Текст книги "Days of Blood & Starlight"

Автор книги: Лэйни Тейлор

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

 

Once upon a time, a girl lived in a sandcastle,

making monsters to send through a hole in the sky.

48

F

ASCINATING

G

UEST

“Captain, we’ve found… something. Sir.”

Jael favored the scout with the baleful look his soldiers knew well. The Captain of the Dominion was not hot-tempered like his brother. His anger was a cool, intentional thing, but just as brutal—arguably more so, as he had full control when he committed his worst acts, and was more able to enjoy himself. “Am I to understand,” he said softly, “that by ‘something’ you don’t mean the rebel?”

“No, sir, not him.” The scout stared past Jael’s head at the silk wall of the pavilion. It was night and the breeze was up. The folds of the tent flapped in a light breeze, and the glow of lanterns painted its ripples crimson and fire, ever-shifting, mesmerizing. Jael knew; he’d been staring at it himself until his steward showed the scout in, but he didn’t imagine the scout was mesmerized. He imagined he just didn’t like to look at his captain’s face.

“Well, what then?” he asked, impatient. It was the rebel he wanted—the Kirin who, unbelievably, had slipped through his fingers—and he could little imagine that anything else would hold his attention at the moment.

He was wrong.

“We’re not sure what it is, sir,” said the scout. He sounded bewildered. He looked repulsed. Jael was used to that look; he got it enough. They tried to hide it, but there was always a tell: a tic, a sliding away of the eyes, a subtle pursing of the lips. Sometimes it irritated him enough that he gave them something to take their mind off their revulsion. Like agony, for example. But if Jael were to punish everyone who was disgusted by his face, he would be kept very busy indeed. And anyway, this particular revulsion wasn’t for him. When he realized that, his curiosity stirred.

“We found… it… hiding in the ruins of Arch Carnival. It had a fire.”

“It?” prompted Jael. “A beast?”

“No, sir. It’s like no beast I’ve seen. It says… It says it’s a seraph.”

Jael let out a spray of laughter. “And you can’t tell? What manner of fools surround me that can’t recognize our own kind?”

The scout looked acutely uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, sir. At first I thought it was impossible, but there’s something about the thing. If what it says is true—”

“Bring it here,” said Jael.

And they did.

He heard it before he saw it. It spoke the tongue of seraphim and it was moaning. “Brothers, cousins,” it implored, “be gentle with this poor broken thing, take pity!”

Jael’s steward held the flap of the tent open and beheld the creature first. The fellow was stoic from years in his service and all that that entailed, so when Jael saw him blanch, he took notice.

Two soldiers dragged the thing by its armpits. Its body was a bloated ball, its arms were reedy and ropey, and its face…

Jael did not blanch. The things that disgusted others were a fascination to him. He rose from his chair. Went closer and knelt before the thing to peer at it, and when it looked at his face, it recoiled. This was funny—that such a monster could feel disgust—but Jael did not laugh.

“Please!” it cried. “I have been punished enough. I have come home at last. The blue lovely made me fly again, but she was wicked, oh, false girl, she tasted of fairy tales, but let her have her ash city, let her mourn her dead monsters, she cheated me. The wish ran out. How many times must I fall? It has been a thousand years. I have been punished enough!”

Jael understood that he was looking at a legend. “Fallen,” he said, amazed, and he took in the creature’s fine eyes, sunk in the bloat of its purple face. He looked at its dangling, useless legs and the splinters of bone jutting from its shoulder blades where, in a long-distant past—a past out of stories whose books had been burned and lost—its wings had been ripped from its body.

“So you’re real,” said Jael, and he felt no small awe that the thing could be alive after all that it had endured.

“I am Razgut, good brother, have pity. The other angel, he was cruel, oh, his fire eyes were bright, but he was a dead thing, he wouldn’t help me.”

Fire eyes. Suddenly, Jael found the creature’s gibberish as fascinating as his history.

With a flash of unexpected strength from those reed-thin arms, Razgut jerked free of the soldier holding him and seized Jael’s hand. “You who know what it is to be broken, brother, you will pity me.”

