Текст книги "Dreams of Gods & Monsters"

Автор книги: Лэйни Тейлор

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

Karou had need of persuasion, too, to urge Jael to leave, but it was a particular breed of “persuasion” that Liraz could manage as well as Akiva, and so it was arranged.

“I’m going to go find out what the scouts have to say,” she told Mik and Zuzana, dropping her gear with a thud and rolling her shoulders and neck. She was passingly bothered by the fact that there had been only three scouts waiting for them: Lilivett, Helget, and Vazra. Ziri had dispatched four pairs of scouts, and each pair was to have sent one soldier to rendezvous here and make report on any seraph troop activity around the bay.

So there should have been four.

Probably just late, Karou told herself, but then she heard the Wolf tell Liraz, “We have to assume the worst.”

And so she did.

And… so it was.

41

UNKNOWNS

There were just so many unknowns. From their perch in the Adelphas, the rebels were blind. Up here it was all ice crystals and air elementals, but a world lay beyond the peaks, full of hostile troops and slaves in chains, shallow graves, and the blowing ash of burned cities, and it was all as a play behind a closed curtain to them.

They didn’t know if Jael had sent troops to hunt them down.

He had.

They didn’t know if he had found and secured the Atlas portal since they passed through it.

He hadn’t, yet, but even now his search patrols were crisscrossing the Bay of Beasts, searching.

They didn’t even know if he’d returned to Eretz, victorious or otherwise, and they had no way of knowing that Bast and Sarsagon, the unrepresented pair of scouts, had been captured within hours of their dispatch from the crater a day and a half earlier.

Captured and tortured.

And the rebels didn’t know and couldn’t have begun to imagine that, on the far side of the world, the sky had been twilight-dark for more than a day—a strange and ruthless dark that had nothing to do with the absence of the sun. The sun still shone, but it peered out of the inky indigo like a burning eye from the shadow of a cloak. Its light still fell on the sea and the speckling of green isles. Colors were still tropics-bright—all but the sky itself. It had sickened and blackened, and the stormhunters still wheeled in it, their screams gone hoarse and horrible, and the prisoners in their unprisonlike room watched it out their window and shuddered in nameless horror, but they couldn’t ask any questions of their captors, because their captors didn’t come to them. Not Eidolon of the dancing eyes, not anyone. No food was brought, or drink. Only the basket of bloodfruit remained, and none had grown hungry enough yet to contemplate it. Melliel, Second Bearer of that Name, and her band of Misbegotten brothers and sisters were seemingly forgotten, and, looking out their barred window, they could only imagine that it meant the end of the very world.

Scarab and her four magi wereaware of the state of their home sky. Sendings had come to them, even here, and they felt the disaster as a slackness of their own anima, as though their souls shrank from the shadow of annihilation.

But if they sensed the annihilation that was nearer at hand—much nearer—they did nothing to warn the host in whose midst they invisibly mingled. Perhaps it was apathy bred of centuries of reclusion. They’d been taught that these folk were fools, and that they deserved their wars. To take it a step further, there was a certain sense in the Far Isles that the wars served a grim good: That by occupying itself killing and dying here, the Empire couldn’t muster itself to bother the Stelians with its stupid hostilities.

And if there was a grandiosity in the Stelian belief that, above all, theymust not be bothered, it was a well-deserved grandiosity.

They must not be bothered.

At all costs, the Stelians must be left in peace. Scarab knew, from halfway around the world, what Melliel and the others abandoned in their cell beneath that unnatural dark did not: that Eidolon of the dancing eyes was one of many who strove against the sickened sky, holding the seams of their world intact. That she didn’t have time for prisoners now, or for anything else.

And of course it’s possible that the five fire-eyed interlopers didn’t feel the ambush gathering just out of sight—though it seems unlikely that the collective breath passing in and out of thousands of enemy lungs could go unremarked by magi of such exquisite sensitivity. In any case, they didn’t warn the rebels.

They watched.

Scarab’s sending to the others was plainthought, without sensory threads or any effort at feeling. It is nothing to do with us, she sent.

It had always been true before. She could have no way of knowing how deeply untrue it was today, or what it was this peculiar ragged hybrid army stood against, or what would be the fallout if they failed.

There were just so many unknowns.

ARRIVAL + 48 HOURS

42

THE WORST

The first awareness is a sensation in the spine. Karou feels it and looks to Akiva, across the crowd of soldiers. At the same moment, he looks to her. A crease knits his brows.

