Days of Blood & Starlight

71


THE PIT


By the time Karou reached the pit, it was already done.

Amzallag, Tangris, Bashees. They lay dead in the starlight and Thiago stood by their bodies, calm and shining in all his white, waiting. Waiting for her. Others stood by in a loose semi-circle, and Karou should have taken one look at the scene, spun right around in the air, and fled back to the questionable safety of her room. But she couldn’t, not with those bodies lying there, Amzallag and the sphinxes, their slashed throats still pumping blood into the scree and their souls anchored by failing tethers. Because they had taken her side.

This was to be the price? She would never have another ally. If she let this stand, she might as well abandon the chimaera cause right here and now.

She was dazed with disgust and fury as she dropped down, landing heavily before the Wolf. The blood spatter across his chest and sleeve read as black in the night. Behind him: mounds of earth from the excavation of the pit; a line of shovels standing upright like fence pickets; Karou could hear a low drone, as of a distant engine, but realized it was flies. Down in the dark. She was a moment surveying the terrible scene before she found her voice. Choking, she said, “And here stands the great hero of the chimaera, murderer of his own soldiers.”

“They weren’t my own soldiers, apparently,” he replied. “Their mistake.” And he turned to Amzallag’s body. It lay at the very verge of the pit. Thiago braced himself and, with one clawed wolf’s foot, dug in and gave a powerful shove so that the body rolled. It had to weigh five hundred pounds, but once the shoulders overbalanced the edge, their bulk dragged at the rest. It was slow, so slow… and then sudden. Amzallag’s body tipped into the pit and disappeared into that foul darkness.

Lisseth did the same to the sphinxes’ bodies, which were much lighter, and there was almost no sound, as if the landings were soft—Karou knew, and didn’t want to picture, what it was that cushioned them—but stench rose, and flies, flies by the hundreds. They rose in a buzz of black and seemed to carry the putrescence with them. She backed away, fighting her gag reflex. She could almost feel the air in her mouth, thick and choking, fume and liquid. She staggered back, looked aghast at Thiago.

“They aren’t all monsters like you,” she said. “Like the rest of you.” She scanned the captains assembled around them—Nisk, Lisseth, Virko, Rark, Sarsagon—and they met her eyes, blank and unashamed except for Virko, who looked down when she lit on him.

“Monsters, yes, we are monsters,” said Thiago. “I will give the angels their ‘beasts.’ I will give them nightmares to haunt their dreams long after I am gone.”

“Is that it, then?” she snapped. “That’s your objective, to leave a legacy of nightmares when you die? Why not? Why wouldn’t it be all about you? The great White Wolf, killer of angels, savior to no one.”

“Savior.” He laughed. “Is that what you want to be? What a lofty goal for a traitor.”

“I was never a traitor. If anyone is, it’s you. All of that today about excavating the cathedral? Was it all lies?”

“Karou, what do you think? What would we do with those thousands of souls? Our resurrectionist can barely build an army.”

Such contempt in his voice. Karou’s was its equal. “Yes, well, I’m done building your army, so I’ll need something to keep me busy.” She was practically spitting now, her head filled with the white noise of rage. She would get Amzallag’s soul, and the sphinxes’, too. Amzallag had not lived to have the hope of his family only to die now.

“Done, are you?” Thiago smiled. Killer, torturer, savage. He was in his element. “Do you really think this is a game you can win?” He shook his head. “Karou, Karou. Oh, your name does amuse me. That fool Brimstone. He named you hope because you rutted with an angel? He should have named you lust. He should have named you whore.”

There was no sting in the word. Nothing Thiago said could wound her. Looking at him now, she could scarcely understand how she had let herself be led for so long, doing his bidding, building monsters to ensure his nightmare legacy. She thought of Akiva, the night he had come to her at the river, the crushing pain and shame in his face, and love, still love—sorrow and love and hope—and she remembered the night of the Warlord’s ball, how Akiva had always been the right to Thiago’s wrong, the heat to the Wolf’s chill, the safety to this monster’s menace.

She fixed Thiago with a narrow stare and said quietly, coolly, “It still eats at you, doesn’t it? That I chose him over you? You want to know something?” Love is an element. “It was no contest.” She hissed the last words, and a spasm of fury wracked Thiago’s cold, composed face. That beautiful vessel that Brimstone had made; it hid such a black, deadly thing within.

“Leave us.” He spoke through clenched teeth, and the others were shaking out their wings to obey before Karou had even a moment to regret her words. With the sound of wings and the great, dust-stirring gusts of their backbeats, the fanning fumes of rot, the sting of dirt on her bare arms, her face, she felt the phantom twitch of her own once-wings, so deep was her impulse to flee. Like the night of the Warlord’s ball, when she danced with Thiago and every second her wings had ached to carry her away from him.

Away, away. Get away from him. She gathered herself to leap, but before she could leave the ground, Thiago moved. Fast. His hand flashed out, clamped around her arm—her bruises screamed—and he held. Tight.

“It does eat at me, Karou. Is that what you want to hear? That you humiliated me? I punished you for it, but the punishment was… unsatisfying. It was impersonal. Your protector Brimstone made certain I was never alone with you. Did you know that? Well, he’s not here now, is he?”

Caught in his grip, Karou looked after the departing soldiers. Only Virko looked back. He didn’t stop, though, and all too soon the darkness gathered him and he was gone with the others, wingbeats fading, dust settling, and Karou was left alone with Thiago.

His hand on her arm was a vise; Karou knew how Brimstone had made the Wolf’s bodies. She knew the strength in him, and she didn’t hope to break his grip. “Let me go.”

“Wasn’t I kind? Wasn’t I gentle? I thought that was what you wanted. I thought it would be the best way with you. Coaxing and kindness. But I see I was wrong. And do you want to know? I’m glad. There are other means of persuasion.”

