Текст книги "Dreams of Gods & Monsters"

Автор книги: Лэйни Тейлор

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Текущая страница: 31 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

78

(BREATHE)

Karou combed her hair. Calmly. Well, the calm was an exercise. (Breathe.)She laid down the comb. It was a Kirin relic that she’d found: carved bone with a crude silhouette of a stormhunter etched into the handle. She was going to keep it.

(Breathe.)

By the light of a flickering skohl torch, she looked down at herself. She was still in her Esther clothes. They were in a decent enough state, though she didn’t like knowing there was Razgut drool on her sleeve. She’d left a few things here in the caves when she went away, but they were dirtier still. She wondered if she would ever again know the simplicity of a closet full of clothes, and the pleasure of choosing an outfit—a cleanoutfit—in which to go and meet her… what? What could she call Akiva?

Boyfriendsounded too Earth. Loverwas affectation, intended to shock. “Have you met my lover? Isn’t he divine?” Nope. That is, yep, he was divine. Nope, she wasn’t go to call him that, even if she was dizzy with the urgency to makehim that.

(Breathe.)

Partner? Too dry.

Soul mate?

A warmth spread through her. When had it ever been truer than it was for her and Akiva? And yet, as a word, it, too, rang with wan associations. “You like the Pixies? I swear, it’s like we’re soul mates!”

Well, she didn’t have to call him anything right now. She just had to go to him, and she was pretty sure he wouldn’t care what she was wearing.

One last breath. Her heartbeat kicked up a notch, getting wind that it was time, really and truly time, at last.

Akiva had helped her conjure Ziri’s body. He’d tithed, at his insistence, and he didn’t need vises, which was good, because she didn’t think she could have touched his bare skin to clamp them on without dissolving back into the state of tremulous hunger that had possessed her in the grand cavern. She’d sunk into her trance state knowing he was there, and then, when it was done—the new body wrought and stretched out on the floor, as yet inanimate—she had come back out of herself to the sight of Akiva watching her. He’d looked kind of dazed with happiness, and immediately the same feeling had bloomed in her.

“That’s the longest I’ve ever been able to look at you,” he’d said.

“I thought you were going to watch the resurrection.” She gestured to the new body, glorying in the sight of it. It looked almost exactly like Ziri’s true flesh had, and she thought that he could pass as his natural self. She’d even left off hamsas, in part because the true Ziri hadn’t had them, and in part because she wanted them to become obsolete.

“I meant to watch,” Akiva said, abashed, and scratched his fingers through his short, thick hair in that way he had. “I got distracted.”

“Well, no fair. I didn’t get to look at you back.”

“I promise to hold still for you later.” Later? After, he meant. After they’d had their fill of notholding still.

(Breathe.)

“I accept.”

And then, and then, oh holy, at last: the smile.

The smile that she had never yet seen with these eyes, but only remembered through Madrigal’s. Warm with wonderment, a smile so beautiful it ached. It crinkled his eyes, and shaped his beauty into another kind of astonishing, a better kind, because it was the astonishment of happiness, and that reshapes everything. It makes hearts whole and lives worth living. Karou felt it fill her, dizzy and delirious, and she fell a little deeper in love.

He’d offered to leave her to finish the resurrection alone, and she’d accepted, because she wanted to have a moment with Ziri, as he’d guessed she must. And seeing Ziri’s new eyes open—brown, and not ice-blue, and with none of Thiago’s arrogance to overcome in letting himself shine through—had been the sweetest moment yet in her career as a resurrectionist. She’d hugged him, and held him, and told him it was all over, he didn’t have to hide anymore, and his relief had been so profound it had deepened her already very deep appreciation of what he’d put himself through for all their sakes.

Between them they’d come up with the simplest explanation they could for his absence and return, and then he’d gone. Karou thought that he’d been so happy to be in Kirin form again that he’d just wanted to fly, though maybe he’d sensed her own distraction. Or it could have been the news of who’d been carrying his soul around in a canteen, and was out there in the caverns somewhere, waiting.

Whatever the reason, he’d gone off quickly enough, and here she was, her last duty fulfilled, her time her own. She paused, took a breath. From the pocket of her bag she collected one small thing that she’d been been carrying since the sultan’s picnic on the floor of the desert hotel in Morocco, a couple of days past. A whim.

A wishbone. Smiling, she closed it in her hand. From the first night, it had been their parting ritual at the temple of Ellai: to make a wish. She was ready for ritual again, but not the parting part. They’d had enough of that to last them lifetimes.

