Текст книги "Dreams of Gods & Monsters"

Автор книги: Лэйни Тейлор

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

51

ABSCOND

They had no view of the commotion from their window, so Karou and Akiva glamoured themselves and went out. Mik and Zuzana followed, visible, leaving Virko in the room.

The argument was under way in the front court—the dusty domain of kasbah children who pushed one another around in a wheelbarrow and glared at hotel guests—and there was no mistaking the source of the conflict. A young woman sat half in and half out of the open door of a car, and she seemed to have little awareness of herself or her surroundings.

Her face was blank and bloodied. Her lips were full. She was deep brown and smooth-skinned, and her eyes were unnerving: pretty and too light, too wide open, and the whites so very white. Her arms slack in her lap, she rested on the seat’s edge, head tilted back as impossible streams of language flowed from her bloodied mouth.

It took the mind a moment to sort it out. The blood, the woman, and the two languages, loud and at cross-purposes. The men were arguing in Arabic. One of them had apparently brought the woman here and was keen to ditch her. The other was a hotel employee, who, understandably, was having none of it.

“You can’t just dump her here. What happened to her? What’s she saying?”

“How should I know? Some Americans will be coming for her soon. Let them worry.”

“Fine, and in the meantime? She needs care. Look at her. What’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t know.” The driver was surly. Afraid. “She’s not my responsibility.”

“And she’s mine?”

They went on in this vein while the woman went on in… quite a different one. “Devouring and devouring and fast and huge, and hunting,” she said– cried, in Seraphic—and her voice was mournful and sweet and drenched in pain, like an otherworldly fado. A soul-deep, life-shaping lament for what is lost and can never return. “The beasts, the beasts, the Cataclysm! Skies blossomed then blackened and nothing could hold them. They were peeled apart and it wasn’t our fault. We were the openers of doors, the lights in the darkness. It was never supposed to happen! I was chosen one of twelve, but I fell all alone. There are maps in me but I am lost, and there are skies in me but they are dead. Dead and dead and dead forever, oh godstars!”

Hairs raised on Karou’s neck. Akiva was beside her. “What’s happening to her?” she asked him. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”

“No.”

“Is she a seraph?”

He hesitated before again saying no. “She’s human. She has no flame. But there’s something.…”

Karou felt it, too, and couldn’t name it, either. Who was this woman? And how was she speaking Seraphic?

“Meliz is lost!” she keened, and the hairs stood up on Karou’s arms. “Even Meliz, first and last, Meliz eternal, Meliz is devoured.”

“Do you know who that is?” Karou asked Akiva. “Meliz?”

“No.”

“What is going on here?”

Karou snapped around at the sound of Zuzana’s voice and beheld her, most excellent rabid fairy, cutting to the chase. She marched right up to the men, who blinked down at her, probably trying to reconcile her steely tone to the tiny girl before them—at least until they got a healthy dose of her neek-neeklook. They broke off arguing.

“She’s bleeding,” Zuzana said—in French, which, due to Morocco’s colonial past, was the European language most readily understood here, even before English. “Did youdo this to her?”

Her voice held a glint of outrage, like a knife not yet fully unsheathed, and both men hastily proclaimed their innocence.

Zuzana was unmoved. “What’s wrong with you, just standing here? Can’t you see she needs help?”

They had no good answer for that, and no time to make one anyway, because Zuzana—with Mik’s assistance—was already taking charge of the young woman. Each at an elbow, they eased her up to a stand, and the men only watched, silenced and chastened, as they led her away between them. There was no break in her flood of Seraphic—“I am Fallen, all alone, I break me on the rock and I will never again be whole.…”—and no flicker of focus in her striking eyes, but her feet moved and she made no protest, and neither did the men, so Zuzana and Mik just tookher.

And a couple of hours later, when the Americans in dark suits came to claim her, the hotel clerk led them first to Eliza’s room and then—finding it emptied of both person and possessions—to the rooms of the small fierce girl and her boyfriend who had, between them, ordered half the food in the kitchen. They knocked on the door but got no answer, and heard no movement within, and when they let themselves in, it wasn’t really a surprise to find the occupants gone.

No one had seen them leave, not even the kasbah kids playing in the courtyard that was the only way to reach the road.

Come to think of it… no one had seem them arrive, either.

They’d left nothing behind but thoroughly empty dishes and—this would be one for the conspiracy theorists—several long blue hairs in the shower where an angel’s hand had stroked a devil’s head, locked in a long—and so very long-awaited—embrace.

Once upon a time…

A journey began,

that would stitch all the worlds together with light.

