Daughter of Smoke & Bone

48





PURE



Madrigal Kirin was Madrigal of the Kirin, one of the last winged tribes of the Adelphas Mountains. The Adelphas were the natural bastion between the Seraph Empire and the free holdings—the defended chimaera territory—and it had been centuries since anyone had dwelt safely in their peaks. The Kirin, flash-fast and superb archers, lasted longer than most. They were annihilated only a decade ago, when Madrigal was a child. She grew up in Loramendi, a child of towers and rooftops, not mountains.

Loramendi—the Cage, the Black Fortress, the Warlord’s Nest—was home to some million chimaera, creatures of all aspects who would never, but for the seraphim, have lived together or fought side by side, or even spoken the same language. Once, the races had been scattered, isolated, sometimes trading with one another, sometimes skirmishing—a Kirin like Madrigal having no more in common with an Anolis from Iximi, for example, than a wolf did with a tiger—but the Empire had changed all that. In naming themselves the world’s keepers, the angels had given the creatures of the land a common enemy, and now, centuries into their struggle, they shared heritage and language, history, heroes, a cause. They were a nation—of which the Warlord was leader, and Loramendi capital.

It was a port city, its broad harbor filled with warships, fishing vessels, and a stout trade fleet. Ripples in the surface of the water gave evidence of amphibious creatures who, part of the alliance, escorted the ships and fought on their side. The city itself, within the massive black walls and bars of the fortress, was shared by a multifarious population, and though they had been stirred together over the centuries, still they tended to settle in neighborhoods like with like, or near enough, and a caste system prevailed, based on aspect.

Madrigal was of high-human aspect, as was said of races with the head and torso of man or woman. Her horns were a gazelle’s, black and ridged, flowing up off her brow and back in a scimitar sweep. Her legs shifted at the knees from flesh to fur, the gazelle portion giving them an elegant, exaggerated length, so that when she stood to her full height she was nearly six feet, not including horns, and an undue portion of that was leg. She was slender as a stem. Her brown eyes, spaced wide, were as large and glistening as a deer’s but with none of a deer’s vacantness. They were keen and immediate and intelligent, leaping like sparks. Her face was oval, smooth and fair, her mouth generous and mobile, made for smiling.

By anyone’s measure, she was beautiful, though she made as little as possible of her beauty, keeping her dark hair short as fur and wearing no paint or ornament. It didn’t matter. She was beautiful, and beauty would be noticed.

Thiago had noticed.





Madrigal was hiding, though she would deny it if accused. She was on the roof of the north barracks, stretched out on her back like she’d fallen from the sky. Or, not the sky. If she had fallen from the sky, she would have landed on iron bars. She was within the Cage, on a rooftop, her wings splayed wide on either side of her.

All around, she felt the manic rhythms of the city, and heard and smelled them, too—excitement, preparations. Meat roasting, instruments being tuned. A firework test fizzled past like a misbegotten angel. She should have been preparing, too. Instead she lay on her back, hiding. She wasn’t dressed for festivity, but in her usual soldier’s leathers—breeches that fit like a skin to the knee, and a vest that laced in the back, accommodating wings. Her blades, shaped in homage to the sister moons, were at her sides. She looked relaxed, even limp, but her stomach was churning, her hands clasped in fists.

The moon wasn’t helping. Though the sun was out—it was full, effulgent afternoon—Nitid had already appeared in the sky, as if Madrigal actually needed a sign. Nitid was the bright moon, the elder sister, and there had been a belief among the Kirin that when Nitid rose early it meant she was eager, and that something was going to happen. Well, this evening something was certainly going to happen, but Madrigal did not yet know what.

It was up to her. Taut within her, her unmade decision felt like a bow strung too tight.

A shadow, a wing-stirred wind, and her sister Chiro was sweeping down to land beside her. “Here you are,” she said. “Hiding.”

“I’m not—” Madrigal started to protest, but Chiro wasn’t hearing it.

“Get up.” She kicked Madrigal’s hooves. “Up up up. I’ve come to take you to the baths.”

“Baths? Are you trying to tell me something?” Madrigal sniffed herself. “I’m almost sure I don’t smell.”

