Days of Blood & Starlight

25


ENEMY QUEUE FORMS HERE


Ten escorted Karou to her room, and she must have taken Karou’s quiet for complaisance, because she chatted away, offering unwelcome critique on recent resurrections, and was caught completely off guard at the top of the stairs when Karou shut the door in her face and slammed down the crossbar.

A moment of stunned silence, and then the thumping began. “Karou! I’m supposed to help you. Let me in. Karou.”

“I love you, crossbar,” whispered Karou, and petted it.

Ten’s voice rose steadily, scolding, huffing. Unbuckling her knife belt, Karou ignored her. On her table lay a half-strung necklace, but she didn’t want to pick it up, and she didn’t want company—or babysitting. She wanted a pencil and a page, and to render the exact look on Razor’s face as he came at her, the V of the broken table and the blur of figures at the periphery who’d done nothing to help her. Drawing had always been how she processed things. Once they were on paper they were hers, and she could decide what power they would hold over her.

She took up her sketchbook and smoothed it open. In the margin she saw the ragged remnants of a torn-out page and recalled, as vividly as if she were looking at it, the sketch of Akiva that had been there. He’d been asleep in her flat. She had destroyed that sketch, of course. She had destroyed them all.

If only she could do the same with her memories.

Angel-lover.

Even the thought of the word brought on shame. How could she have done it: loved Akiva—or rather, thought she had? Because now, whatever there had been between them wore that pall of filth—angel-lover—and looked nothing like love. Lust, maybe. Youth, rebellion, self-destructiveness, perversity. She’d barely known him; how could she have thought it was love? But whatever it had been… could it ever be forgiven?

How many chimaera would Karou have to resurrect before they accepted her?

All of them. That was how many. Every last one who had died because of her. Hundreds of thousands. More.

Which was, of course, impossible. Those souls had evanesced, including the ones dearest to her. They were lost. Was that it, then? No possibility of redemption?

This was her life, and it was her nightmare, too, and sometimes the only way she could bear it was by telling herself it would end. If it was a nightmare, she would wake up and Brimstone would be alive; everyone would be alive. And if it wasn’t a nightmare? Well then, it would end in one of the very many ways that lives end. Sooner or later.

She drew, and captured Razor’s snarl with awful vitality.

You really want to know what I’m up to, Zuzana? Here it is. I’m trapped in a sandcastle with dead monsters, forced to resurrect them one after the next, all while trying to avoid getting eaten.

It sounded like a pitch for a Japanese game show, and Karou couldn’t help laughing again, though only for a second, because Ten heard from the other side of the door and let out a soft snarl. Great. The she-wolf probably thought she was laughing at her.

Enemy queue forms here, wrote Karou below her sketch.

Oh, Zuze.

She cast an eye over her tooth trays and damned them for being so full. She’d been too efficient on her collecting trip; it would be some time before she could plead the necessity of going out again. The faster she worked, though, the faster the time would come, and when it did, she would do more than e-mail Zuzana. She would find her. She would slouch down for tea and goulash with her and Mik at Poison Kitchen and tell them everything, then bask in their outrage on her behalf.

They would agree with her that ungrateful Heth bone priests did not deserve regal lion heads but perhaps hamster next time, or maybe Pekingese.

Or better yet, she imagined Zuzana saying in her sharp way, to hell with them all.

I’m not doing it for them, Karou would reply. It was a practiced thought, one she clung to. It’s for Brimstone. And for all the chimaera the angels haven’t yet managed to murder. She had only to remember Loramendi to feel the desperation of her duty. There was no one else to do this work but her.

From somewhere outside came the sentry’s call, a single short high whistle. Karou jumped up and was at the window in a stride. A patrol was returning, the first of the five. Unblinking, she leaned out her window and scanned the sky. There: from the direction of the mountains where the portal hung high and unseen in the thin air. They were still too distant to make out silhouettes and know which team it was, but, squinting, she could see that they were six. That was a reason to be glad; one team at least was intact.

Nearer, nearer, and then she saw him: tall and straight, his horns like a pair of pikes. Ziri. A knot loosened in her chest that she hadn’t known was there. Ziri was okay. She could make out the others now, and soon enough they were circling over the kasbah and dropping into the court, half on wings of her creation, no two the same in size or form but all alike in menace: armed to kill, leathers black with blood and ash. She was glad to see Balieros, too, but her relief was really for Ziri.

Ziri was Kirin; he was kin.

When Karou looked at him, her Madrigal memories grew bright, and she remembered the men of her tribe as she hadn’t seen them in so long. She had been only seven years old when she was orphaned by angels. She was away from home that day, a free child in a wild world, and had returned to the aftermath of the slave raid and the end of life as she knew it. Death and silence, blood and absence, and, deep in the caves, huddled together: a handful of elders who had managed to save the very smallest of the babies.

Ziri had been one of those babies, tiny and new as a kit with its eyes still shut. Karou had some small memories of him in Loramendi later: he used to follow her around blushing—her foster sister, Chiro, teased her that he had a crush on her. “Your little Kirin shadow,” she had called him.

“It’s not a crush,” Madrigal had argued. “It’s kinship. It’s longing for what he never had.”