She went. She walked, holding the wishbone to her heart. Or she started out walking but was soon enough gliding, skimming along, not touching the floor. One could get lazy, she thought, but she wasn’t especially worried about it. The passages twisted. Her torch flickered green, trailing long and threatening to go out when she went too fast. It was almost used up, but she wouldn’t need it, as soon as she was with Akiva.

And she came to the entrance to the bath cavern. There was a laugh in her throat as she rounded the bend, ready to murmur, laughing, Finally, finally, I thought I might die,against his mouth, against his throat, hungry and laughing and eager and—

She stopped short.

Akiva wasn’t here.

Of course, murmured a tiny, cold voice in her heart.

She smothered it. Yet.Akiva wasn’t here yet. Which was odd, because he’d said he was coming directly. Well, okay. No reason for concern. Maybe he’d gotten lost. No. Karou had more respect for Akiva’s resourcefulness than to believe that. Maybe he’d gone to do something, thinking he could still make it back before she did. She hadgotten here fast; Ziri hadn’t lingered.

The water was pale green and steaming, the crystal growths glittered, and the curtains of darkmoss swayed where their longest tendrils trailed in the current. Karou considered slipping out of her clothes and into the water, but only briefly, and not seriously. A feeling of foreboding was working its knuckles into her shoulders. It was a more advanced feeling of foreboding than she was prepared for, and she realized when it hit that she’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since they flew back through the Veskal portal. What other shoe? She didn’t know. That cold little of coursevoice didn’t know, either. It just knew– shejust knew, on some level—that it had all been too easy.

It was a sensation in the spine, like she’d gotten just before the Dominion ambush. There was something she was missing.

Yes. Akiva.That’s what she was missing.

He should be here.

She tried to be reasonable. She’d only been here five seconds; he would come around the corner any second.

But he didn’t.

Of course, of course. Did you really think you could have happiness?

Karou’s pulse hammered faster and her breathing shallowed, but it was panic barely contained, this time, not desire.

Akiva didn’t come.

Karou’s torch sputtered and died, and she had no seraph fire to light her passage back. She had to feel her way in darkness, clutching her unbroken wishbone to her heart.

79

LEGENDS

“Look.”

Ziri saw the stormhunter before Liraz did. He didn’t point, only breathed the word, not wanting to send it veering in the opposite direction. The creatures could sense the smallest movements from impossible distances. In fact, it was a marvel that it was flying this near them.

It was flying towardthem.

Liraz did look, and Ziri was caught as much by the play of starlight over the fine planes and curves of her face as by the sight of a stormhunter on a direct path for them. More, in fact, and easily. He watched her watch it, and drew wonder from her wonder.

Until she said, eyes narrowing, “Something’s wrong.”

He turned, and saw that in the moment that he’d been looking at Liraz, the creature had veered aside, and was no longer on a course for them. It was still distant, and for a beat he didn’t see what it was that had alarmed Liraz. It was gliding, tilting on an updraft. It looked glorious.

Ziri squinted. “Is that—?”

“Yes.”

Liraz’s voice was tense, and for good reason. This was an anomaly akin to… well, akin to a Kirin and a Misbegotten going for a starlight fly together. Strange, Ziri thought, was going to have to try harder in the future. Still, it wasstrange.

It was the unmistakable shimmer of seraph wings.

His first thought was that an angel was hunting it, somehow pursuing it. But nothing in the manner of its flight suggested distress. It was just flying, and an angel was flying alongside it.

“Have you ever heard of that happening?” he asked.

Liraz gave a small laugh, barely a breath. “No. I know Joram wanted one for his trophy room. It was a sport, for a while. Every lickspittle lord and lady in the Empire hoped to bring him one, with no luck, and some died trying, and finally he had to call in hunters, trappers. The best. And do you know how many they got?”

It was the most she’d spoken since he found her in the entrance cavern, so disarmingly tongue-tied, and again Ziri found himself pulled to watch her, half forgetting the stormhunter and the mystery of a seraph flying at its side. “How many?” he asked.

“None.”

“I’m glad.”

“Me, too.”

He realized, with a pang of deep sorrow, that though she was directly upwind of him, and the spice scent of her was as bright to his senses as a color, he could no longer detect the other—the secret perfume, so fragile, that hid within it. He had breathed it while carrying her in his arms, but his Kirin senses were duller than the Wolf’s had been, and it was lost to him now. Well, he would always remember that it was there. That was something. Being the Wolf had given him that, at least.

They held their position and watched in silence as the stormhunter went on tilting and wheeling, the angel keeping pace with it, sometimes pulling ahead, sometimes falling behind.