His free hand, suddenly, was at her waist, thrust under the edge of her shirt to clutch at her bare skin. Her own free hand flew to the crescent-moon blade sheathed at her hip, but Thiago batted it away and seized the weapon himself, flinging it into the pit. It was only seconds before the other followed it, and Karou was shoving uselessly at his chest in her struggle to get free of him.

It all happened so fast, and she was off her feet, hitting the scree so hard her vision went dark and her breath was driven from her lungs. She was gasping and Thiago was over her, heavy and far too strong, and the useless thought looping in her mind was, He can’t, he can’t hurt me, he needs me, and all the while he was laughing.

Laughing. His breath on her face; she turned away from it, struggled, every muscle straining against him, every gasped breath a lungful of stench from the pit.

She was strong, too. Her body was Brimstone’s work as much as his was, and it wasn’t empty strength, either—she had trained all her life. She got an arm free and twisted, wedged her shoulder between them, pulled up a knee and threw him off, rolled clear as he came lunging right back at her and she was up and reaching for the sky, for escape, when he tackled her from behind and she went down hard again. Her face in the scree this time and pain flaring through her and she was pinned, his weight so heavy on her shoulders she could get no purchase to throw him off, and then his voice was in her ear—“Whore,” he breathed—and his breath was hot, his lips were on her earlobe, and then the sharp points of his fangs.

He bit her. Tore her.

She screamed, but he slammed her head into the scree again and the scream choked off.

She couldn’t see him. He was holding her facedown in the dirt and rocks when she felt his clawed fingers dig under the waistband of her jeans and tug. For a second, her mind went blank.

No.

No.

The screaming wasn’t her voice. It was her mind, and it was the same foolish, outraged loop again: He can’t, he can’t.

But he could. He was.

The jeans stayed put, though, even when he yanked so hard it dragged her a foot across the ground, her cheek feeling every rock, and so he rolled her over again to get at the button and he was on her and he was smiling and her blood was on his lips, on his fangs, it dripped into her mouth and she tasted it. The stars were above him and it was when he let go of her arm to grab both sides of her jeans and try to lever them off that her fingers closed on a rock and she smashed his smile from his face.

He gave a grunt of pain, but his face stayed right there. His blood joined hers on his fangs and his smile came back. His laugh, too. It was obscene. His mouth was a grimace of red and he was still on her.

“No!” she cried, and the word felt like it pulled from her soul.

“Don’t act so pure, Karou,” he said. “We’re all just vessels, after all.” And when he yanked at her jeans this time they peeled down and caught on her boots, bunching around her calves. She felt rocks beneath her bare skin, gouging. The screaming in her head was deafening and useless, useless, as his knee came down between hers and wedged them apart. His snarl was pure animal and Karou fought. She fought. She didn’t fall still. Every muscle was in motion, working against him. His clawed fingertips lacerated her arms holding her, and the rocks tore at her back, at her legs, but the pain was so far away. She knew that she must not lie still, she must never lie still. He shifted his grip on her arms so he was holding both her wrists with one hand—to free his other hand, to free his other hand—but she tore out of his grip and reached for his eyes. He pulled back just in time and she missed and dug grooves in his cheeks instead.

He backhanded her.

She was blinking and the stars were swimming. She was shaking her head to clear it when she remembered her knife.

In her boot.

Her boot seemed such a very long way from her hands. He held her wrists so tightly she could barely feel her fingers, and when he paused and drew himself up again to fumble at his own clothes—not so white now, she heard herself think from very far away—he had to let one of hers go. She let it fall aside this time, limp. She closed her eyes. Outside the circle of their ragged breathing, the desert silence was like a void, eating sound, swallowing it. She wondered: If she screamed, would they even hear her at the kasbah? If they did, would anyone even come?

Issa. Issa should have been here by now.

What had they done to Issa?

Karou didn’t scream.

Thiago forgot her free hand as he lowered himself onto her, and she turned her head aside and squeezed her eyes shut. She didn’t look at him. His breath came in wolfish pants now, and she shifted her hips and turned, twisted to deny him, and she didn’t look as she groped under the bunched denim of her jeans for the top of her boot. For her knife. That small hilt, it was cool in her hot hand. In the pain and breathlessness, the squeezed-shut blindness, the fug of rot and the buzz of flies, the scraping, shifting scree and the press and wrench of flesh, that hilt was everything.

She eased it free. Thiago was trying to push her hips flat. “Come, love,” he said in his purr of a voice. “Let me in.” Nothing had ever been as perverse as that soft voice, and Karou knew that if she looked at him she would find him smiling. So she didn’t look.

She sank her blade to the hilt in the soft hollow of his throat. It was a small knife, but it was big enough.

Heat poured over Karou and it was blood. Thiago’s hands abruptly forgot her hips. And when she did open her eyes, he wasn’t smiling anymore.





72


A SAD WASTE OF PAIN


“Kill everyone,” Jael commanded his soldiers with morbid good cheer.

Akiva still stood in the center of the bath, his brother and sister with him, and they still held their swords, though with the sick pulse of the devil’s marks, he knew they were in no condition to defend themselves against so many soldiers.

“Not everyone,” corrected Ur-Magus Hellas, who had moved to Jael’s side, and who, unlike the rest of the council members, was manifestly unshocked by all that had transpired. A conspirator.

“Of course,” said Jael, all lisping courtesy. “I misspoke.” To his soldiers: “Kill everyone but the Misbegotten.”

Hellas’s look of smug complacency vanished. “What?”

“Certainly. Traitors must have a public execution, must they not?” said Jael, deliberately not taking Hellas’s meaning. He turned to the bastards, still with that repulsive cheer. “As my brother said earlier, room can always be made on the gibbet.”

“My lord,” said Hellas, affronted and only just beginning to be afraid. “I mean myself.”

“Ah, well. I am sorry, old friend, but you have conspired in my brother’s death. How could I trust you not to betray me?”

