“What’s wrong with you?” he bellowed, half lifting the shorter man off the bloodied sand. “Damn it, Gwen, what are you doing?”
Gwennec struggled in Hassan’s arms, sobbing.
“She’s killed the things I love,” he quavered, lunging again toward Luz. “She and her Holy Office. A holy office! They mutilate and terrify and shame and say they do it out of love. But they’ve killed love. They will burn down the Church itself so they can rule over the ashes. I will never see my abbey again, I will never see the Sacrament in my life, I will die unshriven, but that’s not enough—no, like a pestilence, she raises herself from the dead so she can poison more lives, even in this place at the end of the very earth.” He lunged again, but Hassan’s arms, no longer those of a hunched scribe, held him fast; defeated, he collapsed against Hassan’s shoulder and went slack, giving himself to his grief.
“It’s all right, you silly boy,” murmured Hassan, speaking, or so it seemed, into the monk’s matted hair. “You think Luz has decided to be a particularly awful sort of person, and if you kill her, the evil will go away. But it’s not like that. Plenty of ordinary, peaceful men and women think someone like me ought to be murdered, even if they’d never dream of doing it themselves. Get enough of them together and the Inquisition will spring into existence all by itself, as if called from the very air.” He stroked Gwennec’s hair, untangling one of the many knots that had formed in it, and looked over his head at Fatima with an expression she couldn’t read. “But she’s alone here. Just a half-dead inquisitor, cut off from all that ordinary evil. We have the king of the birds. She can’t hurt us.”
The confidence with which Hassan made this pronouncement caused Fatima to startle and stare at him, certain he wasn’t serious. She had no power: she had done nothing but look into a pool of water. If she had stared down a leviathan, it was only because the sun had intervened; if she had opened the way to the island, it was only by throwing a mapmaker overboard. It seemed to her that she had acted in the only way she could have: there was nothing kingly about that. The others looked to her for leadership because they needed it. It did not follow that Fatima could wage a war, or keep a peace that did not want to be kept.
Luz stirred at their feet. A hand as bloodless as the chalk cliffs reached out to touch the instep of Fatima’s foot. Fatima didn’t dare move. With effort, Luz raised her hand a little more and clutched the sodden hem of Fatima’s robe, the robe Mary had made for her from the purple brocade: a royal robe, she had called it. Fatima wanted to turn away, to leave Luz there on the beach where she would certainly die. She deserved as much. She would do nothing but disrupt the quiet order of things in Con, the little rituals that shaped their days; even when she was cut off from the source of her power, her faith was the sort that loomed over the lives of others. Yet the hand that clung to Fatima’s robe was clenched like a child’s.
Fatima snarled in frustration. Bending down, she put her hands beneath Luz’s elbows and sat her up. It was only then that she saw her face, and her eyes. Her mouth was raw and cracked, as well it might be after expelling the better part of a wooden ship, but it was her eye, her left eye, that made Fatima sway on the balls of her feet. The spot was gone. There was a fine wound, a thread, running along the white of Luz’s eye toward her pupil, as if the spot had been torn out by force. The wound was red and sunken and the effect was singular: it looked as though Luz’s eye had very nearly been cut in half, slashed, like the mark a merchant might leave on old goods condemned to the scrap heap.
“Kill her,” begged Gwennec, rocking in Hassan’s arms. “Leave her for the sea. Don’t bring her back to Con with us. She can’t build anything, Fatima, she only knows how to tear down the things her betters have made.”
Fatima wanted nothing more than to do as Gwennec asked, but Luz’s hand was still wrapped in her skirt. She sat down on the sand next to the white-faced inquisitor and looked out toward the sea. Waves rose and fell, littered with the debris of Luz’s ship, casting the spars up and down, up and down, as they bore them back into the east. Then a little movement, running counter to the motion of the water, made Fatima sit up straighter. It came again, bulging along the crest of a wave and subsiding into a foamy wake. Fatima stood. The spars gathered themselves together, pulling up foam and oily water and the dark ebbing liquids of Luz’s own body, and rose up to crouch on the surface of the sea.
No one spoke. Fatima could hear the ragged pull of Gwennec’s breath and the high keening of Hassan’s; and her own breath, deeper, thundering along her limbs and returning again to her chest. The vision rose farther out of the water, twisting around itself like the coils of a serpent. The motion was familiar in a way that the vision itself was not, and in a moment, Fatima knew, though she could not exactly say how, what was gathering itself before her eyes.
“Hassan,” she whispered.
“I see it,” came Hassan’s voice, strained and high. “The—the thing we set loose in the dark beneath the Alhambra. It’s here. It’s followed us.”
Fatima felt a stab of guilt. It was her anger, in the end, that had freed the coiled horror in the water: anger she had turned on Hassan instead of toward some useful end.
“It was I,” she said. “I set it loose, not you. Never you, love.”
Hassan’s fingers found hers and intertwined themselves against her palm. The thing in the water was looking at her, through her, though it had no eyes; she felt its gaze in her spine, as though it was peeling away each layer of her to appraise what lay at her core.
“Look, Luz,” Fatima whispered. “There is the voice you thought was God.”
Luz raised her head and looked silently, her eyes deadened and unreadable. Vikram had warned them that the thing would attach itself to someone, but in the panic of her flight, Fatima had never imagined it would settle in the very person pursuing her. A mote in the eye of the Deceiver, he had called it, yet Fatima had failed to recognize it for what it was. It had seemed so small. Now it unfurled, surging upward until it loomed over the beach, eclipsing the pale sun. Fatima didn’t move, couldn’t move; her feet were sunk in the wet sand, the earth itself shrinking from the abscess of bile and wood that crouched upon the waves.
She could only stand, so she stood. She planted her feet between her friends and the wretched Luz and the thing in the water, and waited. The vision rushed toward her. She could feel the salt spray on her face and smell it, mingled with the copper of blood and some other unwholesome scent, like a boneyard. At the last moment, when she was sure it would engulf them all, it suddenly collapsed, subsiding once again into wood and water to be pulled apart by the sea.
Fatima swayed where she was, afraid she might cry, feeling unwontedly lonely, less like a king than like a child in borrowed clothes who was about to be found out.
“Is it gone?” quavered Hassan.
“Gone?” Fatima looked around herself without seeing. “It was never gone to begin with. It’s been with us the entire way. Of course it isn’t gone.”
Luz, childlike herself, tugged at Fatima’s sodden hem. Reaching out, she began to write in the sand with one finger, laboring over each letter until the message was whole.
More will come, it said.
Chapter 23