Days of Blood & Starlight

67


THE ONLY HOPE IS HOPE


Amzallag bulled forward and fell to his knees before Issa. “Who?” he asked, almost whispering. “Who went into the cathedral?” A few other soldiers leaned forward with intense, restrained yearning.

“Thousands.” Issa’s voice was tender. “There was no time to make a record. I’m sorry.”

Karou stepped forward. “All the children went,” she said, looking to Issa for confirmation. “And all the mothers. The chances are very good for your families.”

Amzallag looked stunned. On his tiger features “stunned” came across as a wide-eyed version of his constant ferocity—ferocity that was more Karou’s doing than his. His soul was as plain as tilled earth and as steady as a carthorse, but with this body she had given him he could hardly help but look ferocious. His jaws with their kitchen-knife fangs were agape and his deep orange eyes were unblinking. Although he was kneeling—his stag forelegs buckled before him and tiger haunches bunched in a crouch—he still towered above Issa, and his arms, when he reached for her hands, were huge and gray. Before he sees his family again, Karou thought, I can give him a gentler form.

But that was getting ahead of herself. Way ahead.

While Amzallag’s big hands took Issa’s, Karou watched Thiago. When Amzallag said “Thank you,” in a voice like the saddest pull of a violin, Thiago’s fangs showed in a fleeting snarl.

“I am only a messenger,” said Issa.

At that, Thiago’s eyes slid from her to Karou. “Tell us again,” he said, “how exactly that was accomplished.”

“How what was accomplished?” Issa asked. Amzallag released her hands and rose, turning himself with smooth tiger movements to stand at her side—and Karou’s side—across the court from the Wolf. The move was deliberate, and sent a clear message of allegiance. Karou’s feeling of triumph was compromised, however, by the inquisition she felt coming.

“How you arrived among us,” Thiago said. “One morning, here you were. It is very strange.”

“Strange it may be, but I can’t satisfy you. The last thing I remember before waking is, of course, dying.”

“And where was it Brimstone planned to send your soul, in the grip of his squall? You must know that at least.”

Karou interrupted. “Is this all you have to say? We’ve just told you that thousands of our people can still be saved, and you talk of squalls? Thiago, our children can live again. This is enormous news. Can’t you be glad?”

“My gladness, my lady, is tempered with realism, as yours should be. Live where? Live how? This changes nothing.”

“It changes everything!” she cried. “Everything you’re doing is hopeless. Can’t you see? It is futureless. This brutality, the civilian attacks? Your father would be sick. Everything you do to the seraphim, Joram will return a hundredfold, a thousandfold.” She was appealing to the host now. “Did Thisalene give you satisfaction? The angels must die?” She pinpointed Tangris and Bashees, and fought against the fear that would have snatched her voice right back into her throat. To call out the Shadows That Live? Was she mad? Remember the chicken impression, she told herself with a surge of hysteria.

“In Thisalene,” she said, “you slew a hundred angels.” The sphinxes met her look in their inscrutable way. “And hundreds of chimaera died for it.” One sphinx blinked. Karou continued, taking in the others. Oh, her heart, it was beating furious-fast. “And the rest of you. You let them die. You gave them hope—the Warlord’s smiles, the messages. We are arisen? And then? All those folk of the south, they couldn’t believe that you would start this fight, call the enemy down on them in such impossible numbers, only to abandon them. Do you know…” Karou swallowed. Her own cruelty felt icy, spiky, to put it to them like this. “Do you know that they died watching the sky for you?”

She saw Bast take a stagger-step back. Some others were breathing as though their throats had gone tight. Virko was staring at the ground.

“Don’t listen to this,” snarled Ten. “She can’t know what happened there.”

