Days of Blood & Starlight

15


FRACTURED


She should have known that night, long ago in another life, another flesh, that she was followed, but joy had dulled her caution.

She was Madrigal of the Kirin. She was in love. She was in the grip of a huge, bold dream. For a month of secret nights, she had flown in darkness to the temple of Ellai, where Akiva waited, restless with new love and on fire as she was to remake their world. She always savored the moment of arrival—her first glimpse of his upturned face as she slipped down through the canopy of the requiem trees, and how he would see her and light up with a joy to answer her own. It was the image she would keep with her in the days that followed—Akiva’s lifted face, so perfect and golden, bright with such amazement and delight. He reached up to draw her down. His hands skimmed up her legs as she descended, took her hips and gathered her right out of the air so that their lips met before her hooves ever touched ground.

She laughed against his mouth, her wings still open behind her like great dark fans, and he sank down, reclining on the moss right there with her astride him. They were giddy and hungry, and made love in the middle of the grove in plain sight of the bright-eyed evangelines whose night symphony was their music.

In plain sight of those who had followed Madrigal from the city.

Later, it made her sick to realize that they had watched. They had waited and watched, not content with the treason of mere kissing, but needing a more outrageous raft of crimes—to see it all, and to hear what they would talk of afterward.

And what had they been rewarded with?

The lovers moved languidly into the small temple, where they sipped from the sacred spring and ate bread and fruit that Madrigal had brought. They worked at magic. Akiva was teaching Madrigal his invisibility glamour. She could manage it for a moment, but it required a heavier pain tithe than she could sustain on her own to hold it in place. In the temple, she flickered in and out: there, not there.

“What shall I do,” she mused, “for pain?”

“Nothing. No pain for you. Only pleasure.” He nuzzled her, and she pushed him off, smiling.

“Pleasure won’t help me stay invisible long enough for it to count.”

They couldn’t hide forever, and would need to be able to come and go in both their lands, among chimaera and seraphim, unseen as needed. They were working out whom to recruit to their cause; they were poised to begin. It would be a critical moment, giving themselves away to their first few chosen fellows, and they talked them over in turn.

They also discussed whom to kill.

“The Wolf,” Akiva said. “As long as he is alive, there is no hope for peace.”

Madrigal sat silent. Thiago, die? She knew Akiva was right. Thiago would never accept less than the total demise of the enemy, and certainly she had no personal love lost for him, but to kill him? She toyed with the wishbone hanging around her neck, conflicted. He was the soul of the army and a unifying hero of her people. The chimaera would follow him anywhere. “That’s a problem,” she told Akiva.

“You know it as well as I do. Joram, too,” said Akiva.

If possible, the emperor was even more bloody-minded than Thiago was. He also happened to be Akiva’s father. “Do you… do you think you can do it?” asked Madrigal.

“Kill him? What am I for but killing?” His tone was bitter. “I am the monster he created.”

“You’re not a monster,” she said, drawing him to her, stroking his brow, which was always hot as fever, and kissing the ink lines on his knuckles as if she could forgive him the lives they represented. They let talk of killing fall away and wished in silence that they could have the world they wanted without having to kill for it.

Or, as it turned out instead, die for it.

Outside, Thiago decided that he had heard enough, and he set fire to the temple.

Even before they smelled smoke or saw the lick of fire, Madrigal and Akiva were jolted by the screams of the evangelines. They’d never even known that the creatures could scream. They leapt apart, spun instinctively for weapons that weren’t there. They’d left them on the moss outside, along with their shed clothes.

“So careless” was the first thing Thiago said when they were drawn up short, rushing from the burning temple to find a company of soldiers waiting. The White Wolf, front and center, had Madrigal’s crescent-moon knives, one in each hand. He let them swing back and forth, hooked from his fingertips. Behind him, one of his wolf retinue held Akiva’s swords. He chinged the blades together in a taunt.

One beat followed the sound, a single beat of stillness, and then chaos leapt in.

Akiva raised his arms, summoning magic. What he intended to do, Madrigal never knew, because Thiago was ready for him, and four revenant soldiers had already thrown up their palms, hamsas outfaced to the angel. A fury of sickness hit him. He staggered, dropped to his knees, and they were on him with the butts of their swords, their heavy gloved fists and booted feet, and one whipping reptilian tail wrapped in chains.