“I?” Hellas went red. “I have conspired? With you—”

A cluck of the tongue, and Jael said, “You see? Already you are singing songs about me. Everyone knows it was Beast’s Bane who killed Joram and poor Japheth, too, his own blood. How could I let you leave this room, to go and spread lies about me?”

The magus’s red face drained white. “I wouldn’t. I’m yours. My lord, you need a witness. You said—”

“The bath girl will serve as a witness. She will serve better, because she will believe what she says. She saw the bastard slay the emperor. The rest, well, she’ll be distraught. She’ll believe she saw it all.”

“My lord. You… you need a magus—”

“As if you are capable of magic,” Jael scoffed. “I’ve no need of frauds or poisoners. Poison is for cowards. Enemies should bleed. Take heart, my friend. You die in noble company.” He gave the slightest of gestures—little more than a twitch of his hand—and the soldiers moved forward.

Hellas cast wildly about for some protector. “Help!” he cried, though he had certainly played a part in ensuring that no help would be forthcoming.

The other council members cried out, too. Akiva felt more pity for them, though there was little enough space in his own mounting misery to waste pity on this coterie of cruel, hand-picked fools.

It was a bloodbath. The Silverswords, big useless brutes and already disarmed, struggled and died. One Dominion soldier dispatched both Namais and Misorias—still unconscious—with light sword strokes to their throats. He might have been scything weeds, so dispassionate was the gesture. The bodyguards’ eyes flew open and both experienced the moments of their death with a brief thrash and skid in the dregs of the red bath. The remaining servant girls were not even spared; Akiva saw that coming and tried to shield the one nearest him, but there were too many Dominion, and too many hamsa trophies arrayed against him. The soldiers shoved him back to Hazael and Liraz before silencing the girl’s screams with no evidence of remorse.

They were their captain’s men through and through, Akiva thought as the scene played out before his eyes. He had witnessed—and partaken in—more than his share of carnage, but this massacre staggered him in its callousness. And its cunning. Watching it, and knowing that he would be blamed for it—that the infamy would be his while Jael took up the mantle of emperor—Akiva burned hot and cold, furious and powerless.

He cast wildly about for some trace of the clarity and power that had earlier possessed him, but he sensed nothing beyond his mounting desperation. He looked to his brother and sister; they stood back to back. He could see their strain.

There were four council members besides Hellas; they died more or less as they had watched their emperors die: shocked, outraged, and helpless. Hellas squealed. He tried to get airborne, as if there were any escape in the vaulted glass ceiling, and the soldier’s sword caught him in the gut instead of the heart. The pitch of the squeals sharpened, and the magus grabbed at the blade where it entered him; he clutched it as he sank back to the floor, staring down at it with disbelief, and when the soldier jerked the blade free, fingers scattered. Hellas lifted his maimed hands up before his face—blood, so much blood; it fountained from stumped fingers—and that was what he was looking at, in abject horror and still squealing, when the soldier corrected his aim and delivered a clean thrust to the heart.

The squealing stopped.

“I don’t believe he even tried to do any magic,” Jael observed. “And all that pain to tithe, too. What a waste. A sad waste of pain.”

Then he turned a piercing look Akiva’s way and pointed to him. Akiva tensed to defend himself—or try. His grip on his sword was weak and worsening as sickness pulsed at him from all sides. But the soldiers were well attuned to their captain’s gestures; they did not attack.

“Now here,” Jael said, “stands a magus.”

Akiva was still standing, though he thought not for long. The sensation of so many hamsas trained on him, it dragged him back years to the scaffold in the agora of Loramendi, Madrigal, and how she had looked at him, and how she had laid her head down on the block; how it had fallen and echoed and he had screamed and been able to do nothing. Where had that state of true sirithar been then? He shook his head. He was no magus; a magus could have saved her. A magus could save himself and his brother and sister from these soldiers with their clawed, gnarled trophies, their stolen strength.

Jael mistook his reaction for modesty. “Come now,” he said. “You think I don’t know, but I do. Oh, this display of glamour, the swords? That was very good, but the birds? That was marvelous.” He whistled wetly and shook his head: a heartfelt compliment.

Akiva took care to give away nothing. Jael might suspect, but he couldn’t know the birds had been his work.

“And all to save a chimaera. I’ll admit, that puzzled me. Beast’s Bane, help a beast?” Jael was looking at him, drawing out a pause. Akiva didn’t like the look or the pause. Always, their encounters had played like a high-stakes game: exaggerated courtesy veiling mutual distrust and deep dislike. They had gone far beyond the need for courtesy now, but the captain kept up the charade, and in it there was a ghost of glee. He was toying with a smile.

What does he know? Akiva wondered, feeling certain now there was something, and he would have given much in that moment to put a sharp end to Jael’s glee.

“She tasted of fairy tales,” Jael said. The words struck a chord of familiarity—and a note of dread, too—but Akiva couldn’t place them. Not until Jael added, almost singing, “She tasted of hope. Oh. What does that taste like? Pollen and stars, the Fallen said. He did go on about it, foul thing. I almost felt sorry for the girl, to have felt the touch of such a tongue.”

A roaring in Akiva’s ears. Razgut. Somehow, Jael had found Razgut. What had the creature told him?

“I wonder,” asked Jael, “did you ever find her?”

“I don’t know who you mean,” Akiva replied.

Jael’s smile unfurled fully now, and it was a nasty specimen, malicious and excited. “No?” he said. “I’m glad to hear it, since there was no mention of any girl in your report.” This was true. Akiva had said nothing of Karou, or the hunchback Izîl who had hurled himself from a tower rather than give up Karou, or of Razgut, either—who at the time Akiva assumed had died with the hunchback. “A girl who worked for Brimstone,” Jael continued. “Who was raised by Brimstone. Such an interesting story. Far-fetched, though. What interest could Brimstone possibly have taken in a human girl? For that matter, what interest could you have taken in a human girl? The usual kind?”