“I do know what happened,” said Karou. She hesitated. Was it betrayal to tell of Balieros’s defiance? He would tell them, if he were here; she felt sure of it. The future of the rebellion hung in the balance, and she had this weight to slam heavy on the scale. How could she not use it? “Because one team did what none of the rest of you would. Do you really believe Balieros and Ixander, Viya, Azay, and Minas succumbed to some town guard? They died fighting Dominion in the south. They died defending chimaera. While you were doing what?”

The sun was climbing, the heat growing heavy. The court was bright and still. Thiago answered her. “While we were doing what the angels were doing, and yet it’s us you scathe, not them. Would you have us lie down and bare our throats to them?”

“No.” Karou swallowed. This was difficult ground she was treading: how to argue for a different course without coming across as some starry-eyed peacenik—naive at best, an enemy sympathizer at worse, which they already believed she was. It all came down to this: She could offer them no real alternative to fighting. When she had dreamed together with Akiva of the world remade, she had believed that he would bring his people forward as she would somehow bring hers—as if the future were some country they could meet in, a land with different rules, where the past might be overcome—or overlooked?—like a seraph knuckle tally erased from the skin.

Now, on the outside of the bubble of that foolish love, Karou saw how grim their dream would have become had they been left to pursue it, how dirty, how bruised. Those tally marks would never have faded. They would have remained always—between herself and Akiva, chimaera and seraphim—and the hamsas would, too. They couldn’t even touch properly. To have believed that they might join two such sets of hands together, the dream seemed madder than ever. And yet… the only hope is hope. Brimstone’s words, back then and again now, as gifted her by Issa.

“Daughter of my heart,” was the message Brimstone had sent just for Karou. She wanted to cry again right here in the court, thinking of it. “Twice-daughter, my joy. Your dream is my dream, and your name is true. You are all of our hope.”

Her dream. A dream dirty and bruised is better than no dream at all. But she had had Akiva then, and the hope that he might bring the seraphim to their new way of living. What did she have now? Nothing to promise, and no plan. Nothing but her name.

“No,” she said again. “I would not have us bare our throats. Nor would I have you thrust our people to their knees in your rush to slaughter theirs. Nor would I have you leave our future buried under the ash, so that you might bury theirs.”

Thiago’s eyes narrowed as he tried but couldn’t at once find words to answer that.

Karou went on. “Brimstone once told me that to stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength. If we let them turn us into monsters…” She looked at Amzallag, the gray hue of his flesh, at Nisk and Lisseth, who stood just behind Thiago, still recognizable as Naja but with none of Issa’s beauty and grace. At all the others, overlarge, overfanged, winged and clawed, and unnatural. She had done this, the literal work of turning these chimaera into the monsters the angels believed them to be.

“Someone has to stop killing,” she implored Thiago. “Someone has to stop first.”

“Let it be them, then,” he said, so cold, his lips trembling with the effort not to fall into a full wolf snarl. His fury was palpable.

“We can only decide for ourselves. At least we can stop the assaults long enough to think of another way, instead of making it worse, always worse.”

“We are destroyed, Karou. It can’t get any worse.”

“It can. It has. The Hintermost? The Tane? What is Razor doing right now, and how will it be answered? It can get worse until there is no one left. Or maybe… maybe it can get better.” Again Akiva’s words came into her head, and again Karou spoke them, this time without blushing. “Eretz will have chimaera in it or not, depending on what we do now.”

And that was when the Shadows That Live spread their silent wings and lifted with the grace of dreams and nightmares to float over the heads of their comrades and land lightly at Karou’s side. They didn’t speak; they rarely did. Their stance was clear: elegant heads held high, eyes defiant. Karou was breathless with a sudden swell of emotion. Of power. Amzallag, Tangris, Bashees, Issa. Who else? She looked to the rest. Most seemed stunned. In more than a few pairs of eyes, though, Karou saw malice to match the Wolf’s, and knew that there were those among them whose hate would never again be touched by hope. In others, she saw fear.

In too many others. Bast would come, though; Karou willed her to take a step. She was on the verge. Emylion? Hvitha? Virko?

