Текст книги "Dreams of Gods & Monsters"

Автор книги: Лэйни Тейлор

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

49

AN OFFER OF PATRONAGE

“Patience, patience.”

Thus had Razgut counseled Jael half a day earlier. Patience.Even then, he’d been feeling the pinch of impatience himself. Now, with two full days gone by since their arrival, it was more of a stab. He’d belittled Jael for his expectations, but secretly he was beginning to worry.

Where were all their offers of patronage? Had he miscalculated? This was all his own plan. Only arrive in glory, he had said, and they will fall all over themselves to give you what you want. Oh, not the presidents, not the prime ministers, not even the Pope. They would roll out every red carpet, yes. There would be no shortage of bowing and scraping, but the powers that be would have to practice caution when it came to arming a mysterious legion. There would be scrutiny. Oversight.

Committees.

Oh, give me a half-mad butcher of a tyrant, thought Razgut, at his wit’s end. Only save me from committees!

But while presidents, prime ministers, and popes entertained them, the quicker, darker currents of the world’s will should have been shaping themselves into action. Private groups, the crazy ones, the hellfire chasers, the doomsday gloaters. They should have been lining up, sending offers, paying bribes, getting word to the angels no matter what it cost them. Take us! Take us first! Burn the world, flay the sinners, only take us with you!

The world was rife with them, even on a normal day, so where were they all? Had Razgut misjudged humanity’s love affair with the end of the world? Was it possible this pageant would not play out quite so easily as he had thought?

Jael had been in foul humor, pacing the suite of magnificent rooms, alternating cursing with icy silence. He kept the cursing low, to his credit, doing nothing “un-angelic” that might ruffle the feathers, so to speak, of their pious hosts. He played his part whenever called upon: the diplomatic posturing, the feasting, the dazzling. The Catholic Church seemed determined to match pageant with pageant, and certainly their costume collection won the day. If Razgut had to endure one more ceremony clinging to Jael’s back and listening to an old man in a fancy gown drone in Latin, he thought he might scream.

Scream and let himself be seen, just to spice things up.

So it was with a churning gutful of… hope… that he observed the curious shuffle-dance of faintheartedness being performed in the doorway by one of the Papal Palace servants.

A step forward, a step back, arms aflutter, chickenlike. The man was one of the few approved to enter their chambers and see to their needs, and he had until now kept his eyes fixed on the floor in their “holy” presence. Razgut had thought, on several occasions, that he could probably release his glamour and not even be noticed. That was the level of discretion these servants displayed. They were very nearly ghosts, though the thought of such an afterlife made Razgut bilious.

Or perhaps it was the prodigious output of the Papal Palace kitchens doing that.

He had not indulged in so much rich food in many a century, and found it interesting that the discomfort of his overtaxed intestines had not yet induced him to reduce his intake. Perhaps soon.

Or perhaps not.

The servant cleared his throat. You could almost hear his heartbeat from across the room. The Dominion guards remained motionless as statues, and Jael was in his private chamber, resting. Razgut considered speaking up. Would a disembodied voice really be the oddest thing that happened to this man all day? But he didn’t have to. The man managed to summon some spine and mince forward, drawing an envelope from the pocket of his starched and immaculate coat and laying it down upon the floor.

An envelope.

Razgut’s field of vision narrowed in on it. He knew what it must be, and his hope sharpened.

Finally.

Jump forward one minute, though—the servant gone, Jael summoned, and Razgut visible, splayed across the refreshment table with the envelope in his hand—and he gave no hint of his own very deep relief and curiosity. He only peeled a slice of paper-thin prosciutto free of its fellows and made sure to give audible proof of his delectation.

“Well, what does it say?”

Jael was impatient. Jael was imperious. Jael was, thought Razgut, at his mercy.

“I don’t know,” he replied casually, and also truthfully. He hadn’t opened it yet. “It’s probably a fan letter. Possibly an invitation to a christening. Or a proposal of marriage.”

“Read it to me,” Jael commanded.