Madrigal tried to run to him but was caught by Thiago’s fist slamming into her belly so hard it lifted her off her feet. For a weightless, airless moment she didn’t know up from down, and then she hit the ground. Bones jarred. Blood rose up her throat, filled her mouth and nose.

Choking, gasping, sick. Pain. Pain and blood. She coughed for breath. Naked, she curled around the pain. Overhead: smoke, trees catching fire, and then Thiago. He stared down at her, his lip curled in a snarl.

“Foul thing,” he growled in a tone of deepest revulsion. “Traitor.” And then, the vilest thing of all: “Angel-lover.”

She saw murder in his eyes and thought she would die right there on the moss. In some deep place, Thiago was fractured. He was sometimes called the Berserker for his savage killing sprees in battle; his trademark was tearing out throats with his teeth. It was a very dangerous thing to make him angry, and Madrigal flinched from a blow that never came.

Thiago turned away.

Maybe he wanted her to have to watch. And maybe it was just base instinct—an alpha urge to destroy a challenger. To destroy Akiva.

There was so much blood.

The memory was lurid, mixed with choking smoke and the shrieks of serpent-birds roasting alive, and though it wasn’t Karou’s proper memory but Madrigal’s, it was still her own, arising from her deeper self. It was all her, and she remembered everything: Akiva on the ground, his blood running into the sacred stream, and Thiago, wild-eyed but eerily composed and utterly silent, laying into the angel’s body with blow after blow, his own face, his white hair shining with fine bloodspray.

He would have killed Akiva then, but one of his more levelheaded followers stepped in and pulled him off, and so it hadn’t ended there. Madrigal had heard the awful, echoing screams of her lover for days afterward as he was tortured in the prison of Loramendi, where she awaited her own execution.

That was the Thiago whom Karou saw—killer, torturer, savage—when he appeared before her a lifetime later in the ruins of Loramendi.

But… it all looked different now, didn’t it? How, after all, in the light of what had come to pass, could she argue that he had been wrong?

Akiva should have died that day, and so should she. It had been treason, their love, their plans, and worst of all: her fool mercy, to save the angel’s life not once but twice, so that he might live to become what he was now. The Prince of Bastards, they called him, among other names. Thiago had made certain she heard them all—Lord of the Misbegotten, Beast’s Bane, the Angel of Annihilation—and behind each name lurked the accusation: Because of you, because of you.

If it weren’t for her, the chimaera would still live. Loramendi would still stand. Brimstone would be stringing teeth, and Issa, sweet Issa, would be fretting over his health and winding serpents around human necks in the antechamber of the shop. The children of the city would still run riot on the Serpentine in all their many shapes, and they would grow up to be soldiers, as she had, and be cycled through body after body as the war went on. And on.

Forever.

Looking back now, Karou could scarcely believe her own naiveté, that she had believed the world could be some other way, and that she could be the one to make it so.





16


THE INHERITORS


In her doorway, Karou thrust out her hand and said, “Thiago, just give me the tooth.”

He stepped closer, so that his chest butted at her fingertips and she had to pull them back. Her pulse stuttered. He was so near; she really wanted to move away, but to do so would give him space to enter, and she must not do that. Since joining with him, she had tried hard never to be alone with him. His nearness made her feel small, so weak by contrast, and so… human.

With a magician’s flourish, he opened his hand, revealing the molar as if he were daring her to take it. What would he do if she did—grab her hand?

She hesitated, wary.

“Is it for Amzallag?” Thiago asked.

She nodded. He had asked her for a body for Amzallag, and that’s what he was getting. Aren’t I the compliant little helper, she thought.

“Good. I’ve brought him.” He raised his other hand, which held a thurible.

Karou’s belly flipped. So it was already done. She didn’t know why this part of the process unsettled her so much; she supposed it was the image of two creatures going off into the scree and only one coming back. She hadn’t seen the pit, and she hoped she never would, but some days she could smell it: a fug of decay that gave reality to what was usually remote. Thuribles were clean and simple; the new bodies she made were as pristine as Thiago’s clothes. It was the other bodies that bothered her—the discarded ones.

But in that way, as in pretty much every way, she was alone. Thiago was unfazed. He swung Amzallag’s thurible as if he had not just murdered a comrade and pushed his body into a pit of rotting corpses. The comrade had been willing, after all; anything for the cause, and the old bodies just didn’t serve the new purpose, so Karou was replacing them, one by one.

The Wolf fixed her with his pale stare, so intense it made her want to back up a step. “It has begun, Karou. What we’ve been working for.”