Akiva said nothing. Jael was too happy; it was clear that Razgut had told him everything. The question, then, was how much did Razgut know? Did he know where Karou was now? That she was carrying on Brimstone’s work?

What did Jael want?

The captain—no, Akiva reminded himself, Jael was the emperor now—said with a shrug, “Of course, the Fallen also claimed the girl had blue hair, which really strains credulity, so I thought, how can I trust all the other things he’s telling me about the human world? All the other fascinating things you left out of your report. I had to get creative. By the end, I believed he was telling the truth, strange as it all sounds, and what I can’t make out is how the three of you failed to report on their advancements. Their devices, nephew. How is it that you failed to mention their wondrous, unimaginable weapons?”

Akiva’s sick feeling was deepening, and it wasn’t just from the hamsas. It was all coming together. Razgut and weapons. Pure white surcoats. Harpers. Pageantry. To make an impression, he had thought when he’d heard the rumors, but it hadn’t made any sense. No one could imagine that the Stelians would be impressed by white surcoats and harps.

Humans, on the other hand…

“You’re not invading the Stelians at all,” Akiva said. “You’re invading the human world.”





73


THE SCREAM


Thiago seemed to not quite understand why all of a sudden he couldn’t breathe, or what the small pinch at his throat had to do with it. His hand flew to the blade, pulled it out, and as his blood poured out all the faster—onto Karou, all onto Karou—he looked at the knife with… condescension. Karou had the idea that his last living thought was, This knife is too small to kill me.

It wasn’t.

His eyes lost focus. His neck lost strength. His head came down heavy on her face; for a moment he floundered, then twitched, then stopped. He was dead weight. He was dead. Thiago. Dead and heavy. His blood kept flowing and Karou was pinned under him, her knees still splayed, her ankles caught in her pushed-down jeans, and her own panicked gasping breath was so loud in her ears she imagined the stars could hear it.

She pushed him off, partway anyway, dragged herself the rest of the way out from under him, kicking at his legs to get free, and then she rose, unsteady, and pulled at her jeans. She fell and rose again. Her arms were shaking so violently it was a few tries before the jeans were up, and then she couldn’t manage the button. She couldn’t stop shaking, but she couldn’t leave it undone, it was unthinkable, and it was this that brought the tears—her frustration that she couldn’t make her fingers perform this simple action, and she had to do it, she couldn’t leave it. She was sobbing by the time it was finally done.

And then she looked at him.

His eyes were open. His mouth was open. His fangs were red with her blood and she was red with his blood. Her vest that had been gray was sodden and black in the starlight, and the White Wolf, he was… exposed, he was obscene, his intention laid bare and as dead as the rest of him.

She had killed the White Wolf.

He had tried to—

Who would care?

He was the White Wolf, hero of the chimaera races, architect of impossible victories, the strength of their people. She was the angel-lover, the traitor. The whore. Those who would have stood with her were gone—murdered right here or sent away to die. Ziri wouldn’t be coming back. And Issa, what had they done to her?

Am I alone again?

She couldn’t bear to be alone again.

She still couldn’t stop her shaking. It was convulsive. She was having a hard time drawing breath. She felt light-headed. Breathe, she told herself. Think.

But no thoughts came, and scarcely more breath.

What were her options? Flee or stay. Leave them, let them die—all of them, all the chimaera in Eretz, and let the souls lay buried—or stay and… what? Be forced to resurrect Thiago?

Just the thought of it—of the skim of his soul against her senses, of life returning to those pale eyes and strength to those clawed hands—dropped Karou to her knees to retch. Both options were unbearable. She couldn’t abandon her people—a thousand years Brimstone had borne this burden, and she broke after a couple of months? “Your dream is my dream. You are all of our hope.”

But she couldn’t face the Wolf again, either, and if she stayed, they would make her bring him back.

Or kill her.

Oh god, oh god.

She retched again. It racked her, spasm after spasm, until she was a shell, as raw on the inside as the outside—a vessel, she heard his voice in her head, we’re all just vessels, and she retched again and it was just bile. Her throat stung, and when the rasp of her own choking finally died away, she heard a sound, and it was near.

And it was wings.

She panicked.

They were coming back.




“Invade the human world?” Jael looked affronted. “You malign me, nephew. Is it an invasion if we are welcomed?”

“Welcomed?”

“Yes. Razgut assured me they will worship us as gods. That they already do. Isn’t it wonderful? I’ve always wanted to be a god.”

“You’re no god,” Akiva said through clenched teeth. He thought of the human cities he had seen—images of lands at peace that had struck him as so alien when he had first arrived. Prague with its beautiful bridge, people congregating, strolling, kissing on the cheeks. Marrakesh, its wild square filled with dancers and snake charmers, the teeming lanes where he had walked beside Karou before… before they had broken the wishbone, and with it the fragile happiness he had known could not last. “They’ll take one look at your face and brand you a monster.”

Jael reached up and ran a finger down his scar. “What, this?” He shrugged, unconcerned. “That’s what masks are for. Do you imagine they’ll really care if their god wears a mask? They’ll give me what I want readily enough, I have no doubt.”

And what was that? Akiva didn’t know much about human battle, but he knew some. He remembered the strange cafe Karou had taken him to in Prague, decorated with gas masks from a bygone war. He understood that they could poison the air and make all things die gasping, and that they could pump each other full of metal in the time it took an archer to draw back a bowstring, and he knew that Razgut had not lied to Jael. Humans did worship angels. Not all of them did, but many, and their worship could be as deadly as their weapons. Bring the two things together—bring them into Eretz—and it would make the war of the last thousand years look like a shoving match.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said. “It will mean the end of Eretz.”

“The end of the Stelians, anyway,” said Jael. “For the Empire, it will be a new beginning.”

