Текст книги "Days of Blood & Starlight"

Автор книги: Лэйни Тейлор

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

38

T

HE

I

NEVITABLE

Rattle of thuribles, clatter of teeth.

Karou’s fingers were restless at her trays. Sift, string. Teeth, teeth. Human, bull. Jade chips, iron. Iguana teeth—little saw-blade nasties—bat bones. Sift, string. When she came to the antelope teeth, she sat back and stared at them.

“Who are those for?”

Karou startled, and clasped her fist around them. She’d forgotten Ten for a moment. Watching. The she-wolf was always watching.

“No one,” she said, and set them aside.

Ten shrugged, and returned to the task of mixing incense.

In London, at the Natural History Museum, Karou had hesitated beside the beautiful bull oryx for minutes, her hands tracing up its long, ridged horns, remembering what it was like to bear that weight on her own head.

“You could be Kirin again,” Ten had said, but the thought had never even occurred to Karou. The antelope teeth weren’t for her. They were for Ziri, and she hadn’t even wanted to take them. Superstitiously, it had seemed to her that the preparation invited his death—like digging a grave before someone died. Yes, death was expected, death was routine, but… not for Ziri.

Lucky Ziri.

Remarkably, he was still in his natural flesh. Through speed, skill—luck, he would be the first to say—he had never yet been killed. And, as foolish, as hypocritical as it was to care about his “purity,” Karou did. He was the last of her tribe, the last true flesh of her kind. There was something sacred in that, and when he had flown out on that first assault, a small, cold dread had crystallized in her and grown, only subsiding when she saw him return.

And now she was waiting again—just to see him, and know that the Kirin were not yet gone from the world—but this wasn’t like before. This time, she didn’t see how he could possibly come back. Her parting words to him—her only words to him—had been so cruel, as if he were to blame for any of it. Would she ever get the chance to unsay them?

Sift, string. Teeth, teeth.

The hours passed and her dread grew. The sun rose, dragging all the hours behind it, and never had a day in this place seemed so sluggish, so hot, so unending. Karou felt aged by the time it finally subsided to twilight. Again and again she found the antelope teeth in her palm.

In the end, that night in London, she had taken her pliers to the oryx’s mouth. It wasn’t an invitation to Ziri’s death, she had persuaded herself, but a way of preparing herself for its inevitability. All chimaera soldiers died. Maybe now his time had come. She tried to imagine him coming back in a thurible, his true flesh—the last Kirin body in all of Eretz—abandoned somewhere, broken or burned—and found that she could handle it.

So long as it kept her from considering the other possibility: that he might not come back at all.

39

T

ASK

N

UMBER

O

NE

On an unpaved road in southern Morocco, a car crunched to a stop, disgorging two passengers and their backpacks before pulling away with a backdraft of dust and Berber shouts for luck. Zuzana and Mik shielded their faces, coughing. The drone of the engine grew faint, and as the air cleared and they could look around, they found themselves at the edge of a vast emptiness.

Zuzana tilted back her head. “Holy. Mik. What are the creepy lights?”

Mik looked up. “Where?”

She gestured to the sky—the entire sky—and he shuttled his gaze back and forth twice before settling on her and asking, “You mean… the stars?”

“No way. I’ve seen stars. They’re, like, these faraway specks in space. Those are right there.”

What by the light of day was an austere land the unrelieved color of dust became, in the dark, a midnight tapestry ludicrous with stars. Mik laughed, and Zuzana laughed, too, and they cursed and marveled, their necks craned all the way back. “You could pick those bastards like fruit,” Zuzana said, reaching up and waggling her fingers at them.

They soon fell silent and stood looking out over the rough and rugged crust that was this land. It was like something out of a documentary—and not the feel-good kind. His voice bright, Mik said, “We’re not going to die out there, are we?”

“No.” Zuzana was firm. “That only happens in movies.”

“Right. In real life, fool city folk never die in the desert and turn into bleached skeletons—”

“To be crushed under the hooves of camels,” added Zuzana.

“I don’t think camels have hooves,” said Mik, sounding less than certain.

“Well, whatever they have, I would kiss a camel right about now. We probably should have gotten some camels.”

“You’re right,” he agreed. “Let’s go back.”

Zuzana snorted. “Really, intrepid desert explorer. We’ve been here less than five minutes.”

“Right, and where is here, exactly? How do you know this is the right spot? It all looks the same.”

She held up a map. Overscribbled in red ink and fluttering with Post-its, it was not an object to inspire confidence. “Here-here. Don’t you trust me?”