She nodded. A chill ran through her. Rebellion. Revenge. “Has there been news?” she asked.

“No. But it’s early yet.”

Several days ago Thiago had dispatched five patrols of six soldiers each. What exactly their missions were, Karou didn’t know. She had asked, but she hadn’t exactly argued when Thiago told her, “Don’t worry about that, Karou. Save your strength for resurrection.”

Wasn’t that what Brimstone had done? He had left the war to the Warlord, and she was leaving the rebellion to the Wolf.

“I admit I’ve been pacing.” Thiago tossed the tooth up and caught it. “I was glad to have a reason to come up. Won’t you let me help you, Karou?”

“I don’t need help.”

“It will help me, to have something to do.” With that, he moved forward so that she had to step aside or risk something like an embrace, and then he was past her. He was in her chamber, and it seemed to grow smaller around him.

It was a beautiful room, or had been once. The high ceiling glinted with mosaics, and faded silk panels lined the walls. A pair of windows with carved shutters stood open to the night, their ledges three feet deep, revealing the fortress thickness of the walls. It wasn’t very big; there were other rooms that would be more suitable to Karou’s work, but she had claimed this one because of the crossbar at the door and the feeling of safety it gave her—though a fat lot of good that did her now that Thiago was on the wrong side of it.

Stupid, she thought. Hanging back at the open door, she told him, “I’d rather work alone.”

He approached her worktable. Setting the tiger molar down with a click, he looked at her. “But you are not alone. We are in this together.” His intensity—his seeming sincerity—was piercing. “We are the inheritors, Karou. What my father and Brimstone were to our people, you and I are to those who remain.”

And what a heavy inheritance it was: no less than the fate of the chimaera races and all their hopes for survival.

The chimaera were barely clinging to the world. Thiago’s band of soldiers was all that remained of the chimaera army, and only through Karou’s collaboration did they have any hope of mounting a real opposition.

When she’d joined them they were hardly more than sixty: a handful of wounded survivors of the defense of Cape Armasin, who had escaped through the mine tunnels, along with others they had met as they moved across the ravaged land. They were mostly soldiers, with a few useful civilians such as the smith Aegir and a pair of farmwives to see to the cooking. And though sixty was a paltry number for a rebel force, they did have more hope than that.

They had thuribles. They had souls.

Karou’s best guess: Several hundred slain soldiers waited in stasis in the silver vessels, and it was up to her to bring them back to the fight.

“We are in this together,” Thiago had said. She looked at him hard and waited for the usual revulsion to rise, but it didn’t. Perhaps she was just too tired.

Or… perhaps Fate laid out your life for you like a dress on a bed, and you could either wear it or go naked.

Across the room, he had found her case of tools. It was a pretty thing, embossed leather the color of saffron, and looked like it might be a cosmetics case.

It was not.

He spilled its contents onto the table. There were some everyday objects—straight pins, a small blade, a hammer, pliers, of course—but mostly there were vises. They weren’t flashy: just plain brass screw clamps like the ones Brimstone had used. It was amazing the pain you could cause with such simple objects, if you knew what you were doing. Karou had had them handmade to order by a smith in the medina of Marrakesh who hadn’t asked questions but had guessed their purpose and smirked at her with a knowingness that had made her feel dirty. As if she enjoyed this.

“I’ll tithe,” said the Wolf, and Karou felt, in the void of her curiously absent revulsion, relief rush in.

“Really?”

“Of course. I would have before, if you had ever let me come in. Do you think I like knowing that you’re locked in here alone, suffering?”

Yes, she thought, but at the same moment she experienced a twinge of doubt for all her suspicion, and all the nights of barred doors. Thiago would give his pain to her magic so that she didn’t have to. How could she say no to that? Already he was stripping off his impeccable white shirt. “Come.” He smiled, and she saw in him a fatigue to mirror her own. “Let’s do it and be done.”

Karou gave in. She pushed the door closed with her foot and went to him.





17


THE PAIN TITHE


There is intimacy in pain. Anyone who has comforted a sufferer knows it—the helpless tenderness, the embrace and murmur and slow rocking together as two become one against the enemy, pain.

Karou did not comfort Thiago. She didn’t touch him more than she had to as the pain invaded his body. But she was alone with him in the candlelight, and he was half-clad and subdued, his handsome face grave with endurance, and while she certainly felt what she expected—a grim pleasure to give back some small measure of the anguish he had once caused her—it wasn’t all she felt.