Jael smiled. It was when Jael smiled that he felt most keenly what his face was: a mask of scar tissue, a horror. He didn’t mind being a horror. He lived. The one who had cut him, well, she had lived long enough to rue her poor aim, and then long enough to rue having ever lived at all. Jael was ugly, and though his teeth were broken he was most avowedly not, and as for pity, it had never troubled him. Still, he let Razgut clutch at his hand. He waved the soldiers off when they tried to drag the creature back, and he ordered his steward to bring food.

“For our guest,” he said.

Our fascinating guest.

49

A T

RUE

S

MILE

All of Karou’s careful hiding of her bruises was undone the moment she rolled up her sleeves and dumped her tool case out on her table. It was a small shock lost in larger shocks, though, and Zuzana said nothing. Karou didn’t look at her; she didn’t want to see her friend’s reaction. She focused on Ziri.

Thiago and Ten put him on her bed—so much for Zuzana and Mik sleeping there tonight—and Ten went for boiled water to wash his wounds. Ziri had not regained consciousness, which was a mercy since Karou had nothing to give him for the pain. Why would she? She wasn’t a healer.

But… she supposed she was; she could do what an ordinary healer could not—at least, in theory. The same magic used in conjuring flesh could also knit and heal it. It was even possible to repair a dead body and restore its soul to it, though this could only be done immediately after death before any decomposition began, and if the injuries were not too extensive. As soldiers tended not to die at the resurrectionist’s door, the gleaning of souls was the practical alternative. Also, Brimstone had said that it was usually easier to conjure a new form than restore a broken one.

He had compared it to mending a slice in knitted wool: the wool skein had been one continuous fiber in the original creation and was now fraught with interruptions, each its own snafu of loose ends and lost stitches. The interruptions could be put right, but it took maniacal craft, and the whole was unlikely to emerge quite as it had been before.

Karou knelt to examine Ziri’s injuries. As terrible as the smile looked, she felt sure she could manage. It had been sliced clean by a very sharp blade, and the muscles affected were on the large side, their configuration straightforward. There might be some scarring, but what of that?

Thiago leaned over her shoulder. “Is that… ash?” he asked.

Karou realized that it was. It was ash blackening Ziri’s mouth and lips. The inside of his mouth was black, too. “It looks like he ate it,” she said.

“Or was fed it,” replied Thiago darkly.

Fed ash? By who? Karou reached for Ziri’s hands, gently curling them open. When she saw what had been done to him, a soft sound of anguish escaped her lips. His hands were pierced through, as if he had been crucified. The left one was torn entirely from the center of his palm out through the webbing between his third and fourth finger, as if he had wrenched it free of whatever had pinned it. The imagined pain brought a trembling white noise to her ears. She laid the hands back gently on Ziri’s chest.

“So. Can you heal them?” asked Thiago.

Karou heard skepticism in his voice, and didn’t blame him for it. Hands were ridiculously complex. She’d had to draw and label them in anatomy classes in art school: all twenty-nine bones, seventeen muscles just in the palm, and… over a hundred ligaments. “I don’t know,” she admitted.

“If you can’t, tell me now.”

She went cold. “Why?” she asked, though she knew the answer.

“If he can’t use his hands, this body is of no use to him—or to me.”

“But it’s his natural flesh.”

Thiago shook his head, not unsympathetic. “I know. And as rare a thing as that is, do you think he’ll thank you for salvaging it if he can’t hold his blades?”

Is that all that matters? Karou wondered, and the bleak answer was: yes.

She felt the Wolf looking at her, but she kept her eyes on Ziri. Broken, brutalized Ziri. Lovely, long-limbed Ziri, graceful echo of a dead people. What manner of monstrous body would Thiago ask for to replace this perfect one? It wouldn’t come to that. She would keep Ziri from the pit. She would. “I’ll heal him.”

Thiago began, “If it would be faster to make him a new—”

“I can do it,” Karou snapped, and the Wolf sat back.

When she turned to face him, he was giving her a considering look. “All right, then. Try. But first I need to question him.”