“This is about the Stelians, then? Why?” Akiva couldn’t understand what stoked this hatred of Stelians. “Send me to them, as Joram wanted to. I’ll be your envoy, your spy. I’ll carry your message to them, but leave human weapons in the human world.”

Akiva hated abasing himself to Jael, and Jael just scoffed. “My message? What message could I have for those fire-eyed savages? I’m coming to kill you? Dear nephew, that was a fool’s mission, and Joram was the fool. Did you believe all that about serving as envoy? I just needed him to bring you here. For reasons that I think have been made clear.” He gestured around the blood-spattered, corpse-strewn bath.

Yes, his reasons were clear, all too clear now. While Akiva had been planning to deliver Eretz from Joram, Jael had been waiting in the wings, and not just waiting. Orchestrating. Maneuvering his bastard scapegoat right into place.

“And if I hadn’t killed him?” Akiva asked, disgusted that he hadn’t felt the jerk of puppet strings all along.

“That was never a risk,” said Jael, and Akiva understood that even if he hadn’t killed Joram—if, by chance, he had come here as a loyal soldier to receive his emperor’s gratitude and orders—he would have been framed for the murder anyway. “The moment you walked though that door, you were an assassin and a traitor to the realm. It helps that you are, of course. It’s good to have a true witness. The servant girl owes you her life. Hellas, alas, owes you his death. But don’t feel too badly. He was a viper.” Jael, calling someone a viper. Even he saw the hypocrisy in it, and laughed. Akiva didn’t know if he had ever seen anyone enjoy himself quite so much.

Hazael was the first to succumb to the sickness of the devil’s eyes. He dropped to his knees and vomited onto the blood-spattered tile. Liraz edged closer to him, looking soon to follow suit.

“You think we have no other allies?” Akiva asked. “That no one else will rise against you?”

“If you can’t succeed, nephew, who could?”

It was a fair question. A devastating question. Was this it, then? Had he failed his world—and Karou—so spectacularly?

“I’m a little sorry I can’t have you in my service,” said Jael. “I could use a magus, but it would be so hard to trust you. I can’t shake the feeling that you don’t quite like me.” An apologetic shrug, and his gaze slid past Akiva to lock on… Liraz.

Through his weakness and his nausea, Akiva felt a surge of fury and dread and helplessness, but there was the edge of something more, something hard and glittering that he hoped, he hoped might be the edge of sirithar, coming within reach once more.

“You, though,” Jael said to Liraz. “So lovely. It appears that I’ll have need of new bath attendants when I move into these quarters.” He looked at a dead girl on the floor and smiled that splay of a smile that tugged his scar white and pulled puckers along the remains of his nose and lips.

Liraz gave a hard laugh; Akiva heard his sister’s weakness in it, and her struggle to bear up under it. “You can’t trust him, but you think you can trust me?”

“Of course not. But I never trust women. I learned that lesson the hard way.” He reached up to touch his scar, and when he did, his eyes gave the slightest flicker in Akiva’s direction. That was all, but it was enough.

Akiva knew who had cut Jael.

Hazael rose from his knees. It had to take extraordinary effort, yet somehow he managed a version of his lazy smile when he said, “You know, I’ve always wanted to be a bath attendant. You should take me instead. I’m nicer than my sister.”

Jael returned the lazy smile. “You’re not my type.”

“Well, you’re not anybody’s type,” said Hazael. “No, wait. I take it back. My sword says she’d like to know you better.”

“I’m afraid I must deny her the pleasure. I’ve been kissed by swords before, you see.”

“I may have noticed.”

“Festival,” said Akiva abruptly, and all eyes turned to him. It was Jael’s that he held. “It was my mother who cut you.” He didn’t want to talk about his mother with Jael; he didn’t want to open the door to his uncle’s memories—what lay on the other side of it could only be horrific—but he had to buy time. And… he had hoped her name might be the key to unlocking sirithar. It was not.

“So you have guessed,” said Jael. “Do you know, that might have been my favorite part of the day. When you assumed it was Joram who killed her? He may as well have, though. He did give her to me.”

Give her…? Akiva couldn’t think about it. “She can’t be the reason you hate the Stelians. One woman?”

“Ah, but not just any woman. Women are everywhere, beautiful women are nearly everywhere, but Festival, she was wild as a storm. Storms are dangerous things.” He looked at Liraz again. “Thrilling. Stormhunters know. That there’s no ride in the world like a storm in fury.” He motioned to a soldier. “Take her.”

Akiva thrust himself in front of the soldier; he felt slow, sluggish. Hazael was moving, too. Liraz managed to swing her sword, but the sound it made, careening off a Dominion blade, was weak, and it flew from her grip to fall with a muffled thud onto the pile of bodies that had been Joram, Japheth, Namais, and Misorias. Disarmed or not, she was not cowed. “Kill me with my brothers, or you’ll wish you had,” she spat.

“Now I’m insulted,” said Jael. “You would die with them, sooner than scrub my back?”

“A thousand times.”

“My dear.” He pressed a hand to his heart. “Don’t you see? Knowing that is what makes it sweet.”

The soldiers closed in.

Two score Dominion with the severed hands of dead revenants upheld, and Hazael still dealt a death before his own came to him.

His slice took a soldier in the face. His blade lodged in bone, and as the soldier fell, the weight pulled Hazael forward, so the thrust that was coming to him sank deep. Up under one raised arm it slipped, where there was no protection from mail or plate or even leather. It went through him and out between his wings. He stumbled, looked at Akiva, then down at the sword. He let go of his own, gave up trying to free it from the skull it was wedged in, and even as Hellas had, he reached for the blade he was spitted on. But his hands weren’t working. He batted at the hilt; he crumpled, and Akiva saw it all through the flare of clarity he had been desperate for.

Sirithar, come too late. Like a blood daub, after the killing is done.

Hazael fell. Liraz threw herself to her knees to catch him.