She’d felt deeply for him, an orphan like her but with no memories of their home or their people to hold on to. There had been some elder Kirin left, and a few other orphans his age, but Madrigal was the only Kirin in her prime whom he had ever seen.

Funny, now the tables were turned, and it was her looking to him and seeing what she had lost. He was grown now, and tall even before the antelope horns that added several more feet. His legs were human tapering to antelope, as her own had once been, and, coupled with his vast bat wings, gave him the same buoyant gait all the Kirin had possessed—a lightness as if the earth underfoot were incidental and he might at any instant go airborne and rise leagues above it all.

Only there was no lightness in him now. His tread was heavy and his face grim, and as the patrol assembled in formation to await their general, he was the only one to give a glance up at Karou’s window. She half raised her hand to him, her bruised arm screaming at the simple gesture, which… he did not return. He lowered his head again as if she weren’t even there.

Stung, Karou let her hand fall.

Where were they coming from? What had they seen? What had they done?

Go down and find out, came a whisper in the back of her mind, but she didn’t heed it. Whatever went on in the ashfall landscape and blood-crusted world of war where her creations went forth to do violence, it wasn’t her concern. She conjured the bodies; that was all.

What more could she possibly do?





26


GRIEVOUS HARM


The Wolf was in the window right below Karou’s. As soon as Ziri lifted his eyes to look for her, he saw white and dropped his head again. It was barely enough time to register the look of half hope on her face as she raised her hand to him, tentative. Lonely.

And then he shunned her.

The Wolf had told him he must have no contact with her. He had told them all, but Ziri thought those pale eyes had lingered on him when he said it, and that he was the one Thiago watched most closely. Because he was Kirin? Did he think that fact alone would bond them, or did he remember Ziri as a child? At the Warlord’s ball?

At the execution.

He had tried to save her. It would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic—how he had crouched in the crawl space under the tourney stands, getting up his courage, gripping his edgeless training swords as though they might deliver her. The stands had been erected in the agora so the folk could better watch her die; it was a spectacle. Madrigal, so still and straight, so beautiful, had made the stamping masses seem like animals, and he, a skinny boy of twelve, had thought he could storm the scaffold and… what? Cut her pinion, her manacles? The city itself was a cage; she would have had nowhere to go.

It hadn’t mattered. He’d been laid out by the hilt of a soldier’s sword before his feet ever touched the platform. Madrigal never even saw his fool heroics. Her eyes had never left her lover.

That was another lifetime. Ziri hadn’t understood her treason then, or where it could lead. Where it had led. But he wasn’t a lovestruck little boy anymore, and Karou was nothing to him.

So why were his eyes drawn to her window? To her, on the rare occasions she came down?

Was it pity? A glance was all it took to see how alone she was. In the first days, in Eretz, she had been pale, trembling, mute—clearly in shock. It had been harder then, not to go to her or speak even a word. She must have seen it—how something in him leapt to answer her grief, her loneliness, and now she sought him out with that look of half-hope whenever she saw him, as if he might be a friend.

And he turned away from her. Thiago had been clear: The rebels needed her but couldn’t make the mistake of trusting her. She was treacherous and must be managed carefully—by him.

And here he was now, come down to greet the patrol.

“Well met,” said Thiago, striding out like the lord of the manor. Lord of the ruins, rather, but if this mud castle was a comedown for the great White Wolf, he claimed it as he had ever claimed anything—or everything: as his to do with as he wished until he seized the next and better thing. He would have the throne in Astrae before he was through, he claimed, and seraphim for slaves, and as ludicrous a claim as it seemed in light of their circumstances, Ziri would never underestimate the Wolf.

Thiago was a soldier’s soldier. His troops worshipped him, and would do anything for him. He ate, drank, and breathed battle, never more at home than in a campaign tent strewn with maps, hashing strategy with his captains or, better yet, hurling himself at angels with his teeth bared and bloody.

“Reckless,” the Warlord had fumed once, furious when his son had been killed and come back in a new body. “A general need not die at the front!” But Thiago had never been one to hang back in safety and send others forth to die. He led, and Ziri knew firsthand how his fearlessness spread like wildfire in the fray. It was what made him great.

Now, though, with the chimaera hanging on to the frayed end of their existence, it seemed his father’s words had gotten through. When the patrols had gone out to Eretz, he’d stayed behind—with clear reluctance and even bad grace that put Ziri in mind of guardsmen who drew duty during the festival times. It was a heavy thing, to miss out. He had paced, wolf-restless, hungry, envious, and he came alive now at his soldiers’ return.

He clasped them by the arm one by one before coming to a halt before Balieros.

“I hope,” he said, with a grim smile to indicate he doubted it not, “that you have done grievous harm.”

Grievous harm.

The evidence of it painted them, splash and spatter. Blood: dried to a dull dark brown, black where it gathered in the creases of gauntlets and boot heels and hooves. Every edge and angle of Ziri’s crescent-moon blades was grimed with it; he couldn’t wait to clean them. Mutilating the dead. Perhaps it was a proud thing, these cut smiles that had been the Warlord’s message long ago. Ziri only knew that he felt foul, and wanted to go to the river and bathe. Even his horns were crusted with blood where they had impaled an angel who flew at him while he was grappling with another. The patrol had done grievous harm indeed.