Something—

And then, just like that, the sky betrays them. It’s low and bright—a lucent, backlit mist, just as it was when they came from the portal. But this time it isn’t stormhunters that drop from above.

It’s an army.

Many.

The angels are fire, and they are legion, wing to wing, and so the sky has become fire. Bright and alive. But the daylight is brighter and they’re blotting it out—so many—and so a tangled darkness falls on the host below.

Shadows, chased by fire.

Very fast. All very, very fast.

It begins.

The crater is a ragged bowl, and the Dominion are as a lid of fire, and they are many and many, wing to wing and swords drawn, and when they plummet in a single breath’s span, there is no getting out, and no getting around them.

Nor is there any hesitation from below. Everything that had almost happened in the Kirin caves happens now, unchecked and with whip-crack quickness. Swords: unsheathed; palms: upraised. The effect of the hamsas is instantaneous. Like grass rippled by a wind, the attacking ranks sway away, and in the moment’s reprieve this gains the rebels, they surge to greet the ambush, roaring. They don’t wait to be pinned between fire and stone but leap—launch—and meet the emperor’s troops in the air with a sound like fists smashing on fists.

Many fists against fewer, perhaps, but the fewer have magic.

At the first touch of shadow, Akiva reaches for sirithar—

–and is thrown to his knees as though clapped by thunder—thunder as a weapon, thunder in his head—and he’s ringing with it, and tilting, and someone catches him. It’s the Dashnag who isn’t a boy anymore. Rath. His hand is huge on Akiva’s shoulder. The same shoulder once savaged by a chimaera, another chimaera now steadies, and there is no sirithar, only the clash of blades, and then the boy Rath lunges into battle and Akiva surges to his feet and draws his swords, and he can’t see Karou…

… and Karou can’t see him, and she can’t stop to look. There’s Zuzana and Mik and an angel is coming at them and she won’t be able to get there in time. She’s opening her mouth to scream when she sees Virko. He pounces.

Rends.

The angel becomes pieces and Karou has her crescent-moon blades in her hands and it’s dance, cutting her way through the enemy to reach her friends.

Akiva tries for siritharagain, and again thunder invades his head and drives him to his knees.

For the merest instant, he has the impression of a cool hand pressed to his brow, soothing and then gone. All around him is glitter and clash and snarl and stab and teeth and grunt and stagger. Magic is denied him. All he can do is get to his feet and fight.

Zuzana has closed her eyes. Reflexive reaction to dismemberment. You could go your whole life without finding out how you’d react to seeing limbs torn off in front of you, but now Zuzana knows, and she knows the coursing terror of “all this war stuff,” and she decides at once that notseeing what’s happening is worse than seeing it and so she opens her eyes again. Mik is right at her side, and he’s beautiful, and Virko is crouched before her, planted there, and he’s terrible, and he’s beautiful, too. The spikes at his neck have flared wide. She didn’t know they did that. They’d lain sleek, almost, like porcupine quills at rest but bigger, sharper, and with serrated edges, but now they’re all fanned out and bristling and he looks twice his size. It’s like a lion’s mane made out of knives.

And then Karou is there with blood on her blades and Virko is folding his spikes back down—they interweave, Zuzana sees, and the elegance of it… the symmetry almost overwhelms her with its perfection, and that’s the thing that she’ll remember most, not the dismemberment, her mind is already pulling a curtain on that, but the symmetry—and Virko’s spikes aren’t padded now with a smelly blanket, and there’s no harness to hold on to when when Mik boosts her up, but Zuzana’s not afraid, not of this. In the middle of this very bad dream, she’s glad to have a friend with a lion’s mane made of knives. Mik mounts behind her and Virko’s muscles bunch beneath them. He gives a great, labored heave and they leave the ground and then… vanish.

Ziri sees Virko wink out—gone—and Karou is turning, searching. Not for him; Ziri knows that, and he minds less than he did before. A great gust that can only be the draft of Virko’s invisible wingbeats blows her hair back like a battle standard, silken blue and streaming, and in the screaming maelstrom of battle, she is surrounded by a curious cushion of stillness.

Because she’s being protected, Ziri sees, by both chimaera and Misbegotten. Because she’s the resurrectionist, and because she has another, more immediate job to attend to. The realization kicks him forward. Whatever happens here, Karou’s plan must go ahead. Jael must be stopped.