There was gratitude, too. A new body lay on the floor behind them, freshly conjured from teeth and pain, and for a change, the pain had not been her own. “Thanks,” she said grudgingly.

“My pleasure,” replied Thiago.

“I hope not. That would be sick.”

He gave a tired laugh. “The pleasure is not in the pain. It’s in sparing you the pain.”

“How noble.” Karou was removing the vises and his arm was heavy in her hand, his muscle so dense that she’d had trouble fitting the clamps, and was having trouble again, wrenching them off. She cringed as she torqued his triceps out of shape, leaving an angry welt. He winced, and an apology slipped automatically from her lips. “Sorry,” she said, and wanted to bite it back. He had you beheaded, she reminded herself. “Actually, I’m not. You had that coming.”

“I suppose I did,” he agreed, rubbing his arm. With a hint of a smile, he added, “Now we’re even.”

A small bark of a laugh, almost but not entirely without mirth, burst from Karou. “You wish.”

“I do, Karou. Karou.”

The laugh died quickly; Thiago said her name too much. It was like he was claiming it. She started to draw away, her hands full of vises, but his voice stopped her. “I’ve had this thought that if I could tithe for you, I could… atone… for what I did to you.”

Karou stared at him. The Wolf, atone?

He looked down. “I know. There’s no atoning for it.”

I can think of a way, thought Karou. “I’m… I’m surprised that you think you have anything to atone for.”

“Well.” He spoke softly. “Not for everything. You gave me no choice, Karou, you know that, but I might have done things differently, and I know that. The evanescence… it was beyond the pale.” He looked at her, beseeching. “I wasn’t myself, Karou. I was in love with you. And to see you with… him, like that. You drove me a little mad.”

Karou flushed and felt laid bare all over again. At least, she thought, struggling to maintain her composure, this human flesh had never been exposed to him the way her natural body had. Still, the way he was looking at her, she gathered that he’d forgotten nothing of that night in the requiem grove.

She fumbled with the vises, returning them to their case.

“There’s something I’ve wanted to tell you, but I didn’t think you were ready to hear it.” A drop in his voice alarmed her. He sounded… confessional.

“I really should finish—” she tried to say, but he cut her off.

“It’s about Brimstone.”

The mention of Brimstone gripped Karou as it always did: like hands at her throat; a throttling, breathless assault of grief.

“He and I had our differences,” Thiago admitted. “That’s no secret. But when I found out that he had saved you, that your soul wasn’t lost… Perhaps you think I was furious that he had defied me, but nothing could be further from the truth. And now… Believe me when I say that every day I wake filled with gratitude for his mercy.” He paused. “Every time I look at you, I bless him.”

Look who’s become a fan of mercy, Karou thought. “Yes, well. It was good luck for you that a spare resurrectionist happened along.”

“I won’t lie. When I saw you in the ruins, I almost fell to my knees. But luck is too small a word for it, Karou. It was salvation. I had been praying to Nitid for hope, and when I opened my eyes and saw you there—you—like a beautiful hallucination, I thought she had answered me, and delivered to me the only person Brimstone ever trained.”

Karou wouldn’t have said Brimstone had trained her; that made it sound like he had intended for her to succeed him, and she knew that he would have carried his burden alone to the end of time sooner than pass it to her. Brimstone, Brimstone. Most of the time she accepted that he was gone—she knew he was—but there were moments when a certainty besieged her out of nowhere: that his soul was in stasis, hidden, waiting for her to find it.

Those moments were shining points of hope, brief and followed by crushing guilt, when she would admit to herself just how badly she wanted to hand Brimstone back this burden. Selfish.

In her deepest heart, she was glad he was free of it, finally at rest. Let someone else bear this weight. It was her turn—and who deserved it more than she did? The ugliness and misery, the wind-borne stench of the pit, the isolation and fatigue, the pain. And if Brimstone hadn’t exactly trained her, he had taught her enough to manage, if only just. She was getting better, faster—thinner, wearier—and with no help from gods or moons or anything else, thank you very much. She told Thiago, with a rough edge to her voice, “Nitid had nothing to do with it.”

“Maybe not. It doesn’t matter. I’m just trying to say thank you.” There was a tremulous pathos in his ice-blue eyes. Keenly the intimacy of the moment struck Karou—their aloneness in the flickering light, his bare skin—and her revulsion came flooding back, nasty as bile.