“Maybe not, but between shining cleanliness and not smelling, there is a vast gray area.”

Like Madrigal, Chiro had bat wings; unlike her, she was of creature aspect, with the head of a jackal. They were not blood sisters. When Madrigal was orphaned by the slave raid that claimed her tribe, the survivors had come to Loramendi—a handful of elders with the few babes they’d managed to hide in the caves, and Madrigal. She was seven, and had not been taken only because she wasn’t there. She’d been up the peak gathering the shed skins of air elementals from their abandoned nests, and had returned to ruin, corpses, loss. Her parents were among the taken, not the dead, and for a long time she had dreamed she would find them and set them free, but the Empire was vast, and swallowed its slaves whole, and it got harder to hold on to that dream as she grew up.

In Loramendi, Chiro’s family, of the desert Sab race, had been chosen to foster her chiefly because, being winged, they could keep up with her. She and Chiro had grown up side by side, as good as sisters in all but blood.

Chiro’s haunches were cat, caracal to be precise, and when she melted to a crouch beside Madrigal, her pose was sphinxlike. “For the ball,” she said, “I would hope that you would aspire to shining cleanliness.”

Madrigal sighed. “The ball.”

“You did not forget,” said Chiro. “Don’t pretend you did.”

She was right, of course. Madrigal had not forgotten. How could she?

“Up.” Chiro kicked her feet again. “Up up up.”

“Stop it,” muttered Madrigal, staying where she was and halfheartedly kicking back.

Chiro said, “Tell me you’ve at least got a dress and a mask.”

“When would I have gotten a dress and a mask? I’ve only been back from Ezeret for—”

“For a week, which is plenty of time. Honestly, Mad, it’s not like this is just another ball.”

Exactly, Madrigal thought. If it were, she wouldn’t be hiding on the roof, trying to block out the thing that loomed over her, that sent her heartbeat skittering like scorpion-mice whenever she thought of it. She would be getting ready, excited for the biggest festival of the year: the Warlord’s birthday.

“Thiago will be looking at you,” Chiro said, as if it could possibly have slipped her mind.

“Leering, you mean.” Leering, peering, licking his teeth, and waiting for a gesture.

“As you deserve to be leered at. Come on, it’s Thiago. Don’t tell me it doesn’t excite you.”

Did it? The general Thiago—“the White Wolf”—was a force of nature, brilliant and deadly, bane of angels and architect of impossible victories. He was also beautiful, and Madrigal’s flesh was ever unquiet around him, though she couldn’t exactly tell if it was arousal or fear. He had let it be known he was ready to marry again, and who it was he favored: her. His attention made her feel warm and skittish, pliant and inconsequential and at the same time rebellious, as if his overwhelming presence was something that needed to be worked against, lest she lose herself in the grand, consuming shadow of him.

It was left to her to encourage his suit or not. It wasn’t romantic, but she couldn’t say that it wasn’t exhilarating.

Thiago was powerful and as perfectly muscled as a statue, of high-human aspect, with legs that changed at the knees not to antelope legs as her own did, but to the huge padded paws of a wolf, covered in silken white fur. His hair was silken white too, though his face was young, and Madrigal had once glimpsed his chest, through a gap in the curtain of his campaign tent, and knew it, also, was furred white.

She’d been striding past as a steward rushed out, and she’d seen the general being suited in his armor. Flanked by attendants, his arms outstretched in the moment before his leather chestplate was fitted into place, his torso was a stunning V of masculine power, narrowing to slim hips, breeches clinging low beneath the ridges of perfect abdominal muscles. It was only a glimpse, but the image of him half-clad had stayed in Madrigal’s mind ever since. A whisper of a thrill came over her at the thought of him.

“Well, maybe a little excited,” she admitted, and Chiro giggled. The girlish sound struck a false note, and Madrigal thought with a pang that her sister was jealous. It made her more sensible of the honor of being Thiago’s choice. He could have anyone he wanted, and he wanted her.

But did she want him? If she did, truly, wouldn’t it be easy? Wouldn’t she be at the baths already, getting perfumed and oiled and daydreaming of his touch? A small shudder went through her. She told herself it was nerves.

“What do you think he would do if… if I rejected him?” she ventured.