He hesitated. “Of course I do. I know how much work you’ve put into this, but… it’s not exactly our area of expertise.”

“Please. I’m an expert now,” she said. She would have aced any quiz on southern Morocco after the research she’d done, and thought she should qualify as an honorary nomad for her efforts. “I know this is where she is. I’m sure of it. Come on, I even learned how to use a compass. We have water. We have food. We have a phone—” She looked at her phone. “Which doesn’t get a signal. Well. We have water. We have food. And we told people where we’re going. Sort of. What’s the risk?”

“You mean, besides… the monsters?”

“Oh, monsters.” Zuzana was dismissive. “You’ve seen Karou’s sketchbooks. They’re nice monsters.”

“Nice monsters,” Mik repeated, staring out at the stark starlit wilds.

Zuzana wrapped her arms around his waist. “We’ve come all this way,” she cajoled. “It can be one of your tasks.”

He perked up at that. “You mean the fairy-tale tasks?”

She nodded.

“Well, okay then. In that case, we’d better get moving.” He hoisted his backpack on and held hers up as she slipped her arms through the straps.

They stepped off the road, and all lay before them.

“Maybe I should have asked before,” said Mik. “But how many tasks are there?”

“There are always three. Now come on. It should be about twelve miles.” She grimaced. “Uphill.”

“Twelve miles? My love, have you ever walked twelve miles?”

“Sure,” said Zuzana. “Cumulatively.”

Mik laughed and shook his head. “Good thing you left your platforms behind.”

“As if. They’re in your pack.”

“My—?” Mik heaved his shoulders up and down, jouncing his pack and the attached violin case with it. “I thought it felt heavier.”

Zuzana looked innocent. On her feet were her approximation of sensible shoes. They were sneakers, but their foam soles were thicker than was strictly necessary, not to mention zebra-striped. She gave Mik’s hand a tug and plunged into the desert. They were both alive with the thrill of adventure, but it was Zuzana who practically gave off a hum, so tightly wound was her excitement. She was going to see her friend again.

Not to mention a giant sandcastle.

Full of monsters.

40

W

RONG

Another night crawled above the kasbah, the stars never so slow in their arc as when lives were in question.

Karou distracted herself with work, a new urgency in the building of bodies. She tried not to think as if she were starting from scratch, but it was hard, with such grim odds.

It could be days before they knew anything. It was an epic long way to the Hintermost, with all the free holdings and the vast southern continent between here and there. Without wings, it would have been several weeks’ overland trudging, but overland trudging was a thing of the past, and thank goodness for that. Karou remembered, when she was Madrigal, chafing at the unbearable pace of her battalions. But with wings, depending on what happened, the patrols could be back in days.

Or never.

The possibility that no one would come back at all was very real, and the strain of knowing that, and waiting, waiting to know something by never actually knowing, it was as old as war itself and it was the worst kind of dragged-out, miserable, gradual understanding she could think of.

So she was startled to hear the sentry’s call just after dawn—too soon—and she was out the window in a stride, a string of teeth still clasped in her hands. She leapt up the parapet on tiptoe and kept going, up and into the sky. It was barely thirty-six hours and there were shapes on the horizon, a full patrol. It seemed like a miracle.

Another minute and they were near enough that she could make out Amzallag’s bulk. It was Amzallag’s team.

No Ziri then.

Yet. She ignored her disappointment, glad at least to see Amzallag, and just marveled that a team—any team, if not the one she was most hoping for—had returned intact from such a fight, and so quickly! She settled to perch on the green palace roof tiles and watch them land. Thiago came out to meet them as he always did, clasping arms and not seeming out-of-the-usual pleased or surprised. She couldn’t hear what they said, but she could see that the soldiers’ sleeves were stiff with blood.

Another patrol returned, and another.

The sun climbed, the squadrons came home to roost one by one, and the miracle of it began to feel suspect. How was it possible that they had lost no one? By midmorning every team was accounted for but Balieros’s, and Karou could barely swallow around the lump in her throat.

“Where did they go?” she asked Ten back in her room, making a fidgeting effort at work.

“What do you mean? They went to the Hintermost,” said the she-wolf, but Karou knew it was a lie. Aside from the fact that they were back too soon, too alive, and the mood was wrong. It was heavy.

From her vantage point she saw the soldier Virko, who with his spiraling ram’s horns reminded her a little of Brimstone, go behind the piss-rampart and fall to his knees to vomit. The sound of his retching rose and fell, traveling in waves across the court where the rest of the company, milling in a queerly quiet way, fell even quieter, and seemed to avoid looking at one another.