It had also protected Caprine farmfolk from an enemy sweep, freed a caravan of slaves, armed them, and sent them wide to spread word of what was coming. But Thiago didn’t ask about that. To hear him, he might have forgotten there were folk in the world who weren’t soldiers—enemy or own—or any cause left but killing.

“Tell me,” he said, avid. “I want to know the looks on their faces. I want to hear how they screamed.”





27


GREAT WILD HEART


Some time around midday, the Dashnag boy, Rath, still carrying Sarazal, led Sveva down a steep wooded slope into a ravine. It was narrow enough that the forest canopy was unbroken overhead, and Sveva thought that the pale damsel boughs arching upward to meet in the middle looked like the arms of maidens joined in dance. Sunlight reached through them, sometimes in bright spears and sometimes dappled lacework, green and gold and ever shifting. Small winged things drifted and hummed from the depths to the heights of this little ravine that was their entire world, and, down below, a creek could be heard, spry as music.

All this will burn, thought Sveva, leaping a drift of vines and shying sideways down the slope behind Rath.

The fires were still behind them, and with the wind from the south carrying the smoke away, they couldn’t even smell it, but they had come several times to hillocks and glimpsed the sky roiling black behind them.

How could the angels do it? Was it so important to catch or kill a few chimaera that they would destroy the whole land? Why did they even want it, just to ravage it?

Why can’t they just leave us alone? she wanted to scream, but she didn’t. She knew it was a childish thought, that the wars and hates of the world were too big for her to understand, and that she was no more important in the scheme of things than these moths and adderflies drifting in their shafts of light.

I am important, though, she insisted to herself. And so was Sarazal, and so were the moths and the adderflies, and the slinking skotes, and the star tenzing blooms so small and perfect, and even the tiny biting skinwights, who, after all, were just trying to live.

And Rath was important, too, even if his breath smelled like a lifetime of blood meals and bitten bones.

He was helping them. When he had grabbed up Sarazal, Sveva hadn’t really believed he meant to drag her away and make a meal of her, but it was hard not to be afraid when her heartbeat skittered sideways at the mere sight of him. Dashnag ate flesh. It was what they were, same as skinwights were skinwights, but that didn’t mean she had to like them. Or him.

“We don’t eat Dama,” he’d said without looking at her, after she’d caught up to him—which was easy, she was so much faster than he was, and he was encumbered by carrying Sarazal. “Or any other higher beasts. As I’m sure you know.”

Sveva knew that this was supposedly the case, but it was a hard thing to take on faith. “Not even if you’re really hungry?” she had asked, skeptical and in some strange way wanting to believe the worst of him.

“I am really hungry, and you’re still alive,” he’d replied. That was all. He kept going, and Sveva had a hard time staying afraid, because Sarazal was asleep with her head on his shoulder and he stayed upright, holding her, when it would have been easier for him to leave her and throw himself forward into the long, loping run the Dashnag used to take down prey. He hadn’t, though.

He’d led them here, and now that they were well down in the ravine, Sveva could hear and smell what he had heard and smelled several miles back with his sharp predator’s senses: Caprine.

Caprine? This was why he had cut east, to catch the trail of these slow, bobbing herdfolk, who, to judge from the smell, still had all their livestock with them?

Rath stopped at the bottom of the slope, and when Sveva drew even with him, he said, “From the village, I think, the one by the aqueduct. You remember.”

As if she could forget the place where the seraph soldiers were strung up with their red Warlord smiles. She would never forget it as long as she lived, the horror mingled with the hope of salvation. The village had been empty; she had supposed its occupants must be dead, and was glad now to know they weren’t, but she didn’t know why Rath was following them.

“Caprine are slow,” she said.

“So they’ll need help,” Rath replied, and Sveva felt a flush of shame. She’d been thinking only of their own escape.

“They might have a healer, too,” Rath added, looking down at Sarazal, who rested against his chest, her eyes still closed, wounded leg curled gingerly in the crook of his arm. It was such an incongruous sight, the predator cradling the prey, that Sveva could only blink and feel that she’d hit the stony bottom of her own shallow depths.

Did she know anything at all?




This land was immense. It seemed to Akiva as though he could rise higher and higher into the air and it would keep unrolling in every direction, endless and green, forever. He knew that wasn’t the case. In the east the earth rose and stepped up a long, low crust of hills to become high desert for days, days into weeks of red clay and barbed plants, where venomous beetles as large as shields burrowed down and lay in wait for months, years, for prey to pass within reach. Some nomads were rumored to live around the sky islands, such as the jackal-headed Sab, but seraph patrols that went that way either reported no signs of life or vanished into the depths and never returned to report at all.

To the west lay the Coast Range, and beyond that the Secret Coast, home to tidal villages and folk who could live in the water or out of it, and who slipped away fish-fast at the sight of the enemy, retreating to deepwater refuges until the danger had passed.

