Текст книги "Dreams of Gods & Monsters"

Автор книги: Лэйни Тейлор

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

58

THE WRONG UGLINESS

All was as it should be. The heavy window shutter was unlatched, as promised, and now Karou had only to get it open in silence. It wanted to creak; its resistance dared her to push it faster and let it squeal. It had been a while since she’d lamented the lack of the “nearly useless wishes” she used to take for granted—scuppies she’d plundered from a teacup in Brimstone’s shop and worn as a necklace—but she found herself wanting one now. A bead between her fingers, a wish for the window’s silence.

There. She didn’t need it. It took patience to open a window with such excruciating slowness while her heart thundered, but she did it. The chamber was open to them, dark but for a rectangle of moonlight stretched out like a welcome mat.

They passed inside one by one, their shapes cutting the moonspill to shards. It re-formed in its entirety as they stepped out of the way. They paused. There was a sense of letting the darkness settle, like water sinking beneath oil.

One last breath before approach.

The bed looked out of place. This was a reception hall, the most famous in the palace. The bed had been brought in, and you had to give them credit for finding a Baroque monstrosity that almost held its own in the fanciful chamber. It was a big four-poster, carved with saints and angels. Twisted blankets traced a form. The form breathed. On the bedside table sat the helm Jael wore to conceal his hideousness from humanity. He shifted slightly as they watched, turning. His breath sounded even and deep.

Karou’s feet weren’t touching the floor. It wasn’t even conscious, this floating; her ability had become natural enough now that it was simply part and parcel of her stealth: Why touch the floor if you don’t have to?

She moved forward, gliding. Akiva would go around to the far side of the bed, and be ready.

This moment would be the most tenuous: waking Jael and keeping him silent while they offered up the “persuasion” that was the crux of Karou’s plan. If it went smoothly, they could be back out the window and away inside of two minutes. She held a wad of burlap in her hand to stifle any sounds he might make before they had a chance to convince him he’d do better to lie quiet. And, of course, after that, to muffle his sounds of pain.

Bloodless didn’t mean painless.

Karou had never seen Jael, though she thought she could imagine his unique brand of ugliness well enough from all the reports she’d heard of it. She was braced for it, when the sleeping angel stirred again and knocked his pillow askew. She was expecting ugliness, and ugliness was what she got.

But it was the wrong ugliness.

Eyes flew open from feigned sleep—fine eyes in a ravaged face, but there was no slash, no scar from brow to chin, only a bruise-colored bloat and depths of depravity deeper even than the emperor’s. “Blue lovely,” said the thing, with a throat-rattling purr.

Karou never had a chance with the wad of burlap. She moved fast, but he had been lying in wait– expecting her—and she wasn’t yet near enough for her lunge to smother his cry.

Razgut had time to shriek, “Our guests have arrived!” before she caught his foul face under the rough weave of the burlap and shut him up. He sputtered to silence but it didn’t matter. The alarm was sounded.

The doors crashed open. Dominion flooded in.

59

SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY

In the Royal Suite of the St. Regis, Esther Van de Vloet stood in the doorway to the bathroom, her pace arrested mid-step by the sight of… of a violin, lying in the tub.

A violin, lying in the tub.

A violin.

…

…

…

Her cry was guttural, a croak almost, as a toad in extremis. Her dogs flew to her, upset, but she shoved them violently away, threw herself to her knees, and reached, groping, up and into the hollowness beneath the marble vanity.

All disbelief, she groped and reached, too frantic even to curse, and when she cried out again, collapsing back on the marble floor, it was an inarticulate torrent of pure emotion that flowed from her.

The emotion was unfamiliar to her. It was defeat.

In under an hour, Zuzana had perfected the art of the angry sigh. The sky remained resoundingly empty, and that wasn’t a good sign. Enough time had passed since Karou, Akiva, and Virko left the St. Regis for them to have routed Jael, but there was no evidence of it, and Zuzana’s phone screen remained as blank as the sky. Of course she’d texted warnings, and had even tried calling, but the calls went straight to voice mail and it reminded her of the awful days after Karou left Prague—and left Earth—when Zuzana hadn’t known if she was alive or dead.

“What are we going to do?”

They’d ducked into a narrow alley, Mik acting strangely furtive, and Zuzana seated Eliza on a stoop before slumping down beside her. This was one of those intensely Italian nooks—tiny, as if once upon a time all people had been Zuzana’s size—where medieval nudged up against Renaissance on the bones of ancient. On top of which some knob had contributed twenty-first century to the party by way of sloppy graffiti enjoining them to “Apri gli occhi! Ribellati!”

Open your eyes! Rebel!

Why, Zuzana wondered, do anarchists always have such terrible handwriting?

Mik knelt before her and laid his violin case on her lap. As soon as he released it, its weight sunk into her.

