Days of Blood & Starlight

41


MAD ALCHEMY


This time, when angels came upon them, Sveva searched their eyes, and none were fire, and she swept their armor, and saw no lilies. Different angels. Bad luck.

To come so close to safety…

She’d really thought they’d made it. The mountains were so big, they’d kept seeming nearer than they were, and within reach. And then at the top of a slope that just had to be the last one—the last hill before the land must feather into those great granite folds that were like the world’s own walls—another valley would yawn open at their feet. Another expanse to cross, another rise to climb. It was like a trick.

But this one, this really was the last. Sveva could see the very place where a row of huge bulged stones met a meadow.

“They look like toes on a big fat foot,” she’d just said, not two minutes ago, smiling with the others. And she’d spun Lell, and the babe had laughed. “The mountain’s toes,” she’d sung. “We’ve reached the mountain’s toes!” And she was prancing, hugging the little Caprine to her chest, still singing her happy nonsense—“I wonder if it’s stinky in between the mountain’s toes”—when Sarazal cried, “Svee!”

And she looked, and they were there. Angels. The wrong angels.

Still, Sveva tensed in a place between hate and hope that hadn’t even existed a few days earlier. They had met mercy once; why not twice? Mercy, she had discovered, made mad alchemy: a drop of it could dilute a lake of hate. Because of what had happened in the gully, seraphim were more than slavers and faceless winged killers to her.

And yet, when these seraphim came pressing down, swords already red and no mercy in their eyes, she had no trouble screaming, “Kill them!”

Rath sprang.

The angels hadn’t seen him. They were almost smirking, this pair in shining armor. They saw a flock of Caprine, a couple of Dama, some grizzled old Hartkind—easy kills all. And the Dashnag? He’d been last up the rise; they didn’t see him until he was on them, already inside the reach of their swords and dragging them down to the ground, grappling, tearing.

They were screaming.

Sveva didn’t want to watch, but she made herself, which is how she saw one of them free an arm and raise his sword, slamming it onto Rath’s back. She shoved Lell at Sarazal and darted in with her slaver’s knife and stuck it. She stuck it right in the gap the angel’s armor left bare. She stabbed him in the armpit, deep, and he dropped his sword.

And died.

So that’s what it feels like, she thought as her boldness gave way to trembling. It feels awful. Her knife was slippery and her gorge was rising. Sarazal grabbed her shoulder. “Svee, come on!” Urgent. And then they were swimming in shadows, all of them. Shadows wheeling, weaving. More angels overhead. Sveva threw back her head.

A lot more angels.

Rath roared. Sveva looked at her sister, at Lell, at Nur with her arms outstretched, trying to reach her child, at all the other Caprine and the old Hartkind couple, and she held on to her knife and pointed to the stone toes in the distance. “Run!” she screamed. They did.

She stood with Rath.

Look at me, she thought with weird, cold pride. Everything was sharp and sure. Stabbing was awful, and she’d never have believed she would stand when she could run. She loved to run. But standing felt good, too. She looked at Rath. He looked at her. She thought he might urge her to go, but he didn’t. Maybe he just knew it wouldn’t matter, that there was no safety, but maybe… maybe he liked not being alone. He was, after all, just a boy.

Sveva smiled at him, and there they stood, so near the end of their journey they could feel the mist of waterfalls from on high, but they were in the shadows of angels now, and not likely to ever come out again.

Unless of course there was another miracle.

When the figures crested the tree line, Sveva almost couldn’t believe it. If she hadn’t seen them before, she would have been as afraid of them as she was of the angels. They were much scarier than angels.

They were revenants. Chimaera.

Saviors. It was so much like the night at the slave caravan, but it was day now and she could see them clearly. She recognized some of them: there was the griffon who had unlocked her shackle, and the bull centaur who had untwisted the metal scrap that bound Sarazal. Sveva searched for the other—the handsome horned one who had put this knife in her hand—but him she didn’t see.

The rebels were five against thrice that number, but they tore through the seraphim like a calamity.

After the first clash, and the first thuds of fallen bodies—enemies all—Rath did turn to Sveva and urge her to go. His eyes were alight. “I knew they’d come back,” he said fervently. “I knew they wouldn’t abandon us. Sveva, go. Catch the others. Take care of them, and tell them I said good-bye.” He put a big clawed hand on her shoulder. “Good luck.”

“But what about you?”

“I told you before, I was looking for the rebels.” He was happy; she saw that this was what he had wanted all along. “I’m going to join them,” he said.

And he did. When Sveva fled, Rath stayed and fought with the rebels.

And died with them, right there at the toes of the mountains.

And was dragged with them into a big pile.

And burned.





42


LUCKY ZIRI


“Come on,” said Hazael. “There’s nothing more we can do.”

More? That would imply they had done something. They had found no opportunity. Too many Dominion, too much open ground. Akiva shook his head and said nothing. Maybe his night flight had spurred folk from their resting places, maybe chased them near enough that some had made the ravines and tunnels ahead of the angels. He would never know. All he would know was this before him.

The sky was spring blue and mountain-clean. Pristine. The smoke was still contained to thin columns, here and there. From this high rock perch the world became a lace of treetop and meadow, and the runoff rivers in the sun were like veins of pure light curving through the contours of hills. Mountains and sky, tree and stream, and the spark of wings as Dominion squadrons moved from site to site, setting their fires. This place was damp, ferny: mist veils and waterfalls. It wouldn’t burn easily.

In such a place, with such a vista, it was almost impossible to accept what had happened here today. The blood daubs gave it away, though.

There were so many. The carrion birds could scent blood in the air from miles away. Judging from their numbers—and from the jerking eagerness of their usually languid spirals—there was plenty of it in the air today.

“And there are our birds,” Akiva said, defeated.