And to the south: the formidable Hintermost, the highest mountains in Eretz as well as the broadest by triple the scope of any other mountain range in the world. They made an epic wall of gray ramparts and natural crenels, gorges riddled through with rivers that cut into the heart of the rock and out again, and slopes glinting with waterfalls by the thousands. There were said to be passes—mazy ravines and tunnels—leading to green lands on the far side, impassable but with the guidance of the frog-fleshed native tribes who dwelt mostly in darkness. And in the highest reaches, ice formations looked like crystal cities from a distance, but proved desolate wind mazes up close, unnavigable but by the stormhunters who nested there, sitting their huge eggs and riding gales that would dash anything else to death in half a wingbeat.

Such were the natural boundaries of this southern continent that the seraphim had long ago sought to tame, and the green earth that lay below Akiva now was its great wild heart, too huge to hold, even if every soldier in the Empire’s array of armies was sent to try. They could—and would—burn villages and fields, but more chimaera here were nomads than farmers, fleet and elusive, and the seraphim couldn’t burn it all, even if they were to try, which—contrary to these billows of black smoke—they were not.

The fires were only to corral the fugitives south and east, to where the forests thinned and creeks filtered down to join the great Kir River, and they might be able to flush them out. And if they succeeded?

Akiva hoped they wouldn’t. In truth he did more than hope: He put all his skills as a tracker to work at untracking. Wherever he gauged chimaera might be—where a crease in the canopy hinted at a creek, for example—he made efforts to lead the team a different way, and because he was Beast’s Bane, no one questioned him. Except maybe Hazael, and then only with his eyes.

Liraz wasn’t with them; their team was a dozen strong, and she’d been assigned to another. Akiva couldn’t help wondering, over the course of the day, with what zeal his sister was pursuing her orders.

“So what do you really think?” Hazael asked him out of the blue. It was getting on into evening, and they had yet turned up no fleeing slaves or villagers.

“About what?”

“About who’s behind these attacks.”

What did he think? He didn’t know. All day Akiva had been at war with hope—trying not to let himself hope, partly because it was so wrong a feeling to take away from a site of massacre, and partly out of simple fear that it might prove fruitless. Was there another resurrectionist? Was there not?

“Not ghosts, anyway,” he gave as a safe answer.

“No, probably not ghosts,” Hazael agreed. “It is curious, though. No blood on our soldiers’ blades, no tracks leading away save the fleeing folk, and five attacks in one night—so how many attackers in all? They have to be strong to do what they did, and probably winged, to come and vanish without tracks, and I’d guess they had hamsas, else our soldiers must have gotten in some strikes. This was just an opening act.” It was a studied assessment; Akiva had thought of all these things himself. Hazael gave him a long look. “What are we dealing with here, Akiva?”

He finally had to say it. “Revenants. It has to be.”

“Another resurrectionist?”

Akiva hesitated. “Maybe.” Did Hazael understand what it meant to him if there was another resurrectionist? Could he guess his hope—that Karou might live again? And what sympathy could he have for his hopes? Suppose his forgiveness hinged on Karou being dead, as if Akiva’s madness might be in the past, something to be gotten over so they could keep on as usual.

There could be no more “as usual” for Akiva. What could there be?

“There!” called the patrol leader, jarring him out of his thoughts. Kala was a lieutenant of the Second Legion, the largest by far of the Empire’s forces, sometimes called the common army. She was pointing down into a gully where the fringe of trees didn’t quite come together, and where, as Akiva watched, one flicker of movement begat another, and another, and then a rush of bodies. Herd movement. The Caprine. His gut seized, and his first impulse was anger: What fools, in all this great wild land, to let themselves be seen.

It was too late to divert attention from them; there was nothing he could do but follow as Kala led the team down toward the trees. She was alert for ambush, and motioned Akiva and Hazael to sweep wide to the gully’s far side, which they did, staring hard into the broken space between treetops, hoping for a clear view, which they did not get—only glimpses of fleece and ambling motion.

Akiva held his swords bitterly. His training was very clear. Take up a weapon and you become an instrument with as pure a purpose as the weapon itself: to find arteries and open them, limbs and sever them; to take what is alive and deliver it unto death. There was no other reason to hold a weapon, no other reason to be one.

He didn’t want to be that weapon anymore. Oh, he could desert, he could vanish right now. He didn’t have to be party to this. But it wasn’t enough that he cease to kill chimaera. He had dreamed so much bigger than that once.

The trees were a whisper of green as he and Hazael descended with the others, and the voice that filled his head was one he had heard only once. It is life that expands to fill worlds. Life is your master or death is. When Brimstone had spoken those words, they’d meant nothing to Akiva. Now he understood. But how could a soldier change masters?

How, with swords clenched in both hands, could one hope to keep blood from spilling?





28


THE WORST KIND OF SILENCE


So many different kinds of silence, Sveva thought, pressing her face into Rath’s shoulder and trying not to breathe. This was the worst kind. This was make-a-sound-and-die silence, which, though she had never experienced it before, she understood instinctively grew more fraught the more souls you shared it with. One might trust oneself to be quiet, but thirty-odd strangers?

With babies?