Chiro was scandalized. “Reject him? You must be feverish.” She touched Madrigal’s brow. “Have you eaten today? Are you drunk?”

“Oh, stop,” said Madrigal, pushing Chiro’s hand away. “It’s just… I mean, can you picture, you know… being with him?” When Madrigal pictured it, she imagined Thiago heavy and breathing and… biting; it made her want to back into a corner. But then, she didn’t have much to go on by way of experience; maybe she was simply nervous, and altogether wrong about him.

“Why would I imagine it?” asked Chiro. “It’s not like he’d have me.” There was no detectable bitterness in her voice. If anything, it was a touch too bright.

She meant, of course, her aspect—chimaera races did intermarry, though such unions were restricted by aspect—but there was more to it than that. Even if she were high-human, Chiro would not satisfy Thiago’s other criterion. That one was not a matter of caste. It was his own fetish, and it was Madrigal’s luck—good luck or bad, she hadn’t yet decided—to qualify. Unlike Chiro’s, her own hands were not marked by the hamsas, with all that they signified. She had never awakened on a stone table to the lingering scent of revenant smoke. Her palms were blank.

She was still “pure.”

“It’s such hypocrisy,” she said. “His fetish for purity. He isn’t pure himself! He isn’t even—”

Chiro cut her off. “Yes, well, he’s Thiago, isn’t he? He can be whoever he wants. Unlike some of us.” There was a barb in that, directed at Madrigal, which accomplished what all her kicking had not. Madrigal sat up abruptly.

“Some of us,” she replied, “should learn to appreciate what they have. Brimstone said—”

“Oh, Brimstone said, Brimstone said. Has the almighty Brimstone deigned to give you any advice about Thiago?”

“No,” said Madrigal. “He has not.”

She supposed Brimstone must know that Thiago was courting her, if you could call it that, but he hadn’t brought it up, and she was glad. There was a sanctity in Brimstone’s presence, a purity of purpose possessed by no one else. His every breath was devoted to his work, his brilliant, beautiful, and terrible work. The underground cathedral, the shop with its dust-laden air pervaded by the whispering vibrations of thousands of teeth; not least its tantalizing doorway, and the world to which it led. It was, all of it, a fascination to Madrigal.

She spent as much of her free time with Brimstone as she could get away with. It had taken her years of badgering, but she had actually succeeded in getting him to teach her—a first for him—and she felt far more pride in his trust than she did in Thiago’s lust.

Chiro said, “Well, maybe you should ask him, if you really can’t decide what to do.”

“I’m not going to ask him,” said Madrigal, irritated. “I’ll deal with this myself.”

“Deal with it? Poor you with your problems. Not everyone gets such a chance, Madrigal. To be Thiago’s wife? To trade in leathers for silks, and barracks for a palace, to be safe, to be loved, to have status, to bear children and grow old…” Chiro’s voice was shaking, and Madrigal knew what she was going to say next. She wished she wouldn’t; she was already ashamed. Her problem was no problem at all, not to Chiro, who wore the hamsas.

Chiro, who knew what if felt like to die.

Chiro’s hand went with a flutter to her heart, where a seraph arrow had pierced her in the siege of Kalamet last year, and killed her. She said, “Mad, you have a chance to grow old in the skin you were born in. Some of us have only more death to look forward to. Death, death, and death.”

Madrigal looked at her own bare palms and said, “I know.”





49





TEETH



It was the secret at the core of the chimaera resistance, the thing that plagued angels, kept them awake at night, strummed at their minds and clawed at their souls. It was the answer to the mystery of beast armies that, like nightmares, kept coming and coming, never diminishing, no matter how many of them the seraphim slaughtered.

When Chiro took the arrow at Kalamet a year ago, Madrigal was at her side. She held her while she died, blood frothing at her sharp dog teeth as she kicked and jerked and finally fell still. Madrigal did what she had trained to do, and what she had done many times before, though never for so close a friend.