Akiva experienced in splendid light the howl that shaped his sister’s mouth. He heard her banshee grief and saw it, too. Sound had form, it was light, everything was light, and everything was grief, and Liraz was trying to hold Hazael’s head as his eyes glazed, but a pair of Dominion grabbed her, dragged her, and Hazael’s head fell. Akiva knew his brother was dead even before his head hit tile, and the thrum he felt inside his skull was like the thousands of summoned wings that had drubbed the skies of the Hintermost.

There were no birds this time. Or if there were, it was the sky that brought them, the sky itself, which at that moment… moved. Outside, over the city and over the sea, as if it had been grasped in a great fist and dragged, the sky lurched. It slid. It gathered, contracting upon one locus and dragging everything to its center: the Tower of Conquest. The sky was a continuous skein, so the disturbance was felt over the whole orb of Eretz.

Campfires as distant as the southern continent flared with the sudden drag of winds. In the jagged ice palaces atop the Hintermost, stormhunters stirred and lifted their great heads. On the mountains’ far side, Sveva and Sarazal and the Caprine emerged from their long passage through the tunnels to blink up at a night sky that seemed set in motion. And on the far side of the world—day where in the Empire it was night—a woman standing at the railing of a terrace looking out over a pale green sea felt the tug of wind at her hair and looked up.

She was young, strong. She wore a diadem on her black hair, a stone scarab set in its burnished gold; her wings were flame and her eyes were, too, and they cut narrow as, overhead, clouds were dragged so fast they blurred. On it went and on, the clouds blurred to streaks, wheeling birds and shadows caught in an inexorable wind. Her eyes stirred to sparks as across her city, her island—her isles—her people stopped what they were doing to watch the sky.

And when it ceased and a profound stillness fell, she knew what was coming, and reached for the railing.

The lurch had been like the gasp that precedes the scream, and then came…

The scream.

Silent, expulsive. The clouds surged back the way they’d come, racing over the pale green sea.

And on the world’s far side, back at the source of this great unnatural gasp and scream, the unbreakable glass of the Hall of Conquest… shattered. The Sword, symbol of the Empire of Seraphim, exploded outward with massive force.

The moons were watching. Their reflections were carried by a million flying shards, so it could be said that everywhere a splinter stuck and stabbed, so, too, stabbed Nitid and Ellai. When the sun rose, dagger fragments of glass would be found embedded in trees many miles away, and in corpses, too, though those were fewer than might have been, had it been day. Pierced birds and angels lay broken on rooftops and a Silversword had crashed through a dome of the seraglio, creating a breach through which dozens of concubines escaped in the confusion, many carrying Joram’s babies in their bellies, others cradled in their arms.

The Sword met the dawn as a steel skeleton, layer after layer of glass gone, all of those labyrinthine corridors peeled away, all those birdcages and painted screens, and that dais of a bed, gone as if they had never been.

The day—dazzling, cloudless—grew into a patchwork of hush and horror, rush and rumor and bodies washing up on beaches as far away as Thisalene.

What had happened?

It was said the emperor was dead at the hand of Beast’s Bane, and the crown prince, too. It surprised no one that Beast’s Bane and his bastard cohorts were gone, or that the ragged Silverswords who had survived the night found, on storming the Misbegotten barracks, that it was empty, not hide nor hair of a bastard soldier anywhere in Astrae.

Across the Empire this would prove true. The Misbegotten had gone with the clouds, it was said.

They hadn’t, though. The clouds had fled to the far side of the world, where the young queen of the Stelians had set aside her scarab diadem, bound back her black hair, and set out with her magi to trace the source of the extraordinary disturbance.

As for the Misbegotten, they had gone to gather at the Kirin caves and await their brother Akiva, seventh of the name, to pledge selves and swords to his cause.





74


THE CURE FOR ENNUI


“I feel like a fly when it’s trapped in the window and almost dead.” Zuzana’s voice sounded as limp as her hair felt.

“That’s it exactly,” agreed Mik. “Fan faster.”

It was Zuzana’s turn wielding the fan, an artifact of crackly palm fronds they had found on the roof of the hotel. Mik, wearing only shorts, was in the chair, tilted back with his feet on the bed and his head back to expose his throat to the breeze. “You are a goddess of air circulation,” he said.

“And you are a specimen of glistening maleness.”

Mik’s laugh was dulled by heat coma. “I was surrounded by monster soldier torsos for a week. I know that I am a glistening specimen of scrawn.”

“You’re not scrawny.” Up and down went the fan as Zuzana formulated a compliment. It was true that being surrounded by bronze-hard pectorals and biceps bigger than her head cast Mik’s physique in a new light, but really, who needed biceps bigger than her head? Well, unless their job was killing angels, in which case that might come in handy. She told Mik, “You have perfect violin-playing muscles.”

“And you, with your mighty puppeteer arms. We put the chimaera to shame.”

She stopped fanning and fell backward onto the bed. It was a bad bed in a cheap hotel, and the flop jarred her teeth. “Ow,” she said without conviction.

“Hey. Your turn isn’t even half up.”

“I know. I just succumbed to ennui.”

“Just now.”

“Just exactly now. You saw it happen.”

Mik let his chair rock forward, and used the momentum to pitch onto the bed beside her. “Ow,” she said again.

“I know a cure for ennui,” Mik told her, half rolling toward her before giving up and flopping onto his back. “But it’s too hot.”

“It is way too hot,” agreed Zuzana, who had no doubt what his cure entailed. “How are there even people in this country? Who can make babies in heat like this?”

“So let’s go,” he said. “The coast. Home. Australia. I don’t know. Why are we still here, Zuze?”

“Here” was Ouarzazate, the biggest city in southern Morocco. It looked like a film set for The Mummy or something, which it probably was, seeing as how it was a movie studio town at the edge of the Sahara desert. It was a little bland, a lot hot, and though their hotel ostensibly had air-conditioning, it had ceased to function some time in the night, which they had not noticed, since the nights actually were cool enough for curing ennui and populating countries.

