Daughter of Smoke & Bone

18





BATTLE NOT WITH MONSTERS



“Girl?” Izîl squinted up at Akiva. “You… you mean Karou?”

Karou? Akiva knew that word. It meant hope in the language of the enemy. So not only did she bear the hamsas, she had a chimaera name. “Who is she?” he demanded.

Clearly terrified, the old man pulled himself up a little straighter. “Why do you want to know, angel?”

“I’m asking the questions,” said Akiva. “And I suggest you answer them.” He was impatient to get on and meet the others, but loathe to leave with this mystery hanging over him. If he didn’t find out who the girl was now, he would never know.

Eager to be helpful, Razgut supplied, “She tastes like nectar and salt. Nectar and salt and apples. Pollen and stars and hinges. She tastes like fairy tales. Swan maiden at midnight. Cream on the tip of a fox’s tongue. She tastes like hope.”

Akiva was stone-faced, unreasonably disturbed by the thought of this abomination tasting the girl. He waited until Razgut gibbered into silence before he said, his voice low in his throat, “I didn’t ask what she tastes like. I asked who she is.”

Izîl shrugged, fluttering his hands in an effort at nonchalance. “She’s just a girl. She draws pictures. She’s nice to me. What more can I tell you?”

His voice was glib, and Akiva saw that he thought he could protect her. It was noble, and laughable. Having no time to waste playing games, he decided on a more drastic approach. He seized Izîl by his shirtfront and Razgut by one of his jagged bone spurs and leapt airborne with the pair of them, hauling their combined weight as if it were nothing.

It was only a matter of wingbeats before all of Marrakesh glimmered below them. Izîl was screaming, his eyes squeezed shut, but Razgut was silent, his face displaying such unutterable longing it shot pity into Akiva’s heart like a splinter—more painful, indeed, than the shard of wood Karou had stabbed him with. It surprised him. Over the years he had learned to deaden himself, and he had lived so long with the deadness that he believed pity and mercy were extinguished in him, but tonight he had experienced dull stabs of both.

Slowly spiraling downward like a bird of prey, he brought the two to rest on the domed peak of the city’s tallest minaret. They scrabbled to hold on and failed, sliding down its slick surface, paddling frenziedly for handholds and footholds before coming to rest against a low, decorative parapet that was all that kept them from plummeting over the edge, several hundred feet to the rooftops of the mosque below.

Izîl’s face was gray, his breathing thin. When Razgut shifted himself on the old man’s back, they teetered perilously close to the edge. Izîl let out a stream of panicked commands to stay low, not shift, hang on to something.

Akiva stood over them. Behind him, the serrated ridge of the Atlas Mountains shone in the moonlight. Breezes teased the flame-feathers that made up his wings, setting them dancing, and his eyes were the muted glow of embers. “Now. If you wish to live, tell me what I want to know. Who is the girl?”

Izîl, with a horror-struck glance over the edge of the roof, answered in a rush. “She’s nothing to you, she’s innocent—”

“Innocent? She bears the hamsas, traffics teeth for the devil sorcerer. She doesn’t seem innocent to me.”

“You don’t know. She is innocent. She just runs errands for him. That’s all.”

Was that all she was, some kind of servant? It didn’t explain the hamsas. “Why her?”

“She’s the Wishmonger’s foster daughter. He raised her from a baby.”

Akiva processed this. “Where did she come from?” He knelt to bring his face closer to Izîl’s. It felt very important that he know.

“I don’t know. I don’t! One day she was just there, cradled in his arm, and after that she was always there, no explanations. Do you think Brimstone told me things? If he had, maybe I would still be a man instead of a mule!” He gestured to Razgut and fell into lunatic laughter. “ ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ Brimstone said, but I didn’t listen, and look at me now!” Tears sprang to the wrinkled corners of his eyes as he laughed and laughed.

Akiva was rigid. Trouble was, he believed what the hunchback said. Why would Brimstone tell his human minions anything, especially mad fools like this? But if Izîl didn’t know, what hope did Akiva have of finding out? The old man was his only lead, and he had lingered too long already.

“Then tell me where to find her,” he said. “She was friendly with you. Surely you know where she lives.”

Woe flickered in the old man’s eyes. “I can’t tell you that. But… but… but I can tell you other things. Secret things! About your own kind. Thanks to Razgut, I know far more of seraphim than I do of chimaera.”

He was bargaining, still hoping to protect Karou. Akiva said, “You think there’s anything you can tell me about my kind?”

“Razgut has stories—”

“The word of the Fallen. Has he even told you why he was exiled?”

“Oh, I know why,” said Izîl. “I wonder if you do.”

“I know my history.”

Izîl laughed. One cheek was pressed flat against the dome of the minaret, and his laugh came out as a wheeze. He said, “Like mold on books, grow myths on history. Maybe you should ask someone who was there, all those centuries ago. Maybe you should ask Razgut.”

Akiva cast a cold eye over the quivering Razgut, who was whispering his unceasing chant of “Take me home, please, brother, take me home. I have repented, I have been punished enough, take me home….”