“You’re welcome,” she said. She pulled his shirt off the chair back and threw it at him. “Get dressed, would you?”

She turned away again, trying to mask her disquiet. The only sound was the ring of the thurible’s chain as she took it from the table and suspended it from a hook over Amzallag’s new body.

It lay before her, huge and inert. Monstrous. She couldn’t believe that Brimstone would be proud of her now, but, as Thiago had persuaded her, these were monstrous times, and the rebels needed to maximize the impact of their small force.

It at least bore a resemblance to Amzallag’s accustomed bodies, being stag and tiger with the torso of a man, but it was much bigger—the iron filings were for size and heft, and fittingly were scavenged from the cage of Loramendi. It was a hulking thing; no armor would fit it. Every muscle was bunched and pronounced, and the flesh had a grayish cast: The excess of iron did that. Its head was tiger, the fangs as long as kitchen knives. And then there were the wings.

Ah, the wings.

The wings were the reason that living soldiers needed new bodies at all. It was Karou’s own fault. It had been her idea to come… here. She glanced at the window and the singular moon that was framed in it. Was she crazy? Stupid? Maybe. It had just been too much, keeping always on the move in Eretz, hiding in ruins and mine tunnels and scanning the sky for seraph patrols. She’d have lost her mind and her nerve keeping on like that, and the chances were that if they’d stayed they’d have been discovered by now, but still, she had to admit she hadn’t thought out all the ramifications of the move.

The pit, chiefly.

The soldiers needed to be able to come and go through the portal in the sky. They needed wings. For the journey here, those who could fly had carried those who could not—multiple trips back and forth, and those too large to be lifted had been slain and gleaned and carried that way. That was a day Karou would never forget, and now that they were here, the wingless were relegated to guard duty until she was able to remake them, at which time they could join the incursions into Eretz.

It was that simple. Simple, ha. Karou shuddered just to look at the fearsome thing on her floor and know that Amzallag’s previous body—the last one of many that Brimstone had made for him—had been thrown away like an old suit of clothes, so that Amzallag could become this. For a moment, she could only see it as its prey would see it, the horror and the hopelessness of escape, those wings, which, unfolded, would quite blot out the sky. Her hands grew clammy. What am I doing?

What am I making?

And… What have I brought into the human world?

It was like surfacing from a dream to glimpse cold reality for just an instant before sleep dragged her back down. Karou’s horror subsided. She was arming soldiers, that’s what she was doing. If she didn’t, who would make the seraphim pay for what they’d done?

As for bringing them into the human world, this place was remote and forgotten; the chance of encountering people was slim to none. And if a small voice in her head liked to whisper, That’s not good enough, Karou, she was getting used to tuning it out.

She took a deep breath. All that remained now was to guide Amzallag’s soul into his new skin, and that was a simple matter for incense. She reached for a cone and turned back to Thiago. He had put his shirt back on, she was glad to see. He looked very tired, his eyes heavy-lidded, but he mustered a smile.

“All ready?” he asked her.

She nodded and lit the incense.

“Good girl.”

She bristled at the words and the caressing tone in which he spoke them. Am I? she wondered as she sank to her knees to raise the dead.





18


ARISEN


Coming up on the silent village, the slave caravan thought nothing of a sky winged by blood daubs. The anomaly would have been an absence of blood daubs; in this work, carrion birds were a given. Usually, however, the carrion was of the beast variety.

Not so now.

The dead were strung up on the aqueduct: eight seraphim with their wings fanned wide. From a distance, they seemed to be smiling. Up close, it was an ugliness to shock even a slaver. Their faces…

“What did this?” someone choked out, though the answer was writ plain before them. In sweeping letters, in blood, a message was painted on a keystone of the aqueduct.

From the ashes, it read, we are arisen.

They panicked and dispatched messengers for Astrae. Being ill-defended, they didn’t delay to cut down their soldiers but hurried on, driving their chimaera chattel with whips. A marked change had come over the captives at the sight of the dead—a brightness, a keen and shifting eagerness. The blood scrawl was not the only message; the smiles were a message, too.

The corners of the dead angels’ mouths had been carefully slit, widened into rictus grins. The slavers knew exactly what it meant and so did the slaves, and all eyes grew sharp—some with fear; others, anticipation.

Night came and the caravan made camp, posted guards. The dark was pocked by small sounds: a scurry, a snap. The guards’ hands were hot on their hilts; their blood jumped, eyes darted.