ARRIVAL + 60 HOURS

52

GUNPOWDER AND DECAY

It was like Christmas for Morgan Toth—in the greed-and-presents sense of the holiday, not the birth-of-Christ sense, of course. Because really.

The text messages on Eliza’s phone were getting crazier and more desperate by the hour. It was some kind of nutjob extravaganza delivered right to him, and he wished, almost, for a partner in crime—someone to marvel, with him, that there were such people in the world! But there was no one he could think of who, if he told them what he’d done, would not quail in self-righteous horror and probably call the police.

Morons.

He needed a groupie, he thought. Or a girlfriend. Wide eyes and awe. “Morgan, you’re so bad,” she would coo. But bad in a good way. Bad in a very, very good way.

The phone buzzed. It was Pavlovian at this point: Eliza’s phone buzzed and Morgan virtually salivated in anticipation of not-to-be-believed, someone– must-be-yanking-my-chain crazy-time. This message did not disappoint.

Where are you, Elazael? The time for petty squabbles is past. Now you must see that you can’t run away from who you are. Our kin have come to Earth, as we have always known they would. We have made overtures. We have offered ourselves to them as helpmeets and handmaidens, in ecstasy and servitude. The day of Judgment draws nigh. Let the rest of this blighted world serve as fodder for the Beasts while we kneel at the feet of God. We need you.

Gold. Pure gold. Ecstasy and servitude.Morgan laughed, because that pretty well summed up what he wanted in a girlfriend.

He was tempted to write back. So far he had resisted, but the game was getting a little stale. He reread the message. How did you engage with insanity like this? They’d made overtures, it said. What did that mean? How had they managed to offer themselves to the angels? Morgan knew from previous texts that the sender—who he gathered was Eliza’s mother, a real piece of work—was in Rome. But as far as he knew, the Vatican was virtually keeping the Visitors prisoner, which was pretty hilarious. He imagined the Pope standing on the dome of St. Peter’s with a giant butterfly net: Caught me some angels!

After much deliberation, he typed a reply.

Hi, Ma! I’ve had a new vision. In it, we *were* kneeling at the feet of God, so that’s good. Phew! But… we were giving him a pedicure? Not sure what it means. Love, Eliza.

He knew it was too much, but he couldn’t help himself. He hit send. In the ensuing silence he began to fear that he’d killed the joke, but he shouldn’t have worried. This was no fragile specimen of crazy he was dealing with. It was hearty.

Your bitterness is an affront to God, Elazael. You have been given a great gift. How many of our ancestors perished without seeing the holy faces of our kin, and yet you can find it in you to laugh? Will you choose to stay and be devoured with the sinners when the rest of us rise to take our place in the—

Morgan never got a chance to finish reading the message, let alone fire off another response.

“Is that Eliza’s phone?”

Gabriel. Morgan whirled around. How had the neuroscientist managed to sneak up on him? Had he forgotten to lock the door?

“Jesus, it is,” said Gabriel, looking stunned and disgusted. Morgan did wonder about the stun. Edinger despised him. Why should this come as a surprise? And what could he say? Caught in the act. Nothing to do but lie.

“She gets a new text message every thirty seconds. Someone’s obviously desperate to find her. I was just going to reply to whoever it is that she’s not here—”

“Give it to me.”

“No.”

Gabriel didn’t ask again. He just kicked the leg of the stool Morgan was sitting on hard enough to swipe it right out from under him. Morgan windmilled and fell hard. What with all the impact and pain and fury, he didn’t even realize he’d relinquished the phone until he was back on his feet, batting his bangs out of his eyes.

Damn. Edinger held the phone. His looked of stunned disgust had only deepened.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Gabriel said, suddenly realizing. “It was all you. Jesus Christ, and I gave you the means. I gave you her phone.”

Morgan’s fury turned to fear. It was like antiseptic hitting pus: the seethe, the bubbling, the burn. “What are you talking about?” he asked, feigning ignorance, and feigning it poorly.

Edinger slowly shook his head. “It was a game to you, and you’ve probably ruined her life.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Morgan said, but he was unprepared to defend himself. He hadn’t thought… He hadn’t thought about getting caught.

How could he not have thought?

“Well. I can’t promise I’ll ruin yourlife,” Gabriel replied. “Honestly, that’s a bit of a commitment. But I can promise you this. I will make sure everyone knows what you’ve done.” He held up the phone. “And if it doesruin your life, I won’t be sorry about it.”

Another letter. The third. The same servant brought it, and Razgut knew by the envelope that it was from the same sender as the previous two. This time, he didn’t bother playing any games with Jael. As soon as the servant—Spivetti was his name—was gone, he seized it and ripped it open.