“Come on,” said Liraz, when it began to put distance between them, heading north. “Let’s follow them.”

They did, and saw that their path was erratic, carrying them near to cliff faces where the wind funneled and charged, and then up to circle around a minor peak, threading through a terrain of clouds. Eventually they spun and headed, once more, toward Liraz and Ziri.

They watched the stormhunter come, and it was very near before Ziri realized that the figure flying along with it was not its only company. There were figures riding it. He hadn’t noticed them before because, not being seraphim, they didn’t give off light.

“Is that—?” he began, dumbfounded.

“I think it is,” breathed Liraz.

It was. And, catching sight of Liraz and Ziri, they gave sharp cries in their strange human language. Ziri could, of course, not understand what they said, but the note of victory was plain, as was the pure, delirious joy.

And who could blame them for it? Mik and Zuzana had tamed a stormhunter. They were going to be legends.

80

A CHOICE

Akiva didn’t know what was happening to him. He was in the bath cavern, heart pounding, waiting for Karou.

And then he wasn’t.

Time stuttered.

“There is the past, and there is the future,” he had said to his brothers and sisters not long ago. “The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other.”

He’d been wrong. There was onlythe present, and it was infinite. The past and the future were just blinders we wore so that infinity wouldn’t drive us mad.

What was happening to him?

He had lost awareness of his body. He was inside that realm of mind, the private universe, the infinite sphere of himself where he went to work magic, but he hadn’t come here of his own accord, and couldn’t rise back out.

Had he beenput here?

There was a sense of presence. A feeling that voices were passing just out of reach. He couldn’t hear them. He only felt them as ripples skimming at the surface of his awareness. As the drag of fingers on the far side of silk. They were in discord.

Energies vied. Not his own.

His own was coiled, clenched. This was what he knew, this was allhe knew: He was not where he needed to be. Karou would come and he wouldn’t be there. Perhaps it had happened already. Time had come unspooled. Had it been ten minutes? Hours? It didn’t matter. Focus. There was only the present. You had only to open your eyes in the right direction to be whenever you wished.

But there were an infinite number of directions and no compass, and it didn’t matter because Akiva couldn’t open his eyes. He was pressed deep. Contained. This was being done to him.

He was not where he needed to be. He was taken. The impotence of it, and at a moment when his hope had been so full he couldn’t contain it. To be crushed down now and robbed of will, when Karou was waiting for him, when they had finally come to a moment that could be just theirs. It was unbearable.

So Akiva didn’t bear it. He pushed.

At once, the thunder. Thunder as a weapon, thunder in his head. He recoiled from it, but not for long. Thunder is sound, not barrier. If that was all that was holding him, then he wasn’t truly held. He gathered every fiber of his strength into a silent roar and pushed, and it exploded in him, merciless, but he was explosive, too, and unflinching.

And he was through it, past it, into silence and the aftershock colors of his violent passage, and… his self. He felt himself. His edges where they pressed on rock. He was lying on the ground, and it was not into silence that he had spilled, but only into a pause between voices, the air taut with the tug of their discord.

“It’s the wrong way.”

It was a woman’s voice, strange to him, its inflections softer than the Seraphic he knew, though not altogether unfamiliar.

“We’ve wasted enough time here.” Sharper, this voice, and younger. Also a woman. “Should I have let him keep his appointment? Do you think it would be easier for him to leave afterhaving his taste of her?”

“His taste? He’s in love, Scarab. You must let him choose.”

“There is no choice.”

“There is. You’re making it.”

“By letting him live? I should think you’d be glad.”

“I am.” A sigh. “But it must be hisdecision, can’t you see that? Or he’ll always be your enemy.”

“Don’t tempt me, old woman. Do you know what I could do with an enemy like that?”

Another silence fell and echoed, dissonant with shock. Akiva understood that they were speaking of him, but that was all he understood. What choice? What enemy?

Scarab, the one was called. There was something there. Something he should know.

When the other spoke, her voice was thin, rising out of the pit of her shock. “Make a harp string of him, is that what you mean? Is that what you would do with my grandson?”

Grandson.Only for a moment, hearing this, did Akiva think, It isn’t me, then, that they’re discussing.He was no one’s grandson. He was a bastard. He was—

“Only if I had to.”

“How could you possibly have to?” This came out as a cry. “It’s a dark thing that you’ve begun, Scarab. You must end it. That isn’t who we are. We’re not warriors—”

“We should be.”

Concussionsof shock.

“We were,” continued Scarab. There was a tone of stubbornness in her, and the willfulness of youth clashing with age. “And we will be again.”

