Lips Touch: Three Times (19 page)

This landscape looked as if it had been disgorged by the mountains
themselves, as if it were the earth's own elemental imitation of

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the castles built by men. It was an otherworldly place and Esme
felt a tingling of recognition at odds with her awe for its alien strangeness.
"Where are we?" she asked Mihai.

He turned sharply and gave her a penetrating look. "I think
you know," he said.

And she realized she did. "Tajbel," she whispered. The
word formed on her lips like something she had always known.

"What's left of it," Mihai said, and Esme read shock in
his eyes. He turned in a slow circle and murmured words that Esme had heard Mab
speak.
"Avo afritim.
Bless and protect us."

Even she could sense that something was wrong here. The citadel
seemed deserted. Cold wind coursed among the spires but made almost no sound. A
drapery of vines claimed the bridges and chasm walls, and in many places the
finely carved stone was crumbling away. One whole bridge had collapsed into the
black, leaving only a few feet of stonework on either side, like walkways to
nothingness. "Who lives here?" Esme asked. "Where are they
all?"

Mihai didn't answer. He suddenly tensed and tilted back his head
like a predator scenting the air. Then his eyes widened and he spun toward
Esme, dropping to a crouch and shooting out one hand to grab her ankle and drag
her to him. It was all one fluid motion, and Esme cried out, startled, and
tried to twist away. But before she even knew what was happening, Mihai had
hooked one arm around her waist, too tight, and hoisted her off her feet. She
saw a blade glint as he drew a knife from some hidden sheath, but she hadn't
even time to gasp before he leapt with animal grace up onto the narrow
balustrade of the bridge, upon which he balanced with Esme still in his grasp.

She started to struggle but then a smell of rot hit her, and an

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arm, thick, white as fish, scab-pocked and horrifically long,
swung up from beneath the bridge to pummel the stretch of railing against
which, a second earlier, she had been leaning. The whole bridge trembled and
the balusters shattered like icicles. Blunt, clawed fingers scrabbled through
the shards, searching, searching for flesh. For Esme.

Finding nothing, the beast swung its other arm onto the bridge and
hauled itself up into the light of day. Esme gasped. Its eyes bulged and glowed
yellow over a flat nose, little more than slits on a nub of dead-looking flesh.
Its whole squat head appeared to be no more than an anchor for the massive
bones and muscles required to work its jaw. Esme watched in horrified
fascination as its mouth opened huge to reveal rows of flat, worn teeth and a
gullet wide enough to swallow animals whole. It bellowed and Esme heard herself
shriek. Holding her, Mihai backed up along the railing, graceful as a cat, and
the beast shambled after them.

"What is that?" she asked urgently.

The bridge shuddered again and Mihai swung to look behind him,
spinning Esme in an arc that revealed to her a panorama of Tajbel's bridges one
after the next all through the long ravine. She gasped. From beneath each
bridge she saw them coming, scrambling. Up from the blackness, arm over long
arm, quick and desperate, coming. They were sickly white, their skin stretched
taut, cheeks and guts sunken to hollows. They were starving, Esme realized,
their huge jaws gaping as if hoping someone might toss something in. Behind
Mihai another had pulled itself onto the bridge and more were coming after it,
crushing the fine stone balusters in their haste.

Again, frantic, she asked, "What are they?"

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Mihai glanced at her, taking his attention from the beasts for
just an instant to study her. His eyes were narrowed, one eyebrow raised in a
question. Only after he turned away again did he say, under his breath, "I
don't know. She would never tell."

"She -- ?" Esme started to say, but she lost her breath
when a beast lunged at them. Mihai swung his blade and severed the monster's
hand from its wrist. Black blood pulsed from the stump but the beast hardly
seemed to notice and kept coming.

For fourteen years the beasts had had to fend for themselves, and
they had not fared well. When the cats were all gone, they'd breached the forest
to hunt, but their putrid scent had chased away all prey but the sick and weak.
They'd grabbed at fish in the stream; they'd resorted to cannibalism.