With steady hands, she lit the incense in the thurible that hung, lantern-like, from the end of her gleaning staff—the long, curved crook that chimaera soldiers carried strapped to their backs—and she waited as the smoke wreathed around Chiro. Arrows rained down, profuse and dangerously near, but she didn’t leave until it was done. Two minutes to be certain; that was the standard. Two minutes felt like two hours in the thickness of arrows, but Madrigal didn’t retreat. There might not be another chance. A furious seraph sally was driving them back from the Kalamet wall. She could drag Chiro’s body with her, or she could complete the gleaning and leave it behind.

What was not an option was to leave it with Chiro’s soul trapped in it.

When Madrigal did finally fall back, she took her foster sister’s soul with her, safe within her thurible, just one of many souls she would glean that day. The bodies were left to rot. Bodies were just bodies, just things.

Back in Loramendi, Brimstone would already be making new ones.





Brimstone was a resurrectionist.

He didn’t breathe life back into the torn bodies of the battle-slain; he made bodies. This was the magic wrought in the cathedral under the earth. Out of the merest relics—teeth—Brimstone conjured new bodies in which to sleeve the souls of slain warriors. In this way, the chimaera army held up, year after year, against the superior might of the angels.

Without him, and without teeth, the chimaera would fold. It wasn’t even a question. They would fall.





“This is for Chiro,” Madrigal had said, handing Brimstone a necklace of teeth. Human, bat, caracal, and jackal. She had labored over it for hours, neither sleeping nor eating since her return from Kalamet. Her eyelids were lead weights. She had handled every jackal tooth in the jar and listened to each until she was certain she had the most favorable—the cleanest, smoothest, sharpest, strongest. The same with the other teeth, and the gems strung with them: jade for grace, diamonds for strength and beauty. Diamonds were a luxury not usually accorded a common soldier, but Madrigal had used them defiantly, and Brimstone let her.

He needed only hold the necklace for a moment to see that it was correct. As he had taught her, she had strung teeth and gems in careful configuration for the conjuring of a body. If they were strung in a different order, the body would manifest accordingly: bat head, perhaps, instead of jackal, human legs instead of caracal. It was part recipe and part intuition, and Madrigal was certain this necklace was perfect.

Resurrected, Chiro would look almost exactly as she had in her original flesh.

“Well done,” Brimstone said, and then he did something rare: He touched her. One big hand came to rest briefly on the back of her neck before he turned away.

She blushed, proud; Issa saw and smiled. A “well done” from Brimstone was uncommon enough; the touch was something special. Everything between the two of them was uncommon, really, and hard-won on Madrigal’s part.

Brimstone was a hermit, rarely seen outside his domain in Loramendi’s west tower. When he did make an appearance, it was at the left hand of the Warlord, and he inspired equal reverence, though of a different sort. The two of them were living myths, almost gods. It was they, after all, who had orchestrated the uprising in Astrae that left their angel masters dead in lakes of blood, and the survivors foundering for years to come as the chimaera found their footing as a people and gouged huge swaths of land back from the Empire to establish the free holdings.

The Warlord’s role was clear—he had been the general, the face and voice of the rebellion, and he was beloved as the father of the allied races. But Brimstone’s part in things was shadowier, and his fearsome persona rendered him a figure of mystery and speculation, rather than adulation. He was the subject of many imaginative rumors—some of which hit on the truth, others nowhere near.

He did not, for example, eat humans.

He did have a doorway to their world, as Madrigal had occasion to learn firsthand when, at the age of ten, she was assigned to be his page.

The youth mistress selected her because of her wings; pure chance. She might as easily have chosen Chiro, but she didn’t. She chose Madrigal, three years an orphan, skinny and inquisitive and lonely, and sent her off with an abstracted command to do as she was told, and keep quiet about what she learned.

What was she going to learn? The secrecy of it at once set young Madrigal’s mind on fire, and it was with wide eyes and jitters that she presented herself in the west tower, to be ushered into the shop by a sweet-faced Naja woman—Issa—and offered tea. She accepted it but didn’t drink, so preoccupied was she with staring at everything: Brimstone, for one thing, bigger up close than she had imagined from her few distant glimpses of him. He hulked behind his desk, ignoring her. In the shadows, his tufted tail switched like a cat’s, making her nervous. She looked around at the shelves and dusty books; she looked at the broad door on its scrollwork bronze hinges that maybe, just maybe, opened to another world; and, of course, she looked at the teeth.