Razgut paused as though he were thinking up a reply, and then he farted. Squinching up his face, he did so with effort. The reward was slight in resonance but grand in aroma, and the emperor was not amused. His scar went white in that way it had when he was extremely put out, and he spoke through clenched teeth, which, on a positive note, didhelp contain the flying spittle.

“Read it to me,” he repeated in his deadly quiet voice, and Razgut judged himself to be one step removed from a beating. If he did as he was bid now, he might spare himself some hurt.

“Make things easy for me,” Jael had said, “and I’ll make things easy for you.”

But where was the fun in easy? Razgut crammed as much prosciutto into his mouth as he could while he still had the chance, and Jael, seeing what he was about, ordered the beating with a dull twitch of his head.

They both knew it wouldn’t yield a result. This was just their routine now.

And so the beating was given and received, and later, when Razgut’s new injuries were seeping a fluid that wasn’t quite blood onto the fine silk cushions of a five-hundred-year-old chair, Jael tried again.

“When we get to the Far Isles,” he said, “and when the Stelians lie shattered in the streets but before we have crushed them utterly, I could demand a boon of them. Everyone grovels at the end.”

Razgut’s smile was a diabolical thing. Until you come up against Stelians, perhaps, he thought, but did not disabuse the emperor of his fantasies.

“If,” Jael continued, visibly struggling to maintain a semblance of grace—a mask that fit him very ill—“if… someone… were to make his best efforts to be accommodating between then and now, I might be persuaded to ask that boon on his behalf. It is not beyond Stelian arts, I wager, to… repair you.”

“What?” Razgut sucked himself upright, his hands flying to his cheeks in his best impression of a beauty queen hearing her name called. “ Me?Truly?”

Jael was not so big a fool as to miss that he was being mocked, but neither was he fool enough to show his frustration to the Fallen thing. “Ah, my mistake. I thought that would interest you.”

And it might have, but for one critical point. Well, two critical points, the first of which was really all that mattered: Jael was lying. But even if he hadn’t been, the Stelians would never grant a boon to an enemy. Razgut remembered them from the time before, and they were not foes to be taken lightly. If—and this was a difficult thing to picture, if simply because it had never happened—they ever found themselves overpowered, they would self-immolate before surrendering.

“It’s not what I would wish for,” said Razgut.

“What, then?”

When Razgut had bartered with the blue lovely for a way back to Eretz, his wish had been simple. To fly? Yes, that was part of it. To be whole again. Not so simple, for more than his wings and legs had been ravaged and he knew that he was, in the most important ways, irreparable. But his true wish, his soul’s bedrock, was simple. “I want to go home,” he said. His voice was stripped of mockery and sarcasm and his usual nasty delight. Even to his own ears, he sounded like a child.

Jael stared at him, blank. “Easily done,” he said, and for that, more than anything Jael had ever said or done to him, Razgut wanted to snap his neck. The void within him was so immense, the weight of it so obliterating, that it sometimes took his breath away to remember that Jael had no knowledge of it at all. No one did.

“Not so easily,” he said. If there was one thing Razgut Thrice-Fallen knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, it was this: He could never go home.

More to conceal his own distress than out of any desire to stop torturing the emperor, he unfolded the letter. What does it say?he wondered. Who is it from? What kind of offer?

Is it almost time?

It was a bittersweet thought. Razgut knew that Jael would kill him the second he no longer needed him, and life, even at its most wretched, does get its hooks in you. With maddening exactitude and the slowest movements he could produce with his shaking fingers, the exiled angel made a show of flattening out the pages.

Confident script, he saw, ink on good paper, in Latin. And then, finally, he read out Jael’s first offer of patronage.

50

HAPPINESS HAS TO GO SOMEWHERE

They were very near, and the situation was absurd. Too absurd, when it came down to it. The shower knob was digging into Karou’s back, the feathers of Akiva’s wings were actually caught in the door, and Zuzana’s contrivance was clear. It was sweet but awkward– extremelyawkward—and if it was meant to enflame anything, only Karou’s cheeks obliged. She blushed. The space was so small. The bulk of Akiva’s wings forced him to bend toward her, and by some maddening instinct, both obeyed the impulse to preserve the wisp of space between them.