Its… weight? “Mik, why does your violin case weigh fifty pounds?”

“I was wondering,” he said, instead of answering. “In fairy tales, are the heroes, um, ever… thieves?”

“Thieves?” Zuzana narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “I don’t know. Probably. Robin Hood?”

“Not a fairy tale, but I’ll take it. A noble thief.”

“Jack and the Beanstalk. He stole all that stuff from the giant.”

“Right. Less noble. I always felt bad for the giant.” He flicked open the clasp on the case. “But I don’t feel bad about this.” He paused. “I hope we can count this as one of my tasks. Retroactively.”

And he flipped up the lid and the case was filled with… medallions. Filled.They varied in size from a quarter’s span to a saucer’s, in an array of patinas of bronze from brassy bright to dull dark brown. Some were entirely engulfed in verdigris, and all were roughly minted and graven with the same image: a ram’s head with thick coiled horns and knowing, slit-pupiled eyes.

Brimstone.

“So,” said Mik in a faux-lazy drawl, “when fake grandma said she didn’t have any more wishes? She lied. But look. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Now she really doesn’t.”

60

NO ONE DIES TODAY

The doors crashed open. Dominion flooded in.

Karou’s first impulse was to reach for pain to tithe for a glamour, and the pain was all too easy to find, because Razgut caught her wrist in his crushing grip and held her, so that it didn’t matter.

Visible or not, she was caught.

She flickered in and out, struggling with the Fallen. His chuckling sounded like a purr, and his grip was unbreakable. She had her crescent-moon blades to fall back on, but they had determined to shed blood only as a last resort, and so her hand paused on her hilt as she watched the soldiers, implacable and many, swords drawn and faces blank, file into the room. Once again, as had happened and happened over these past days, the turn of time went thick as resin. Viscous. Sluggish. How much can happen in a second? In three? In ten?

How many seconds does it take to lose everything you care about?

Esther, she thought, and in the midst of her frantic scuffle she was bitter but unsurprised. They had been expected here. This wasn’t the personal guard of six that Jael kept to guard his chamber. Here were thirty soldiers at least. Forty?

And there. Through the open doors, unhurried, to take up a position behind a deep buffer of soldiers, sauntered Jael. Karou saw him before he saw her, because he was looking straight ahead, unwavering. His ugliness was all she’d heard and more: the knotty rope of scar tissue and the way the wings of his nostrils seemed to creep out from beneath it like they were trapped there—as trampled mushrooms going softly to rot. His mouth was its own disaster, collapsing in on scraps of teeth, his breath coming and going through it like the squelch of steps in mud. But that wasn’t the worst thing about the emperor of seraphim. His expression was. It was intricate with hate. Even his smile was party to it: as malicious as it was exultant.

“Nephew,” he said, and the single wet word was layered with enmity and triumph.

Jael peered out between the shoulders of his soldiers at Akiva. Beast’s Bane, so-called, whose death he’d first argued for when the fire-eyed bastard was just a brat crying himself to sleep in the training camp. “Kill him,” he’d advised Joram then. He remembered the taste of those words in his mouth—keenly, because they’d been among the first he spoke when the bandages were removed from his face. The first he’d triedto speak, anyway, when it was agony, his mouth a red, wet wreck, and the revulsion he saw in his brother’s eyes—and everyone else’s—had still had the power to shame him. He had let a woman cut him. Never mind that he lived and she didn’t. He would wear her mark forever.

“If you’re smart, you’ll kill him now,” he’d told his brother. Looking back, it was so clearly the wrong tactic. Joram was emperor, and did not respond well to commands.

“What, still trying to punish her?” Joram had scoffed, dragging the specter of Festival between them. Both of them had tried and failed to humble the Stelian concubine; she might be dead, but she had never broken. “Killing her didn’t scratch the itch, you have to have the boy, too? What, do you think she’ll know it somehow, and suffer more?”

“He’s her seed,” Jael had persisted. “She was a spore, drifted here. An infection. Nothing safe can grow of her.”

“ Safe? What use have I for a ‘safe’ warrior? He’s myseed, brother. Do you mean to suggest that my blood isn’t stronger than some feral whore’s?”

And there was Joram for you: blind, incurious. The lady Festival of the Far Isles had been many things, but “whore” wasn’t one of them.

“Prisoner” wasn’t, either.

However she’d come to be in the emperor’s harem, and whyever she had chosen to stay, it could not believably have been against her will. She was Stelian, and though she’d never revealed it, Jael was certain that she’d had power. The design, he had always thought, must have been her own. So… why would a daughter of that mystical tribe have put herself in Joram’s bed?

Slowly, Jael blinked at Akiva. Why indeed?You had only to look at the bastard to see whose blood was stronger. Black hair, tawny skin—not as dark as Festival’s had been, but closer to it than to Joram’s fair flesh. The eyes, of course, were purely hers, and sympathy for magic? In case there had still been doubt.

