It made Teddy Da's fur stand up to see it again, even in miniature.

  It had changed and grown; when he'd visited so many centuries ago, there had just been Kitty Hawk's tower at the center. The top of her tower was still visible, but it was surrounded by the new spires, the courtyards, inner walls, gardens, and outer walls of a massive sea-castle.

  “It covers the whole island?” Juan Chang asked.

  “It is the island,” Mei Corina said. “More precisely, it's an ossified coral-craft reef that grows from the bottom of fifty-fathom waters and forms a castle at the very top. It's stronger than anything we ever crafted for the nobles. Golems could beat on those walls for days and never crack them.”

  “Then how are w-”

  “Once Baba Yaga is close, I'll shape her automata to make us a bridge over the outer walls.”

  “Will we do this at night?” Juan Chang asked. “So that we can have surprise on our side?”

  “Night, day, it won't matter. They'll see us coming. The castle's Archive is twin-entangled to a thousand copper-bloods – fish, birds, even eyes that grow like barnacles on the walls. The Archive of the Coral Castle sees through them all and sees everything for miles around.”

  “And the defenses?” Juan Chang asked.

  “The greatest threat is the fierce Barbary Guard. They're gigantic, witch-sped apes with iron-hard knuckles and lightning quick, pummeling fists. There's hundreds of them, but they're controlled with pheromones.”

  “Phero-whats?” Molly asked.

  “Powerful, witchy scents that trigger programmed responses,” Corina said. “The apes are witch-writ to respond to the smell of them. It's how the witches of the castle give them orders, and it's how we'll give them orders, too.”

  “Are you coming to guide us?” Teddy Da asked.

  “I'll stay here and control Baba Yaga's sands. Molly will guide you.”

  “Vora says she knows the way to the dungeon where Corina's friends are,” Molly said.

  “And,” Corina added, “she'll take you to the Great Hall, too.”

  “What's there?” Teddy Da asked. Corina paused before she answered him.

  “In the Great Hall,” she said, “is the crystal-cast body of Kitty Hawk.” The bear felt a rumbling in his throat.

  “And why do we need that?” Teddy Da asked.

  “Because wherever she goes is the true Coral Castle,” Corina said. “And because I know something about Kitty Hawk that only one other witch knows – she's still alive.”

  Teddy Da's fur felt like it was on fire. It was a lie. It had to be. “Snicker-Snack.” His claws tore at the yard-tall model castle so quickly and so furiously that the witchy sands couldn't reform themselves, and it collapsed. Seconds after he stopped, the sands remembered their shape, and the Coral Castle began to rise again in front of him again. He didn't tear at it a second time, but as he watched the walls and the towers rebuild themselves, a growl rose from deep in his throat. “It's a lie,” he snarled at the castle. “Kitty Hawk is dead. I gutted her myself.”

  *****

  The five-hundred-year-old fur-belly sat with Molly, Juan Chang, and Corina on the top of Baba Yaga's central tower. They passed around a bladder full of the Stitchlife's mead and drank until the Damoclesian moon rose to night's nameless noon and threatened to fall on top of them.

  Kitty Hawk's creature held the fluid-filled sack gently in his paws and poured the mead into his open mouth. After he swallowed and his black tongue licked his lips, he said, “She grew me in a glass pickle vat hidden in the back room of a pet store in a long-dead city called Istanbul. The first thing I ever saw was The Witch on her knees. She was surrounded by soldiers, and she laughed at them. One of them said, “Hajume Oto, aka Li Mei Huang, aka Kitty Hawk, aka The Witch, for violations of the Tokyo Bioweapons Convention and for Crimes Against Humanity, you are hereby sentenced to death.” She cackled as their bullet loosed her pale blue color.

  “They cursed and called her a copper-blood copy, but I didn't know what that meant yet, so I burst from my glass womb and spoke my first words. 'Snicker-Snack,' I avenged her.

  Later, when I learned what she had done to the world, I understood two things. First, the cackling crone who died as I was born wasn't Kitty Hawk. Second, Kitty Hawk deserved to die.