And Thiago? He stood staring at Karou, and she remembered the way he had looked down at her in the requiem grove in another life. She saw that savagery in him again, the flaring nostrils and wild eyes, but then… she saw him pull it back. She witnessed the moment that he mastered his fury, and, with calculation and cunning, and effort, put his mask back in place. It was worse than hate or fear, this lie of mildness. This huge, huge lie. “My lady Karou,” he said. “You make a powerful argument.”

Wait, Karou thought. No.

“I will take it under consideration,” he said. “Of course. We’ll consider all possibilities, including—as we now may, with glad hearts—how to glean the souls from the cathedral.”

Her new surge of power shrank to nothing. By giving her this small victory, the Wolf took away her chance for a greater one. Now none of the other soldiers need gather their courage to come to her side, and their relief was profound. She could see it in their posture, in their faces. They didn’t want to choose. They didn’t want to choose her. How much easier it was to let themselves be led by their general. Bast wouldn’t even look at her. Cowards, she thought, starting to shake as all of her pumped-up courage collapsed into frustration. Could they really believe that the White Wolf would consider ending—or even pausing—in his crusade? Victory and vengeance. He would have to tear his gonfalon down, make a new one. She thought with yearning of the Warlord’s symbol: antlers sprouting leaves. New growth. How perfect, and how out of reach.

And now, so quickly, the rest of these soldiers were out of her reach, too. Thiago was accustomed to wielding power, and she was so very not. Effortlessly he took back what little she had gained and turned the army’s energy to his plans.

His plans for gleaning the buried souls from the cathedral.

Amzallag himself was the first to volunteer. He went forward, avid, and others followed him. Karou stood rooted in place, all but forgotten. Issa took her hand and squeezed it, communicating her shared dismay, while the Shadows That Live melted away before she could even thank them, and soon the direct heat of the sun drove most of them from the court.

The day passed away in this atmosphere of new energy. Karou and Issa watched and listened, and Thiago did entirely appear to be doing what he had said he would: considering all possibilities, such as how they might conduct an excavation in enemy-patrolled territory, and even what they might do in the south to help more chimaera reach the Hintermost. It was exactly what Karou wanted, and she could barely breathe, because she knew it was just another move in the Wolf’s game. A feint. But what did it conceal? What was his true game?

Night fell, and she found out.





68


SIRITHAR


Akiva followed Byon through one last set of doors. Fragrance and humidity greeted them; a billow of steam obscured Akiva’s vision at the moment he crossed the threshold, and he heard his father’s voice before he saw him.

“Ah, Lord Bastard. You honor us with your presence.” It was a powerful voice, honed on bygone battlefields crying death to the beasts. Whatever he was now, Joram had been a warrior once.

And he looked it. Akiva bowed; he was rising as the steam cleared, and saw that they were in a bath, and that Joram was naked. The emperor stood on the steaming tiles, hale and solid, his flesh rouged by heat, surrounded by the small army of servants apparently required to purify his royal person. A girl tipped a pitcher of water over his head and he closed his eyes. Another was on her knees, washing him with a lather as thick as whipped cream.

Akiva had envisioned this meeting many different ways, and in none of them had his father been naked. He suspects nothing, he thought. If he did, he would meet me clothed and armed. “My lord emperor,” he said, “the honor is all mine.”

“Our honor, your honor,” drawled Joram. “Whatever shall we do with such an excess of honor?”

“We could always hang it from the Westway,” said another voice, and Akiva didn’t have to see that cut-in-half face to know whose it was. Sunk back on a tiled bath bench in a pose of informality that he alone would dare in the emperor’s presence, was Jael. Well, that was a convenience, as, of course, Jael could not be allowed to live any more than Joram could. He, blessedly, was fully clad. “If only there was room on the gibbet,” he said like a lament, and low laughter rumbled through the others assembled here. Akiva gave their faces a quick scan. None lounged like Jael, but all seemed enough at their ease that he took these bath-time councils to be a common occurrence.