That was unexpected. Everywhere, the *ter-clack of teeth strings, the dusty jars of them, sharp teeth and blunt, huge and strange and tiny as hailstones. Her young fingers itched to touch, but no sooner did the thought enter her mind than, as if he heard it flittering there, Brimstone cut her a look with those slit-pupil eyes of his, and the impulse froze dead. Madrigal froze. He looked away, and she sat rigid for at least an entire minute before venturing one finger out to tap a curled boar tusk—

“Don’t.”

Oh, his voice! What a thing it was, deep as a catacomb. She should have been afraid, and maybe she was, a little, but the fire in her mind was primary. “What are they all for?” she asked, awed. The first question of many. Very, very many. Brimstone didn’t answer. He only finished the message he was writing out on thick cream paper and sent her off with it to the Warlord’s steward. That was all he wanted her for, to carry messages and run errands, to save Twiga and Yasri scurrying up and down the long spiral stairs. He certainly wasn’t looking for an apprentice.

But once Madrigal learned the fullness of his magic—resurrection! It was nothing less than immortality, the preservation of chimaera and all hope for their freedom and autonomy, forever—she was not content to be a page.

“I could dust the jars for you.”

“I could help. I could make some necklaces, too.”

“Are these alligator or crocodile? How can you tell?”

By way of proving her value, she presented him with sheaves of drawings of possible chimaera configurations. “Here’s a tiger with bull’s horns, see? And this one is a mandrill-cheetah. Could you make that? I bet I could make that.”

She was eager, piping. “I could help.”

Wistful, entranced. “I could learn.”

Determined, incorrigible. “I could learn.”

She didn’t understand why he wouldn’t teach her. Later, she would realize it was that he didn’t want to share the burden with anyone—that it was beautiful, what he did, but terrible, too, and the terrible bountifully outweighed the beautiful. But by the time she understood that, she didn’t care. She was in it.

“Here. Sort these,” Brimstone said to her one day, shoving a tray of teeth across his desk to her. She had been with him a few years, as page, and he had been steadfast in keeping her in that role. Until now.

Issa, Yasri, and Twiga all stopped what they were doing and swung their heads around to stare. Was it… a test? Brimstone ignored them, busy with something in his strongbox, and Madrigal, almost afraid to breathe, slid the tray in front of her and quietly got to work.

They were bear teeth. Brimstone probably expected her to sort them by size, but Madrigal had been watching him for years by then. She held each tooth and… listened to it. She listened with her fingertips, and picked out the few that didn’t feel right—decay, Brimstone told her later—discarded them, and shifted the others into piles by feeling, not size. When she slid the tray back to him, she had the tremendous satisfaction of seeing his eyes go wide and lift up to regard her in an entirely new way.

“Well done,” he told her then, for the first time. Her heart gave a strange surging pang while, in the corner, Issa dabbed at her eyes.

After that, and all the while pretending he was doing no such thing, he began to teach her.

She learned that magic was ugly—a hard bargain with the universe, a calculus of pain. A long time ago, medicine men had flagellated themselves, flaying open their own flesh to access the power of their agony, or even maiming themselves, crushing bones and setting them wrong on purpose to create lifelong reservoirs of pain. There had been a balance then, a natural check when it was one’s own harm that was harvested. Along the way, though, some sorcerers had worked ways to cheat the calculus and draw on the pain of others.

“That’s what teeth are for? A way to cheat?” It seemed a little unsporting. “Poor animals,” Madrigal murmured.

Issa gave her an unusually hard look. “Perhaps you would prefer to torture slaves.”

It was so awful, and so uncharacteristic, that Madrigal could only stare at her. It would be years before she learned what Issa meant—it would be the eve of her own death when Brimstone finally talked freely to her—and she would be ashamed that she had never figured it out for herself. His scars. That should have made it obvious—the network of scars, so ancient-seeming on his hide, fine crisscrossed whip splits all over his shoulders and back. But how could she have guessed? Even with all that she had seen—the sack of her mountain village, the dead and the lost, and the sieges she had fought in—she had no foundation for the horror that had been Brimstone’s early life, and he did not enlighten her then.