He had taken special care crafting his last two replies. They had almost felt like love letters. Not that Razgut had ever written a love letter, mind.… Well, no, that wasn’t strictly true. He had, but that was in the Long Ago, and it may as well have been a different being entirely who had penned a sweet farewell to a honey-colored girl. He had lookedlike a different being, that was sure. He had still looked like a seraph, and his mind had still been a diamond without flaw, uncracked—and the pressure it takes to crack a diamond!—and unfurred by the molds and filths that claimed it now. It was so very long ago, but he remembered writing that letter. The girl’s name was lost to him, and her face, too. She was just a golden blur of no consequence, a hint of a life that might have been, had he not been Chosen.

If I don’t return, he had penned in a fine but eager script, forward-tilting, before leaving for the capital, know that I will carry the memory of you with me through every veil, into the darkness of every tomorrow, and beyond the shadow of every horizon.

Something like that. Razgut remembered the feeling that went into it, if not the precise words, and it wasn’t love, or even the most surface-skimming truth. He’d simply been hedging his bets. If he wasn’tchosen—and what were the chances that he would be, out of so many?—then he could have gone home and pretended relief, and the honey-colored girl would have consoled him in her silkiness, and maybe they even would have married and borne children and lived some kind of drab-happy life in the undertow of his failure.

But he hadbeen chosen.

O glorious day. Razgut was one of twelve in the Long Ago, and glory had been his. The day of the Naming: such glory. So much light in the city as had dazed the night sky, and they couldn’t see the godstars but the godstars could see them, and that was what mattered—that the gods see them and know: They were chosen.

The openers of doors, the lights in the darkness.

Razgut never went back home, and he never saw the girl again, but look. He hadn’t lied to her, had he? He was remembering her now, beyond the shadow of a horizon, in the darkness of a tomorrow he could never have imagined.

“What does she say?”

She.

Jael’s voice broke into Razgut’s reverie. This letter, it was from no silken girl but a woman whom he had never seen—though her name was not unknown to him—and there was no sweetness in her, none at all, and that was all right. Razgut’s tastes had matured. Sweetness was insipid. Let the butterflies and hummingbirds have it. Like a carrion beetle, he was called to sharper scents.

Like gunpowder and decay.

“Guns, explosives, ammunition,” Razgut translated for Jael. “She says that she can get you anything you need, and everything you want, as long as you agree to her condition.”

“Condition!” Jael hiss-spat. “Who is sheto name conditions?”

He’d been like this since the first letter. Jael had no appreciation for a strong woman, except as something to break and keep breaking. The idea of a womanmaking demands? A woman whom he was in no position to humble? It infuriated him.

“She’s your best option is who she is,” replied Razgut. It was one of many possible answers, and the only one Jael needed to hear. She’s a vulture. She’s fetid meat. She’s black powder waiting to ignite.“No one else has managed to bribe their way to you, so here is your choice, today: Keep courting these dour-mouthed heads of state and watch them mince through the minefield of public opinion, fearing their own people more than they fear you, or make this simple promise to a lady of means and have done with all of that. Your weapons are waiting for you, emperor. What’s one little condition next to that?”

53

EYEBROW MASTER CLASS

When Mik and Zuzana stepped into the lobby of the St. Regis grand hotel in Rome, several conversations ceased, a bellhop did a double take, and an elegant matron with a silver bob and surgical cheekbones raised a hand to her pearls and scanned the lobby for security.

Backpackers did not stay at the St. Regis.

Ever.

And thesebackpackers, they looked… well, it wasn’t easy to put into words. Someone extremely insightful might say they looked as though they had been living in caves, and then been through a battle, perhaps even ridden here astride a monster.

In fact, they had flown by private jet from Marrakesh, but one could be excused for not guessing as much; leaving Tamnougalt in such a hurry, they hadn’t had a chance to take advantage of the shower, and they had no clean clothes between them, and it’s likely that neither had ever been quite this unsightly in their entire lives.

It was presumed, by patrons and staff, that they were going to ask to use a restroom—as, every once in a while, this did happen, the underclasses being ill-educated in the rules—and then most likely filth it up by bathing themselves in the sink. Wasn’t that what these people did?

The doorman who had admitted them kept his eyes fixed on the floor, aware that he had committed a cardinal sin in allowing hoi polloi to breach the perimeter. No doubt, in bygone days, guards had been put to death for just this offense. But what could he do? They claimed to be guests.

Behind the reception desk, the clerks exchanged gladiatorial glances. Do you want to take them, or shall I?

A champion stepped forth.

“May I help you?”