Joram’s mouth carved a smile from his cruel face. “Room can always be made on the gibbet,” he said.

Was it a threat? Akiva didn’t think so. Joram wasn’t even looking at him; he closed his eyes and tipped back his head for another sluice from his attendant’s pitcher, after which he shook his head hard, spraying water. Namais and Misorias, standing near as ever, both blinked at the spray but elsewise moved not a muscle. Joram’s personal guards—brothers—were said to be deadly fighters. They were Akiva’s first concern. Silverswords were present, as well, two pairs each along facing walls: eight Breakblades with condensation fogging their silver armor, their plumes gone limp in the steam. He wasn’t worried about them.

In fact, as his father stepped out of the shallow pool of lather, away from the white-garbed girls and toward a servant holding a robe, Akiva found his worry draining away. He may not have envisioned a bath in his planning, but in all ways, here was his optimal scenario: a light guard presence in a contained environment, a limited number of witnesses whose word would be taken on faith, and, most important: the absence of suspicion.

Nothing in the eyes of these seraphim hinted at wariness.

There was Crown Prince Japheth, glassy-eyed with boredom. He was a blandly attractive seraph of around Akiva’s age, with some indefinable flaccidness about the set of his features that spoke of weakness. Akiva knew that Japheth was no paragon. He would be better than his father; that was what mattered. Beside him was white-haired Ur-Magus Hellas, head of the emperor’s circle of useless magi, said to have the emperor’s ear. His look of heavy, half-lidded condescension was all Akiva needed to see to know that his own magic remained his secret. A few other faces were unfamiliar, uniform in their haughtiness.

“Let me look at you,” commanded Joram.

“My lord,” replied Akiva, and stood where he was as his father centered himself before him and inspected him with a squint. He had put his robe on, but hadn’t closed it; Akiva wished he would. It seemed a strange intimacy to kill a naked man. Joram was so near that Akiva could have reached out and tapped him on the breastbone. Or pierced him through the heart. He had the unwelcome thought that his father’s steam-pink breast would give like softened butter. He was aware of his own heartbeat pulsing in the tension of his hand. His hand, his arm, his body wanted to draw his sword and be done here, but his mind buzzed with questions.

What is this about?

And something else. Terrible what happened to her. If Akiva didn’t find out now, he never would.

He held his father’s stare. Or perhaps his father’s stare held him. Joram’s eyes were so like Liraz’s and Hazael’s: blue, down-tilting at the outer-corners, generously lashed in gold. Unlike theirs, though, their father’s were devoid of any trace of soul. His stare was infamous; it was said one saw one’s own death in it, or at least the utter worthlessness of one’s life. It brought seraphim to their knees; the unworthy were said to open their own throats for terror and shame.

And Akiva did see death in the emperor’s eyes, but not his own.

He felt a thickness in his throat. He knew what it was: It was emotion, but… for what? Not for Joram, not remorse for what he was going to do. Was it for the faceless, all-but-forgotten woman who’d given him her tiger’s eyes and stood aside as the guards took him? Or… for the face he had seen in silver that day, small and terrified and mirrored over and over in the shin plates of Silverswords. For himself. For all that he had lost and all that he had never had and never would have.

“Yes, you’ll do,” said Joram at last. “It’s lucky, after all, that I let you live. If I’d had you killed, who would I send to them?”

Send to them.

“They may choose to kill you; what do I know of Stelians? You should say your good-byes, just in case.”

From across the room, Jael spoke. “It’s bad luck for soldiers to say good-bye, brother. Have you forgotten? It tempts fate.”

Joram rolled his eyes, turning away from Akiva. “Then don’t say it. What do I care?” He walked out of easy reach; Namais and Misorias were right there. Akiva had let an opportunity go by. There would be another. He would make another. “Be ready to go in the morning.” Joram spared Hazael and Liraz a backward glance; if he noted their resemblance to himself, he gave no sign. “Alone.”