Hazael took his meaning. “I’m sure some got to safety,” he said. It was a moment before Akiva realized he’d said it with Liraz right there. She was looking at them. He waited for her to say something, but she just turned away, looked up into the peaks.

“They say you can’t fly over them,” she said. “The wind is too strong. Only stormhunters can survive it.”

“I wonder what’s on the other side,” said Hazael.

“Maybe it’s a mirror of this side, and seraphim there have chased their chimaera into tunnels, too, and they meet in the middle, in the dark, and find out there’s no safe place in all the world, and no happy ending.”

“Or,” said Hazael, overbright, “maybe there are no seraphim on that side, and there’s the happy ending. No us.”

She turned from the peaks, abrupt. Her tone, which had been curiously remote, turned hard. “You don’t want to be us anymore, do you?” Her gaze shuttled back and forth between them. “You think I can’t see it?”

Hazael pursed his lips, glanced at Akiva. “I still want to be us,” he said.

“So do I,” said Akiva. “Always.” He thought back to the sky of the other world, when he had stopped the pair of them in their pursuit of Karou and made himself tell them—finally—the truth. That he had loved a chimaera, and dreamed of a different life. He’d gambled then that his sister was more than the emperor’s weapon, and if she had shunned the idea of harmony, at least she hadn’t turned on him. Did he think he was the only one who was sick of death? Look at Hazael. How many others? “But a better us,” he said.

“A better us?” Liraz asked. “Look at us, Akiva.” She held up her hands to show her ink. “We can’t pretend. We wear what we’ve done.”

“Only the killing. There are no marks for mercy.”

“Even if there were, I would bear none,” she said. Akiva met her eyes, and he saw a kind of torment in her.

“You have only to begin, Lir. Mercy breeds mercy as slaughter breeds slaughter. We can’t expect the world to be better than we make it.”

“No,” she said, faint, and for a moment he thought she was going to say more, go deeper, demand his secrets. Confess hers? But when she turned away, it was only to say, “Let’s get out of here. They’re burning bodies, and I don’t want to smell the char.”




Ziri watched the blaze. He was upslope on a ridge, in the safety of the trees.

Safety. The word felt absurd. There was no safety. The angels might as well light the whole world on fire and be done with it. The things he had seen burn in these last months. Farms, entire rivers slick with oil. Children running, fleet and screaming—aflame—until they could run and scream no more. And now, friends.

His grip on his knife hilts was so fierce it felt as if his fingers would gouge through the leather to the steel beneath, and through that, too. Safety, he thought again. It was worse than absurd, it was profane. It had also been his mandate on this mission: to be safe.

Balieros had ordered him to hide.

In every engagement there was to be someone kept back, designated safety against such an eventuality as this, to glean the souls of the others should they be slain. It was an honor, a deep trust—to hold his comrades’ perpetuity in his hands—and it was torture.

Lucky Ziri, he thought with bitterness. He knew why Balieros had chosen him. It was such a rare thing for a soldier to be in his natural body; the commander had wanted to give him a chance to keep it. As if he cared about that. Being the one left alive was worse. He’d had to watch the slaughter and do nothing. Even that Dashnag boy had fought—and well—but not Ziri, though his mind and body had screamed to fly into the fray.

The one breach he had permitted himself was to cut down a seraph who pursued the little Dama girl, the deer centaur, pretty as a doll. She was the same girl he’d helped free from the slavers up in the Marazel Hills, and she was holding the knife he’d given her. To think that they had come so far and nearly died right here. He saw the group of them, Dama and Caprine, vanish into a crease in the rocks, and that was good. It had been something solid to hold on to as he watched his comrades die. To know that it was not for nothing.

The five of them had taken fivefold the lives they gave, and the Dashnag boy added to the count. Ziri had watched the seraphim gape and gesture over the corpses—Ixander, especially, whom it took three of them to drag when it finally came to it. They pulled the bodies into a pile, and then, unholy butchers, they hacked off their hands before setting them alight, hacked them off and kept them—why? As trophies?—then lit the whole clearing and watched the blaze devour the mutilated remains. Ziri smelled them now—mingled with the sweet char of grass was the odor of scorched fur, horns, and, horribly, the cookfire scent of meat—and he imagined his comrades’ souls hovering over the clearing, maintaining a tenuous connection with their burnt bodies for as long as they could.

He couldn’t wait much longer. Burning hastened evanescence, and it had been hours already. Soon it would be too late. If Ziri hoped to save his comrades, he had to do it now.

The angels had lingered from morning into afternoon, but finally they were going, lifting skyward in all their abominable grace, and flying away.

He moved steadily down the slope, keeping to the thickest cover, and by the time he came to the edge of the clearing the enemy was gone from the horizon. He surveyed the clearing. The seraph fire was an infernal thing, and burned so hot that the bodies had been eaten to nothing. A wind was rising, stirring the mound of ashes, carrying it into Ziri’s eyes and worse: sundering what little the souls had left to cling to. He lit four cones of incense in his thurible and held it steady. Five soldiers and one volunteer. He hoped he had them all, the boy, too.

He’d done all he could. He closed the thurible with a twist and slipped the gleaning staff back through its loop across his back. He scanned the sky. It was empty, but he knew he had to wait until dark to fly—more hiding, more waiting. The Dominion were everywhere, still spreading the emperor’s message with their terrible efficiency, and, as he had seen… enjoying themselves.

At first, in the rebels’ opening strike, Ziri had hated cutting the Warlord’s smiles on the dead, but right now, all he could think was that the angels’ black joy must be answered.