Ziri looks for Liraz and she’s there, and so is Akiva. They’re fighting back-to-back, lethal. Akiva wields a pair of matched swords, Liraz a sword and an ax, and her smile seems a third weapon, almost. It’s the same smile from the war council, where she’d scoffed at the odds of the fight. “Three Dominion to one Misbegotten?” she’d said, with eagerness. And Ziri sees that before him: three to one and more. And more, and more, but something’s happening. There’s Nisk and Lisseth. Astonishingly, they’re backing Akiva and Liraz up. Each has a blade drawn but a hamsa outheld, too, and against the pulse of weakness, the Dominion can’t match the speed and force of the pair of Misbegotten.

Ziri feels a lift of hope. It’s a hope he knows well and despises: the ugly, black hope that one might, by killing, stay alive awhile longer.

Kill or die, no other choice.

Bodies litter the crater and more are falling. Ziri has a flash image of how it will be filled with corpses as though the mountains have cupped their hands to offer up the dead to Nitid, goddess of tears and life, and to the godstars, and to the void.

The bodies are chimaera, too, and Misbegotten, and then—

–a second darkness falls.

Overhead, a second sky of fire is falling, wing to wing to wing, and even the ugly, black hope can’t outlast this. Another wave of Dominion as great as the first, and today Nitid is the goddess of nothing but tears.

“Karou!” Ziri calls, and it doesn’t surprise him anymore to hear the Wolf’s tenor come from his own lips—a voice to cut through battle clangor and rally tired soldiers to keep on, and keep on, as though life is a prize to be won by bloodletting. Kill and kill and kill to live. How many, and for how long? It’s just a calculus in the end, and though the real Thiago had surmounted impossible odds in battle, none of them had been thisimpossible.

And besides, he isn’t Thiago.

He calls out orders; chimaera and Misbegotten alike take heed. By the time he reaches Karou, there’s a buffer of soldiers forming with Karou, Akiva, Liraz, and Thiago at its center.

“You two need to go,” the Wolf says. His voice is raised above the chaos, and his eyes are intent but not cold, not mad. This White Wolf will tear out no throats with his teeth today. “Get clear of this. Use the glamour. You have a job to do.”

Karou objects first. “We can’t leave you now—”

“You have to. For Eretz.” For Eretz.It’s understood that this means: If not for us.

Because we’ll be dead.

“I’ll only go if you designate a safety,” Karou says in a choked voice. “Someone. Anyone.”

Someone to wait out the killing in safety and come back to glean souls after it’s all over. It’s pointless. Now that the seraphim know about resurrection, they take measures to prevent it. They burn the dead, and guard the ashes until evanescence is certain. But Ziri nods anyway.

It’s time to part. The reluctance that envelops them all is a complex web—a cat’s cradle of loves and longings and… even the earliest tender unfurlings of a possibility so remote it should have been laughable. Ziri glances to Liraz as she glances to him, and both look swiftly away again: Ziri to Karou, Liraz to Akiva. A second only—an eternity—do they permit themselves for farewells. They wish pointless wishes, and let their what-ifs fall to the ground with the corpses.

In the legends, chimaera were sprung from tears and seraphim from blood, but in this moment they are, all of them, children of regret.

As Karou and Akiva begin to turn toward each other for their last look, both their faces falling blank with unfathomable loss– no please no not now please oh—the Wolf speaks up. “Akiva,” he says. “Take them. Get them to the portal. See to it.”

Akiva blinks twice rapidly. He doesn’t want to refuse, but he’s going to. He should be here, fighting—

“It may be guarded,” says the Wolf, anticipating his argument. “They may need help.” The battle around them is reaching a fever pitch. “Go!”

Akiva nods, and they go.

It’s Liraz’s gaze that Ziri holds as they vanish. There’s no period of transparency, only a sudden lurch from thereto not-there, and at the hard and final edge of there, Liraz wears no killing, cutting smile, no scorn or coldness or lust for vengeance. Her features are soft with sorrow and her beauty takes his breath away.

And then she’s gone. Within the center of the sphere of soldiers, the White Wolf is left alone. Lucky Ziri, he thinks, gutted, hollowed. Not today, and not tomorrow.

He looks up. The passage of armies has chased back the mist and he sees ranks of soldiers.

And soldiers, and soldiers, and soldiers.

He laughs. He gathers his stolen body, bares his fangs, and leaps.

He climbsthem. They’re thick enough; they make it easy. He has only to leap and catch one in the air and, catching, kill him. Leap to the next as the body falls. To the next, to the next, until the ground is far below and they’re tangling their wings in a rush to escape him. Still more are closing behind, and he has no shortage of prey. No shortage of blood to spill, and his laughter sounds like choking.

He is the White Wolf.