“Go where, my lord?” asked Akiva. He had already made his plans for the morning, of course—to vanish without a trace—but the loose thread of a mystery was here just waiting for him to pull it. His mother.

“To the Far Isles, of course. The Stelians believe that I have something of theirs, and they want her back. Jael, you’ll remember. I never bother with their names. What was she called?”

“I do remember,” said Jael. “She was called Festival.”

Festival.

“Festival. A name like that and you’d expect her to be fun.” Joram shook his head. “Can they imagine I’d have kept her all this time?”

Festival.

The name, it was like a key in a lock. Images. Perfume. Touch. Her face. For an instant Akiva remembered his mother’s face. Her voice. It was a long time ago—decades—they were fragments only, but the effect was immediate: it was focus and clarity, like light honed to a beam.

The effect was sirithar.

Akiva had thought he knew sirithar. It was a part of his training; he had done dawn katas for years, seeking the calm center of himself; it was elusive, but he had believed he knew what it was. This was different. This was true and instant and indelible. No wonder he hadn’t understood; no doubt none of his trainers had ever achieved it, either.

It was magic.

Not the magic he had discovered for himself, cobbled together out of guesswork and pain. He may as well have lived his life scraping and scratching in the dirt, only now lifting his head to see the sky and its infinite horizons, its unguessable fathoms. Whatever the source of power or the tithe, it wasn’t pain. In fact, the pain in his shoulder was gone. What is this? Light and lift and weightlessness, a depth of calm that made the world around him seem to slow and crystallize so that he saw everything—Japheth’s jaw straining to stifle a yawn, a flicker of a glance shared between Hellas and Jael, the sphygmic jump of Joram’s jugular. The heat and stir of breath and wings, every movement painted strokes of intention on the air. He knew the servant girl was going to rise from her crouch before she did: her light moved ahead of her, she seemed to follow it. Joram’s hands were going to lift; Akiva anticipated it and then they did. The emperor at last closed his robe, tied its sash. He was still speaking, each word as clear and real as a river stone. Akiva understood that what he heard in this state would be committed perfectly to memory.

That he would never forget his father’s last words.

And that he knew what his last words would be.

“You’ll go to them,” Joram was saying with the disengaged certitude of absolute autocracy. Akiva realized he need never have feared he was suspected. Joram was so swollen with his own legend it would not occur to him that he might be disobeyed. “Show them who you are. If they’ll hear you, give them my promise. If they surrender now and yield up their magi, I will not do to them as I have done to the beasts. The Stelians fare well enough snatching envoys out of the air, but what will they do against five thousand Dominion? Have they even an army? They think they can turn me aside so easily?”

You do not begin to understand how far they are beyond you. A part of Akiva wanted to turn in a circle and marvel at the rivers of light swimming through the layers and layers of glass of the Sword, to hold up his own hands and stare at them as if they had been remade, as if he himself were an entirely new creature built of those same rays of light.

Light veiling fire.

A voice, out of the distant past. “You are not his.” It was her voice, a resonant vibrato, accented and full of power. It was that day. “You are not mine. You are your own.” She hadn’t wept. Festival. She hadn’t tried to hold on to him or grapple with the guards, and she hadn’t said good-bye. Good-byes tempt fate, as Jael had said.

Had she thought she might see him again?

“Did you kill her?”

He heard himself ask the question and was aware of many things at once: the sudden stillness of the counsel; the clench of Namais’s and Misorias’s fists on their hilts; a flare of interest from Japheth, who lost his urge to yawn. Behind him, he didn’t even have to see Hazael and Liraz to know that their muscles relaxed into readiness; he knew Liraz was already smiling her unnerving battle smile. “Did you kill my mother?”