Why were they still here, a full day after their invisible escape from monster castle, feet freshly blistered from the hike and resulting tithe bruises at the height of their purple glory?

“I don’t want to go,” Zuzana admitted in a small voice. “Back to tourists and angel cults and puppets and real life?” She was whining and she knew it. “I want to make monsters and do magic and help Karou.”

“That’s real life, too,” he said. “And more to the point, real death. It’s too dangerous.”

“I know,” she said, and she did, but it just felt all wrong leaving Karou there. If Thiago had killed her once, how could she know he wouldn’t again? “Damn it, why doesn’t she have a phone?” she grumbled. Karou was rich; she couldn’t splurge on a satellite phone or something? Whatever. If Zuzana could just know her friend was okay, she would be okay, too.

Which is not to say that she would stop whining.

She’d agreed to leave the kasbah, and here she was. Fine. She hadn’t said she would leave the country. She just couldn’t get over the feeling that if they went any farther away, the whole magical spell of the past week would evaporate and leave her with nothing but a crazy story to tell her grandkids about how, for a week, in a giant sandcastle at the edge of the Sahara desert, she had been a resurrectionist’s apprentice and built great winged soldiers for an otherworldly war.

And they’d make loopy crazy gestures behind her back because hell, it did sound completely insane.

And then? She’d have no choice but to blink invisible—because oh my god, she could do that now—and swat their ruffian hides with rolled-up newspaper as they ran screaming from her cabbagey old-lady kitchen.

“I’m going to be the scariest grandma in the world,” she muttered, grouchy and kind of looking forward to it.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She flipped over and buried her face in her pillow. She screamed into it, got a mouthful of musty hotel pillow, and instantly wanted to bathe her tongue in running water. Of course the pillowcase had been washed since the last occupant, she told herself. Of course. That was why it tasted like stale stranger head.

Mik’s hand was on her back, making slow circles. She turned her face to him.

“I’m finger-painting with your sweat,” he informed her. “That was a heart.”

“A sweat heart. How romantic.”

“Oh, you want romantic? Okay. What does this spell?”

She felt his fingertip slide over her skin, and spoke each letter as it formed. “Z-U-Z-A-N-A. Zuzana. W-I-L-L. Will. Y-O-U.” She paused. “You.” She lay very still, listening with her skin for the next letter. “M.” Her voice dropped. She watched Mik’s face. He was smiling to himself, mischievous, his eyes on his work. Strawberry stubble covered his jaw. A beam of sunshine slipped through a broken slat in the shutter and glanced across his eyelashes; they looked dusted with light.

“A.” Zuzana said. Oh god. Zuzana will you M-A—

Her heart pounded. Could he feel it through her back? When they’d talked about marriage back in Prague she’d been dismissive. Well. She’d been embarrassed to have been caught thinking about it; that wasn’t who she was, some flit girl who dreamed of wedding gowns, and she was just way too young.

R, she felt. “R,” she whispered.

Mik’s hand fell still. “Wrong,” he said. “That was a K.”

“K? That’s not how you spell—” She cut herself off.

“How you spell what?” Mik’s voice was teasing. “I was writing Zuzana will you make me a sandwich? What did you think?”

She jerked her shirt down over her back. “Nothing,” she said, rolling off the bed.

Mik caught her around the waist and dragged her back. “You didn’t think—? Oh. How embarrassing for you.”

Her face was hot. He’d done it again. Jesus. Apparently she was a flit girl who dreamed of wedding gowns. “Let me go,” she said.

But he didn’t. He held her. “I can’t ask you that yet,” he whispered in her ear. “I still have two tasks left.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m not joking.” He sounded serious, and when she looked up at him, at his sweet, earnest face, he looked serious. “Were you?” he asked.

Well, yes, she had been joking about the three tasks. Seriously. She wasn’t a fairy-tale princess. Only, she kind of felt like one right now, and it wasn’t the worst feeling she’d ever had. “No,” she said; she stopped trying to get away. “I wasn’t joking, and here’s your second task. Get the air-conditioning back on, so you can cure my ennui.”





75


IT WAS NEAR AND IT WAS WINGS


Karou was in her room. It was night. Again. A day had passed since the pit. Somehow.

The door was closed, but Mik’s planks were gone. They had taken them, and the shutter bolts, too, and her safety, which, it was now clear, had never been more than an illusion.

She pictured the moon’s racing swerve around the world, and the world’s hurtling course around the sun, and the glitter of the stars in their arcs—but… no. That was illusion, too, just as the rising and setting of the sun was a trick. It was the world that moved, not the stars, not the sun. The sky moved, panning across that vastness as it rolled through space, hurtling end over end, and that hurtling was what kept her pinned here. One of billions.

It doesn’t matter what happens to me, she told herself. I am one of billions. I am stardust gathered fleetingly into form. I will be ungathered. The stardust will go on to be other things someday and I will be free. As Brimstone is free.

Stardust. This was science, she had heard it and read it—all matter came from the explosions of stars—but it sounded like the humans’ own version of Eretz myths. A little drier, maybe: no rapist sun, no weeping moon. No stabbing moon. That was the Kirin story: The sun had tried to take Ellai by force and she had stabbed him as Karou had stabbed Thiago. Nitid had wept, and her tears became chimaera. Children of regret.

Karou wondered: Had Ellai wept? Had she bathed in the sea and tried to feel clean again? That could have been part of the story: Her tears gave the seas their salt, and everything in the world was born of violence, betrayal, and grief.

Karou had bathed in the river. Her tears wouldn’t make it to the sea; they would water date palms in some oasis; they would become fruit and be eaten, and perhaps be wept again through other eyes.

That’s not how it works.

Yes, it is. Nothing is ever lost. Not even tears.

What about hope?