Amzallag sat under the arcade cleaning his sword, and when Karou looked down an hour later or even longer, he was still cleaning it, his movements jerky, angry.

The sight, though, that made Karou’s mouth fill with the sweet saliva that precedes gagging, was Razor. Whatever the teams had been doing for the past day and a half—which was not by any calculation enough time to reach the Hintermost and return—had added a swagger to his whisper-smooth reptilian stride, and… he carried a sack. It was a brown cloth sack, heavy and full, and… stained with some fluid seepage, its color indeterminate, thanks to the brown of the sack. Fighting back the gag, Karou knew what the seepage was, and its color, and no matter how she had berated herself for her willful ignorance just a couple of days earlier, she did not want to know any more than that.

She found the antelope teeth again in her hand and put them down. She kept going to the window. Ten snapped at her for aimlessness, but she couldn’t focus. This was wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

And then, finally, at the slow waning of the day’s hottest hour, the sentry called again. Ziri. Karou was out the window and into the air. The sky was pure cobalt, cloudless and depthless, hiding nothing.

It was also empty. She turned to the sentry tower, confused. Oora was standing duty, and she wasn’t even looking in the direction of the portal. The Wolf appeared beside her, and Oora pointed downhill, into the distance. Karou had to squint to see what they were looking at, and when she did, she breathed, “No. No no. No.”

Humans, two of them, slipping as they climbed the scree.

They were headed straight for the kasbah.

41

M

AD

A

LCHEMY

This time, when angels came upon them, Sveva searched their eyes, and none were fire, and she swept their armor, and saw no lilies. Different angels. Bad luck.

To come so close to safety…

She’d really thought they’d made it. The mountains were so big, they’d kept seeming nearer than they were, and within reach. And then at the top of a slope that just had to be the last one—the last hill before the land must feather into those great granite folds that were like the world’s own walls—another valley would yawn open at their feet. Another expanse to cross, another rise to climb. It was like a trick.

But this one, this really was the last. Sveva could see the very place where a row of huge bulged stones met a meadow.

“They look like toes on a big fat foot,” she’d just said, not two minutes ago, smiling with the others. And she’d spun Lell, and the babe had laughed. “The mountain’s toes,” she’d sung. “We’ve reached the mountain’s toes!” And she was prancing, hugging the little Caprine to her chest, still singing her happy nonsense—“I wonder if it’s stinky in between the mountain’s toes”—when Sarazal cried, “Svee!”

And she looked, and they were there. Angels. The wrong angels.

Still, Sveva tensed in a place between hate and hope that hadn’t even existed a few days earlier. They had met mercy once; why not twice? Mercy, she had discovered, made mad alchemy: a drop of it could dilute a lake of hate. Because of what had happened in the gully, seraphim were more than slavers and faceless winged killers to her.

And yet, when these seraphim came pressing down, swords already red and no mercy in their eyes, she had no trouble screaming, “Kill them!”

Rath sprang.

The angels hadn’t seen him. They were almost smirking, this pair in shining armor. They saw a flock of Caprine, a couple of Dama, some grizzled old Hartkind—easy kills all. And the Dashnag? He’d been last up the rise; they didn’t see him until he was on them, already inside the reach of their swords and dragging them down to the ground, grappling, tearing.

They were screaming.

Sveva didn’t want to watch, but she made herself, which is how she saw one of them free an arm and raise his sword, slamming it onto Rath’s back. She shoved Lell at Sarazal and darted in with her slaver’s knife and stuck it. She stuck it right in the gap the angel’s armor left bare. She stabbed him in the armpit, deep, and he dropped his sword.

And died.

So that’s what it feels like, she thought as her boldness gave way to trembling. It feels awful. Her knife was slippery and her gorge was rising. Sarazal grabbed her shoulder. “Svee, come on!” Urgent. And then they were swimming in shadows, all of them. Shadows wheeling, weaving. More angels overhead. Sveva threw back her head.

A lot more angels.

Rath roared. Sveva looked at her sister, at Lell, at Nur with her arms outstretched, trying to reach her child, at all the other Caprine and the old Hartkind couple, and she held on to her knife and pointed to the stone toes in the distance. “Run!” she screamed. They did.

She stood with Rath.

Look at me, she thought with weird, cold pride. Everything was sharp and sure. Stabbing was awful, and she’d never have believed she would stand when she could run. She loved to run. But standing felt good, too. She looked at Rath. He looked at her. She thought he might urge her to go, but he didn’t. Maybe he just knew it wouldn’t matter, that there was no safety, but maybe… maybe he liked not being alone. He was, after all, just a boy.

