elves,” Ghalrak corrected her. “The High Elves are further south. Much further south.”

  “Can you tell me about them?”

  “Which one?”

  “Both.”

  Ghalrak stroked his beard. “My people have had dealin’s with the Dark Ones for a long time. They’re even more closed and suspicious of outsiders than we are. Oh, we trade with ‘em, aye, and that Queen o’ theirs is one sharp lady. Wouldn’t want to get on her bad side.”

  “Are they dangerous?”

  “Probably. But it’s been so long since they left their own borders a lot of folks think they’re a myth. I went there once. Got to see their capital city. Dwarfs are the only outsiders allowed there, and that only because we’ve got a history with ‘em. I won’t get into that now, it’s too long a story. Anyway, they’re nothin’ to sneeze at. Powerful sorcerers, many of ‘em. Can wield lightning and frost like few others. Some say their wizards can freeze whole armies solid and call down lightning storms to sink fleets o’ ships. Mostly they just keep to themselves. Whatever they’re up to, they ain’t tellin’. And ‘tis death to try and trespass in their land without their leave.”

  Kingley looked the map over, her skepticism fading into brisk professional interest. Maybe that was why he liked talking to her so much. She didn’t patronize and there was never any bullshit with her. "And the High Elves?"

  Ghalrak took a sip of coffee, considering. "Strange, those. Live in cities of glass and silver, in the great balmy forests of the Glittering Isles. We don’t see much of them, either, but the difference is the Dark Elves stay aloof ‘cause they’ve probably got better things to do. The High Elves are aloof ‘cause they think they’re better than everyone. Powerful mages, though. The best in the world. No one, not even the Dark Elves, can match ‘em in that regard. Magic’s as natural to the High Elves as breathin’. Their whole society is built around it. Everyone from the lowest farmer has some form of talent with it. Arrogant pricks though, and no mistake.”

  He pointed at the map again. “The Empire of Morghast.” He said the word as if it were curdled milk on his tongue. “Nasty bunch. Humans, like you, but not nearly as decent as your sort. They’ve conquered just about everythin’ around ‘em, except for the Dryads. Poor bastards. Won’t be many of ‘em left if they lose the war.”

  “What war?” Kingley asked. “And what’s a Dryad?”

  Ghalrak’s gaze glimmered across the map, following a line drawn in wax pencil over a forested peninsula. “The Dryads are the tree-folk. Bark for skin, sap for blood, leaves for hair. Not much for cities, but they keep to their old groves, which are sacred to ‘em. Trouble is, Morghast wants their groves for building ships and war machines, and they also think that anythin’ not them deserves to be wiped out on principle alone, so they’ve been throwing armies at the Dryad Kingdom and grinding it down. Burned a good portion of it, cut down much of what’s left. The Dryads are holding on by their roots, but it’s only a matter of time.”

  Kingley, whose childhood had been shaped by a half-remembered affection for Tolkien and video games, absorbed the revelation. “So you’re saying that this Empire, this Morghast, believes that every other form of life deserves to be exterminated.”

  “Pretty much.”

  A darkness flickered over Kingley’s face, but it was there and gone so fast he wasn’t sure he saw it at all. “I see,” she said flatly.

  The memory faded—though much more had been dicussed before the night was over—and he rose from his seat with a creak. Ghalrak shook his head to clear it. He made his way toward the deck, still marveling at the intricacy of the ship’s passageways. Once, after a heavy supper, Ghalrak had gotten lost belowdecks and ended up in a cavernous chamber lined with blinking, whirring machines—“computers” they called them. A young woman with a stern jaw and blue-dyed hair had turned from one of the stations and barked at him until he retreated. Ghalrak had been surprised at the time but now he grinned drily as he recalled it. American or otherwise, humans were so territorial about their toys. Like children.

  As he approached the main stairwell, he found Kingley waiting for him.

  “Yes?” Ghalrak grunted without preamble. “What is it?”

  “We’ll be coming into San Diego soon,” Kingley informed him. “I thought you’d like to go up on deck to see it.”

  Ghalrak nodded, just once. “Aye. That I would. So would my men.”

  Kingley led the way through three levels and two security hatches onto the deck, which hummed with activity and the sour tang of fuel. The wind was brisk and the sky blue, streaked with high, stringy clouds. Sailors in color-coded vests darted here and there, but even with the constant motion there was an undercurrent of anticipation: the sort of hush that falls when everyone is waiting for something significant to happen.

  Zarrl came to stand next to him beneath the ghostly steel skeleton of the communications array, taking up a position on Ghalrak’s left as Kingley stood to his right. From here, the city was mostly sprawling dark shapes and distant, flickering electric veins. The ship’s engines had fallen silent, so even the lapping of seawater at the hull and the low, rising drone of seabirds carried, unimpeded, across the morning.