“What? Wake him?” Karou shook her head. “It’s better this way—”

“Karou, what do you think happened to him? He’s been tortured, and I need to know by who, and if he gave anything away.”

“Oh.” She saw the sense in that, and as much as she hated to wake Ziri to his pain, she did, as gently as she could.

It was terrible to see his eyes flutter open and cloud with agony. They sought her face, then flickered to the Wolf and back to her. Again she saw in them the urgency that had been there when he first arrived, and felt sure there was something he wanted to tell her.

Thiago was his best self as he knelt at his soldier’s side to question him. “Who did this?” he asked in a soothing tone, but it quickly became evident that Ziri couldn’t speak, not with the severed muscles in his cheeks. The Wolf had to settle for yes and no questions, which Ziri answered with nods and head shakes that clearly caused him pain.

“Did you tell them anything?” asked Thiago, who had learned no more than that “they” were seraphim.

Ziri gave a head shake, immediate and resolute.

“Well done. And… the rest of the team?”

Ziri shook his head again. Tears gathered in his lashes, and Karou understood that he meant they were dead. She had already supposed so, but the news still hit her like a punch. Five soldiers, dead. Balieros. Ixander. She remembered the unexpected softness of Ixander’s soul and how she’d wished to do better by him than that monstrous body.

“Were you able to glean their souls?” asked the Wolf, and Karou leaned forward, hoping.

Ziri hesitated. His eyes went to her. Despairing. Confused. He neither nodded nor shook his head. What did it mean? Thiago asked him again, but Ziri’s eyes fluttered shut, his lashes releasing tears to track down his ash-smudged face, and he moaned. He was lost in pain, and after a few more attempts, Thiago had to let it go with the reassurance that Ziri had not compromised their position. He stood. “Go ahead,” he told Karou, “and luck to you.”

She wished she could assert that luck had nothing to do with it, but the truth was she was praying for it herself. She was almost ready to ask Nitid for help. “Thank you,” she said, and as he went out, she reached for some vises from her table.

Ziri made an inarticulate sound and she looked to him to find him shaking his head, agitated. She didn’t understand at first, but then he hit himself on the chest with his mangled hands and she got it. He wanted her to use his pain.

“Oh, no. No. You’d have to stay conscious to tithe—”

He nodded, hit his chest again, and tried to speak. His face contorted and fresh blood pulsed from the slashes. “Stop,” Karou cried, reaching out to restrain his hands. Their fingers curled together and he held hers tight in spite of the agony it must be causing him. He nodded again.

There were tears in Karou’s eyes now. “Okay,” she said, wiping them away. “Okay.”

Ten returned with water and cloths, and Karou set about cleaning Ziri’s wounds. She had some antiseptic, and as she dabbed it on she felt Ziri’s pain amplify in the air around him, almost like currents of electricity. It was a terrible waste to let it all dissipate while she cleaned his wounds. She needed help. She turned to Ten, but one look at the she-wolf’s heavy, ungentle hands and she looked away again. She couldn’t entrust Ziri’s wounds to her. She looked over her shoulder. Zuzana and Mik were still in the room, standing against the far wall. Zuzana was wide-eyed, pale, and watching her intently. Surely this was not what she had meant when she had petitioned to be Igor, resurrectionist’s assistant, but she did have fine small hands and years of training at delicate work.

“Zuze, do you think you can help me? You don’t have to if you’re not comfortable—”

“What can I do?” She came at once to Karou’s side.

Ten tried to assert herself, but Karou waved her off and explained to Zuzana what she needed, and though her friend paled further, she took the clean gauze and water basin and antiseptic and turned to Ziri. “Hi,” she said. Aside to Karou: “How do you say hi in Chimaera?”

Karou told her, and she repeated it, and Ziri couldn’t say it back, but he nodded.

“This is the one you drew,” said Zuzana. “From your tribe.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Well. Let’s get started.”

Karou nodded encouragement and watched for a moment to make sure Zuzana would be all right, and then, with a deep breath, she sank into the slash-and-burn landscape of Ziri’s pain and began to gather it, and use it.