And then the slaves began to sing.

This had not happened on any previous night. The slavers were accustomed to whimpers from the huddle of captives, not song, and they didn’t like it. The beasts’ voices were raw as wounds, forceful and primal and unafraid. When the seraphim tried to silence them, a tail lashed forth from the huddle and knocked a guard off his feet.

And then, between one leap of the campfire’s flame and the next, they came. Nightmares. Saviors. They came from above, and the slavers’ first confused thought was that reinforcements had arrived, but these were no seraphim. Wings and screaming, spike horns, antlers, lashing tails and hunched ursine shoulders. Bristles, claws.

Swords and teeth.

No angel survived.

Freed slaves melted away into the landscape, dragging the swords and axes—and yes, the whips—of their captors. They would be less easily subdued in the future.

All fell still. Here, too, a message was scribed in the blood of slaughter—the same words as would be found at many such scenes in the days to come.

We are arisen, it read. It is your turn to die.





19


PARADISE


Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love and dared to imagine a new way of living—one without massacres and torn throats and bonfires of the fallen, without revenants or bastard armies or children ripped from their mothers’ arms to take their turn in the killing and dying.

Once, the lovers lay entwined in the moon’s secret temple and dreamed of a world that was like a jewel box without a jewel—a paradise waiting for them to find it and fill it with their happiness.




This was not that world.





20


A COUNTRY OF GHOSTS


Akiva, Hazael, and Liraz walked among the dead angels. They didn’t speak, only looked, and their silence was brittle with anger. These corpses, they were torn, as mice by cats. Akiva couldn’t tell if he had known them—the blood daubs had done their work—but on several of the faces there remained enough flesh to make out the mutilation. The obscene smiles had not been seen for generations, but all seraphim and chimaera knew them from graven memory. This was the Warlord’s signature.

It was what he had done to his seraph masters when he rose up from slavery a thousand years ago and changed the world. It was a powerful and unmistakable symbol of rebellion.

“Harmony with the beasts,” said Liraz under her breath, and Akiva tensed. His words, thrown back at him, and what could he say in response? That these same soldiers had left a string of burned villages in their wake and were no one’s idea of innocent? It would sound as though he thought they deserved this. He didn’t, but he couldn’t feel outrage, either, only sinking sadness. These soldiers had done what they had done, and been done unto in return. This was how it went.

In the cycle of slaughter, reprisal begat reprisal, forever. Now was not the time to philosophize, though, not with blood daubs circling overhead, skawing at them to be gone and leave them to their feasts. He kept his thoughts to himself.

The sun was rising. It touched the stalks of jess with a fairy glimmer, and the tassels fanned like wings in the breeze. Green-gold, gold-green, not yet ripe and never now to ripen. Soldiers were touching fire to the field’s edge, and the flames would spread fast in this tinder heat. Before the sun was fully up, the jess would be crackling, and so would the slain. Fire take the dead. There were no funerals for soldiers.

A shout from above. “You there! What are you doing?”

Akiva tilted back his head. The rays of the early sun lit his amber eyes, and the seraph in the air saw who he was and blanched. “Forgive me, sir. I… I wasn’t informed that you were here.”

Akiva launched into the air to meet him, his brother and sister coming up behind him. “We’ve come with the reinforcements from Cape Armasin,” he said.

The largest garrison in the former free holdings, Cape Armasin had sent soldiers to bolster the small southern contingent in response to these attacks.

The young patrol leader, whose name was Noam, looked slightly dazed to find himself face-to-face with Beast’s Bane. “It’s good to have you, sir,” he said.

For the second time: sir. Liraz made a noise in her throat. Akiva was no sir. Though fame afforded him a certain esteem, he was Misbegotten, and his rank was as it had ever been, and would ever be: low. “What have you learned?” he asked.

The soldier was wide-eyed. “The fight was under the aqueduct, sir.” It stood just behind them, a massive, ancient span, trees enough sprouting from the cracks in its stones to make it a kind of aerial forest. It would have been built by seraphim, Akiva knew, in the early days of the Empire’s first expansion, many centuries gone by, when the angels had come to this wild land of primitive, hostile beast tribes and civilized it. Subdued it.

Subdued. What a gentle word for the slave-making and spirit-crushing that had brought the chimaera under the Empire’s fist. The Warlord had destroyed that fist, but it was back, and now Akiva was a part of it.