And what if the act of answering sparked a black joy of its own? What would Karou think of that? No. Ziri pushed down the thought. He had taken no joy in it, but he couldn’t blame Karou for her scorn. It had surprised him, at the river, how deeply it cut—how she looked at him, how she walked away. He’d covered his shame with anger in the moment—who was she to scorn him?—but he couldn’t fool himself anymore. When Balieros had pulled the patrol aside to ask if they were with him—if they wished to slaughter enemy civilians or aid their own—Ziri’s first thought had been of Karou, of erasing her scorn and replacing it with something else. Respect? Approval? Pride?

Maybe he was still that lovestruck little boy, after all.

Ziri shook his head. He turned back toward the cover of the trees. And saw them standing there watching him: three angels with their arms crossed.





43


AN AMUSING STORY


“You,” said Ziri.

It was often said among chimaera that all seraphim look alike, with such sameness of parts as make them up, but any chimaera would know this angel on sight. The scar that split his face was unique.

Ziri whistled. “Wait until my friends hear that I killed the Captain of the Dominion. They won’t believe it.”

Jael laughed. It was a wet sound. He stepped forward, and his soldiers fanned out to encircle Ziri. Three angels didn’t upset him overmuch, even if one of them was the emperor’s brother. Three was easy. He heard a sound behind him and glanced back to see another… six… emerge from the far wood. Ah. And when he turned back, another three behind Jael. A dozen.

So death, then.

Probably.

“Do you know,” Ziri said to Jael, “every last chimaera soldier claims to have given you that scar. It’s a game we play when we’re bored, who can come up with the best story. Would you like to hear mine?”

“Every last chimaera soldier?” said Jael. “And how many is that these days, four? Five?”

“Yes, well. One chimaera is worth”—he made a show of counting them and a show of smiling—“at least a dozen seraphim. So that should be taken into account.” He had drawn his blades at the first sight of them. They gave him a wide berth now, but he knew that they would close in and try to take him. He welcomed it. All the anguish of the past hours was alive in his hands—a hot thrum where he clasped his hilts. “The story goes like this,” he said. “We were having dinner together, you and I. As we do from time to time. It was grimgrouse. Overspiced. You killed the cook for that. Temper.” He added, as an instructive aside, “You know, in a story, it’s the details like that that make it seem real. Anyway, you got a bone stuck in your mustache. Did I mention you had a mustache?”

Jael did not have a mustache. Around him, Ziri sensed the Dominion tightening. Jael stood at a safe remove, his face showing calculated forbearance. “Did I,” he said.

“A sad, wispy specimen, but never mind. I went to cut the bone out, using your sword, and that was my mistake right there. It’s much bigger than I’m used to.” He held up his crescent moons to illustrate his point. “And, well, I missed. Spectacularly, really, though I always say: I wish I’d missed in the other direction.” He mimicked slashing a throat. “Nothing personal.”

“Of course not.” Jael ran a fingertip down the long, jagged line of his scar. “Do you want to know how I really got it?”

“No, thank you. I’m this close to believing my own version.” A flicker of movement. Behind Ziri, a soldier; he spun, his knives glinting, the sunlight bright and beckoning along their well-honed curves. The steel wanted blood and so did he. The soldier pulled back.

“You can lower your weapons,” said Jael. “We aren’t going to kill you.”

“I know,” Ziri replied. “I’m going to kill you.”

They thought this was funny. Several laughed. But not for very long.

Ziri was a blur. He took the laughers first, and two angels were dead where they stood, throats gaping open before the others could even draw their weapons.

If any of them had ever fought a Kirin, they wouldn’t have felt such comfort in their numbers as to stand so near him with their swords sheathed. Well, their swords came out fast now. The two bodies slumped to the ground, and another two angels were bleeding before ever steel rang on steel. Then it was a melee. Nithilam, as the seraphim called it. Chaos.

Ziri was outnumbered, but he turned it to his advantage. He moved so fast in the spinning kata of moon blades that the seraphim scarcely knew where to look for him. They followed; he spun. They got in the way of one another’s strikes. Ziri’s part was easier: everything was enemy. Everything was target. His crescent-moon blades seemed to multiply in the air; this was what they were made for, not slicing smiles but taking on multiple opponents, blocking, slashing, piercing. Two more angels fell: gut wound, cut tendons.

“Keep him alive!” roared Jael, and Ziri was aware, even in the spiral and glint of flesh and steel, that this was not good news.

He lunged at them, gripping his hilts hard so blood wouldn’t flow beneath his fingers and make his grip slippery. He flew at them, took the fight airborne, and cut and killed, but he never held out any real hope of escape. These were seraph soldiers; he was fast, but they were far from slow, and they were many. Not for the first time in his life, he wished for hamsas. The marks might have weakened them, given him a chance. By the time they disarmed him their host was halved, but he himself bled only from shallow wounds—which he attributed as much to their discipline as to his own agility. They wanted him alive, and so he was.

He was on his knees before them, and no one was laughing now. Jael came toward him. He had lost his smugness; his face was rigid, the scar livid white against the red of his fury. Ziri saw the kick coming and curled to absorb the blow, but it still caught his stomach hard and drove the breath from him.

He turned the gasp into a laugh. “What was that for?” he asked, straightening back up. “If I’ve done something to give offense—”

Jael kicked him again. And again. Ziri ran out of laughter. Only when he was choking up blood did Jael come close enough to rip the gleaning staff off of his back. His eyes were hard with triumph, and Ziri felt the first burn of fear.

“I have an amusing story, too, only mine is true. I met your Warlord and Brimstone recently, and I burned them like I burned your comrades and that is how I know that they are dead and gone, and that this”—he held up the thurible—“can only be for someone else. So… who?”

Ziri’s blood had become strangely loud in his head. It was dawning on him what this was about, that the seraphim had laid a trap in the clearing and waited to see if anyone came gleaning. The rebels had been ghosts, as the Wolf had said; now they were real. He had tipped their hand. “I’m sorry.” Ziri feigned confusion. “Who what now?”