She was as clean as it was possible to be without hot water and soap. She had submerged herself in the rushing water until her arms and legs were numb, her bruised, torn skin scrubbed free of blood—her own blood and… not only her own blood. Not even mostly.

And not only Thiago’s, either.

She heard a sound and it was near and it was wings.

She jolted her mind from the memory like it was a face she could slap.

Think of something else.

Her pain. That would serve. Which pain, though? There were so many, and she had become too much a connoisseur of pain to let them blend into one haze. Each scrape, each contusion was its own entity, like stars in a constellation. A constellation called what? The Victim?

She looked like a victim. Raw. Brutalized. The right side of her face had been dragged over the scree. Her lip was split, her cheek purple, scraped and scabbing. Open blisters on her palms wept from the handle of the shovel. The shovel. Don’t think. Her earlobe. That was the pain she decided to focus on; she could do something about that. It was torn and swollen where the Wolf had bitten her; she might have mended it the way she had mended Ziri’s hands and cut smile, but she didn’t think she would be able to maintain the focus she would need, and anyway, she couldn’t bear the thought of the vises. Her whole body was ache and sting and scream.

“You make beautiful bruises,” Thiago had told her once. You don’t, she thought, looking at the ugly mottling that covered her arms, the splayed finger marks that told what he had done to her.

Tried to do, she reminded herself.

Had Ellai stabbed the sun in time, she wondered, or had the sun had his way? The story was unclear. Karou decided to believe that Ellai had protected herself, as she had. She held a curved upholstery needle over a candle flame to sterilize it. A hand mirror was propped on the table in front of her, and when she looked at it she zeroed in on her ear, avoiding any focus on her face. She didn’t want to see her face.

All those years of martial arts training, she thought as the needle began to glow. You’d think fighting could look like it does in movies: plenty of space to deliver elegant choreography, land clean kicks, and glare cool glares. Ha. There had been no space, only grappling and panic, and Thiago’s strength had counted for a hell of a lot more than her repertoire of fancy kicks.

Of course, she had killed him. She might look like a victim, but she wasn’t. She had stopped him.

If only that could have been the end of it.

A sound and it was near and it was wings.

It echoed in her head, the wingbeats, and the thud, the thumping sound dirt made when it was flung from the shovel. And the flies. How did flies find the dead so fast?

She felt like she was still at the edge of the pit, that fetid darkness threatening to drag her down. She jammed the needle through her earlobe, hard. It served to thrust the memory away again, but she knew the memory was like the flies—she might shoo it away, but nothing could keep it from coming back—and the piercing hurt. Her small sharp gasp was enough to wake Issa.

Issa. There was the night’s one blessing. She still had Issa.

“Sweet girl, what are you doing?” The serpent-woman uncoiled from her place in front of the door and gave a little hiss of exasperation when she saw the needle stuck through Karou’s earlobe like a fishhook. “Let me do that.”

Karou let her take the needle. What if she didn’t have Issa? If, after everything else, they had taken Issa from her, too? “I couldn’t sleep,” she whispered.

“No?” Issa’s voice was soft, and so were her hands. She eased the needle through Karou’s flesh and pulled the first stitch taut. “My poor child, it’s little wonder. I wish I had some dream tea to give you.”

“Or requiem tea,” said Karou.

Issa’s voice was not soft when she said, “Don’t say such things! You are alive. As long as you are alive, and he is…” She tapered off. He who? Whatever she was going to say, she rethought it. “As long as you are alive, there is still hope.” She took a breath, steadied her hand, and asked, “Ready?” before she put needle again to flesh.

Karou winced. She waited until the needle was through. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Was it…? Is that how you and Yasri…?”

“Yes,” said Issa. “It was peaceful, child, don’t be sad.” She sighed. “I wish she were here, though. She would know what to give you. She had a dozen tricks for helping Brimstone sleep.”

“We’ll get her,” Karou said, wondering when, wondering how, and wondering what the place looked like today. Thiago had put the temple to the torch and the requiem grove, too. It had been eighteen years; had the trees grown back? The grove had been ancient. She remembered arriving in the moonlight to the sight of the treetops, the glint of the temple roof showing through, and how her heart would race knowing Akiva was waiting for her below. Akiva, waiting to gather her out of the air. Akiva lying beside her, tracing her eyelids with his fingertip, his touch as soft as hummingbird-moths, as soft as the drift of requiem blossoms falling in the darkness.

She closed her eyes and clasped her arms, one hand over each forearm, and felt the tenderness of her bruises. Thiago, her ally; Akiva, her enemy. How twisted it was. What makes an enemy?

No. She couldn’t forget. She dug her fingers into her bruises to shake herself out of her memories. Ink lines inscribed on killing hands make an enemy. Ash palisades where cities once stood make an enemy.

Issa tied off another stitch and cut the thread. Karou thanked her and wondered What now?

The sun would rise; she couldn’t stay in her room forever. She would have to face the chimaera. She couldn’t wait for her bruises to fade. Would they even notice? They took her bruises for granted. How much did they know of what had happened at the pit?

Not all of it, that was certain, and—dear gods and stardust—they had better never find out.

A sound and it was near and it was—

“Karou.”

A choked whisper. Karou blinked.

“Who’s there?” Issa’s voice was sharp, and Karou knew she hadn’t imagined the whisper. It came from the window, and this time it was not Bast.

“Please.”

The voice was disembodied, the word pulled long, and it was too low a whisper to ring with the richness of his voice, but Karou knew who it was. Her body flashed hot and cold. Why? Why would he come back here? She stood up fast and her chair smashed backward.

Issa stared at her. “Who is it, child?”

But Karou didn’t have time to answer. The bolts were gone from the shutters. The window came open. Issa startled, the heavy muscle of her serpent’s coil rippling in the candlelight, and Karou shrank from the intrusion—and from the heat—as Akiva simultaneously appeared, in the soft glimmer of a vanishing glamour, and crashed to the floor.