They were huddled under a lip of earth carved out by the creek in fuller seasons; the water passed before them, flicking at their hooves—and Rath’s huge clawed paws—and its burble might at least cover some small sounds—whimpers or sniffs. Of which, Sveva noted, she heard none and nothing. With her eyes closed, she might have been alone, but for the heat of Rath on one side and Nur on the other. The Caprine mother held her baby tucked against her, and Sveva kept expecting Lell to cry, but she didn’t. This silence, she thought, was remarkable: a perfect, shimmering thing, and fragile. Like glass, if it shattered, it would never come back together again.

If Lell cried, or if someone’s hoof lost purchase and skidded on the bank, or if any sound rose over the innocent burble of the creek, they would all die.

And if the innermost frightened-child part of her wanted to blame Rath for them being here at all, she couldn’t. Oh, not for lacking of trying. It was good to have someone to blame, but the problem with Sveva and blame was that if she kept tracing it back, there was only her, racing down the valley ahead of Sarazal, wind in her hair and not heeding her sister’s call to turn back. This wasn’t Rath’s fault, and what’s more, she and her sister would probably be dead already if not for him. And the Caprine, well, they would be dying right now. Right this very moment.

What an odd and terrible thing to know.

If Rath hadn’t scented the Caprine and followed them, caught up to them, and joined them, then this fraught silence would not exist at all; this same air would be pierced with bleating screams, and Lell would be crying, sweet small bundle, and all the others, too, instead of the aries.




“Aries!” said Hazael, laughing—laughing with relief, it seemed to Akiva—and he saw that in the gully were only aries: shaggy, curling-horned livestock, and no Caprine sheepfolk, no chimaera at all.

“You and you.” Kala pointed out two soldiers. “Kill them. The rest of you…” She turned in a half circle, surveying her team; she hung in the air, wings sweeping wide enough to brush the leaning trees at the gully’s edges and shed sparks. “Find their owners.”




Sveva heard the screams of the aries and pressed her face harder into Rath’s shoulder. Rath had persuaded the sheepfolk to drive off their flock and double back along the creek bed, climb out of that ravine and into another—this one—and take shelter. They were too many, all together, and the aries were too loud, too unruly to trust with their lives; they’d be seen, he’d said, and he’d been right.

Now the aries were dying.

Sveva clutched her sister’s hand; it was limp. The screams of the aries were terrible, even at a distance, but they didn’t last long, and when they finally trailed away she imagined she could feel the angels wheeling in the sky overhead. Angels, hunting. Hunting them. She clutched the hilt of her own stolen knife and it made her feel her smallness all the more, made as it was for an angel’s big brute fist.

Maybe she would stab one with it. What would that feel like? Oh, her hate was hot; she almost hoped she got the chance. She’d always hated angels, of course, but in a faraway, vague kind of way. They’d been monsters from bedtime tales. She’d never even seen one before she was captured. For centuries this land had been safe—the Warlord’s armies had kept it so. What ill luck, then, to live in the time of failed safety! Now, suddenly, seraphim were real: leering tormentors, beautiful in a way that made beauty hideous.

And then there was Rath, dreadful in a way that made dreadful… well, if not beautiful, then regal, at least. Proud. How curious, to take comfort in the bulk of a flesh-eater at her side, but she did. Again, Sveva felt herself scraping at her own shallows; since she was taken slave, her world had fallen open. She had beheld seraphim and revenants; she had seen death and smelled it, and today, just today, she had learned more of folk than in all her fourteen years together. First Rath, then the Caprine: sheepfolk she had called herdbeasts, and would have left to fend for themselves. Nur had made a poultice for Sarazal and given her some spice in water, hoping to break her fever. They had shared their food, and Lell, who smelled of grass, had taken to Sveva and ridden astride her back for a time, her little arms wrapped around Sveva’s waist where just days ago a great black shackle had been.

Sveva’s eyes were closed. Her face was against Rath’s shoulder, and her hip hard against Nur’s, and the silence held them together. It was the worst kind of silence, but a good kind of closeness. These weren’t her folk, but… they were, and maybe that meant that anyone could be anyone’s, which was a sort of nice thing to think, with the world falling apart. Sveva wondered if she would ever get home to her mother and father so she could tell them that.

She tried to pray, but she had only ever prayed at night, and it seemed to her that the moons made poor protectors when angels chose to hunt by day.

In the end, it wasn’t Lell who gave them away, but Sarazal.

She jolted awake, her limp hand suddenly clenching and pulling free of Sveva’s. The fever had come down; Nur’s spice and poultice had worked, and Sarazal’s big dark eyes, when they fluttered open, were much clearer than when Sveva had looked at them last. Only… they fluttered open to see Rath’s fearsome face mere inches from her own.

And Sarazal opened her mouth, and screamed.





29


THE DEVILS WILL STILL BE THERE IN THE MORNING


“Listen to this one,” said Zuzana. “She-devil sighting in southern Italy—”

“Blue hair?” asked Mik. It came out muffled. He had a pillow over his face and had been trying to sleep.

“Pink, actually. I guess the legions of Satan are exploring their color options.” She was sitting up in bed, reading off her laptop. “So, she scaled the side of this cathedral and hissed, at which point the witness was able to ascertain, at a distance of some hundred feet, that her tongue was forked.”

“Good eyes.”

“Yeah.” She puffed out her cheeks and backpaged to her Google search screen. “What a bunch of morons.”