Joram should have listened to his brother. He should have let him exercise his wrath in whatever way he saw fit, but instead he’d mocked him and banished him to eat his meals alone, saying he couldn’t bear the sucking sounds he made.

Well, Jael could afford to laugh about it now, couldn’t he? And make all the sucking sounds he liked while doing so.

“Beast’s Bane,” he said, stepping forward but not too far forward, keeping a thick barrier of his soldiers in place, two score Dominion between himself and the intruders, and ten of them wielding the very special weapons that had subdued Akiva so spectacularly before: bare hands.

Not their own, of course. Withered and mummy-brown, some clawed, all inked with the devil’s eyes, they held them out before themselves, the severed hands of chimaera warriors.

At the sight of them, the beast by Akiva’s side emitted a growl low in his throat. The ruff of spikes at his neck lifted, bristling, and opened like a deadly flower. He seemed to double in size right there, becoming a battlefield nightmare, all the more terrible for the stark contrast between himself and this ornate room he suddenly seemed to fill.

It chilled Jael. Even safe behind his barricade of flesh and living fire, and even expecting it—thanks to the warning of that monstrous woman who was to be his human benefactor—the sight appalled him. Not the chimaera itself, but seraph and chimaera standing together? The beasts had been his brother’s crusade. Jael had his sights set on a new enemy, but nevertheless, the alliance he saw before him here marked a thousand years turned inside out—a cancer that must not be permitted to spread through Eretz.

When he returned, he would crush any sign of it. The rest of the rebellion must be crushed already, he thought with satisfaction. Why else would these three come to him alone, without an army at their back? He wanted to laugh at them for fools, but he saw how narrow his salvation had been and a shudder stopped him cold. If not for the woman’s warning, he would have been asleep in that bed when they slipped through the window.

Too close. Only luck had given him the upper hand this time. He wouldn’t be so careless again.

“Prince of Bastards,” he continued, feeling as though he were performing a rite many years delayed: the purging of Stelian infection, the eradication of Festival’s last trace and whatever she had meant by bringing it forth. “Seventh bearer of the cursed name Akiva.” Here he paused, speculative. “No Misbegotten ever bore that name to manhood before you. Did you know that? Old Byon the steward, he gave it out of spite. Wanted your mother to beg him not to. Any other woman in the harem would have, but not Festival. ‘Scribble whatever you like on your list, old man,’ she told him. ‘My son will not be tangled in your feeble fates.’ ”

He studied Akiva closely, scanning for a reaction. “Brave words, no? And how many deaths have you eluded, all told? The curse of your name, and the several deaths I carved out for you. How many more?”

It seemed to him that Beast’s Bane stiffened then. Jael sensed a wound. “Others die, but you live?” he probed. “Perhaps you’ve turned the curse outward. Youdon’t die. Everyone near you does instead.”

Akiva’s jaw was hard-clenched. “It must be a terrible burden,” Jael pressed, shaking his head in mock pity. “Death looks for you and looks for you, but he can’t seeyou. Invisible to death, what a fate! Finally, he grows weary of the search and takes whoever is near at hand.” He paused, smiled, and tried to sound warm and genuine as he said, “Nephew, I have good news for you. Today we break the curse. Today, at last, you die.”

Even braced for the sight of his uncle, Akiva was unprepared for the visceral assault of reliving this moment, and it caught him like a fist to the heart. It was an echo of the Tower of Conquest, when, just like this, Jael and his soldiers had seized control of the room.

“Kill everyone,” Jael had said on that day, and, expressionless, his soldiers had complied, gutting counsellors, butchering the big brute Silverswords that Hazael and Liraz had taken such care to disarm without hurting. They had even cut down the bath attendants. It had been a literal bloodbath, emperor and heir discarded in a pool of red. Blood on the walls, blood on the floor, blood everywhere.

The voice, the face, the number of soldiers. Akiva could guess, by the still-healing abrasions on their faces, that some of these men had been at the tower and survived its explosion. In addition to swords, they even leveled at him the same vile weapons that they had surprised him with on that bloody day.

And Jael’s greeting was the same, too. Oh, that slurp of a voice. “Nephew.”He had said it then to Japheth, the witless crown prince, just before he slew him. Now it was all for Akiva, and was followed by a hissed litany of his many names.

Beast’s Bane. The Prince of Bastards. Seventh bearer of the cursed name Akiva.

Akiva listened in silence, hearing them all and wondering: Were any of them him? What had his mother meant, that he wouldn’t be tangled in their feeble fates? It made him feel as though even “Akiva” weren’t his true name, but just another Misbegotten accessory, like his armor or his sword. His name, like his training, was something imposed on him, and hearing Festival’s reaction to it, he wondered: Who else was he? What else?