Jael looked down. He stirred the ashes with the tip of his sword. “You will tell me who the resurrectionist is,” he said. “Sooner would be better. For you, I mean. Myself, truly I don’t mind if it takes… a bit of work.”

Well, that didn’t sound like fun at all. Ziri had no experience of torture, and when he thought of it, there was one face that came to mind.

Akiva’s.

Ziri would never forget the day. The agora, all of Loramendi turned out to watch, and Madrigal’s lover forced to watch, too. The seraph had been on his knees as Ziri was now, weak from beatings and hamsas and undone by grief. Had he given up anything to the Wolf? Ziri didn’t think so, and strangely enough, the thought gave him strength. If the angel could withstand torture, he could, too. To protect Karou, and with her, the chimaera’s hope, he thought he could endure anything.

“Who is it?” asked the captain again.

“Come closer,” replied Ziri with a bloody grin. “I’ll whisper it in your ear.”

“Oh, good.” Jael sounded pleased. “I was afraid you were going to make it easy.” He gestured to his soldiers, and two stepped in to seize Ziri’s arms. “Hold him,” he said. He stabbed the gleaning staff into the black earth and began to roll up his sleeves. “I’m feeling inspired.”





44


SOME LUXURIES


“I said no humans would be hurt.” Karou’s voice, already hoarse from arguing, sounded like a growl to her. “That was the first thing. No humans hurt. Period.” She was pacing in the court. Chimaera were gathered in the gallery and on the ground, some basking in the sun and others withdrawn in shade.

As if he were teaching her a hard life truth, Thiago said, “In war, Karou, some luxuries must be put aside.”

“Luxuries? You mean not killing innocent people?” He didn’t say anything. That was what he meant. Karou’s stomach twisted in a knot. “Oh god, no. Absolutely no. Whoever they are, they’re nothing to do with your—” She stopped. Corrected herself. “Our war.”

“But if they endanger our position here, they are everything to do with it. You had to know the risk, Karou.”

Had she known? Because of course he was right that it would only take a hiker telling tales to bring a media storm down on the kasbah. And then what? She didn’t like to think of it. The military, surely. Once upon a time, a tale of monsters in the desert might have been dismissed as backpackers smoking too much hashish, but times had changed. So, what now?

“They might keep going,” she said, but that was feeble and they both knew it. It was a hundred degrees out and there was no other destination for many miles. Besides which, even at a distance it was obvious the hikers weren’t doing so well.

They were dragging uphill, pausing every minute or so to bend over with hands on knees, slug water from canteens, and then… the small one doubled over and heaved. They were too far for the accompanying sound to carry, but it was obvious that they were at risk of heat exhaustion, if not already suffering from it. The pair leaned together for a long time before they got moving again. Karou paced. The hikers needed help, but this was oh so very much not the place that they would find it. If they only knew what they were headed toward. But even if they did know, they were clearly in no state to turn back.

Thiago was calm, always so maddeningly calm—until he wasn’t, anyway—because the hikers posed no urgent danger. He was content to let them approach. And then what?

The pit?

Again Karou’s stomach seized. She could smell it today. Maybe because it had fresh fodder—Bast had finally taken her walk with the Wolf. Karou had already conjured her new body; it lay on her floor even now—and maybe because the breeze was one of those mild but insistent wafts from just the right direction. It might have been saying, Here, smell this. Here, smell this, over and over.

Karou stopped pacing and stood before the Wolf. She put her shoulders back and tried not to shake, tried to sound like someone to be reckoned with as she said, “I’m going to go down there and help them, and I’ll take them around the back gate into the granary.” It was cool in the granary, and isolated. The truck was there. “I’ll give them some water, they will see no one, and then I’ll drive them to a road.” She paused. She heard herself, and knew she wasn’t conveying the forcefulness she wanted. “You won’t have to do anything,” she said, but her voice cracked and her head filled with cursing. What a perfect time to sound like an adolescent boy. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Very well,” Thiago said. His expression was so arranged. Karou imagined she could see the strings holding it in place, this benign Thiago-mask, and it made her furious. It was like beating her fists against a wall talking to him. “Go on, then,” he urged.

And she went, trying to have some dignity and not stomp like a powerless child. She went out the gate, and the breeze was stronger here: rot rot, wrong wrong. Bodies putrefying in a pit, and if she didn’t help them, the hikers would end up there, too, and any other humans who had the misfortune to wander too near this godforsaken place. What had she done, leading the rebels into this world?

But then she thought of Eretz, and what the rebels’ prospects would have been if she hadn’t—and the prospects for all chimaera—and she didn’t know what was right anymore. She’d wanted to believe that they could be trusted to have some humanity. They were soldiers, not brute killers, and not wild animals, either, whose appetites functioned beyond the reach of reason. She knew Amzallag wouldn’t harm anyone without justification, and neither would Balieros, or Ziri, or most of the others. But she had only to think of Razor—and his sack—to know that all bets were off.

She had to remind herself to keep her feet on the ground as she left the kasbah; it was her first impulse now to fly, so unaccustomed had she become to human society, and it wasn’t easy walking on the shifting scree.

She realized that her hair was uncovered. What if the hikers recognized her? They really could be a danger. But what was she supposed to do?

It didn’t take long for them to spot her. Coming down the slope from the fortress, she would be the only moving thing in sight. They were still too far off for her to see clearly, but she heard the cry that came at her, and she stopped walking like she’d hit a barrier. It came rolling over the rocks and scrub, full-throated but dissolving at the edges into weakness.

The voice.

It just wasn’t possible. But the cry was “Karou!” and the voice was Zuzana’s, and Karou had certainly learned that “possible” and “impossible” were rough categories at best. Oh god, no, she thought, staring at the figures and seeing what she had never expected to see: Zuzana and Mik, here.