Mik peered out from beneath the pillow. “It’s bright out there,” he said. “Come into my lair.”

“Lair. That’s some fancy lair you’ve got, mister.”

“It’s exactly the right size for my head.”

“Uh-huh,” Zuzana said vaguely. “Here’s one from yesterday, um, Bakersfield, California. Blue hair, cool coat, floating. Hurray! We’ve found Karou! What she’s doing in Bakersfield, California, stalking schoolchildren is unclear.” She gave a derisive snort and returned to the Google screen.

The world, it would seem, was overrun with blue-haired devils. The same message boards that reported angels among us were keeping abreast of the devil situation, too, and in a quirk of coincidence—ahem—ever since the widely televised showdown on the Charles Bridge, devils tended to have blue hair, black trench coats, and tattoos of eyes on the palms of their hands.

Karou was the face of the Apocalypse, which Zuzana happened to think was a pretty kick-ass brand of infamy. She had even made the cover of Time magazine with the headline “Is This What a Demon Looks Like?” There was this gorgeous picture someone had taken that day as she faced the angels, her hair wild, hamsas outthrust before her, a look on her face of fierce concentration with a hint of… wild delight. Zuzana remembered the wild delight. It had been a little freaky. Time had tried to interview her for the piece, and strangely enough had failed to print her expletive-riddled response. Kaz, of course, had not disappointed them.

“Come sleep,” Mik tried again. “The devils will still be there in the morning.”

“In a minute,” Zuzana said, but it wasn’t a minute. An hour later she had made a cup of tea and moved to the armchair beside the bed. The message boards weren’t getting her anywhere; that was where the crazies went to play. She narrowed her search. She’d already traced the IP address of Karou’s single e-mail to Morocco, which wasn’t a surprise. The last she’d heard from her friend she’d been in Morocco. This wasn’t Marrakesh, though, but a city called Ouarzazate—pronounced War-za-zat—in a region of palm oases, camels, and kasbahs at the fringes of the Sahara desert.

Dust and starlight? Why, yes. One would imagine.

Priestess of a sandcastle? Kasbahs did look extraordinarily like sandcastles. Too bad there were, like, fifty million of them scattered over hundreds of miles. Still, Zuzana was excited. This had to be right. She got that dorky song “Rock the Casbah” stuck in her head and hummed it as she drank tea and paged through dozens of sites that mostly came up as trek outfitters or “authentic nomad experience” kasbah hotels, all of them with these sparkling swimming pools that didn’t look terribly nomad-y to her.

And then she came across a travel blog a French guy had written about his trek in the Atlas Mountains. It was only a couple of days old and mostly it was just landscape pictures and camel shadows and dusty children selling jewelry at the roadside, but then there was this one shot that caused Zuzana to set her teacup aside and sit up. She zoomed in and leaned close. It was the night sky with a perfect half pie of a moon, and—obscure enough that she wouldn’t have noticed them if she weren’t looking—shapes. Six of them, with wings, they were visible mostly for the way they blotted out the stars. Hard to determine scale in a sky photo, it was the subtitle that got her.

Don’t tell the angel chasers, but they have some seriously big night birds down here.





30


A POOR JUDGE OF MONSTERS


Karou went to the river to bathe—feeling almost absurdly indulgent about shampooing her hair, and more so about the wastrel fifteen minutes she took to let it dry fanned out on a hot rock—and when she got back to the fortress, the crossbar was missing from her door.

“Where is it?” she demanded of Ten.

“How would I know? I was with you.”

Yes, she had been, never mind that Karou hadn’t wanted her. It wasn’t safe for her to go off alone, Thiago had said, even to the shallows of the river that spilled out of the mountains and passed just downhill of the kasbah, in plain sight of the sentry tower—with some large rocks that she valued for the hiding of nudity from keen eyes. The chimaera were as intrigued by her humanity as Issa and Yasri had always been, but were less kind about it.

“What a queer plain thing you are,” Ten had observed today, with an up-and-down look that took in Karou’s tailless, clawless, hoofless, and otherwise less self.

“Thanks,” Karou had said, sinking into the river. “I try.”

She’d had a fleeting impulse to let the current carry her away under the water, just downstream a ways where she could be free of the she-wolf’s presence for, oh, a half hour? Ten had been quite the fixture over the past several days: her assistant and chaperone, overseer and shadow.

“What will you do when I have to go back out for teeth?” Karou had asked Thiago that morning. “Send her with me?”

“Ten? No. Not Ten,” he’d replied, in such a way that Karou had instantly taken his meaning.

“What, you? You’re going to come with me?”

“I admit, I’m curious to see this world. There must be more to it than this desert. You can show me.”

He was serious. Karou’s stomach had seized. She’d been joking about Ten, but him? “You couldn’t. You’re not human—you’d be seen. And you can’t fly.” And you’re vile, and I don’t want you.

“We’ll think of something.”

Will we, Karou had thought, imagining Thiago in Poison Kitchen with his wolf feet kicked up on a coffin, spooning goulash into his cruel, sensual mouth. She wondered if Zuzana would swoon over his beauty as she had Akiva’s, and immediately thought: No. Zuze would see right through him.