And Liraz is flying, fast, racing toward the portal. The battle rings behind her, and then fades into the rushing of the air, the air that’s stinging her eyes. That’s all it is, the sting: the air, and speed.

“We haven’t been introduced. Not really.” That was what he’d said to her in the thermal pools before giving her his secret like a knife. You could kill me with this. But I trust that you won’t.

Trust. Did she trust him because he’d saved her life, or because he’d trusted her with his secret, or both? Seeing him fight, his style was efficiency with panache; he was brutal and graceful, but it was nothing like the grace she’d beheld in the Hintermost when he wore his true body and danced the Kirin spin of crescent-moon blades. They had seemed an extension of himself. These swords didn’t. This body didn’t, either. Since he told her who he is, his White Wolf form has seemed to her like a costume, as though he might unfasten it and step out, long and lean, dark and horned and winged. In her mind’s eye, he’s a silhouette. She only ever saw him at a great distance, and doesn’t even know what his true face looked like.

She wishes she did.

And in the next second the wish seems stupid and petty. What does it matter what his face looked like before? Behind her he could be dying—again and forever. What does “true” even mean when it comes to a face? Only souls are true, and when you spill them to the air they melt away, as Haz’s had, and countless others, and the loss… The loss.Liraz clutches her hand to her stomach. Fires go out, and the world grows dim.

How could it have taken her so many years to feel the preciousness of life?

They fly, and it’s long minutes at speed before they leave the mountains behind them and course out over the dark water of the bay. It looks like a sea from here, haze shrouding the horizons and the land that hems it in. Karou finally spots Mik and Zuzana on Virko, ahead. The humans are trying to maintain the glamour but it flickers, unreliable, and a Dominion patrol has spotted them. They’re closing in.

Virko wheels and dips. He makes it. He soars through the cut and vanishes in a ripple, and then Karou, Akiva, and Liraz arrive at the flapping loose edges of the slash in the sky, and instead of darting straight through, Karou spins toward Akiva. They’ve let go of their glamours, and when she looks at him, the impossibility of good-bye overwhelms her anew—and worse than before, so much worse, coming in the crush of peril. How can she leave him like this?

“Go!” Liraz screams at her. “Go now!”

Karou grabs Akiva’s hand. Helpless, she tries to forge a final moment with him. A look at least, if not words, if not more. Something to remember. His hand is so warm, and his eyes are so bright—but haunted. He looks aggrieved, heartsick, furious and ready to curse the godstars. He squeezes her hand. “We’ll be okay,” he says, but it’s with desperation. He wants to believe it but doesn’t, quite, and if he doesn’t then Karou can’t, either.

Oh god, oh god.She wants to drag him through the portal with her and never let him go.

Liraz is still screaming at her and the sound fills Karou’s head, fills her with panic—and anger—and Akiva touches her elbow, urging her through, and that’s it. She feels the tatter of the sky brush against her face and she’s not in Eretz anymore, and Liraz’s screams—“Go! Go!”—ring in her head, stoking her panic. She flushes with fury, ready to hate her, if only for a moment, absolutely ready to tell her to shut up, and she swings around to face the portal to wait for her—

–as, on the other side, Akiva turns away from it. He’s empty. He’s just watched Karou disappear, and he turns to meet his sister’s eyes one last time before she follows. Take care of her, he wants to say but won’t. And of yourself. Please, Lir.And their eyes do connect for an instant.

“The urn is full, my brother,” she says.

Urn?Akiva blinks, once; then he remembers. Hazael had told him that. Akiva is the seventh bearer of his name; six Akivas dead before him meant the cremation urn was full. “You have to live,” Hazael had said, silly and matter-of-fact.

Hazael who had died, while Akiva lived.

Akiva’s thoughts are fractured. The Dominion will be on them in seconds. He sees them as hurtling shapes behind Liraz. There’s a thrum of frenzy that his sister’s screams—“Go! Go! Go!”—have built in him, but still the thought finds purchase: that he’s never seen her look more alive than she does right now. There’s purpose and energy and resolve in her expression. She’s focused; she’s alight.

And then her feet connect with his chest.

Heart-bruising, rib-jarring, breath-stealing force. All his air and his thoughts are driven out in a rush, and he’s reeling, unmoored. He can’t breathe and can’t see.

And when he catches himself he’s through the portal.

It flares into flame, and Liraz is on the far side. She’s burning it shut. Akiva thinks he hears a shiver of steel—sword on sword—in the instant before the connection between the worlds is lost.

The slash in the sky is cauterized like a wound. Liraz is still in Eretz and Akiva is here in her place. With Karou.