Not them, not here.

How? How?

Did it matter? They were here, and they were in danger—of heatstroke, of chimaera—and Karou’s heart pounded and swelled within her—with panic, with… gladness… and more panic, and more gladness, and a surge of anger—what were they thinking?—then tenderness, astonishment, and her eyes were wet when her feet left the earth and she flew down the slope and caught them and crushed them in a hug that threatened to finish what the heat had begun.

It was really them. She drew back to look at them. Zuzana had sagged down with exhausted relief. Tear tracks stood out against the red of her cheeks, and she was laugh-crying, crushing Karou’s hands with a vise-tight grip—a squeeze right on the bruised web of her hand that made her gasp.

“Jesus, Karou,” Zuzana rasped, her voice spent in crying out. “The freaking desert? It couldn’t have been Paris or something?”

And Karou was laugh-crying, too, but Mik wasn’t laughing or crying. He had a careful hand at Zuzana’s back, and his face was tense with concern. “We could have died,” he said, and the girls fell silent. “I should never have agreed to this.”

After a beat, Karou agreed. “No, you shouldn’t.” She took in the desert panorama with new eyes, imagining coming across it on foot. “What on earth were you thinking?”

“What?” Mik stared at her, looked to Zuzana then back to Karou. “Didn’t you want us to come?”

Karou was taken aback. “Of course not. I would never… God. How did you even find me?”

“How?” Mik was helpless with frustration. “Zuze figured out your riddle, that’s how.”

Riddle? “What riddle?”

“The riddle,” Zuzana said. “Priestess of a sandcastle, in a land of dust and starlight.”

Karou blinked at her. She remembered writing that e-mail; she had just brought the chimaera through the portal to the kasbah, and had been in Ouarzazate scrounging supplies for Aegir. “That’s how you found me? Oh, Zuze. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for you to come here. I never thought…”

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.” Mik raised his hands to his head and turned his back. “We’ve come to the godforsaken navel of nowhere and you don’t even want us here.”

Zuzana looked crestfallen. Karou felt horrible. “It’s not that I don’t want you!” She dragged her friend into another crushing hug. “I do. So much. So much. It’s just… I would never have brought you into… this.” She gestured to the kasbah.

“What is this?” Zuzana asked. “Karou, what are you doing out here?”

Karou opened her mouth and closed it again, twice, like a fish. Finally, she said, “It’s a long story.”

“Then it can wait,” Mik said firmly. Karou had never seen anger on his face before, but he was flushed with it now, his eyes narrow with accusation. “Can we please get her out of the sun?”

“Of course.” Karou took a deep breath. “Come on.”

She shouldered one of their packs and dragged the other. Mik helped Zuzana up the slope, and Karou didn’t take them the long way around to the granary, but the more direct route to the main gate, where they froze on the threshold and stared.

Again, Karou saw with new eyes, imagining how these creatures must look to humans.

Thiago stood looking bemused, Ten just behind him. Thiago himself you could almost mistake for human, but Ten was another story with her wolf head and humped shoulders. As for the rest of the court, it was a horror show: soldiers gathered in the gallery and on the ground, even on the rooftops, strangely still but for the lash of a tail here and there, the flick of a wing. Their monstrous size, their many and varied eyes, unblinking. Razor, too near for comfort, flicked out his serpent tongue, and Karou found herself in a ready stance, light on her toes, in case he should leap.

Mik spoke in a hoarse stage whisper. “Let’s just get this out of the way so I can relax. Karou, your friends aren’t going to eat us, are they?”

No, Karou thought. They are not. She whispered back, “I don’t think so. But try not to look delicious, okay?”

She was rewarded with a snort from Zuzana. “That poses a problem, seeing as how we are totally delicious.” A half beat later, anxiously: “Wait. They don’t understand Czech, right?”

“Right,” said Karou. The whole time, she was looking at Thiago and he was looking at her. The stench of the pit was in the air, and it was then that the nightmare surreality of the life she had been living was sucked away as by a vortex, just gone, and everything was real. This was her life, not a grim dream she would wake from, and not purgatory but her actual life in the actual world—worlds—and now her friends were in it, and it was their life, too.

It made a difference.

“These humans are my guests,” she said, and she felt the words come from some iron place within her that hadn’t existed an hour ago. She didn’t speak loudly, but there was such a change in her voice. Coming from that iron place, it was heavy and true; it wasn’t persuasive, or desperate, or antagonistic. It just was. She approached the Wolf, nearer than she liked to be to him. She forced herself to breach his physical space, the way he did hers, tilted back her head, and said, “Their lives are not a luxury. These are my friends, and I trust them.”

“Of course,” he said, smiling, the perfect gentleman. “That changes everything.” He nodded to Mik and Zuzana and even welcomed them, but his smile, it was just wrong. Like he’d learned it from a book.





45


DEAD


“Who was that?” Zuzana whispered as Karou led her and Mik out of the big courtyard where the monsters were gathered. “The other white meat?”

Karou’s laugh sounded like a choke. “Oh god,” she said when she could breathe again. “And now that’s what I’m going to think every time I see him. Watch your step.”

They were on a rubble-strewn path, Mik holding Zuzana’s elbow, and they had to pick their way over a collapsed wall. Zuzana peered around. From a distance, the kasbah had looked regal in a crazy sandcastle way, but inside it was pretty desolate. Not to mention—she stepped over a timber bristling with giant rusty nails and skirted the edges of a gaping hole—dangerous. And it smelled bad, too, like piss and worse. What was that smell? Why was Karou living here? And the creatures back there… They weren’t entirely unlike the drawings in her sketchbooks, but they weren’t like them, either. They were much bigger and freakier than anything Zuzana had imagined.