Akiva said, “I don’t need to ask him anything.”

“Ah, no? I see. A man once said, ‘All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.’ Mark Twain, you know. He had a fine mustache. Men of wisdom so often do.”

Something in the old man was shifting as Akiva watched. He saw him lift up his head to peer out over the stone lip that was keeping him from sliding to his death. His madness seemed to have abated, if indeed it hadn’t all been an act to begin with. He was gathering up the tatters of his courage, which, under the circumstances, was not unimpressive. He was also stalling.

“Make this easy, old man,” said Akiva. “I didn’t come here to kill humans.”

“Why did you come? Even the chimaera don’t trespass here. This world is no place for monsters—”

“Monsters? Well, then. I am not a monster.”

“No? Razgut doesn’t think he is, either. Do you, monster of mine?”

He asked it almost fondly, and Razgut cooed, “Not a monster. A seraph, a being of smokeless fire, yes, forged in another age, in another world.” He was looking hungrily at Akiva. “I’m like you, brother. I’m just like you.”

Akiva did not enjoy the comparison. He said, “I’m nothing like you, cripple,” in an acid tone that made Razgut flinch.

Izîl reached up to pat the arm that was like a vise around his own neck. “There, there,” he said, his voice ringing hollow of compassion. “He can’t see it. It is a condition of monsters that they do not perceive themselves as such. The dragon, you know, hunkered in the village devouring maidens, heard the townsfolk cry ‘Monster!’ and looked behind him.”

“I know who the monsters are.” Akiva’s tiger eyes darkened. How well he knew. The chimaera had reduced the meaning of life to war. They came in a thousand bestial forms, and no matter how many of them you killed, more always came, and more.

Izîl replied, “A man once said, ‘Battle not with monsters lest you become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’ Nietzsche, you know. Exceptional mustache.”

“Just tell me—” Akiva began, but Izîl cut him off.

“Have you ever asked yourself, do monsters make war, or does war make monsters? I’ve seen things, angel. There are guerrilla armies that make little boys kill their own families. Such acts rip out the soul and make space for beasts to grow inside. Armies need beasts, don’t they? Pet beasts, to do their terrible work! And the worst is, it’s almost impossible to retrieve a soul that has been ripped away. Almost.” He gave Akiva a keen look. “But it can be done, if ever… if ever you decide to go looking for yours.”

Fury flashed through Akiva. Sparks rained from his wings, to be borne by breezes over the rooftops of Marrakesh. “Why would I do that? Where I come from, old man, a soul’s as useless as teeth to the dead.”

“Spoken, I think, by one who still remembers what it was like to have one.”

Akiva did remember. His memories were knives, and he was not pleased to have them turned against him. “You should worry about your own soul, not mine.”

“My soul is clean. I’ve never killed anyone. But you, oh you. Look at your hands.”

Akiva didn’t take the bait, but he did curl his fingers reflexively into fists. The bars were etched along the tops of his fingers: Each represented an enemy slain, and his hands bore a terrible tally.

“How many?” Izîl asked. “Do you even know, or have you lost count?”

Gone entirely was the quivering madman Akiva had hauled up off the cobbles of the plaza. Izîl was sitting up now, or as near as he could come to it, encumbered as he was by Razgut, who looked back and forth in distress between his human mule and the angel he hoped had come to save him.

In fact, Akiva knew the precise number of kills recorded on his hands. “What about you?” he threw back at Izîl. “How many teeth, over the years? I don’t suppose you kept count.”

“Teeth? Ah, but I only took teeth from the dead!”

“And you sold them to Brimstone. You know what that makes you? A collaborator.”

“Collaborator? They’re just teeth. He makes necklaces, I saw him. Just teeth on strings!”

“You think he’s making necklaces? Fool. You’ve had everything to do with our war, but you were too stupid to see it. You tell me that battling with monsters has made me a monster? Doing business with devils, what has that made you?”

Izîl stared at him, mouth hanging open, then stated in a rush of sudden understanding, “You know. You know what he does with the teeth.”

Bitterly, Akiva breathed, “Yes, I know.”

“Tell me—”

“Shut up!” Akiva commanded as the final tether of his patience snapped. “Tell me where to find her. Your life is nothing to me. Do you understand?” He heard the brutality in his own voice and saw himself as if from without, looming over these poor, broken creatures. What would Madrigal think if she could see him now? But she couldn’t, could she? And that was the point.

Madrigal was dead.

The old man was right. He was a monster, but if he was, it was because of the enemy. Not just a lifetime at war—that hadn’t managed to make Akiva what he was. It was one act that had done this, one unspeakable act that he could never forget or forgive, and for which, in vengeance, he had vowed to destroy a kingdom. He hissed. “Do you think I can’t make you talk?”

To which Izîl replied with a smile, “No, angel. I don’t think you can.” And then he pitched himself off the minaret, carrying Razgut with him, to fall two hundred feet and shatter against the roof tiles below.