But there was a flaw in that. Zuzana hadn’t seen through Akiva, had she? And neither had she. Apparently Karou was a poor judge of monsters, which was most unfortunate considering her current situation.

“Who took it?” she demanded. Her heartbeat was out of whack, coming in little staccato bursts.

“What are you carrying on about? It’s only a piece of wood.”

“It’s only my safety.”

This was to be the cost of clean hair? How was she supposed to sleep when anyone could waltz right in? She slept poorly enough as it was. It struck her then, a swift little thought like the jab of a needle, that she had slept just fine with Akiva only a few feet away, that night in her flat in Prague. What was wrong with her sensors that she had felt safe with him? “This was your idea, wasn’t it? Because I locked you out the other day?” Even the wall brackets had been pried away, so she couldn’t just find another beam and slot it in place. “Do you want someone to kill me in my sleep?’

“Calm down, Karou,” said Ten. “No one wants to kill—”

“Oh, really. No one wants to, or no one will?”

Did she expect Ten to sugarcoat it? “Fine. No one will,” said the she-wolf. “You are under the White Wolf’s protection. That’s better than any piece of wood. Now, come. Let’s get back to work. There’s Emylion to finish, and Hvitha goes to the pit tonight.”

And that was that? She was just supposed to sidle meekly into her room and get back to work on the Wolf’s resurrection wish list? Like hell. Karou turned back toward the stairs, but Ten stood in her way, so she crossed the room to where the window stood open. If Thiago wanted her watched, she thought, he’d do better to assign a shadow who could fly.

Ten realized what she was about to do and said, “Karou…” just as she stepped into the air and, after floating there just long enough to throw a defiant glare Ten’s way, let herself fall. Fast. A great whoosh of air, and she pulled up short at the last second to land in a crouch four stories down.

Ow. Pulled up a little too short. The soles of her feet smarted, but it had surely looked dramatic. Ten’s head was out the window, and Karou fought the impulse to flip her off—the British V version, which was so much cooler than the American single-finger—but it was ridiculous either way. Don’t be such a human, she told herself, and went looking for the Wolf.

He was probably in the guardhouse, the half-razed structure where he held court with his captains, drawing maps in the dirt and then scuffing them away, pacing, ranting, planning. Karou started in that direction and passed Hvitha, who gave her a sharp nod and didn’t slow his steps. I guess I’ll see you later, thought Karou with a twist of pity. Hvitha hadn’t exactly been kind to her, but he hadn’t been unkind, either—he hadn’t been anything—and it couldn’t be very nice walking around knowing he was scheduled to have his throat slit in a few hours. Such a waste, it seemed, of Brimstone’s craftsmanship.

Not my call.

Karou passed clothes draped over a wall to dry in the sun, and it came to her that this place was beginning to feel downright inhabited—thanks to herself. Nine more soldiers in the past few days—her pace was improving with Ten’s help, but holy hell, her arms were a mess—and life seemed everywhere amplified. She could hear Aegir’s hammer and see smoke rising from the forge, smell the almost-but-not-quite-nothing smell of boiling couscous, and also the not-nearly-nothing-enough waft of rankness from the buttress that had become the default piss wall of soldiers who couldn’t bother to walk out of the kasbah—or, hello, fly.

You’re welcome for the wings, now use them to pee farther away please thank you!

An argument, a hoot of laughter, and from the court: the ching of newly wrought blades heaved in newly wrought hands as her most recent revenants got the feel of their bodies, wings and all. She paused under an arch to watch and caught sight of Ziri at once. He was with Ixander, her greatest monstrosity to date, and was positively dwarfed by him.

Ixander had always been big—he was Akko, one of the larger tribes and a mainstay of the army—but now he stood grizzly height, maybe ten feet, thickset and tusked to Thiago’s specifications. His wings were almost as big as a stormhunter’s, and the muscle required to anchor them made his hunched bear back enormous. The body was inelegant, and Karou was sorry about it. Her brief contact with his soul had surprised her with its… meadowiness.

The impression of souls was synesthetic: sound or color, flashes of image or feeling, and Ixander’s had been meadowy. Dappled light and newbloom and quiet—the opposite of the colossal beast body that he seemed now, with Ziri’s help, to be mastering.

Ziri cast himself to the sky, graceful and silent, and beckoned Ixander to follow, which he did with neither grace nor silence. His wingbeats gave the air a sonic thrashing and kicked up flurries of dust that reached Karou even across the court. In the air, the pair began to drill fighting stances, and Karou found her focus not on Ixander but on Ziri, as she forgot her outrage and her errand and was sucked back across years by the sight of a Kirin in flight.

Every time, it was like falling backward into Madrigal. She never felt more chimaera than in the first instant of catching sight of Ziri—and never more human than in the next, when it caught up to her what she was now. It wasn’t disappointing. She was who she was. It was just the slightest bit disorienting, a brief vibration between two selves that would always be separate, like two yolks in one shell.

“You could be Kirin again, you know,” Ten had told her at the river.

“What?” Karou, rinsing her hair, had thought she must have misheard.

“You could be chimaera. It might be easier for the others to accept you.” Again she’d given Karou that up-and-down look and chuffed at her unfortunate humanness. “I could help you.”

“Help me?” She had to be joking. “What, you mean kill me? Thank you sooo much!”

