But… this place. These dead. With her muddled head, Karou felt unequal to the mystery. The white-haired man’s hand lay right before her, its hamsa taunting her. She laid her own beside it to compare the marks, but his lay in the shadow of his body, so she reached out to lift it into the light.
The marks were identical. She saw that as her mind worked at something else, a too-slow warning from her sluggish senses.
His hand, his dead hand… it was warm.
It was not dead.
He was not dead.
A whip-crack movement and he came upright, spinning on his knees. His hand, which had lain inert in hers, caught her throat and lifted her off her feet, slamming her down onto the stone table. Her head. Against stone. Her vision blurred. When it cleared again he was above her, eyes ice-pale, lips drawn back over fangs. She couldn’t breathe. His hand still clutched her throat. She clawed at it, struggled to throw him off, managed to get her knees between them and kick out.
His grip loosened and she gasped a breath, tried to scream, but he was over her again, heavy and nak*d and bestial, and she fought him with everything in her, fought him with a wildness that plunged them over the edge of the table to the floor. It was chaos and thrashing, and bare limbs so strong Karou couldn’t break free. He was on her, straddling her legs, staring, and some kind of crazed madness seemed to clear from his eyes. His lips eased from their snarl and he looked human again, almost, and beautiful, but still terrifying and… confused.
He gripped her by the wrists, forced open her hands to see her hamsas, then looked sharply at her face. His gaze roved over all of her so that she felt as if she were the nak*d one, and then he gave a thick growl that sent shudders through her. “Who are you?”
She couldn’t answer. Her heart was pounding. Her wounds were on fire. And, as ever, she had no answer.
“Who are you?” He dragged her upright by her wrists and flung her back onto the stone table and was over her again. His movements were fluid and animal, his teeth sharp enough to rip out her throat, and all at once Karou saw how her trespass through the other door was going to end: in a pool of blood. She found her breath.
And screamed.
18
BATTLE NOT WITH MONSTERS
“Girl?” Izîl squinted up at Akiva. “You… you mean Karou?”
Karou? Akiva knew that word. It meant hope in the language of the enemy. So not only did she bear the hamsas, she had a chimaera name. “Who is she?” he demanded.
Clearly terrified, the old man pulled himself up a little straighter. “Why do you want to know, angel?”
“I’m asking the questions,” said Akiva. “And I suggest you answer them.” He was impatient to get on and meet the others, but loathe to leave with this mystery hanging over him. If he didn’t find out who the girl was now, he would never know.
Eager to be helpful, Razgut supplied, “She tastes like nectar and salt. Nectar and salt and apples. Pollen and stars and hinges. She tastes like fairy tales. Swan maiden at midnight. Cream on the tip of a fox’s tongue. She tastes like hope.”
Akiva was stone-faced, unreasonably disturbed by the thought of this abomination tasting the girl. He waited until Razgut gibbered into silence before he said, his voice low in his throat, “I didn’t ask what she tastes like. I asked who she is.”
Izîl shrugged, fluttering his hands in an effort at nonchalance. “She’s just a girl. She draws pictures. She’s nice to me. What more can I tell you?”
His voice was glib, and Akiva saw that he thought he could protect her. It was noble, and laughable. Having no time to waste playing games, he decided on a more drastic approach. He seized Izîl by his shirtfront and Razgut by one of his jagged bone spurs and leapt airborne with the pair of them, hauling their combined weight as if it were nothing.
It was only a matter of wingbeats before all of Marrakesh glimmered below them. Izîl was screaming, his eyes squeezed shut, but Razgut was silent, his face displaying such unutterable longing it shot pity into Akiva’s heart like a splinter—more painful, indeed, than the shard of wood Karou had stabbed him with. It surprised him. Over the years he had learned to deaden himself, and he had lived so long with the deadness that he believed pity and mercy were extinguished in him, but tonight he had experienced dull stabs of both.
Slowly spiraling downward like a bird of prey, he brought the two to rest on the domed peak of the city’s tallest minaret. They scrabbled to hold on and failed, sliding down its slick surface, paddling frenziedly for handholds and footholds before coming to rest against a low, decorative parapet that was all that kept them from plummeting over the edge, several hundred feet to the rooftops of the mosque below.
Izîl’s face was gray, his breathing thin. When Razgut shifted himself on the old man’s back, they teetered perilously close to the edge. Izîl let out a stream of panicked commands to stay low, not shift, hang on to something.
Akiva stood over them. Behind him, the serrated ridge of the Atlas Mountains shone in the moonlight. Breezes teased the flame-feathers that made up his wings, setting them dancing, and his eyes were the muted glow of embers. “Now. If you wish to live, tell me what I want to know. Who is the girl?”
Izîl, with a horror-struck glance over the edge of the roof, answered in a rush. “She’s nothing to you, she’s innocent—”
“Innocent? She bears the hamsas, traffics teeth for the devil sorcerer. She doesn’t seem innocent to me.”