And the first answer that came to him was simple, as simple as what he had come here to do, as simple as his desires.

I am alive.

He remembered the moment—and it seemed very long ago but wasn’t—when he had lain on his back in the training theater at Cape Armasin, an ax—Liraz’s ax—embedded in the hardpan just inches from his cheek. He’d believed Karou was dead, and then and there, breathing hard and looking up at the stars, he had accepted life as a medium for action. Something to wield like a tool. One’s own life: an instrument for the shaping of the world.

And he remembered Karou’s plea from just the day before, when they were crushed into that tiny shower. “I don’t want you to be sorry,” she had said. “I want you to be… alive.”

She’d meant something more than life as a tool. Something about the way she’d said it, Akiva had known that, to her, in that moment, life was hunger.

And whatever his name, whatever his past or ancestry, Akiva wasalive, and he was hungry, too. For the dream, for peace, for the feel of Karou’s body pressed against his, for the home they might share, somehow, somewhere, and for the changes they would see—and cause—in Eretz for decades to come.

He was alive and intent on staying that way, so while his uncle taunted him, probing for a weak spot—it wasn’t enough to kill; he had to torment—Akiva heard what he said, but none of it touched him. It was like threatening darkness at the break of day.

“Today we break the curse,” said Jael. “Today, at last, you die.”

Akiva shook his head. Passingly he wondered if he should be pretending weakness he didn’t feel. In Joram’s bath, these gruesome hand “trophies” had given the Dominion the advantage they needed to subdue Akiva, Hazael, and Liraz. Tonight things were different. No rush of weakness assaulted him. He experienced only a sensation of awareness in the new scar at the back of his neck as his own magic met it and turned it aside. He remembered the feeling of Karou’s fingertips tracing the mark, so lightly, when he had shown it to her, and he remembered the press of her palm against his heart, no magic screaming into his blood, and no sickness, only what the touch itself intended.

He was aware of her flickering glamour and her struggle with the thing Razgut. He wanted to surge toward her, smash the bloated purpled face and free her, even twist off that vile stringy arm if he had to. And he wanted to back the creature into a corner and fire questions at him, too. Fallen.What did it mean? He’d had the chance to ask him once before and had thrown it away, and now wasn’t the time, either. He knew Karou could manage the creature.

His own true adversary stood before him. “Not today,” Akiva told Jael. The first words he’d spoken since coming into this room. “No one dies today.”

Jael’s laugh was as nasty as ever. “Nephew, look around. Whatever you meant by creeping to my bedside in the night”—and here he diverted his attention for the first time from Akiva to glance at Karou, and an appreciative light came on in his eyes—“and I expect that it is notthe more pleasant of several possible explanations.…” He paused. Smiled. “I would expect it to run counter to my own intentions.”

He was enjoying himself. This was an echo of the Tower of Conquest for him, too, so much so that he was failing to notice the critical difference: Akiva wasn’t trembling under his assault of magic. “It does,” Akiva acknowledged. “Though I doubt it’s what you expect.”

“What?” Mockery. Hand to his chest. “You mean you haven’tcome to kill me?”

He spoke it like a good joke. Why else, indeed, would they have come? Akiva’s reply was mild. “No. We haven’t. We’ve come to ask you to leave. Leave just as you came, with no blood spilled, and carrying nothing from this world back with you. Go home. All of you. That’s all.”

“Oh, that’s all, is it?” More laughter, spit flying. “You make demands?”

“It was a request. But I am prepared to demand.”

Jael’s eyes narrowed, and Akiva saw the mockery transform first to incredulity and then to suspicion. Did he begin to sense that something was wrong? “Can you count, bastard?” Jael was trying to hold on to his mockery. He wanted this to be funny, but an edge to his voice betrayed him, and when his eyes swiveled suddenly like they were on casters, Akiva saw that he was doing an accounting of his own, and trying to believe in the strength of his position. “You are two against forty,” he said. Two.He discounted Karou. Well, Akiva wasn’t going to correct him. It wasn’t his uncle’s only error; it was only the most obvious. “However strong you are, however cunning, it’s numbers that matter in the end.”

“Numbers do matter,” Akiva conceded, thinking of shadows chased by fire, and the tangled darkness of the ambush in the Adelphas. “But other factors sometimes turn the tide.”

He didn’t wait for Jael to ask what those other factors might be. Only a fool would ask—what could the answer be, but a demonstration?—and Jael was not a fool. So before the monstrous emperor could command his soldiers to strike first, Akiva spoke. “Did you think,” he asked, “that you could ever surprise me again?”

After that came one word only. It was a name, in fact, though Jael wouldn’t know it. And for an instant, his brow furrowed with confusion.

An instant only. Then the tide turned.