  “She united the old Science and the ancient secrets into her Stitchlife craft and used it to make my giant brothers. They were her weapons, and she used them as threats to help her reshape a world she thought was broken beyond change by any other means. But her Gargantuans were uncontrollable; they destroyed everything man had made. The mile-tall Lizard King. Pollitux, the Leather-Wing. There were many, many more giants she birthed, and they crushed and burned the world. Their stomping feet, their burning breath, and the wind from their wings ended everything man had built. Kitty Hawk wanted to be the world's Witch-Queen, but her children became the terrible, Gargantuan Kings of the earth and what they did – what she did – unmade a thousand years of progress.

  “I wandered the rubble in the last years of their reign. My brothers were a plague, and anywhere man rose in the ruins they made, they appeared to crush him again. She made them to be short-lived, and after fifty years, my brothers disappeared into the sea or folded their wings and turned to dust, but the damage had already been done.

  “I made my way from Istanbul to Shanghai and back. I saw Barragor's bones in Jerusalem. His ribs were a skeleton temple, and his spine curved a mile high over the ruins of that ancient city where he died jealously guarding its broken stones. The husks of Ocho, the eight-thousand leg horde covered Mumbai and Nha Trang, too. Everywhere was ruin. Man huddled in the rubble-filled fringes of the dead cities or lived near-feral in the growing wilds.

  “The third time I wandered East, a century after my birth, I saw the sea-tower of the Coral Castle newly-grown off the coast and when I did, I knew I'd found Kitty Hawk. I swam the salty waters to her tower, and as the waves battered me against the walls, I sank my claws in and climbed to a window. I killed her witch-sped Barbary Guard one by one while her apprentices fled and hid. At the very top, I claw-cut my way through the witch-bone door and found her waiting for me. The same cackling, old, bone-wreathed crone that died at my birth embraced me with a mother's love. She called me 'the prodigal bear'. She said she always knew I'd find my way home to her. She told me that all my brothers had died, but that she knew I'd live. 'For a thousand years', she said, because that was how she wrote me. She said she'd rewritten herself with what she'd leaned making me and that now, she'd live for many centuries, too.

  “Man was rising again, she said, and he would need to be ruled. She showed me my growing brothers. The embryos were already ten-yards-tall where they slumbered, curled in enormous, veined sacks. I told her that my new brothers would be a plague like the last of them, but she wouldn't hear the truth of it. 'This time they'll be smart like you,' she said, 'This time, I'll be able to control their power.'

  “I told her she was wrong. I told her that her creatures would destroy everything again. What was left of it. She laughed her cackle-cry. Even as I spoke the words she tied to my claws and cut her down, her laughter never ceased. I killed The Witch. I killed Kitty Hawk. Her blood was iron-red like yours. She was no copper-blood copy. I am a wretched, mother-murdering creature, but know I speak the truth when I tell you this: Kitty Hawk is dead.”

  They all sat in silence while the bear wept.

  “That's a sad story,” Corina said, “There's a story they tell the littlest apprentices of the Coral Castle when they want them to be good. It has an ending that's less sad than yours. The story goes that Kitty Hawk's talking bear came to the Coral Castle because he'd seen her destroy the world and feared she'd do it again. He killed the witch-sped apes of her Barbary Guard, but Kitty Hawk was clever: she hid inside the shell of a giant clam and had her red-blooded, half-script clone meet the bear when he came for her. The bear took the half-script for his mother. While he cried rivers of tears, he killed his mother to save the world from her terrible power. Kitty Hawk watched and listened until her weeping, blood-sticky bear threw himself from the top of the Coral Castle and into the sea. The Witch was so moved by what her littlest monster had done that she swore her ancient oath then and there. Kitty Hawk gave up the quest of power and swore that her Stitchlife craft would only be used to rebuild the world she'd destroyed.” Corina smiled at the blinking bear. “You thought you killed your mother, little Gargantuan, but you were wrong. To this day, you thought your claws murdered her, but it was you and your vorpal claws that truly birthed Kitty Hawk and the Oath of the Stitchlife Witches.”

  “She truly lived?” the bear asked. “And she swore that oath as you said?”