But Ten was not joking. “Oh, no. Thiago would do that, of course. But I would resurrect you. You’d just need to show me how.”

Oh, is that all? “Tell you what,” Karou had said with a big mock-cheerful smile. “Let’s do you instead. I have all kinds of ideas for your next body.” Ten hadn’t particularly liked that, but Karou did not care much what Ten liked. She was still annoyed. Was this something Ten and Thiago had discussed? Maybe it would be easier to blend in if she looked like a chimaera, but it didn’t make sense to even think about it now. Karou needed to be human to get the rebels’ food for them, as well as cloth for clothes, and material for Aegir’s forge, not to mention teeth. But would they expect it of her, eventually?

Well, they could expect all they wanted. She looked at the hamsas on her palms; they almost seemed like a signature. Brimstone had made her this body, and she was keeping it.

Laughter called her back to the moment. Ziri and Ixander were sparring, and Ixander had lost his balance and begun to spiral groundward. Trying to right himself, he thrust back on awkward wingbeats to crash into the crumbled parapet that edged the court, where he set off a cascade of dirt and ended up hanging by one hand from the wall. Laughing. And Ziri was laughing, and others, and the sound was so alien, so light. It made Karou realize she was spying, because they never laughed when she was around and would surely stop if they saw her. She drew back, not wanting that to happen.

Ziri darted forward in the air and smacked Ixander’s hand with the flat of his blade, making him lose his grip on the parapet and drop to the ground with a roar. He landed with concussive force and tried to swat at Ziri, who was taunting him from above, still laughing as he darted just near enough to whack Ixander on the helmet before pulling clear. Some of the others gathered around taunting—in unmistakable good humor—and when Ixander leapt airborne in pursuit, they cheered.

All five patrols had returned from Eretz, not a single casualty, barely even a wound. Thiago had been in a fine mood, and the atmosphere in the kasbah was one of glory, though what glory, or what their mission had been, Karou still didn’t know. One of the farmwives who cooked the food had made Thiago a new gonfalon to replace the one that had burned with Loramendi; it was more modest, made of canvas, not silk, but it bore a white wolf and the words Victory and vengeance that were his motto. And now, apparently, all of theirs.

Privately, Karou preferred the Warlord’s heraldry: antlers sprouting leaves to signify new growth, but she was far from immune to the desire for vengeance—it was huge and ugly in her: a primal drumbeat, a baring of teeth—and she had to admit Thiago’s motto made a better rallying cry for a rebellion.

The banner hung from the gallery at the head of the court, seeming to declare the Wolf’s eminence. Where’s mine? Karou thought, with an inward surge of hilarity. Why not? We’re in this together, Thiago had told her. So what would he do if she made her own gonfalon to string up beside his? And what would be on it? A string of teeth? A pair of pliers? No. A vise, and her motto could be Ouch.

She smiled to herself. It was funny, she thought, but her smile turned wistful because she had nobody to tell. In the court, the soldiers were still laughing, and she was in the shadows and no part of it.

Ixander was moving with much more ease now, and it took her a moment to understand why—it was because he wasn’t trying so hard. He was moving as bodies are meant to move, without thought. She experienced a surge of pride, seeing the bear heft of him snap to a smooth glide. Ziri’s taunting had provoked him to forget his self-consciousness—which Karou guessed was Ziri’s plan—and Ziri paid the price for it now as Ixander caught him around the neck and fake-throttled him before tossing him right out of the air. Ziri hit the ground at a reeling run and skidded to a halt on his cloven hooves practically nose-to-nose with Balieros, the big bull centaur who was his patrol leader.

Balieros shook his head, his shoulders shaking with laughter, and, putting an arm around Ziri’s shoulder, walked back with him to watch Ixander fly.

Karou got a lump in her throat. How easy they all were with each other, and quick to laugh. Once she had been part of their soldiers’ closeness, sharing barracks and battle camps, meals and songs. She had saved lives and gleaned souls; she had been one of them.

But she’d made her choices, and now she had to live with them.

When the laughter abruptly ceased, Karou gave a start, thinking the soldiers had seen her spying, but they weren’t looking in her direction. A beat later, Thiago strode into view. Karou recalled that she had been going to demand her crossbar back, but now her outrage-courage left her. It wasn’t just him, though the Wolf certainly had an effect on her courage. It was whom he was with.

The Shadows That Live.

They were beautiful in their way, and sinuous in their stride. Tangris and Bashees were identical: sphinxlike panther creatures of dusky black, fine-boned and softly furred, with the heads of women and wings of dark owl feathers that were perfectly silent in flight. They weren’t large, or terrible, but Thiago treated them with a deference he showed no other soldiers, and it was no wonder. No one else could do what they did. Karou’s hands turned clammy. Was he sending them on a mission?

He was.

This time she couldn’t wonder dumbly what nature of mission, or pretend not to understand. The Shadows That Live were legend, and they were… special… and so their mission must be special, too.

They lifted away and flew, leaving silence behind them. No one called good-bye or wished them luck. They didn’t need luck. Somewhere in Eretz, some angels needed it badly, but they wouldn’t get it. Whoever they were, they were as good as dead already.