  Ghalrak squinted. “Can’t make nothin’ out.”

  “Just wait for it,” said Kingley.

  The two Dwarfs were soon joined by others of their kind—and as the shore grew closer, they began to grasp the size of the city, the scale of it…

  Ghalrak comprehended suddenly that the soaring towers were made of metal and when he realized just how tall they were, his fingers tightened on the rail and he sucked in a breath. Many of the other Dwarfs gasped and swore quiet oaths, Ghalrak among them.

  “By my beard…” he murmured.

  Ghalrak had sailed all around the world. He’d seen things few others had seen. He’d seen wonders, and terrors, and fought monsters and storms and dangers of the deep. Very little, if anything, fazed him anymore. Very little impressed him, either.

  But this…

  Ghalrak had never seen anything like it, even in Thafar-Gathol!

  Metal towers stabbed at the clouds, each one glass-sheathed and gleaming in the morning sun, so bright and sharp they seemed to pierce straight through the fog that wisped in off the sea. The city spread in every direction for many leagues. The Under-Realm's cities were grand, their vaults and forges vast, but they were the Dwarven kind of vast: enclosed, disciplined, chiseled within the earth, not sprawled recklessly above like a garden gone wild. This was…insanity. The sheer size of it! It had to be home to millions of people! And the ships! There were ships in the harbor that made Lexington look tiny, and on the docks, great and wondrous machines waited: cranes taller than any siege engine, container lifts, vehicles of a kind Ghalrak had never seen before in rows that stretched for miles. The city bristled with industry, but it did not belch smoke or vomit soot like the forges of home; it was a beast of efficiency.

  In that moment Ghalrak knew that any attempt by his people to make war on the Americans would be nothing short of suicidal. This was but one city and the Americans, from what Kingley had said, possessed many others far larger. Wherever these humans had come from, however they came to be here, no longer mattered. What mattered now was doing everything he could to make sure that peace with the Americans prevailed. He was sure now, deep in his bones, that the foreigners brought a new age with them. Those who learned their arts would prosper. Those who did not would be ground to nothing. And if the Under-Realm plays its cards right, it may be perfectly positioned to benefit from this new age.

  “What do you think?” Kingley asked.

  Ghalrak didn’t reply for a long moment. What do I think? I think we're fucked, he almost said, but what came out was a short, terse response. “Pretty impressive. You didn’t exaggerate.”

  Kingley smiled. “Welcome to America, Ghalrak Dramz,” she said, and let him have the moment in peace.

  His crew—hard men all, many with faces as battered as the ship’s own hull—stood on the deck in mute awe. Zarrl simply stared, mouth slightly agape, one hand unconsciously stroking the warhammer at his belt. The other dwarfs gathered in tight knots, muttering in their own tongue, the words full of reverence and more than a little fear.

  The ship slid through the harbor with the quiet, predatory grace of an apex predator.

  Ghalrak let his gaze crawl over the port, to the sweeping causeways and docking arms and all those lovely, lovely machines. He had always thought himself broad-minded, for a Dwarf, but this? There was no downplaying this.

  He stared at the sprawling web of roads that funneled endless columns of vehicles in and out of the city. Some ferried goods in shipping containers the size of houses; others scuttled like beetles across the black-paved arteries, their movement so orderly it seemed choreographed, like the advance and retreat of a tide. Beyond, Ghalrak glimpsed the inland hills, neatly terraced and bristling with antennae and pale white dishes. What function they served, he did not know.

  The city loomed, and as the ship eased into its berth, Ghalrak’s mind worked feverishly. Already he imagined what he would tell the the High King, the lords of his people and the Guild Masters on his return. He could barely contain his anticipation—and his dread. He had never felt small before, even in the audience halls of High Kings or in the echoing depths of the Under-Realm's grandest forges. But here, in the first city of the Americans, he felt less than a raindrop in a deluge.

  Suddenly one of the Dwarfs pointed upward. “There!” the sailor said. “Look at that!” An arm jutted out, finger quivering with wonder.

  From the far side of the bay, something skimmed low over the water. At first Ghalrak thought it was some monstrous bird—a roc, perhaps, but no. Not even of those massive birds flew that fast. No, as it got closer and the noise it made grew louder, he realized it was a machine. A flying machine.

  What a thing of wonder! he thought, gazing up at it as it soared overhead at an impossible speed. What my people could do with such marvels as these!

  The machine soared low overhead like a sleek silver dart, trailing a long white tongue of vapor behind it. The sound—like thunder and steel colliding—rattled his teeth. The ship trembled, the water jumped, and all the Dwarfs recoiled on instinct, drawing back as if from a predator’s shadow.