He taught her teeth and how to draw power from them, how to manipulate the residue of life and pain in them to bring forth bodies as real as natural flesh. It was a magic of his own devising, not something he’d learned, but invented, and the same with the hamsas. They weren’t tattoos at all, but a part of the very conjuring, so that bodies came into existence already marked, infused with magic in a way no natural body could be.

Revenants—as the resurrected were called—didn’t have to tithe pain for power; it was already done. The hamsas were a magical weapon paid for with the pain of their last death.

It was the lot of soldiers to die again and again. “Death, death, and death,” as Chiro put it. There were just never enough of them. New soldiers were always coming up—the children of Loramendi and all of the free holdings, trained from the time they could grip a weapon—but the battle tolls were high. Even with resurrection, chimaera existed at the edge of annihilation.

“The beasts must be destroyed,” thundered Joram after his every address to his war council; the angels were like the long shadow of death, and all chimaera lived in its chill.

When the chimaera won a battle, the gleaning was easy. The survivors went over land and city for all the corpses of the slain and drew out every soul to bring back to Brimstone. When they were defeated, though they risked death to save the souls of their fallen comrades, many were left behind and lost forever.

The incense in the thuribles lured the souls from their bodies. In a thurible, properly sealed, souls could be preserved indefinitely. In the open, prey to the elements, it was only a matter of days before they evanesced, teased apart like breath on wind, and ceased to exist.

Evanescence was not, in itself, a grim fate. It was the way of things, to be unmade; it happened in natural death, every day. And to a revenant who had lived in body after body, died death after death, evanescence could seem like a dream of peace. But the chimaera could ill afford to let soldiers go.

“Would you want to live forever,” Brimstone had asked Madrigal once, “only to die again and again, in agony?”

And over the years, she saw what it did to him, to thrust that fate on so many good creatures who were never let to go to their rest, how it bowed his head and wearied him and left him staring and morose.

Becoming a revenant was what Chiro spoke of, hard-eyed, while Madrigal tried to decide whether to marry Thiago. It was a fate she could choose now to escape. Thiago wanted her “pure”; he would see that she stayed that way—already, he was manipulating his commanders to keep her battalion away from danger. If she chose him, she would never bear the hamsas. She would never go into battle again.

And maybe that would be for the best—for herself, and for her comrades, too. She alone knew how unfit she was for it. She hated to kill—even angels. She had never told anyone what she’d done at Bullfinch two years earlier, sparing that seraph’s life. And not just sparing it, but saving it! What madness had come over her? She had bound his wound. She had caressed his face. A wave of shame always rose in her at the memory—at least she chose to call it shame that quickened her pulse and flushed her face with delicate color.

How hot the angel’s skin had been, like fever, and his eyes, like fire.

She was haunted with wondering if he had lived. She hoped he had not, and that any evidence of her treason had died right there, in the Bullfinch mist. Or so she told herself.

It was only in moments of waking, with the lace edge of a dream still light in her grasp, that the truth came clear. She dreamed the angel alive. She hoped him alive. She denied it, but it persisted, rising in flashes to startle her, always accompanied by a quickening of the blood, a flush, and strange, rushing frissons of sensation all the way to her fingertips.

She sometimes thought that Brimstone knew. Once or twice when the memory had caught her unaware, that rush and shiver, he had looked up from his work as if something had captured his attention. Kishmish, perched on his horn, would look, too, and both of them would stare at her unblinking. But whatever Brimstone knew or didn’t know, he never said a word about it, just as he didn’t say a word about Thiago, though he had to know that Madrigal’s choice was heavy in her mind.

And that evening, at the ball, it would be decided, one way or the other.

Something is going to happen.

But what?

She told herself that when she stood before Thiago, she would know what to do. Blush and curtsy, dance with him, play the shy maiden while smiling an unmistakable invitation? Or stand aloof, ignore his advances, and remain a soldier?

“Come on,” said Chiro, shaking her head as if Madrigal were a lost cause. “Nwella will have something you can wear, but you’ll have to take what she gives you, and no complaining.”

“All right,” sighed Madrigal. “To the baths, then. To make ourselves shiningly clean.”

Like vegetables, she thought, before they go in the stew.