Sveva smiled at him, and there they stood, so near the end of their journey they could feel the mist of waterfalls from on high, but they were in the shadows of angels now, and not likely to ever come out again.

Unless of course there was another miracle.

When the figures crested the tree line, Sveva almost couldn’t believe it. If she hadn’t seen them before, she would have been as afraid of them as she was of the angels. They were much scarier than angels.

They were revenants. Chimaera.

Saviors. It was so much like the night at the slave caravan, but it was day now and she could see them clearly. She recognized some of them: there was the griffon who had unlocked her shackle, and the bull centaur who had untwisted the metal scrap that bound Sarazal. Sveva searched for the other—the handsome horned one who had put this knife in her hand—but him she didn’t see.

The rebels were five against thrice that number, but they tore through the seraphim like a calamity.

After the first clash, and the first thuds of fallen bodies—enemies all—Rath did turn to Sveva and urge her to go. His eyes were alight. “I knew they’d come back,” he said fervently. “I knew they wouldn’t abandon us. Sveva, go. Catch the others. Take care of them, and tell them I said good-bye.” He put a big clawed hand on her shoulder. “Good luck.”

“But what about you?”

“I told you before, I was looking for the rebels.” He was happy; she saw that this was what he had wanted all along. “I’m going to join them,” he said.

And he did. When Sveva fled, Rath stayed and fought with the rebels.

And died with them, right there at the toes of the mountains.

And was dragged with them into a big pile.

And burned.

42

L

UCKY

Z

IRI

“Come on,” said Hazael. “There’s nothing more we can do.”

More? That would imply they had done something. They had found no opportunity. Too many Dominion, too much open ground. Akiva shook his head and said nothing. Maybe his night flight had spurred folk from their resting places, maybe chased them near enough that some had made the ravines and tunnels ahead of the angels. He would never know. All he would know was this before him.

The sky was spring blue and mountain-clean. Pristine. The smoke was still contained to thin columns, here and there. From this high rock perch the world became a lace of treetop and meadow, and the runoff rivers in the sun were like veins of pure light curving through the contours of hills. Mountains and sky, tree and stream, and the spark of wings as Dominion squadrons moved from site to site, setting their fires. This place was damp, ferny: mist veils and waterfalls. It wouldn’t burn easily.

In such a place, with such a vista, it was almost impossible to accept what had happened here today. The blood daubs gave it away, though.

There were so many. The carrion birds could scent blood in the air from miles away. Judging from their numbers—and from the jerking eagerness of their usually languid spirals—there was plenty of it in the air today.

“And there are our birds,” Akiva said, defeated.

Hazael took his meaning. “I’m sure some got to safety,” he said. It was a moment before Akiva realized he’d said it with Liraz right there. She was looking at them. He waited for her to say something, but she just turned away, looked up into the peaks.

“They say you can’t fly over them,” she said. “The wind is too strong. Only stormhunters can survive it.”

“I wonder what’s on the other side,” said Hazael.

“Maybe it’s a mirror of this side, and seraphim there have chased their chimaera into tunnels, too, and they meet in the middle, in the dark, and find out there’s no safe place in all the world, and no happy ending.”

“Or,” said Hazael, overbright, “maybe there are no seraphim on that side, and there’s the happy ending. No us.”

She turned from the peaks, abrupt. Her tone, which had been curiously remote, turned hard. “You don’t want to be us anymore, do you?” Her gaze shuttled back and forth between them. “You think I can’t see it?”

Hazael pursed his lips, glanced at Akiva. “I still want to be us,” he said.

“So do I,” said Akiva. “Always.” He thought back to the sky of the other world, when he had stopped the pair of them in their pursuit of Karou and made himself tell them—finally—the truth. That he had loved a chimaera, and dreamed of a different life. He’d gambled then that his sister was more than the emperor’s weapon, and if she had shunned the idea of harmony, at least she hadn’t turned on him. Did he think he was the only one who was sick of death? Look at Hazael. How many others? “But a better us,” he said.

“A better us?” Liraz asked. “Look at us, Akiva.” She held up her hands to show her ink. “We can’t pretend. We wear what we’ve done.”

“Only the killing. There are no marks for mercy.”

“Even if there were, I would bear none,” she said. Akiva met her eyes, and he saw a kind of torment in her.

“You have only to begin, Lir. Mercy breeds mercy as slaughter breeds slaughter. We can’t expect the world to be better than we make it.”