She didn’t know how long she was within herself, in that strange place where she worked at Brimstone’s magic. This wasn’t the continuous, meditative, and fluid feel of a conjuring, but a faltering, puzzling piecing-together and picking at loose ends, trying to reconstruct what had once been whole. It seemed to take a very long time; she existed in a curious sense of suspension, like she was underwater and should have to surface to take a breath, but didn’t, and when she finally did come up it was like rising from black water. She blinked, breathed. The sun had risen; the shutters were closed but light seeped in around the edges, and though the fortress walls kept out the worst of the heat, the coolness of night had gone; it felt like much of the day had gone with it.

“Karou.” It was Zuzana’s voice, hushed with reverence. “That was… amazing.”

What was? Karou tried to focus her eyes. They were dry, as if she hadn’t blinked in hours, which maybe she hadn’t. She looked around. Ten was gone. Zuzana was still at her side; Mik was on her other side, his arm around her, and she realized with a slumping weariness that he was pretty much all that was holding her upright. Her exhaustion felt like gravity, inexorable. Her head had never been so heavy.

Finally she looked at Ziri, who had kept conscious for hours as well, feeding her his pain, and she found him looking back. He smiled at her. It was a smile full of exhaustion, sorrow, and other unreadable things, but it was a true smile, and not an ugly message carved in flesh.

She had done it.

She drank in the sight of his face. She had mended him, and almost without a trace of scarring. And his hands? That was the true test. She reached for them, held them and looked, and at first her breath caught because the scarring was ugly, knotted, and she thought she had failed, but then he flexed his fingers and the movements were fluid, and she breathed again. She breathed out a laugh and tried to rise. Dizziness broke over her.

The room fell sideways.

And that was all there was for a while.

50

L

IKE

J

ULIET

Zuzana perched on the edge of Karou’s bed. Her friend lay asleep, eyes closed, the skin around them deep blue. Her breathing was steady and deep. At her side lay Ziri, also sleeping, and their breathing had fallen into rhythm. Zuzana had bathed her friend’s face with cool water, and her hands and wrists, too, before laying them at her sides. “She needs rest,” she said to Mik. “And I need food. Tell me you’re not starving.”

In response, Mik flipped open his pack and dug something out. “Here,” he said.

Zuzana took it. It was—or had been—a bar of chocolate. “It melted on hell hike.”

“And then unmelted. In a new and exciting shape.”

Zuzana inhaled deeply in the direction of the window, and fanned air at Mik. “Do you smell that? It’s food. Excitingly shaped chocolate can be dessert. We can share it with the chimaera.”

Mik’s concern-crease appeared. “You don’t really want to go down there without Karou.”

“I do.”

“And share your chocolate.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Who are you, and what have you done with the real Zuzana?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, putting on a stiff affect and flat voice. “I am the human called Zuzana, and I am not trying to lure you out to the monsters. Trust me, meaty human—I mean Mik.”

Mik laughed. “I’m only not freaked out by that because you haven’t been out of my sight since we got here.” He took her hand. “Don’t go out of my sight, okay?”

She regarded him mildly. “What about the bathroom?”

“Ah. That.” They had made a pact never to be one of those couples who use the bathroom in front of each other. “I must maintain my mystique,” Mik had told her solemnly, holding her hand in both of his. Now he said, “Well, we should at least have a code word then, to determine whether the other one is an impostor. In case, you know, a monster steals my body in the five minutes I’m peeing.”

“You think they can steal bodies? And more importantly, you can pee for five minutes, and yet you wouldn’t even pee on Kaz for me?”

“I’ll be apologizing for that forever, won’t I? But seriously. Code word.”

“Fine. How about… impostor?”

Mik was expressionless. “Our impostor code word should be impostor?”

“Well, it’s easy to remember.”

“The whole point is to be sly. If I suspect you’re not really you, I need to find out without you knowing I know. Like in movies. I’ll have my back to you, you know, facing the camera, and I casually say, uh, haberdasher in conversation—”

“Haberdasher? That’s our code word?”

“Yes. And you fail to respond to it and my expression goes all bleak and horrible”—he demonstrated bleak and horrible—“because I’ve just found out your body has been taken over by hostile forces, but by the time I turn around I’m cool. I pretend to be fooled while I quietly plot my own escape.”