Like strangers in an elevator.

And weren’t they strangers, really? Because the pull between them was so strong, it was easy to fall into thinking they knew each other. Karou, who had never believed in such things before, was willing to consider that in some way their souls didknow each other—“Your soul sings to mine,” he had told her once, and she could swear that she had felt it—but they themselves did not. They had so much to learn, and she so badly wanted to learn it, but how do you do that, in times like these? They couldn’t sit on top of a cathedral, eating hot bread and watching sunrises.

This wasn’t a time for falling in love.

“Are you two all right in there?” asked Virko. His voice was cast low, not quite a whisper, and Karou imagined the hotel clerk hearing it and wondering who was hiding in the bathroom. With that, the scenario hit a new level of absurdity. In the midst of everything that was going on and the great weight of the mission they were on, they were squished into a bathroom, hiding from a hotel clerk.

“Fine,” she said, sounding choked, and it was such a lie. She was anything but fine. It struck her that even to say so in that offhand way was… glib. Careless. She hazarded a glance at Akiva, afraid that he could think she meant it. Oh sure, fine, and nice weather we’re having. What’s new with you?And it was a fresh scrape of anguish to see, again, the pain in his eyes, and the anger. She had to look away. Akiva, Akiva.Back in the caves, when their eyes had at last met across the breadth of the great cavern—across all the soldiers between them, both sides, and the weight of their treacherous enmity, across the secrets they both carried, and the burdens—even at such a distance, their look had felt like touch. Not so now. A wisp of space between them only, and the meeting of their glances felt like… regret.

“Children of regret,” she said aloud. Well, she whispered it, and stole another look up at him. “Do you remember?”

“How could I forget?” was Akiva’s answer, an ache in his heart and a scrape in his voice.

She had told him the story—she, Madrigal—the night they fell in love. He remembered every word and touch of that night, every smile and gasp. Looking back at it was like peering down a dark tunnel—all his life since—at a bright place of light on the far side, where color and feeling were amplified. It seemed to him that that night was a place– theplace—he’d kept all his happiness, bundled up and stowed away, like gear he’d never need again.

“You told me it was a terrible story,” she said.

It was the chimaera legend of how they’d come to be, and it was nothing less than a rape myth. Chimaera were sprung of the tears of the moon, and seraphim from the blood of the brutal sun. “It isterrible,” Akiva replied, hating it even more now than he had then, in light of what Karou had endured at Thiago’s hands.

“It is,” Karou agreed. “And so is yours.” In the seraph myth, chimaera were shadows come to life, wrought by huge world-devouring monsters who swam in darkness. “But the tone is right,” she said. “I feel like both now: a thing of tears and shadow.”

“If we’re going by the myths, then I would be a thing of blood.”

“And of light,” she added, her voice so soft. They were almost whispering, as though Virko couldn’t hear every word, just on the other side of this glass partition. “You were kinder to yourselves in your legend than we were,” Karou continued. “We made ourselves out of grief. You made yourselves in your gods’ image, and with a noble purpose: to bring light to the worlds.”

“A black job we’ve done of it,” he said.

She smiled a little, and gave breath to a rueful laugh. “I won’t argue with that.”

“The legend also says that we’ll be enemies until the end of the world,” he reminded her. When he’d told her that story, they’d been entwined, naked and supple after love—their first, their first lovemaking—and the end of the world had seemed as much a myth as the weeping moons had.

But Akiva could almost feel it now, pressing down on them. It felt like hopelessness. At what point, he wondered, was there nothing left to save?

“That’s why we made up our own myth,” said Karou.

He remembered. “A paradise waiting for us to find it and fill it with our happiness. Do you still believe that?”