And he saw his father’s eyes, unsurprised and full of contempt. “You have no mother. As you have no father. You are a link in a chain. You are a hand to swing a sword. A hull to dress in armor. Have you forgotten all of your training, soldier? You are a weapon. You are a thing.”

Those were the words. Akiva had heard them echo backward through the shimmer of sirithar. He already knew they were Joram’s last.

And so he dropped the glamour from his sword and drew it from his sheath. He was moving within the tide of time; it would be done before the witnesses could even register their shock. Namais and Misorias began to move, but they existed in another state of being. Akiva was fire veiled in light. They couldn’t hope to stop him. He crossed the space to the emperor in the time it took a blink of surprise to crease his cold eyes.

How could he not see the change in me? Akiva wondered, and he slid his blade through the silk of his father’s robe and into his heart.





69


SCRATCHING


It was Bast who came scratching at Karou’s window. The shutters were secured by their long brass latches, and across the room Mik’s planks were sunk in their floor gouges, jammed up under handles and hinges. Door and window were both shut tight, and Issa and Karou were within, uneasy. Karou paced. Issa twitched her tail. They were waiting for something to happen.

And something did.

The scratching at the shutters. A hoarse whisper. “Karou. Karou, open the window.”

Karou shrank back. “Who’s there?”

“It’s Bast. I’m on sentry duty, I shouldn’t be here.”

“Why are you?” Karou’s anger flared. If Bast had come across the court this morning, others might have, too. And… what if they had? Karou didn’t even know what she would have done. She was so out of her depth she wanted to curl up and cry. Oh, Brimstone, did you really think I could do this? Well, he couldn’t have known that the Wolf would live through the war to thwart her at every turn, could he?

“It’s… it’s the Wolf,” came Bast’s reply, and Karou felt as though the air were sucked out of the room. Here it was, the clatter of the other shoe dropping. What had he done? “He’s taken Amzallag and the sphinxes. I saw them from the tower.”

Taken? Karou and Issa exchanged a sharp look. Karou yanked the window open. Bast clung to the ledge, wings half-open and lightly fanning to keep her balanced on her too-narrow perch.

“Taken them where?” Karou demanded.

Bast looked stricken. “To the pit,” she whispered.

Afterward Karou would wonder if Bast had been Thiago’s pawn or his conspirator, but in that moment she didn’t suspect her. Her horror seemed real, and maybe it was. Maybe she was thinking how it could have been her making that walk, with how close she had come to taking Karou’s side. And maybe—probably—she was thinking that it was a mistake that would never again tempt her.

One does not side against the Wolf.

With shaking hands Karou buckled her knife belt back on and felt better with the weight of her crescent moons at her hips. The open window was before her. Issa was at her side, but couldn’t come through it with her. Karou turned to her.

“I’ll follow, sweet girl.” Issa moved the door, scales rippling. “Go. I’ll be right behind you.”

And Karou did go, out into the night. She was already away and over the rampart when Issa pulled up the planks and set them aside. She opened the door.

And came face-to-face with Ten.





70


LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR


The emperor dropped to his knees. His eyes died; the hate flickered out of them as life poured red from his chest. No one caught him, and he keeled over with a splash into the shallow channel of the bath. Water and lather bloomed pink.

A servant girl screamed.

Namais and Misorias were in motion. Akiva blocked their strikes; nothing had ever been easier.

He sensed the guards coming off their walls, their shock blunting the air. At least one got tangled in his own bell sleeve fumbling for his hilt, and cursed. As one, Hazael and Liraz unsheathed their swords.

The Silverswords might have believed they had the advantage from numbers alone—eight to two—but at the first crossing of blades their confidence evaporated. This was no exercise of parries and thrusts such as they were used to, no nice ching and chime of silver. Hazael and Liraz wielded their longswords two-handed, such power in their strikes as had rent the armor and hide of countless revenants. Decades of battle, hands black with their terrible tally, and their onslaught caught the guards like a force of nature.