“Escape?” She stuck out her lower lip. “You mean you wouldn’t try to save me?”

“Are you kidding?” He pulled her against him. “I would stick my head down monster throats looking for you.”

“Yes. And hope that they’d conveniently swallowed me without chewing. Like in fairy tales.”

“Of course. And I cut them open and out you pop. Though they would be missing out on your amazing flavor if they didn’t chew.” He nibbled her neck and she squeaked and pushed him off. “Come on then, brave monster-throat-looker-downer, let’s go get some dinner. I am almost positive it will not be us on the menu.” She sniffed the air. “If only because they’re already cooking it.” When he started to renew his protest, she held up a hand. “What are you more afraid of: them, or me with low blood sugar?”

His stern caution-mouth twisted into a smile. “I’m not sure.”

“Bring your violin,” she said, and with a shrug, he did. Zuzana laid her hand on Karou’s forehead before leaving, and then they were out the door, skipping down the stairs on the trail of food.

Karou’s sleep was haunted and dangerously deep. She lost the thread of her days and nights, or her lives—human and chimaera—and wandered through tableaux of memory like they were rooms in a museum. She dreamed of Brimstone’s shop and her childhood there, of Issa and Yasri and Twiga, scorpion-mice and winged toads and… Brimstone. And even in her sleep she felt as if her vises were clamping down on her heart.

She dreamed of the battlefield at Bullfinch, the fog, and her first sight of Akiva as he lay dying.

Of the temple of Ellai. Love and pleasure and hope, the hugeness of the dream that had filled her in those weeks—she had never in either of her lives been as happy as that—and the delicacy of the wishbone that she and Akiva had held between them, their knuckles resting together in the moment before the snap.

And finally, Karou dreamed herself in a crypt, waking like a revenant—or like Juliet—on a stone slab. All around were bodies burned beyond recognition, and in their midst stood Akiva. His hands were on fire and his eyes were pits. He stared across the piled dead at her and said, “Help me.”

She came awake and upright in an instant, and day had again passed to night, and there was a warm presence at her side.

“Akiva,” she gasped. It spilled from the dream, this name that carved a piece out of her when she even so much as thought it. Spoken aloud it was sharp and cruel, a spike, a slap—and not only to herself but Ziri, if he heard. Because it was not Akiva beside her. Of course it wasn’t, and what ran through Karou’s mind in that instant was bitterness, a double pang: one for when she thought it was him.

And one for when she realized it wasn’t.

Akiva started at the sound of his name, the sound of Karou’s voice, the sight of her upright, awake, and so near. He couldn’t stop the surge of heat that answered her cry, a flare that must surely have rolled off his wings and touched her across the room. Touched her and… the one lying beside her, who didn’t move or open his eyes even when she cried out.

Akiva held himself still, glamoured, and Karou didn’t so much as look around; her eyes were on the Kirin, and Akiva couldn’t guess what had made her call his name, but whatever it was, it seemed already forgotten. She stared down at the Kirin and Akiva closed his eyes. He quieted his breathing and reassured himself that she couldn’t hear his heartbeat as he moved toward the window.

He wanted to stay. He never wanted to take his eyes off Karou again, but now that she had awakened—he’d just had to know that she would—he couldn’t stomach spying on her like this. And he wasn’t sure he could handle what might come next, when the Kirin woke.

He wouldn’t wonder what there was between the two of them. He had no right to wonder.

She was alive, that was what mattered.

That, and… she was the resurrectionist. That realization carried a numbness that blotted out nearly everything else.

Nearly.

Seeing her sleeping at another man’s side was too big to blot out. It was too like the sight of her friends through her window in Prague, and Akiva was shaken by the same absurd jealousy as he had been then, when for a moment he’d thought it was her. If he had any decency in him he would wish her happiness with one of her own kind, because whatever else was uncertain in these terrible days, one thing was sure: There was no hope that she could still love him.

Karou reached for the Kirin’s hand and it was more than Akiva could bear. He hurled himself out the window and was gone.