“You don’t know. She is innocent. She just runs errands for him. That’s all.”
Was that all she was, some kind of servant? It didn’t explain the hamsas. “Why her?”
“She’s the Wishmonger’s foster daughter. He raised her from a baby.”
Akiva processed this. “Where did she come from?” He knelt to bring his face closer to Izîl’s. It felt very important that he know.
“I don’t know. I don’t! One day she was just there, cradled in his arm, and after that she was always there, no explanations. Do you think Brimstone told me things? If he had, maybe I would still be a man instead of a mule!” He gestured to Razgut and fell into lunatic laughter. “ ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ Brimstone said, but I didn’t listen, and look at me now!” Tears sprang to the wrinkled corners of his eyes as he laughed and laughed.
Akiva was rigid. Trouble was, he believed what the hunchback said. Why would Brimstone tell his human minions anything, especially mad fools like this? But if Izîl didn’t know, what hope did Akiva have of finding out? The old man was his only lead, and he had lingered too long already.
“Then tell me where to find her,” he said. “She was friendly with you. Surely you know where she lives.”
Woe flickered in the old man’s eyes. “I can’t tell you that. But… but… but I can tell you other things. Secret things! About your own kind. Thanks to Razgut, I know far more of seraphim than I do of chimaera.”
He was bargaining, still hoping to protect Karou. Akiva said, “You think there’s anything you can tell me about my kind?”
“Razgut has stories—”
“The word of the Fallen. Has he even told you why he was exiled?”
“Oh, I know why,” said Izîl. “I wonder if you do.”
“I know my history.”
Izîl laughed. One cheek was pressed flat against the dome of the minaret, and his laugh came out as a wheeze. He said, “Like mold on books, grow myths on history. Maybe you should ask someone who was there, all those centuries ago. Maybe you should ask Razgut.”
Akiva cast a cold eye over the quivering Razgut, who was whispering his unceasing chant of “Take me home, please, brother, take me home. I have repented, I have been punished enough, take me home….”
Akiva said, “I don’t need to ask him anything.”
“Ah, no? I see. A man once said, ‘All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.’ Mark Twain, you know. He had a fine mustache. Men of wisdom so often do.”
Something in the old man was shifting as Akiva watched. He saw him lift up his head to peer out over the stone lip that was keeping him from sliding to his death. His madness seemed to have abated, if indeed it hadn’t all been an act to begin with. He was gathering up the tatters of his courage, which, under the circumstances, was not unimpressive. He was also stalling.
“Make this easy, old man,” said Akiva. “I didn’t come here to kill humans.”
“Why did you come? Even the chimaera don’t trespass here. This world is no place for monsters—”
“Monsters? Well, then. I am not a monster.”
“No? Razgut doesn’t think he is, either. Do you, monster of mine?”
He asked it almost fondly, and Razgut cooed, “Not a monster. A seraph, a being of smokeless fire, yes, forged in another age, in another world.” He was looking hungrily at Akiva. “I’m like you, brother. I’m just like you.”
Akiva did not enjoy the comparison. He said, “I’m nothing like you, cripple,” in an acid tone that made Razgut flinch.
Izîl reached up to pat the arm that was like a vise around his own neck. “There, there,” he said, his voice ringing hollow of compassion. “He can’t see it. It is a condition of monsters that they do not perceive themselves as such. The dragon, you know, hunkered in the village devouring maidens, heard the townsfolk cry ‘Monster!’ and looked behind him.”
“I know who the monsters are.” Akiva’s tiger eyes darkened. How well he knew. The chimaera had reduced the meaning of life to war. They came in a thousand bestial forms, and no matter how many of them you killed, more always came, and more.
Izîl replied, “A man once said, ‘Battle not with monsters lest you become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’ Nietzsche, you know. Exceptional mustache.”
“Just tell me—” Akiva began, but Izîl cut him off.
“Have you ever asked yourself, do monsters make war, or does war make monsters? I’ve seen things, angel. There are guerrilla armies that make little boys kill their own families. Such acts rip out the soul and make space for beasts to grow inside. Armies need beasts, don’t they? Pet beasts, to do their terrible work! And the worst is, it’s almost impossible to retrieve a soul that has been ripped away. Almost.” He gave Akiva a keen look. “But it can be done, if ever… if ever you decide to go looking for yours.”
Fury flashed through Akiva. Sparks rained from his wings, to be borne by breezes over the rooftops of Marrakesh. “Why would I do that? Where I come from, old man, a soul’s as useless as teeth to the dead.”
“Spoken, I think, by one who still remembers what it was like to have one.”
Akiva did remember. His memories were knives, and he was not pleased to have them turned against him. “You should worry about your own soul, not mine.”
“My soul is clean. I’ve never killed anyone. But you, oh you. Look at your hands.”