He didn’t mean it the way it came out: harsh, as though it were nothing but the fool fantasy of new lovers tangled in each other’s arms. It was himself he wanted to chasten, because he hadbelieved it, as recently as yesterday, when Liraz had accused him of being “preoccupied by bliss.” She’d been right. He’d been imagining bathing with Karou, hadn’t he? Holding her against him, her back to his chest, just holding her and watching her hair swirl on the surface of the water.

Soon, he’d thought, it will be possible.

Flying away from the caves this morning, seeing their armies mixed and moving in effortless flight together, he’d imagined a lot more than that. A place that was theirs. A… a home. Akiva had never had a home. Not even close. Barracks, campaign tents, and, before that, his too-brief childhood in the harem. He’d actually let himself picture this simple thing, as though it weren’t the biggest fantasy of all. A home. A rug, a table where he and Karou could eat meals together, chairs. Just the two of them, and candles flickering, and he could catch her hand across the table, just to hold it, and they could talk, and discover each other layer by layer. And there would be a door to shut out the world, and places to put things that would be theirs. Akiva could scarcely conjure what those things might be. He’d never owned anything but swords. It said so very much that, to flesh out his picture of domestic life, he had to draw from the old, rotted artifacts in the Kirin caves where once upon a time his people had destroyed hers.

Plates and pipes, a comb, a kettle.

And… a bed. A bed and a blanket to cover them, a blanket that was theirs together. There was something in the thought of this simple, simple thing that had crystallized all of Akiva’s hope and vulnerability and made him able to see and believe, truly, that he could be a… a person, after the war. It had seemed to him, this morning, in flight, almost within reach.

He hadn’t bothered dreaming of where this home would be, or what you would see when you walked out the door, but now when he imagined it, that was allhe saw: what lay outside the quiet little “paradise” of his daydream.

Corpses were strewn everywhere.

“Not a paradise,” Karou said, faltering, and she flushed and briefly closed her eyes. Akiva, looking down at her, was caught by the sight of her lashes, dusky and trembling against the blue-tinged flesh around her eyes. And when she opened her eyes, there was the jolt of eye contact, the pupil-less black sheen of her gaze, depthless, and all her worry was there, and pain to match his own, but also strength.

“I know there’s no paradise waiting for us,” she said. “But happiness has to go somewhere, doesn’t it? I think Eretz deserves some, and so…” She was shy. There was still the space between them. “I think we should put ours there, and not in some random paradise that doesn’t really need it.” She hesitated, looked up at him. Looked and looked, pouring herself out through her extraordinary eyes. For him. For him. “Don’t you?”

“Happiness,” he said, his voice holding the word so gently, a tinge of disbelief in his tone, as though happiness itself were as much a myth as all their gods and monsters.

“Don’t give up,” Karou whispered. “It isn’t wrong to be glad to be alive.”

A silence, and she could feel him struggling to find words. “I keep getting second chances,” he said, “that aren’t rightly mine.”

She didn’t answer right away. She knew what guilt he shouldered. The magnitude of Liraz’s sacrifice shook her to her core. After another long, deep breath, she whispered, hoping it wasn’t the wrong thing to say, “It was hers to give,” feeling that it was a gift not only to Akiva but to herself.

And, if Brimstone was right, that hope was the only hope, and that the two of them were, somehow, hope made real, then it was a gift for Eretz as well.

“Maybe,” he allowed. “You argued before that the dead don’t want to be avenged, and that may be right, sometimes, but when you’re the one left alive—”

“We don’t know that they’re—” Karou broke in, but couldn’t even finish the sentence.

“Life feels stolen.”

“Given.”

“And the only response that makes sense to the heart is vengeance,” he said.

“I know. Believe me. But I’m hiding in a shower with you instead of trying to kill you, so it would seem that the heart can change its mind.”

A ghost of a smile. That was something. Karou returned it, not a ghost but a real smile, remembering every beautiful smile of his, all those lost, radiant smiles, and making herself believe that they weren’t forever ended. People break. They can’t always be fixed. But not this time. Not that.