As for the white guy, he looked almost human; he was supernaturally hot—holy, those eyes, those shoulders, he’d be right at home on the cover of a romance novel—but there was something so icy about him that she’d gotten a shiver in spite of practically melting to death in this desert hell.

“That was Thiago,” Karou said. “He’s… in charge.”

Zuzana had gotten that much from his lord-of-the-manor air. “In charge of what, exactly?” she asked. Something occurred to her and she stopped walking. “Wait. Where’s Brimstone?”

Karou stopped, too, and her stricken expression was all the answer Zuzana needed. “Oh no,” she said. “Not—?” Dead?

Karou nodded.

Dead. That word was not supposed to be part of this adventure. Horrified, Zuzana asked, “And… Issa? Yasri?”

Again Karou’s expression was her answer.

“Oh, Karou, I’m so sorry,” Zuzana said, and when she looked to Karou now, she really looked, not with the pure relief that had gripped her on first sight, but seeing her. She was too thin, sharp, her lips were chapped, her hair in a slapdash braid, her shirt—some Moroccan-style loose cotton shift—was wrinkled as if she lived in it, and her eyes had that bruised sleepless look. And not just sleepless; she looked… depleted.

Another shiver went down Zuzana’s spine. What had she walked into, brought Mik into? She’d gotten so caught up in the mystery and the challenge; of course she’d known something was going on with Karou. Her cryptic e-mail had made that clear, but she hadn’t really considered it might involve the word dead and this stench in the air that she was sure now was rot.

She swallowed hard. She had a fat headache, her feet were killing her, she really, really wanted a shower, and she had a sad presentiment that ice cream was out of the question, but there was someone she hadn’t asked after yet. She hesitated, afraid of seeing another bleak answer written on her friend’s face. “What about Akiva?”

An answer appeared on Karou’s face all right, but it wasn’t the one Zuzana had expected. The bleakness transformed to severity. Karou’s jaw clenched, her eyes narrowed. “What about him?” she asked, hard.

Zuzana blinked. What? “Um. Is he… alive?”

“Last I heard,” Karou said, and turned away. “Come on.”

Zuzana and Mik looked at each other wide-eyed and followed in her wake. Karou’s tense posture was a warning to keep silent, but Zuzana chose to ignore it. Frankly, it pissed her off. She’d come all this way; she’d solved a riddle that wasn’t even a riddle; she’d found Karou in the middle of the Sahara desert—okay, they weren’t really in the Sahara desert but close enough, and if she ever told this story she was absolutely going to say she had hiked into the middle of the Sahara desert in zebra-striped sneakers. Whatever. She really didn’t think she deserved to be stonewalled. “What happened?” she asked her friend’s back.

Karou glanced over her shoulder. “Let it go, Zuze. I’ll tell you everything else, but I don’t want to talk about him.”

How bitterly she said it. “Karou.” Zuzana reached for Karou’s arm; when her friend winced from her touch, she drew back her hand. “What?” Zuzana asked. “Are you hurt?”

Karou stopped walking. She let go of the packs she was dragging and hugged her arms to herself, looking so lost. So beautiful and so lost. How was it fair that she looked so beautiful with such an obvious lack of effort? “I’m fine,” she said, trying for a smile. “It’s you two Lawrence of Arabias I’m worried about. Would you just shush and let me get you inside?” Karou looked to Mik for support, and of course he agreed with her.

“Come on, Zuze, we can catch up on everything later.”

Zuzana sighed. “Fine. Bullies. But I might die of curiosity.”

“Not if I can help it,” said Karou, and Zuzuna gave Mik’s hand an involuntary squeeze, because it didn’t sound like she was joking.




Karou was still trying to push the thought of Akiva from her mind when they reached the palace. Just the mention of his name was enough to make her feel turned to stone. Well. Stone was better than pulp, and she was never going to let anyone make her feel like that again.

She stepped aside to usher her friends through the door. As dusty and worn on the outside as the rest of the kasbah, inside, the palace was, well, it was dusty and worn, too, but it was also unexpectedly lavish. Once home to the sloe-eyed brides of tribal chiefs and all their chittering broods, it was a complex of many grand rooms. There were pilasters of etched alabaster, badly chipped, and lantern niches in the shape of keyholes. The walls were paneled with faded silk, the ceilings carved in Arabic honeycombs, and a grand staircase swept upward, tiled in cracked lapis the color of Karou’s hair.

Zuzana turned in a slow circle, taking it all in. “I can’t believe you live here,” she said. “No wonder you gave me your dinky flat.”

“Are you kidding?” Karou had to laugh at the absurdity of the comparison. “I miss that flat so much.” And that life. “Trade you.”

“No, thanks,” said Zuzana at once.

“Wise girl.” Karou started up the stairs, pausing to offer Zuzana her arm. Between herself and Mik, who was not exactly peppy, they helped her up to the first landing, where a corridor led to Thiago’s suite and the small antechamber where Ten slept. A twist, and there were more stairs. “I still can’t believe you’re here,” Karou said as they climbed. “You have to tell me how you did it. After you get some rest, that is. You two can have my bed while you’re here.”

“Where will you sleep?” asked Mik.

“Oh, don’t worry about that. I don’t sleep much.”

Zuzana’s eyebrow rode high. “Really. Or eat, apparently. Or groom.” At the sight of that eyebrow—insult notwithstanding—Karou was flooded with love. Zuzana, here. It boggled. She crushed her in another hug, which did not stop Zuzana from asking, “So what do you do, exactly?”

Karou released her. “I’ll tell you everything else,” she had said, and she’d meant it. She’d been desperate for someone to talk to, hadn’t she, and now, like a wish granted, Zuzana and Mik were here. It felt like magic.

Karou took a deep breath, mindful of the state in which she had left her room, and put her hand to the heavy cedar door. “You sure you want to know?”