The scent of blood temporarily diverted the other oncoming beasts
from Mihai and Esme, and they went for their wounded fellow. Beast against
beast they clashed, crazed. One knocked another off the bridge and it wailed as
it fell, a long, fading ululation unpunctuated by any thud or rock slide from
below. The cry just faded as if the chasm had no bottom. Jaws gaped and fingers
reached as the beasts came at Mihai and Esme from both sides.

More came. Too many more.

There sounded a great crack and the bridge lurched. It dropped a
foot and Mihai kept his balance, but then it started to break apart beneath its
load and crumble away into the abyss. Esme squeezed her eyes shut and screamed,
but her voice was lost in the roar of the collapsing bridge. Behind her shut
eyelids she imagined the blackness of the chasm rushing up to swallow her and
she thought of Mab back in London, alone, and she knew her mother wouldn't
survive losing her. She felt a terrible surge of anguish and then, at once,

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she realized she
wasn't
falling. Mihai's arm still held her
so tight she could barely breathe, and she wasn't falling. She fluttered open
her eyes. The bridge and the beasts were gone -- there were plenty more, to be
sure, and they were still coming, but that danger seemed distant now. The
bridge she had stood on had fallen away, and those beasts with it.

In Mihai's grasp, she was floating. Stunned, she looked up at him.

He was whispering fiercely and without pause. His Druj eyes looked
almost white in the gloom as he stared straight ahead, whispering his magic. He
and Esme drifted through the air and Esme's heart thudded in her chest, her
mouth hanging slack in amazement. Beasts grunted and swung along the walls of
the ravine, trying to reach them. Mihai carried Esme across the chasm on
gliding steps. It was like flying.

He brought her to the very last spire. It was taller than the
others and had once been joined to them by a bridge, but it was clear the
bridge had fallen long ago; its abutments had been swallowed by creeping vines
and all that was visible was one rusted truss jutting from the vegetation. From
it hung a small iron cage.

The sight of the cage thrust a spear of memory into Esme's
consciousness. It was only a glimpse, but for a split second she seemed to see
long red hair spilling out through the bars, and small hands clutching at them
from within. Then Mihai set her down in a portico before the lone spire's
battered door. Deep claw marks scored the wood. The beasts had tried to get in
here, but the door appeared intact. Mihai took a key from his pocket and fitted
it into the lock. As the door swung inward, a choking odor rushed out, a fume
of rot many years entombed. Esme stumbled back and swayed at the edge

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of the step, overcome with nausea. It was a sheer drop to the
chasm below, and Mihai reached out and gripped her arm, hard.

"Ow," she said, as he pulled her forward into the dark
reek of the spire. "Wait," she cried, resisting. "I don't want
to go in there --"

"The beasts will come," Mihai said, pulling her inside
and closing and locking the door behind them. Esme thought she would suffocate
in the dense, putrid air, and she dropped to her knees to retch. When she was
through and looked round, Mihai had gone deeper into the rough rock chamber. It
was dark, but not fully dark. A few small apertures in the rock admitted shafts
of light, enough to illuminate a milky mirror framed in jewels. Esme's memory
sang to her at the sight of it. She knew the mirror. She knew this place.

It was like a chapel, the rock ceiling high and vaulted. The walls
recessed into niches and were carved with the clustered shapes of winged men
and stags and wolves and moons, crows and serpents and crocodile beasts with
the heads of hawks. And amid the carvings Esme saw eyelids, dozens and dozens
-- perhaps
hundreds
-- of tarnished silver eyelids, just as she had
dreamed about on her fitful night in France before the wolves found her. In her
dream they had opened to reveal real eyes, but these were all closed. Viscous
yellow streaks had dribbled from some of the hinged corners and Esme realized
this was the source of the smell: dead eyes, hundreds of them.

Mihai watched her. Esme thought he seemed to expect something of
her.