“No,” she said, faint, and for a moment he thought she was going to say more, go deeper, demand his secrets. Confess hers? But when she turned away, it was only to say, “Let’s get out of here. They’re burning bodies, and I don’t want to smell the char.”

Ziri watched the blaze. He was upslope on a ridge, in the safety of the trees.

Safety. The word felt absurd. There was no safety. The angels might as well light the whole world on fire and be done with it. The things he had seen burn in these last months. Farms, entire rivers slick with oil. Children running, fleet and screaming—aflame—until they could run and scream no more. And now, friends.

His grip on his knife hilts was so fierce it felt as if his fingers would gouge through the leather to the steel beneath, and through that, too. Safety, he thought again. It was worse than absurd, it was profane. It had also been his mandate on this mission: to be safe.

Balieros had ordered him to hide.

In every engagement there was to be someone kept back, designated safety against such an eventuality as this, to glean the souls of the others should they be slain. It was an honor, a deep trust—to hold his comrades’ perpetuity in his hands—and it was torture.

Lucky Ziri, he thought with bitterness. He knew why Balieros had chosen him. It was such a rare thing for a soldier to be in his natural body; the commander had wanted to give him a chance to keep it. As if he cared about that. Being the one left alive was worse. He’d had to watch the slaughter and do nothing. Even that Dashnag boy had fought—and well—but not Ziri, though his mind and body had screamed to fly into the fray.

The one breach he had permitted himself was to cut down a seraph who pursued the little Dama girl, the deer centaur, pretty as a doll. She was the same girl he’d helped free from the slavers up in the Marazel Hills, and she was holding the knife he’d given her. To think that they had come so far and nearly died right here. He saw the group of them, Dama and Caprine, vanish into a crease in the rocks, and that was good. It had been something solid to hold on to as he watched his comrades die. To know that it was not for nothing.

The five of them had taken fivefold the lives they gave, and the Dashnag boy added to the count. Ziri had watched the seraphim gape and gesture over the corpses—Ixander, especially, whom it took three of them to drag when it finally came to it. They pulled the bodies into a pile, and then, unholy butchers, they hacked off their hands before setting them alight, hacked them off and kept them—why? As trophies?—then lit the whole clearing and watched the blaze devour the mutilated remains. Ziri smelled them now—mingled with the sweet char of grass was the odor of scorched fur, horns, and, horribly, the cookfire scent of meat—and he imagined his comrades’ souls hovering over the clearing, maintaining a tenuous connection with their burnt bodies for as long as they could.

He couldn’t wait much longer. Burning hastened evanescence, and it had been hours already. Soon it would be too late. If Ziri hoped to save his comrades, he had to do it now.

The angels had lingered from morning into afternoon, but finally they were going, lifting skyward in all their abominable grace, and flying away.

He moved steadily down the slope, keeping to the thickest cover, and by the time he came to the edge of the clearing the enemy was gone from the horizon. He surveyed the clearing. The seraph fire was an infernal thing, and burned so hot that the bodies had been eaten to nothing. A wind was rising, stirring the mound of ashes, carrying it into Ziri’s eyes and worse: sundering what little the souls had left to cling to. He lit four cones of incense in his thurible and held it steady. Five soldiers and one volunteer. He hoped he had them all, the boy, too.

He’d done all he could. He closed the thurible with a twist and slipped the gleaning staff back through its loop across his back. He scanned the sky. It was empty, but he knew he had to wait until dark to fly—more hiding, more waiting. The Dominion were everywhere, still spreading the emperor’s message with their terrible efficiency, and, as he had seen… enjoying themselves.

At first, in the rebels’ opening strike, Ziri had hated cutting the Warlord’s smiles on the dead, but right now, all he could think was that the angels’ black joy must be answered.

And what if the act of answering sparked a black joy of its own? What would Karou think of that? No. Ziri pushed down the thought. He had taken no joy in it, but he couldn’t blame Karou for her scorn. It had surprised him, at the river, how deeply it cut—how she looked at him, how she walked away. He’d covered his shame with anger in the moment—who was she to scorn him?—but he couldn’t fool himself anymore. When Balieros had pulled the patrol aside to ask if they were with him—if they wished to slaughter enemy civilians or aid their own—Ziri’s first thought had been of Karou, of erasing her scorn and replacing it with something else. Respect? Approval? Pride?

Maybe he was still that lovestruck little boy, after all.

Ziri shook his head. He turned back toward the cover of the trees. And saw them standing there watching him: three angels with their arms crossed.