“An ambush,” Noam added. “They were killed in the underpassage, and strung up there.” He indicated the red message painted on the aqueduct’s soaring upper story.

Arisen. Arisen.

Akiva stared at the words. Who?

Liraz spoke. “Could the villagers have done this?”

Noam glanced at the dead. “It’s a Caprine village,” he stated simply, which Akiva understood to mean that the placid sheep-aspect beasts could never have committed such an act, let alone wrestled the corpses up the aqueduct.

“Are there enemy dead?” he asked.

“No, sir. Only our own, and no blood on their weapons.”

So they hadn’t managed a single stroke in self-defense? And these had been seasoned soldiers who had survived the war itself.

“And down there, sir.” Noam indicated the line of the road wending south through the hills. “The slave caravan was hit, too.”

Akiva looked. The scene was pastoral: a softness of valleys, hills shading one behind the next like the shadows of shadows, all of it as tranquil as birdsong. And there, lingering just above the horizon, was Ellai. A ghost moon all but vanished by the dawn. I saw what happened here, she might have taunted. And I laughed.

“The slaves?” he asked Noam.

“Gone, sir. Into the woods. The slavers were… fed chain.”

“Fed chain?” repeated Hazael.

Noam nodded. “The slaves’ shackles.”

Akiva watched his brother and sister for a reaction, but they gave away nothing. What would you do, he wished he could ask them, if someone put our people in chains?

Slaves were held to be a necessary evil in the affairs of empire, but Akiva did not share that belief, and didn’t mourn the loss of slavers. Soldiers, though, were another matter, and here were eight more. The death toll was sharp and rising. There had been five attacks in all. In one furious night, at Duncrake, Spirit Veil, the Whispers, the Iximi Moors, and here, in the Marazel Hills, seraph “cleansing” patrols had been taken by surprise, killed, mutilated, and left as gruesome messages for the Empire.

It was worse than war, he thought, to bleed out your life while your faraway folk danced hallelujah and raised their cups to the peace.

Peace, indeed.

Akiva looked down. The flames were halfway across the field by now, the first soldiers already swallowed up. Squalls swam in the rising heat, dropping down almost lazily to pick off the smoke-stunned grassjacks that fled in clouds ahead of the blaze.

“Sir?” asked Noam. “Can you tell what did this?”

Revenants, Akiva thought at once. He had seen enough dead-strewn battlefields to know that only the biggest, most monstrous and unnatural chimaera could have caused such rending of flesh. But the revenants were gone. “Probably some survivors of the war,” he said.

“There’s talk,” said Noam, hesitating. “That the old monsters aren’t really dead.”

The Warlord and Brimstone, he meant. “Believe me.” Akiva was besieged by memories of their last moments. “They’re dead and more than dead.”

And what would this wide-eyed young soldier say if he knew how fervently the hero Beast’s Bane wished they weren’t?

“But the message. We are arisen. What else could it mean but resurrection?”

“It’s a rallying cry. That’s all.” The Warlord and Brimstone had gone beyond all retrieval. He had watched them die.

But… he had watched Madrigal die, too.

A sliver of doubt slid under his certainty. Was it possible? Akiva’s pulse gave a short, sharp spike. He thought of the thurible he had found, its small message scrawled in a bold hand: Karou. If there was another resurrectionist, maybe the word was not such a terrible taunt as he had believed.

No. He couldn’t let himself hope. “There was only ever Brimstone,” he said, more harshly than he’d intended.

Liraz was watching him, her eyes drawn ever so slightly narrow. Did she know what he was thinking? She knew about the thurible, of course. “No more secrets,” she had said, and there weren’t. Did a brief flare of hope count as a secret? If it did, it was one he felt justified in keeping.

Noam nodded, accepting his word. With a light tone, as if he were repeating foolishness he himself did not believe, he said, “Others are saying it’s the ghosts.” His eyes, though, betrayed a real fear, and Akiva couldn’t blame him. Brimstone’s last words chilled him, too.

He remembered how Joram’s voice had reverberated through the agora of Loramendi in the silence after all resistance was crushed. The Warlord and Brimstone had been on their knees; they had been kept alive to witness the deaths of everyone else.

Everyone else.

“You doomed them,” Joram had hissed in the Warlord’s ear. “You were never going to win. You are animals. Did you really think you could rule the world?”

“That was not our dream,” the Warlord had said with quiet dignity.

“Dream? Spare me your beast dreams. Do you know what my dream has been?” asked Joram, as if there were any who didn’t know he sought to dominate all Eretz.