  “Shit,” the junior officer nearby muttered under his breath, eyes wide as he straightened his cap. “Sorry, Captain Dramz. The Air Force likes to show off when the Navy pulls in. Inter-service rivalry.”

  Ghalrak didn’t respond. He was too absorbed in his own thoughts.

  We must align ourselves with these Americans, he thought. And learn as much of their arts of making as we can. Only then can the Under-Realm hope to thrive. We have iron, and copper, and riches of every kind. Surely we have things these Americans want. Even things like the flying machine cannot be made out of thin air.

  As the shadow of the skyscrapers fell across the flight deck, Kingley leaned in, voice pitched low. “We’ll dock soon, and then you’ll get your introduction to the city proper. I imagine there’ll be quite a few people eager to meet you.”

  That sounded just fine to Ghalrak. He had no time or desire for pageantry; he wanted to meet with someone in authority, someone with the power to make decisions. “Aye,” he said. “We’ll be ready.” He could already see the disbelief and fear among his crew curdling into a restless energy. They want to see more of this place as much as I do.

  He turned to Zarrl. “Pass the word. We’re going ashore. Tell the crew to keep their eyes open, mouths closed, and ears keen. There is more to learn here than in a year of merchanting.” He paused. “Tell the men to break out their best armor and weapons. If we truly be the first Dwarfs to set foot here, let’s represent our home with pride. Full armor, two ranks, two wide and twenty-five long. We’ll march in two columns. I’ll bear the standard. Now go.”

  Zarrl was moving before the Dwarf even finished talking.

  “One more thing,” Ghalrak said.

  “Aye?”

  “Anyone who breaks disciplines or gets involved in fights or some other dumb shit will answer to me. There’s too much at stake here to risk giving offense.”

  Zarrl gave a resolute nod. A lifetime of military drills and guild discipline had burned obedience deep into him, but Ghalrak could still see the giddy curiosity in the other Dwarf’s eyes as he eyed the port and its endless mechanical marvels.

  Ghalrak didn’t explain to Kingley why he was going belowdeck and she didn’t press. As he dressed in the suit of master-crafted spell-forged armor he kept in his cabin, he thought of the High King, of the Under-Realm’s long-cultivated suspicion and pride, of the countless times the Dwarfs had been burned in the past by humans and their wars, and how easily the humans fractured from within.

  It did not take him long to finish armoring himself. Dwarf armor, like all else that came from the Kingdom Below, was practical to a fault and could be donned in moments. His consisted of a suit of overlapping steel plates engraved with sorcerous runes of protection and endurance, and the smoky, wavy ripples in the metal—similar to Damascus steel—spoke silently of its quality. The suit was worn over a shirt of chainmail that ran down to his waist and his arms and legs were armored in metal greaves, gauntlets and sabatons edged with gold. His helm consisted of a simple metal dome fitted with a visor that covered half his face, which could be lifted or lowered as needed.

  By the time Ghalrak emerged back onto his crew were already mustered, lined up in their best, nervous but disciplined, the clangor of their assembly echoing up the steel and rivets. Zarrl had enforced his orders exactly: every Dwarf wore a fresh tunic under the mail, boots brushed, helms gleaming.

  Zarrl handed him the standard—the standard of the Under-Realm, a snow-capped mountain topped with a crown of gold upon an azure field—and Ghalrak took his place at the head of the column. The Americans stopped to stare, which was appropriate and gratifying, but Ghalrak didn’t let it show.

  As the Lexington slowed and eventually came to a stop, he barked out, “Right then, lads! Let’s show ‘em how we do it in Thafar-Gathol!”

  “AYE!” the Dwarfs roared back.

  The boarding ramp juddered down with a mechanical whine, and a gust of sea air swept up, tinged with the scent of asphalt, exhaust, and coffee shops—only in America, Ghalrak reflected, would the tang of the docks be diluted by roasted beans.

  The Dwarfs moved as one in perfect lockstep. Two neat columns, armor catching the sun and standard snapping in the wind, they marched down onto the pier with the gravity of a diplomatic honor guard. Ghalrak led, chin high, eyes keen under the half-shaded visor. Zarrl paced two steps behind, counting cadence with the heel of his boot.

  The reception was…mixed. At the foot of the ramp, a knot of humans stood waiting. Some were officers in formal dress, others in business suits, all outnumbered by uniformed policemen and, standing conspicuously at the perimeter, a loose semicircle of heavily armed soldiers wearing helmets with reflective black visors. Kingley must’ve told someone we were comin’, Ghalrak thought. His eyes flicked to the human commander who, along with Hunley and a few others, was walking just a few paces behind and beside him and his men. He didn’t wait for her to make introductions—he fixed his gimlet stare on the group of humans, settled on the one who wore a uniform similar to Kingley’s but with more embellishments, and marched right up to him.

  “Take me,” he said, “to whoever’s in charge.”