The words spoken may have been: May I help you,but the tone was something more along the lines of: It is my unbearable duty to interact with you, and I intend to punish you for it.

Zuzana turned to meet her challenger. She saw before her a young Italian woman, mid-twenties, sleekly attractive and just as sleekly dressed. Unamused. Nay, unamusable. The woman’s eyes did a quick flick up and down, flaring with something like indignation when they arrived at Zuzana’s dust-caked zebra platform sneakers, and her mouth puckered into a little knob of distaste. She looked rather as though she were preparing to remove a live slug from her arugula.

“You know,” observed Zuzana, in English, “you’d probably be a lot prettier if you didn’t make that face.”

The face in question froze in place. A nostril-flare suggested that offense was taken. And then, as though in slow motion, one of the woman’s fine, plucked eyebrows ascended toward her hairline.

Game. On.

Zuzana Nováková was a pretty girl. She’d often been compared to a doll, or to a fairy, not just because of her slight stature but also her fine, small face—a happy blending of angles and arcs set under skin clear as porcelain. Delicate chin, rounded cheeks, wide glossy eyes, and, though she would annihilate anyone for suggesting it, somewhat of a Cupid’s bow mouth. All of this cuteness, it was one of nature’s great bait and switches, because… that wasn’t all there was to Zuzana Nováková. Not even a little bit.

Deciding to take her on was akin to a fish deciding idly to gobble up that pretty light bobbing in the shadows and then– OH GOD THE TEETH THE HORROR!—meeting the anglerfish on the other side.

Zuzana didn’t eat people. She withered them. And there in the sparkling marble, crystal, and gilded lobby of one of Rome’s most exclusive luxury hotels, in just under two seconds, Zuzana’s eyebrow taught a master class. Its rise was something to behold. The sweep of it, the arch. Contempt, amusement, amused contempt, confidence, judgment, mockery, even pity. It was all there, and more. Her eyebrow communicated directly with the Italian woman’s eyebrow, somehow telling it, We have not stumbled in here to bathe in your sink. You have miscalculated. Tread lightly.

And the eyebrow conveyed the message to its owner, whose mouth promptly lost its slug-in-the-arugula pucker, and even before Mik interceded to say, mildly, almost apologetically, “We’re staying in the Royal Suite?” she was tasting the first sour hint of her mortification.

“The… RoyalSuite?”

The Royal Suite at the St. Regis had hosted monarchs and rock legends, oil sheiks and opera divas. It cost nearly $20,000 a night during ordinary times, and these were notordinary times. Rome was currently center of the world’s attention, filled to the rafters with pilgrims, journalists, foreign delegations, curiosity-seekers, and crazies, and there simply were no vacancies. Families were renting out balconies and cellars—even rooftops—at a premium, and the already overtaxed police were having a time breaking up pilgrim camps in the parks.

Zuzana and Mik didn’t know how much this was costing Karou—or her fake grandmother, Esther, or whoever was footing the bill. Ordinarily, such extravagance would have made them feel awkward and small, peasants in the presence of gentry. Indeed, it would make them feel exactly as this woman had intended them to feel. But not today. In light of recent experience, these insulated, rarified people put Zuzana in mind of expensive shoes kept in their box the three hundred and sixty-two days of the year when they weren’t being worn. Wrapped in tissue, safe from harm, and all they knew of life was gala events and the inside of the box. How dull. How dumb. By contrast, the grime of her journey, the outré inappropriateness of the state of her, it felt like armor.

I earned this dirt.

Respect. The dirt.

“That’s right,” she said. “The Royal Suite. You’ll be expecting us.” She shrugged her backpack off and let it fall to the floor, its pores emitting a satisfying puff of dirt on impact. “It would be great if you could take care of that,” she said, yawning. She raised her arms straight up in the air to stretch out her shoulders, less because they needed it than because this would reveal her pit stains in their full glory. There were, she knew, actual concentric circles stained into them from multiple sweatings. They looked like tree rings and were queerly meaningful to her. She had produced them by living through a dark fairy tale that… that others may nothave lived through.

This shirt would never be washed.

“Of course,” said the woman, and her voice was the shed hull of a voice now. It was funny, watching her struggle against her overwhelming facial impulses to purse her lips or frown, wrinkle her nose or practice that half-lidded, steely I judge you and find you wantinglook that chic Italian women so excel at. She was diminished. Her amateur eyebrow had slunk back to its resting place, where it stayed during the remainder of their transaction, an apostrophe humbled to a comma. In next to no time, Mik and Zuzana were being led to an elevator. Subsequently elevated. Ushered down a preposterously plush hallway. To be reunited with the rest of their party.