They weren’t two fighting off eight. They were two cutting through eight. Slight as Liraz was, her first blow dislocated the shoulder of the guard who blocked it. His uff of pain was followed by a clatter as his sword flew from his hand; she didn’t finish him as he staggered back but spun toward another guard with a low lightning kick that took him out at the knee. His uff bit at the heels of his comrade’s, and he was down, too.

Hazael’s first strike shaved through his opponent’s blade, leaving the guard holding a pretty silver stub.

All of this transpired in the gasp between breaths—the Misbegotten schooling the swaggering Silverswords in the vital difference between a guard and a soldier—and the guards’ eyes flared wide in understanding. The posture of the remaining five changed from menacing confidence to a defensive hunch. Readjusting their grips, they formed a loose circle around the Misbegotten, and their volley of glances, one to another, was easy to interpret:

Go on, attack them.

You attack them.

They needn’t have worried. Liraz and Hazael didn’t wait. Waiting gave the enemy time to think. They themselves didn’t need to think any more than their swords did. They attacked. They were nithilam. The clangor was deafening, and the nickname “breakblades” proved well-founded as the guards’ flashing, brittle weapons shattered at the slash of steel. Across the room, one of the unknown counselors ducked just in time as a flying shard of silver sword embedded itself in the wall where seconds earlier his head had been.

The Breakblades were all disarmed, lightly injured, and when one made a halfhearted try for a sword, Liraz had only to grin and shake her head, and he halted like a guilty child.

“Just stand there,” she told them. “Demonstrate for us your great skill at standing there, and you’ll be fine.”

The others stood taking up space—so much space, such big bodies, and such poor training. Their lives had never been in danger before, and if Liraz and Hazael had wanted to kill them they’d have found it pitifully easy. But they didn’t want to kill them. They’d scarcely drawn blood. Joram had been one target, and he lay dead and unattended in shallow water that had deepened now from pink to red. Jael was the other.

But Jael was gone.

“Akiva,” said Liraz. “Jael.”

Akiva already knew. The three Misbegotten held the center of the room. It was quiet. All told maybe two minutes had passed since Akiva’s blade had entered his father’s heart. He had disarmed Namais and Misorias—they had put up a better fight, but not good enough—and had rendered them unconscious with the hilt of his sword to forestall any heroics that might force him to kill them. One had landed facedown, and in the moment it had taken Akiva to turn him over with his foot and prevent him from drowning in the shallow red water, Jael had vanished.

Where? If he had escaped through some secret door, he had failed to take his nephew along. Akiva took a long, level look at the crown prince. Japheth had pulled one of the serving girls against him as a living shield. She was frozen, crushed to his chest, her long braid caught in his fist where a better man would have held a sword.

And here is the new emperor, Akiva thought.

Wherever Jael had gone, he must now raise the cry. Akiva braced for the response that must come. He was surprised that it hadn’t already; he’d expected the guards at Samekh Gate to hear the ring of blades and come rushing in; it was then that he and Hazael and Liraz were to have glamoured themselves invisible and taken to their wings to find their way out under cover of chaos.

There was, however, no chaos.

Maybe, he thought, sound didn’t travel well through all these interlocking glass walls. In the eerie calm, Akiva’s newfound state of sirithar left him, like something that had come and gone of its own volition, and his senses were robbed of their newfound scope. In this dimness and diminishment, he surveyed the room. The gallery of flatterers sat pinned in place, aghast; mouths gulped fishlike at the humid air. His eyes skimmed over them. Hellas had lost his smugness.

And there was Japheth, clutching the serving girl. Akiva supposed this display shouldn’t surprise him, but to hear someone is craven is one thing. To see it made so plain is another. But what was he to do? Their purpose here today must be made clear. It was the assassination of a warmonger, not mutiny against the Empire entire, and not a grasp for power for themselves.