“This isn’t the end of hope,” she said. “We don’t know about the others, but even if we did, and even if it wasthe worst… we’re still here, Akiva.And I’m not giving up as long as that much is true.” She was serious. Fervent, even, as if she could force him to believe her.

And maybe it worked.

There had always been, from the first—at Bullfinch, in the smoke and fog—an amazement in the way Akiva looked at her, his eyes held wide to take her all in. Afraid to blink, almost to breathe. Something of that amazement came back to him now, and his steeliness and the implacability of his rage surrendered to it. So much of expression is the muscles around the eyes, and Karou saw the tension there let go, and it triggered a relief in her that may have been vastly disproportionate to the small change that brought it about. Or maybe perfectly proportionate. This was no small thing. If only it were that easy to let go of hate. Just relax your face.

“You’re right,” Akiva said. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to be… alive.”

Alive. Heart-beating, blood-moving alive, yes, but more than that. She wanted him to be eyes-flashing alive. Hands-to-hearts and “we are the beginning” alive.

“I am,” he said, and there waslife in his voice, and promise.

Karou was prey, still, to flashes of remembering him through Madrigal’s eyes. She had been taller in that body, so the sightline was different, but this moment still struck a direct link to memory: the requiem grove for the first time, just before their first kiss. The blaze of his look and the curve of his body toward her. That’s what struck the vibration between then and now, and time cast a loop that brought her heart back to its simpler self.

Some things are always simple. Magnets, for example.

It took hardly any movement at all. It wasn’t the requiem grove, and it wasn’t a kiss. Karou’s cheek was just of a height to let it rest against Akiva’s chest, and she did, finally, and the rest of her body followed her cheek’s good example. The damned wisp of space was abolished. Akiva’s heart beat against her temple, and his arms came around to hold her; he was warm as summer, and she felt the sigh that moved through him, loosening him so that he could meld more fully to her, and she sighed her own loosening sigh and met his meld. It felt so good. No air between us, thought Karou, and no more shame. Nothing more between us.

It felt so good.

She traveled her hands around him so that she could hold him even closer, even tighter. Every breath she took was the heat and scent of him, remembered and rediscovered, as she remembered and rediscovered his solidity, too—the realness that somehow came as a shock, because the impression of him was so… unearthly. Elemental. Love is an element, Karou remembered from a long, long time ago, and she felt like she was floating. To the eye Akiva was fire and air. But to the touch, so there. Real enough to hold on to forever.

Akiva’s hand was moving down the length of her hair, again and again, and she could feel the press of his lips to the top of her head, and what filled her wasn’t desire, but tenderness, and a profound gratitude that he lived, and she did, too. That he had found her, and that he had found her again. And… dear gods and stardust… yet again. Let that be the last time he ever needed to come looking for her.

I’ll make it easy for you, she thought, her face pressed to his heartbeat. I’ll be right here.

Almost as if he heard—and approved—he tightened his arms around her.

When Zuzana opened the bathroom door and called out, “Soup’s on!” they slowly disengaged and shared a look that was… gratitude and promise and communion. A barrier was broken. Not by a kiss—not that, not yet—but touch, at least. They belonged to each other to hold. Karou carried the heat of Akiva on her body as she stepped out of the shower. She caught sight of the pair of them in the mirror, framed there together, and thought, Yes. This is right.

One last look passed between them in the mirror glass—soft and glad and pure, if far from free of their sorrow and pain—and they followed Virko into the bedroom, where an astonishing wealth of food was spread over the floor like a sultan’s picnic.

They ate. Karou and Akiva kept within easy touching distance of each other, which Zuzana noted with an approving and ever-so-slightly smug eyebrow.

They had just begun to make a dent in the array of dishes when they heard the shouting, coming from outside.

Car doors slammed, and two male voices vied with each other, angry. It could have been anything, just some private dispute, and would not have caused the five of them to rise to their feet—Akiva first of all—and move en masse to the window. It was the third voice that did that. It was female, melodic, and distressed. It was caught up in the hostility of the other two like a bird in a net.

And it was speaking Seraphic.