“I don’t speak Hebrew.”
“Quiet!” I pressed the bridge of my nose. “Truth. Truth. But the trick of it is when you erase the first letter, the golem stops because the word spells . . . spells death. Emet! The word is emet.” I squeezed the last bit of water from my hair into my cupped palm. Then I dipped my finger and wrote EMET on the general’s broad forehead.
The thirsty clay absorbed the water, and the letters faded.
Nothing else happened.
“Damn.”
“Maybe they don’t speak Hebrew either.”
“No,” I said slowly. “They wouldn’t.” A thought kept buzzing by, like a mosquito in my ear.
“You have any other magic words?”
Something about Chinese tradition and numbers . . . and Joss the day we first met. “Four,” I said. “Four is death.” Swag raised his head from my chest and hissed. “Shh. Five is wu and it sounds like ‘me’ but also ‘not.’ Me and not me. So fifty-four would be . . .”
“Me, dead?”
“And not dead.” I dipped my finger in the water again, and the shadow of my hand passed over the general’s eyes. I wrote the characters in Chinese, as Auntie Joss had written them for me on the chart she’d sold me—my number, and my mother’s, the numbers that would control my fate. The marks shone wetly on the clay forehead, and for a moment, everything was still as I held my breath.
The numbers started to fade, and I dropped my hands by my sides, the water in my palm dripping down my fingers. Swag shifted on my shoulders. “Nothing.”
“It was a good try.”
“Maybe Slate has some ideas? We can go back to the ship and . . .”
“And what? Amira?” Part of me was aware he was speaking, but I didn’t answer. I was too mesmerized by the eyes of the general, no longer blank, but glowing with scarlet light.
It faded as the letters faded, but I turned to Kash, flushed with triumph. Swag was still hissing in my ear, and Kashmir’s eyes shone with wonder in the glow of the lamp.
Then the light was ripped away, like a sheet pulled off a painting, as a dark shape screeched out of the shadows and leaped at his throat.
Glass smashed, and the sky herring scattered to the corners of the room. A black form crouched on Kashmir’s chest, growling; the thing was almost the size of a man, but it smelled of rot, and the sound it made was inhuman.
Kash’s knife was pinned under his hip. His hands were pressed up under the creature’s jaw as it twisted, wet teeth snapping as it shrieked in fury. With every cry, the herring darted, throwing shadows behind them. Kashmir’s eyes widened, white in the dark: the thing had its claws around his neck.
I drummed the beast with useless fists, but it didn’t even feel the blows. I whirled and yanked the bronze sword out of the general’s grasp, swinging wildly—the flat of the blade connected, but the sword bounced out of my hands. It clanged like a bell on the stone as the thing howled and arched backward. Kashmir finally threw it off, but it rolled to its feet and turned to me.
I stumbled back and fell under an onslaught of gray teeth. My shoulder hit the unforgiving stone, and then the back of my head. For a moment the world was bright with pain. Then the shadows in my vision blurred with sudden tears, and all I could see clearly were two bloodshot eyes.
I tried to push the beast away, but it clung tight, all bone and sinew under my hands, though the weight of it crushed the air out of me. The creature screamed, and so did I, until its hands closed around my throat. I scrabbled at the bony fingers as my lungs burned and my ears rang; weakening, I stared, face-to-face with the thing. It wasn’t a thing at all.
Then Swag leaped—a gleam of gold in the wavering light. The wild eyes widened and the hands loosened their grip; I was coughing and curling up and reaching out as my attacker fell away and hit the stone with a wet crack. Kashmir loomed over the prone form, raising his knife. In the shadowy light, Kash’s own face looked like a skull.
“No,” I said, wheezing, my breath stuck high in my throat. “No!” I waved my hand like a flag of surrender. “It’s a person. Oh, God, it’s a person.”
Kashmir lowered his hand, then sheathed his knife. Our attacker lay sickeningly still. I crawled over to push back the stringy hair with shaking hands. Lifeless eyes stared out of sunken wells. My heart thundered in my ears, but even accounting for starvation, those eyes were unfamiliar to me. “It’s not her.” I choked on my relief; I could breathe again, but the air was so sour. “It’s not her.”
Swag was wrapped around the skinny throat like a golden collar, teeth deep in the loose flesh, blood dripping through his coils and spreading in a black pool on the floor below. My palms were wet with it. I wiped my fingers on my trousers and cupped the man’s wasted face in my hands, my shoulders heaving. “I killed him, Kashmir.”
“No, amira, it’s all right—”