So, holding the crown prince’s gaze, Akiva spoke the words of accession. “The emperor is dead. Long live the emperor.” In the atmosphere of steam-heat and shock, his voice was heavy, solemn. He crossed his arm over his chest, pressing the hilt of his sword to his heart, and gave Japheth a small nod. Behind him, Hazael and Liraz did the same.

Japheth’s terror gave way to confusion. He glanced aside, looking to the council for explanation as if this possibility had never occurred to him. The bath girl took advantage of his confusion and writhed free, darting for the door like a creature freed from a trap. Akiva let her go. The door slammed open as she blew through it and he thought surely now the guards must come flooding into the room.

And still they did not.

Bereft of his living shield, Japheth dropped to his knees and began to crawl slowly backward, trembling. Akiva turned away, disgusted. “We’re done here,” he said to his brother and sister. Whatever was going on outside this bath, it wouldn’t do to wait any longer. It would have been easier to go with chaos for cover—ten gates standing open as their guards rushed to respond—but they would make do, and fight if they had to. He was ready to be gone, to put Astrae and his own treachery behind him.

He made it as far as the door.

It was not Silverswords, with their heavy-booted incompetence and pretty, useless blades, who forced him back. It was Dominion. Not guards but soldiers: ready and calm and many. A score, more. Two score, crowding the room but bringing no chaos with them, no tide of easy escape. Only grim faces and swords already slick with blood.

Whose blood?

And… they brought with them something else, something utterly unexpected, and at the first touch of that wave of debilitating and so-familiar nausea, Akiva understood. As the soldiers winched a tightening circle around him and his brother and sister, around the shamefaced disarmed Breakblades and the corpse of the emperor, they carried grisly… trophies… before them, and he knew that this had all been orchestrated. He had played a part written for him by Jael, and he had played it perfectly.

The Dominion were holding out hands. Dried, severed hands, marked with the devil’s eyes. Revenant hands, as powerful as they had ever been when upheld by their true owners: the chimaera rebels they had killed and burned in the Hintermost.

Akiva felt the assault of the magic as if it entered his bloodstream and curdled him from the inside. He tried to hold out against it, but it was no good. He began to shake and couldn’t stop.

“Thank the godstars,” he heard the counselors murmuring. “We are saved.” Fools. Did they not yet wonder what Dominion were doing inside the Tower of Conquest?

Their captain was with them. “Nephew,” he said. For a second Akiva thought Jael was addressing him, but he was looking at Japheth. “Allow me to be the first to offer my congratulations,” he said. He was flushed—from the heat, from fear?—his scar a long gnarl of white. He moved to Japheth, who remained on his knees, and told him, “This is no meet pose for the ruler of the Empire of Seraphim. Get up.”

He held out his hand.

Akiva understood what was going to happen, but the pulsing sickness of the hamsas met the dullness that had descended in the aftermath of sirithar, and he could do nothing to stop it.

Japheth reached for his uncle’s hand and Jael took it, but did not raise his nephew to his feet. He pivoted behind him. Japheth gave a gasp of pain as Jael crushed the prince’s soft hand in his swordsman’s grip and prevented him from rising. A glint of metal, a jerk of the arm, and it was done inside a second: Jael drew his dagger across his nephew’s throat and a fine red line appeared there.

Japheth’s eyes were wide and rolling. His mouth gaped and no sound came out but a gurgling. The red line grew less fine. A drip became a rivulet. A rivulet a rush.

“The emperor is dead,” Jael said before it was strictly true. He smiled and wiped his blade on Japheth’s sleeve before dropping him with a shove that sent his body to join Joram’s in the red water. “Long live the emperor.”

Akiva felt himself as stunned and fish-mouthed as the counselors.

As for Jael, he couldn’t have looked more pleased. He turned to Akiva and executed a mocking bow. “Thank you,” he said. “I was so hoping you would do that.”

From there, Akiva’s best-case scenario went very badly wrong.