  “As I said, Fur-Belly, they tell the story of the prodigal bear to scare the youngest apprentices in the Castle. They tell it so every Stitchlife Witch knows that if they break Kitty Hawk's oath to serve mankind, then Kitty Hawk's bear will return to the Coral Castle again and gut them without mercy.”

  Chapter Two

  Stealing Witches

  Hala Zamis had reigned for a century, and she'd had many supporters, but after Hilde Conac exposed her role in a rebel cabal plotting against the will of the castle, the Stitchlife Conac took the throne of the Coral Castle for herself.

  The rebel witches claimed that the Stitchlifes no longer followed Kitty Hawk's oath to serve mankind. They claimed that since Kitty Hawk had died, the Stitchlifes had only served the nobles and their power and that this wasn't what Kitty Hawk intended.

  Fools, Hilde Conac thought. The Coral Castle had survived through all the centuries and all the wars between the noble families precisely because they served Power. Whatever happened, whichever family rose above the others, the Witches would always be kept safe because they served not one noble family, but all of them, and through the nobles they served mankind. Hilde Conac was glad that her dangerously naïve predecessor and her conspirators were now safely locked away in the deepest dungeons of the Coral Castle because now, the witches had a new Queen who understood Power.

  Serving the nobles and serving stability was serving mankind, and that was the Will Of The Castle.

  The Archive woke Hilde Conac in the middle of the night and directed her attention to a ship approaching from over the horizon to the East. While she sat inside the tower-top lab that had once been Kitty Hawk's own, Hilde Conac's wreath showed her the view from a copper-blooded gull. Its eyes were written for day, and at night, all they could show her was a dark shape moving West across the starlit ocean. The gull was just over the horizon, and as it circled the approaching ship, the Stitchlife Conac didn't know exactly what she was looking at, but she knew that soon enough, it would be closer and her spyglass would see it clearly by starlight and show her what the gull's pinprick eyes couldn't make out in darkness.

  Hilde Conac walked to the opposite side of the lab and out to the balcony where the spyglass rested. Her hand slid up its bony spine to a knobby protrusion beneath its enormous, five-foot-long, telescope head. Its corneas were a yard-wide in the front and tapered to an inch at the rear. Looking in the back of its head and out through the front she could see for miles, but the creature had no eyes for its own use. So with gentle pushes of her hand on the bony knob behind its neck, she guided it. Its heart beat only once a minute and it walked slowly on elephantine legs as she led it around the tower's circular balcony so it could point the long shaft of its bone-shelled head at the oddity.

  She settled the spyglass into position on the East side of the tower. After it sat on its tailless, pale-blue rump and locked its front legs for stability, the Stitchlife Conac's bony hand guided the creature's swiveling head to her target.

  Breaking the far-off, hazy horizon's line, silhouetted against the quickly lightening sky, it looked like a castle-keep on the edge of the world. As it sailed closer, she saw that the castle was clearly set atop an oar-driven ship. The line of it looked different than it had through the gull's eyes. In just a few minutes, the shape of it had changed. It was changing still.

  Her view of the ship's stern was mostly blocked by the castle, but she spied enough of it to see that as she watched, it was growing shorter. The edges of the ship blurred slightly like sand was blowing over them. Hilde Conac softly stroked the spyglass's head from back to front, and inside the bone shell, muscles contacted and increased the magnification. Its heart beat once, and the view was lost for a moment, but when she saw closer and clearer, Hilde Conac realized sands actually were blowing over the ship. They moved from the steadily shortening stern of the ship to the bow where they piled themselves in a bulbous-tipped, high-set prow, like a twenty-yard-wide figurehead.

  Only cellular automata moves like that, she thought.

  The whole ship was made of it. Hilde Conac doubted her eyes because she'd never seen so much automata at once. It was more than she'd ever seen in two centuries of golems and avatars, and here it was, all in one place, coming right at the Coral Castle.

  She pointed her spyglass's head at the witchy ship's tallest tower and saw silhouetted figures against the rose sky. Her hand coaxed the creature to magnify, and she immediately recognized the bulging band that ringed one of the figures' heads. A Stitchlife's wreath. On one side of the far-off witch was a tall, cloaked figure. On the other side was what appeared to be a girl-child. Also wearing a wreath. And braids jutting up like a demon's horns. Next to her was a short, fur-edged creature. When it turned its head and she saw its shape more clearly, it made her remember a story she'd first heard two hundred years ago. Hilde Conac's heart beat faster with childhood fear.

