Daughter of Smoke & Bone

16





FALLEN



Akiva found Izîl cowering behind a garbage pile in the Jemaa el-Fna, his creature still clinging to his back. A half circle of frightened humans crowded in on them, menacing, but when Akiva dropped from the sky in an explosion of sparks, they fled in all directions, squealing like slapped pigs.

The creature reached out to Akiva. “My brother,” it crooned. “I knew you’d come back for me.”

Akiva’s jaw clenched. He forced himself to look at the thing. Bloated as its face was, its features held an echo of long-ago beauty: almond eyes, a fine, high-bridged nose, and sensuous lips that were perverse on such a wretched face. But the key to its true nature was at its back. From its shoulder blades protruded the splintered remnants of wing joints.

Incredibly, this thing was a seraph. It could only be one of the Fallen.

Akiva knew the story as legend and had never wondered whether it was true, not until this moment, faced with the proof of it. That there were seraphim, exiled in another age for treason and collaborating with the enemy, cast into the human world forever. Well, here was one of them, and indeed, he had fallen far from what he once had been. Time had curved his spine, and his flesh, pulled taut, seemed to snag on every ridge of vertebrae. His legs dangled uselessly behind him—that was not the work of time, but of violence. They had been pulverized with cruel purpose, that he should never walk again. As if it were not punishment enough that his wings were torn away—not even cut, but torn—his legs were destroyed, too, leaving him a crawling thing on the surface of an alien world.

A thousand years he had lived like this, and he was beside himself with joy to see Akiva.

Izîl was not so happy. He cowered against the stinking mound of refuse, more afraid of Akiva than he had been of the mob. While Razgut gibbered, “My brother, my brother,” in an ecstatic chant, the old man shook with a palsy and tried to back away, but there was nowhere for him to go.

Akiva loomed over him, the brilliance of his unglamoured wings lighting the scene like daylight.

Razgut reached longingly toward Akiva. “My sentence is up, and you’ve come to bring me back. That’s it, isn’t it, my brother? You’re going to take me home and make me whole again, so I can walk. So I can fly—”

“This has nothing to do with you,” said Akiva.

“What… what do you want?” Izîl choked out in the language of the seraphim, which he had learned from Razgut.

“The girl,” Akiva said. “I want you to tell me about the girl.”