Eyebrow.

“Okay then.” Karou pushed open the door. “Come in and I’ll tell you.” Innocently, as they moved past her, she added, “Oh, and don’t trip over the body on the floor.”





46


UN-ALIVE


Some months had passed since Karou had first tested truth-telling on Zuzana back in Prague. It had been so unfamiliar then, talking about her secret life, that she hadn’t known how to begin. She’d just blurted it all out, angels and chimaera and all, and if Kishmish hadn’t appeared at that very moment—on fire—she would probably have lost her friend forever.

Well, the things she had to tell now made that first round of confessions sound plain tame, but Mik and Zuzana were primed to believe. They had, after all, just walked into a kasbah full of monsters. Still, the idea of resurrection might take some getting used to.

“Ohmygodwhyisthereadeadmonsteronyourfloor?” was Zuzana’s breathless question when she saw Bast’s new body sprawled before her.

“Well. She’s not dead exactly,” Karou hedged.

Zuzana reached out a dust-caked sneaker and gave the inert flesh a nudge. “She’s not alive.”

“True. Um. Let’s call her… un-alive.”

And thus did Zuzana and Mik learn that un-alive could mean dead—and usually did—but it could also mean new. “I made it earlier,” Karou told them, much as she might say she had knitted a hat, or baked a cake.

Zuzana was calm, effortfully so. She perched herself at the edge of Karou’s bed and folded her hands in her lap. “Made it,” she repeated.

“Yes.”

“Explain, please.”

Karou did explain, as succinctly as possible, gesturing to her tooth trays and neglecting to mention the small matter of the pain tithe. She also poured water into a basin so her friends could bathe their faces and feet—in that order, she specified with mock gravity—made mint tea, and set out dishes of almonds and dates. When they were done with the basin, she emptied it out the window without looking, hoping Thiago or Ten might be walking below, but no shout or growl answered the splash, and she closed her shutters against the heat.

She performed the resurrection right away, partly because it was easier to show what she did than tell, but also to clear the room of bodies so her friends could relax.

The awakening was the easy part. The magic was already done, so no tithe was required or rolling up of sleeves to reveal ugly bruised arms. Karou felt such shame for her bruises, and didn’t want Zuzana to see them, but it wasn’t called for at this stage. All she had to do was hang up the thurible Thiago had brought her, light a cone of incense, and place it on the body’s brow. Zuzana and Mik watched the whole procedure without blinking, though there was really nothing to see. The scent of sulfur, the creak of chain, these were the only signs. Karou alone could sense the soul that emerged from the vessel, lingering for just a moment before funneling itself into its new body.

Bast had, until now, looked rather like an Egyptian cat goddess: the slender human form, high breasts, feline head with exaggerated ears; Karou had maintained the feline aspect as much as she could, but had, at Thiago’s request, sacrificed much of the human. This new body was all sleek muscle, not as big as some, being made for agility. The arms and upper torso remained human for versatility with weapons—Bast was a good archer—but the haunches were leopard, for leaping and springing. And of course there were the all-important wings, sprawled open to take up much of the floor. Karou was glad this wasn’t one of her more monstrous creations, first for the sake of Zuzana and Mik, and now, unexpectedly, Bast.

Bast’s soul, she discovered, had a delicate beauty ill-suited to a soldier, and she wondered briefly what sort of life she might have had in a different world. Well, she thought as Bast opened her eyes, they would just never know.

Zuzana gave a small gasp. Mik just stared.

Bast lifted her head, eyes widening at the sight of new humans, but said nothing. She focused on her new self, testing her limbs with small gestures before rising unsteadily to find paws where hands and feet had been.

“All right?” Karou asked.

The soldier nodded and stretched her entire supple spine. The gesture was unmistakably feline; she might almost have been a cat waking on a window ledge. “It’s well done,” she said, her voice like a purr in her newly made throat. “Thank you.”

Something clenched in Karou’s chest. None of them had ever thanked her before. “You’re welcome,” she said. “Do you need help down the stairs?”

Bast shook her head again. “I don’t believe so.” She stretched again. “As I said, it’s well done.” Again, that clenching in Karou’s chest. A compliment. It was kind of ridiculous how grateful she felt for those few words. When the door settled closed behind Bast, she turned to her friends.

“Well,” said Mik, leaning back on one elbow, eyes lazy with feigned cool. “That wasn’t weird.”

“No?” Karou dropped into her chair and rubbed her face. “My weird gauge must be off. I’d have guessed it was at least a little weird.”

“Again,” said Zuzana.

“What?” Karou dropped her hands and looked at her friend.

Zuzana’s expression was vivid with amazement. “Again, again.” She bounced up and down at the edge of the bed, childlike, clapped her hands and demanded, “When can I do it? You’re going to teach me, right? Of course you are. That’s why you brought me here.”

“Teach you? I didn’t bring you here—”

But Zuzana wasn’t listening. “This is so much better than puppetry. Holy hell, Karou. You’re making living things. You’re freaking Frankenstein!”

Karou laughed and shook her head. “No, I’m not.” She’d had ample time to consider and discard that comparison. “The whole point with Frankenstein is where the soul comes from.” If a human created “life,” there could be no soul, only a poor benighted monster with no place in the world—or heaven or hell, either, if you were concerned about that, which Karou was not. “I have the souls already.” She pointed to the pile of thuribles. “I’m just making the bodies.”

“Oh, is that all?” drawled Mik. “Ho hum.”

But Zuzana was fixed on the dozens and dozens and more dozens of thuribles. Her eyes went round, her mouth, too. “All of those?” She was across the room in a flash, pulling one from the middle of the pile and setting off a minor landslide. “Let’s make one. Please? Show me how you make the body.” She was still bouncing; Karou feared she might ricochet. “I’ll be your Igor. Please please please? Look.” She went hunchback and dragged a leg. “What is your wish, Herr Doktor?” Snap, she was herself again. “Please? Whose soul is this? How can you tell? Can you tell?”