  Kitty Hawk's bear was returning to the Coral Castle.

  *****

  The thick-skulled Barbary Guard watched the approaching ship from the top of the outer walls. The very sight of strangers was enough to raise snarling growls, but when Hilde Conac smashed a vial of pheromone, it drove them into a maddened battle rage. The seven-foot-tall apes roared, beat their fur-covered, barrel-chests, and showed their long teeth to the strange ship in the waters below.

  They followed it around the outer walls of the Coral Castle in a howling pack. When it stopped on the West side and floated fifty yards off the tightly shut doors of the castle's only dock, they expected the invaders to ram their way in. Half of the apes jumped from the tops of the walls into the gardens below and descended the stairs to the dock. The other half prepared to leap from the outer walls onto the ship if it came any closer.

  None of the simian beasts expected to see the uncanny mass on the prow of the ship change shape and form a bridge over the outer walls. A curl at the end of it unrolled like a tongue and extended over the gardens and the inner walls, all the way to the Queen's tower.

  The sandy bridge was high over their heads, and even the mighty leaps of the apes' powerful, witch-writ legs couldn't spring them to reach it. The smell of the invaders as they passed was maddening.

  One of the oldest apes, one with coarse, grayed fur and long, stitched-up claw scars across his torso, smelled something familiar in the scent-mix that the wind carried down from above: the smell of the bear that gave him his four-hundred-year-old scars. It made the stink of the old ape's fear rise in the salty air, and when the apes on either side of him tasted it, they sank their long teeth into his flesh and pummeled him with their mighty fists. Then they threw his bloody, gray-furred body into the ocean so the stink was gone from their ranks.

  Their blood-sticky feet left blue hand-prints on the coral-craft stone as they jumped from the walls and ran the long path to the Queen's tower. That's where they saw the invaders were going, and the apes were eager to tear them apart.

  *****

  Juan Chang led, and Molly followed his red-cloak as it whip-snapped in his witch-sped wake. When they passed over the Barbary Guard atop the outer walls, she heard their frustrated growls and blood-hungry howls. She thought it would take them time to reach the top of the Queen's tower, and Molly was surprised to see a pair of apes run out across the balcony to meet them.

  Teddy Da surged ahead, jumped, and flung himself at the first of the black-furred Barbaries. His claws tore so deeply through the thick-muscled flesh, fur, and bone that the roaring ape's cry turned to a gurgling moan as his lungs met the salted sea air. The second of them raised a blue-skinned, callous-knuckled fist to pummel him, but Juan Chang was close behind the fur-belly, and his heavy-bladed hunting knife swung so insistently that by the time the ape's closed fist fell, the Barbary wielded only a spurting stump. The ape lifted his other fist high to crush his attacker's crown, but nine Populist sabers made a pin-cushion of his enormous heart.

  Drops of pale blue color hung in the air, and Molly darted through it, chasing the figure she saw disappear out the witch-bone doors. She dashed under the high-vaulted ceiling of Kitty Hawk's ancient laboratory, across the syn-womb and organ-filled room and reached her fingers into the narrowing crack of the doors before they closed. The doors were stronger than she was, and Molly couldn't stop them from closing until Teddy Da's claws slashed at the muscled hinges. Copper-blood spattered them both as tendons and muscles whipped out from where they'd been cut and sprayed radially in the air. After that, the doors swung open with ease.

  Molly and Teddy Da caught Hilde Conac only steps beyond the door. The Stitchlife's eyes widened with terror when she saw the bear. Juan Chang joined them in the hallway only half a heartbeat later. “The Stitchlife Conac,” he said. “I'm Juan Chang, and Mei Corina sends her greetings.”

  Hilde Conac growled like a Barbary as they brought her back inside her lab. Only moments after they closed the doors tight, the animal cries grew close outside. Then, the pounding of the Barbaries' huge fists threatened to bounce Juan Chang's musketeers off the doors they struggled to hold shut.