"What is this place ... ?" she murmured. "Don't you
remember?" he asked softly.

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Remember?
She wanted to shake her head, to deny any
such memories. How could she remember a chapel of silver eyelids? How could she
recognize that iron cage hanging outside? And how could she know that Mihai's
lips had tasted like river? What was happening to her? In her memory things
were moving. Deep, as if her mind had a crypt that had been unsealed and in it
things were uncoiling -- stealthy things, clammy as reptile flesh, things she
didn't want to see by the light of day.

She caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye and
turned, freezing in place when she saw what it was. One of the eyelids had
opened. They weren't all dead. The sickly orb of an eye stared out at her; its
iris was brown, like her own eyes. Her
real
eyes. It seemed human. She
felt pinned in place by its scrutiny and held very still, not even daring to
breathe.

"It doesn't see you. That's not the way it works," Mihai
said, noticing her rigid posture. He gestured to the mirror and said,
"Watch."

Esme looked at the glass. Something stirred in its cloudy surface
and an image began to take shape. When it cleared, she saw a line of camels
swaying their way over a dune with a red sky behind them, a sinking sun, and
long shadows splayed out ahead of them. For an instant she felt as if she were
there, trudging with them in the sand. "Where ... where is that?" she
asked Mihai.

"You would know better than I."

She felt a flash of frustration. How would she know? She turned
from the mirror to retort, but before she could speak, something clambered up
from that seething crypt of memory and assaulted her. It was a face. A man. A
man with one eye. The socket of the other

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was hollow and raw and Esme's gorge rose in her throat. She shook
her head and the face receded. She whispered, "I
don't
know."

He shrugged. "Nor do I. Africa maybe. She had spies
everywhere. This is --
was
-- the Tabernacle of Spies. The Druj Queen
has always collected eyes. From village rats, eagles circling in the skies,
crows, even songbirds in the thickets. She would take one eye and bring it here
and leave the creature where it was, and she could see what her spies saw as
they moved through the world. All of them. And not just animals. Humans too,
like this one." He gestured to the staring brown eye. "She liked to
watch the world."

"She ... she plucked out their eyeballs?" Esme asked.
"That's ...
terrible!'
Then she paused, struck suddenly by the
memory of her mother and the one-eyed seagull on the beach years ago. Mab's
behavior didn't seem so irrational now.

Mihai was looking at all the silver eyelids and all the trails of
old rot that had oozed from them, and he said, "I suppose most of the
spies have died. She used to maintain her collection so carefully, replacing
old eyes with new. She won't be happy to see it like this. To see all of Tajbel
fallen to this," he said, and Esme thought she detected not only sadness
in him, but as he watched her face closely, also a hint of fear.

"Was this your city?" she asked.

"Not mine. I came from another tribe."

"You have tribes? What... what
are
you?"

He looked at her keenly again, and again she had the sense he was
expecting something of her. "We are Druj," he said simply.

"I know, but what
are
you?"

"Ah, Esme. I haven't learned how to tell that story
yet." "Is it true you don't have souls?"

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"We never die. What need have we for souls?"

"Is that all souls are for? For when we die?" asked
Esme.

Something happened in Mihai's face then. The cool, almost cruel,
animal flatness of his expression vanished and in spite of his sharp teeth and
his pale, pale eyes, he looked suddenly human. Vulnerable. "No," he
said, his voice like a growl in his throat. "They're for living too."

Esme felt a surge of pity for him and was surprised by a sudden
impulse to reach out and touch his hair. Her hand moved toward him before she
even realized it and she made a fist and drew it back against her side. She was
overcome by a powerful feeling of vertigo, as if she were standing at the edge
of that crypt and it was deep, so deep, filled with rising mists of memory,
with sulfur and scurrying things, and with terrible, terrible secrets. She had
to steady herself against the wall, feeling silver and stone beneath her
fingertips, and the old crust of liquified eyes.