The Warlord’s stag antlers were broken, ragged. He had been beaten, and it seemed to cost him great effort to hold up his head. At his side, Brimstone wasn’t managing even that. He was hunched forward, his weight on one splayed hand, the other arm wrapped across his middle where he bled from a gash, and his great shoulders heaved as he tried to draw breath. He wasn’t long for life, but still he managed to raise his head and answer.

That voice. It was the only time Akiva ever heard it, and the sound of it—the feel of it—would never leave him. Deep as the beat of a stormhunter’s wings, it had seemed to lodge in the base of his skull and live there.

“Dead souls dream only of death,” the resurrectionist told the emperor. “Small dreams for small men. It is life that expands to fill worlds. Life is your master, or death is. Look at you. You are a lord of ashes, a lord of char. You are filthy with your victory. Enjoy it, Joram, for you will never know another. You are lord of a country of ghosts, and that is all that you will ever be.”

It sounded like a curse, Akiva had thought, and it had pitched Joram into a fervor. “It shall be a country of ghosts, I promise you that. A country of corpses. No beast shall crawl but that it drags a weight of shackles and is so scored by the lash that it can hardly raise its head!”

Anger was the emperor’s resting state. Seraphim were beings of fire, but it was said that Joram burned hot, like the core of a star. It gave him enormous appetites—such an inferno to feed—and when it snapped into rage it was terrible, beyond all reach of reason or control.

He killed Brimstone on the spot. One slash; surely he meant to sever his head, but Brimstone’s neck was thick and he failed, and as Brimstone collapsed in a torrent of blood, Joram wrenched up his sword and raised it for another try. With a bellow of rage, the Warlord, ancient creature, lowered that rack of broken antlers and launched himself at the emperor. It took two soldiers leaping in to put him down, but not before he speared Joram on one jagged prong and felled him, not killing him, not even seriously wounding him, but stealing his dignity on his day of triumph.

And ever since, Joram had been delivering on the promise he had made: a country of ghosts, indeed.

“If ghosts could pick up killing where the living left off,” Akiva told Noam, “we’d have wiped each other out long ago.”

Again Noam nodded, accepting his words as wisdom. “Sir?” he asked. “Are there new orders?”

Liraz finally couldn’t take it anymore. “You don’t have to call him sir,” she said. “You know what we are.” Misbegotten. Bastards. Nothing.

“I…” Noam stammered. “But he’s—”

“Never mind,” said Akiva. “No. No new orders. What are the standing orders?” They had just arrived; he didn’t know. “Are we to track the rebels?”

But Noam shook his head. “There’s nothing to track. They just vanished. We’re… we’re to answer them.”

“Answer them?”

“The messages, the smiles. The emperor…” He swallowed audibly; he was being careful, weighing his words for Akiva’s benefit, but they lacked conviction. “The emperor can send a message, too.”

Akiva was silent, taking this in. At Cape Armasin he had been lucky: in the north, there had been no one left to kill. Here it was another story. Fleeing villagers, freed slaves, chimaera trying to make their way to the Hintermost, where they believed they might find sanctuary, a way through the mountains to a new life. And now he was supposed to hunt them down? Make a message out of them?

Beast’s Bane. He should be good at it.

A mixture of desperation, fatigue, and helplessness overcame Akiva. He wanted no part of Joram’s message.

Corpse smoke gusted up from the field, and the angels beat their wings and backed away from it to come to rest atop the aqueduct. Noam noticed gore and broken feathers where the soldiers had been strung up, and emotion broke through his martial stolidness. “What is it all for?” he asked wildly—of the sky, of no one. “I can’t remember. I… I don’t think I ever knew.” He fixed abruptly on Akiva. “Sir,” he implored, Liraz’s scold forgotten. “When will it end?”

It won’t, thought Akiva. He looked into the eyes of this young soldier and knew that soon enough, whatever was in him that made him ask why would be dead, of necessity—another soul ripped out to make way for a monster. Armies need monsters, as the old hunchback had told him in Morocco, to do their terrible work. Who knew that better than Akiva? He looked at Hazael, Liraz. Was it too late for them? For himself?

Desperate and tired, helpless and besieged by the meat scent of burning comrades, he did something he had not done in a very long time, not since Madrigal was ripped naked from his arms at the temple of Ellai.

He imagined two futures for Eretz: One as Joram would have it, the other as it might be.

A different sort of life.