“What are you saying?”Akiva’s defender—his… grandmother?—was aghast. Staggered. Akiva knew because he felt her turmoil enter him, and he understood. It entered him and became his own, just as he had pushed his despair into every soldier in the Kirin caves, and it had become theirs. This woman had called him grandson, and there was another vital piece to this puzzle. Scarab.

Accompanying the audacious basket of fruit the Stelians had sent to answer Joram’s declaration of war had been a note, unsigned but for a wax seal depicting a scarab beetle.

Stelians.

Akiva opened his eyes and came upright in one movement. They were in a cave, and it looked and felt like the Kirin caves, and sounded like them, too, eerie with wind flutes, and he registered relief in the back of his mind. He hadn’t been taken away, then. Karou wouldn’t be far off. He would be able to find her, and make things right.

The two women were before him, and gave a start at his sudden lurch. It meant something that neither leapt back, nor even stepped back. Scarab’s eyes didn’t even widen, but only fixed on him and he was still again, held frozen in the act of rising to his feet, and suddenly intensely aware, as he had been before, when he felt an unseen presence in the cave, of the discrete entity that was his life.

And of its fragility.

They held him motionless and stared at him. All he could do, because he couldn’t move, and because it was all he wanted to do anyway, was stare back.

He hadn’t seen a Stelian since he was five years old and had taken one last desperate look over his shoulder at his mother as he was dragged from her. Here were two women, and the older of them… Akiva couldn’t say that she looked like Festival, because he didn’t remember his mother’s face, but looking at this woman made him feel as though he did. Scarab had called her “old,” but she wasn’t, nor young, either. Cares had touched her, deepening the set of her eyes, etching the corners of her mouth. Her hair was a braid wound as a crown and shot through with silver bright enough to seem like ornament. In her eyes still echoed tremors of her recent shock, and a deep, a very deep pathos. Toward her, from first sight, Akiva felt kinship.

The other, though.

Her black hair was unbound and wild. She wore a storm-gray tunic that wrapped her slim form in slanting folds, fastening at her shoulder to leave bare her brown arms that were ringed wrist to shoulder with evenly spaced golden bands. Her face was severe. Not like Liraz’s, or Zuzana’s, made so by expression only, but sculpted for it from the start. Sharp, with the hard, hunting brow of a hawk, shadowing her eyes in a line. The way her cheekbones and jaw cut to edges seemed the work of a chisel, but her mouth was full and dark, her only softness.

Until she smiled at him, that is, and he saw that her teeth were shaved to points.

Akiva recoiled.

He saw then, for the first time, that there were more besides the two women: another woman and two men, for five in all. The others had been silent and remained so, but watched them with burning intensity.

“Clever you,” said Scarab, pulling Akiva’s attention back to her. And now he saw that her teeth were normal, white and straight. “We mustn’t underestimate you, I suppose.” She turned on the other woman. “Or did yourelease him, Nightingale?”

Nightingale. She shook her head without once taking her eyes off Akiva. “I did not, Queen.” Queen? “But I won’t bind him again. This is where we grant him the dignity due his birth and talk to him.”

“Talk to me about what?” he asked. “What do you want with me?”

It was Scarab who answered, with a dark sideward glance to Nightingale. She was regal in her arrogance, so that Akiva thought he would have known now, if he hadn’t already heard, that she was queen. “A choice has been made on your behalf. By me.”

“And that is?”

“Not to kill you.”

It wasn’t a complete surprise, given what he had overheard, but there was a force to it, so bluntly spoken. “And what have I done to call my life into question?” Being certain of his own innocence, he didn’t expect the vehemence of her reply.

“ Much,” she snapped, biting a piece off the air. “Never doubt it, scion of Festival. By rights you’re dead already.”

He tried to rise to his feet, but found himself still constrained. “Can you let me go?” he asked, and to his surprise, she did.

“Because I don’t fear you,” she said.

He stood. “Why should you? Why should I threaten you, even if I could? How many times have I wondered about the people of my mother’s blood? And never once with a thought to hurtyou.”

“And yet no one has come so close to destroying us in over a thousand years.”

“What are you talking about?” he burst out. He’d never even been near the Far Isles, nor seen a Stelian. What could he have done?

Nightingale cut in. “Scarab, don’t taunt him. He doesn’t know. How could he?”

“Know what?” he asked, quieter now, because when they came from Scarab, in anger, the accusations seemed absurd, but from Nightingale, in sadness, they did not. The intrusion in his mind. The tide of power sweeping through him. The way he felt… discardedafter, as though it had used him, and not the other way around. Faltering, he asked, “What have I done?”