She had a million more questions and didn’t give Karou time to answer any of them. Karou looked helplessly at Mik, who sat back and shrugged, as if to say, this one’s all yours.

“Oh my god.” Zuzana snapped motionless as an idea seized her. “Art exhibit. Can you imagine?” She set the scene with spokesmodel hands. “Balthus Gallery, a half-dozen chimaera bodies in, like, decorative sarcophagi, and at the opening everyone’s all, ooh, ahh, what’s your medium, they’re so lifelike, and we just smile all Mona Lisa and swirl our wine around in our glasses? That would be the best thing ever. But no! Even better. We bring them to life! The smoke, the smell, those lantern things, and then these sculptures lift their heads and get up. Everyone would just think it was puppetry or something, what else could it be, and they’d be trying to figure out how we did it, and they’d be all posing for pictures with monsters and not even know it.”

She kept going, and Karou laughed helplessly and tried to stop her. “That is never going to happen. You understand that, right? Never.”

Zuzana rolled her eyes. “Duh, killjoy, but wouldn’t it be awesome?”

“It would be pretty awesome,” Karou allowed. She hadn’t really thought of her work as art, which struck her now as silly, especially in the wake of Bast’s compliment. A memory rose from her Madrigal life, how when she was a child newly in Brimstone’s service she had loved to come up with ideas for new chimaera, and had even drawn pictures to show him what she had in mind. She wondered if that was what had made Issa start her—Karou-her—with drawing. Sweet Issa, how she missed her.

“But you’ll let me help you, right?” Zuzana was earnest. She handed Karou the thurible she had pulled from the pile. “Let’s do this one first. Who is it?”

Karou took it and just held it. She didn’t want to say that Thiago decided who got resurrected and when. “Zuze,” she said instead, “you can’t.”

“I can’t what?”

“You can’t help me. You can’t stay here.”

“What? Why?” Zuzana began to come out of her spell of wild glee.

“Trust me, you don’t want to stay here. I’m going to take you back as soon as you’re rested enough to travel. I have a truck—”

“But we just got here.” She looked so betrayed.

“I know.” Karou sighed. “And it’s so great to see you. I just want to keep you safe.”

“Well, what about you? Are you safe?”

“Yeah, I am,” she said, aware as she said it how unsafe she felt pretty much all the time. “Me, they need.”

“Uh-huh.” Zuzana regarded her unhappily. “About that. Why you? Why are you here, with them? How is it you are doing this?”

That was a whole other neighborhood of the truth, and Karou felt as reluctant to broach the subject of her true nature as she was to reveal her bruises. Why all the shame? She took a deep breath.

“Because,” she said, “I’m one of them.”

“What kind?”

Karou blinked. It was Mik who had asked, and the question was so casual she thought she must have misheard. “What?”

“What kind of chimaera were you? You were resurrected, right? You have the tattoo eyes.” He gestured to her palms.

Karou turned to Zuzana and found her looking every bit as unflabbergasted as Mik. “That’s it?” she said. “I tell you I’m not human, and you’re all tra-la-la?”

“Sorry,” said Mik. “I think you neutralized our capacity for surprise. You should have started with that, and then told us you raise the dead.”

“Anyway,” added Zuzana. “It’s kind of obvious.”

“How is it obvious?” Karou demanded. She had believed she was human her whole life; she would not be persuaded that she had somehow been unconvincing at it.

“Just this aura of weird you have.” Zuzana shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Aura of weird,” Karou repeated, flat.

“Good-weird,” said Mik.

“So what kind?” Zuzana asked.

The question was so light, so offhand. Karou felt her palms go clammy. It was, after all, her tribe they were asking about, the family that had been ripped away from her so long ago. Flashes of the day besieged her, the long blood streaks on the floors where bodies had been dragged to the cave mouth and heaved over the drop. She breathed. They didn’t get it. Of course they didn’t. In their life it was not necessary to worry whether someone had been orphaned by slave raiders before you asked after their family.

Once upon a time she had had parents, a home, kin. Once upon a time, she had belonged somewhere, perfectly and without trying. “I was Kirin,” she said softly. I am Kirin, she thought, though everything Kirin had been taken from her: her tribe and her home by angels, her true flesh by the White Wolf, and now, maybe… Ziri. “I’ll show you,” she heard herself say.

She reached for her sketchbook and pencil and held them a moment, tight, wondering if she could do this. She had tried to draw Madrigal before, but found her hand deflecting her pencil into some other effort. She was afraid—of getting it wrong, of getting it right, of what she would feel at the sight of her former self. Would she feel like it was her true form, and long for it? Or would it be strange, as if she had never even been that long-ago girl? Either way, she couldn’t imagine it would make her happy.

Still, she thought it was time, and so she started to draw. A curved line. Another. Her horns took shape. Zuzana and Mik watched. Karou almost felt as if she were watching, too, rather than creating the image, and she was a little surprised by what emerged on the page. By who emerged.

“Um. You were a guy?” asked Zuzana.

Karou released her pent-up breath in a laugh. “No. Sorry. That’s not me; that’s Ziri. He’s…” It felt too brutal to say he was the last living member of her tribe, so she said only, “He’s Kirin, too.”

“Oh, phew. I don’t know why it would be freakier if you were a not-human guy in your previous body than a not-human girl, but it would.”

Mik asked, “Where is he? Is he here?”

“His team is overdue back from a mission in Eretz.”

Zuzana must have heard the anxiety in her voice. “What does that mean, overdue? Are they okay?”

“Maybe. I hope. They might just be late.”

Or they might be dead.