Days of Blood & Starlight (18 page)

“Come sleep,” Mik tried again. “The devils will still be there in the morning.”

“In a minute,” Zuzana said, but it wasn’t a minute. An hour later she had made a cup of tea and moved to the armchair beside the bed. The message boards weren’t getting her anywhere; that was where the crazies went to play. She narrowed
her search. She’d already traced the IP address of Karou’s single e-mail to Morocco, which wasn’t a surprise. The last she’d heard from her friend she’d been in Morocco. This wasn’t Marrakesh, though, but a city called Ouarzazate—pronounced War-za-zat—in a region of palm oases, camels, and kasbahs at the fringes of the Sahara desert.

Dust and starlight?
Why, yes. One would imagine.

Priestess of a sandcastle?
Kasbahs did look extraordinarily like sandcastles. Too bad there were, like, fifty million of them scattered over hundreds of miles. Still, Zuzana was excited. This had to be right. She got that dorky song “Rock the Casbah” stuck in her head and hummed it as she drank tea and paged through dozens of sites that mostly came up as trek outfitters or “authentic nomad experience” kasbah hotels, all of them with these sparkling swimming pools that didn’t look terribly nomad-y to her.

And then she came across a travel blog a French guy had written about his trek in the Atlas Mountains. It was only a couple of days old and mostly it was just landscape pictures and camel shadows and dusty children selling jewelry at the roadside, but then there was this one shot that caused Zuzana to set her teacup aside and sit up. She zoomed in and leaned close. It was the night sky with a perfect half pie of a moon, and—obscure enough that she wouldn’t have noticed them if she weren’t looking—shapes. Six of them, with wings, they were visible mostly for the way they blotted out the stars. Hard to determine scale in a sky photo, it was the subtitle that got her.

Don’t tell the angel chasers, but they have some seriously big night birds down here.

30

Karou went to the river to bathe—feeling almost absurdly indulgent about shampooing her hair, and more so about the wastrel fifteen minutes she took to let it dry fanned out on a hot rock—and when she got back to the fortress, the crossbar was missing from her door.

“Where is it?” she demanded of Ten.

“How would I know? I was with you.”

Yes, she had been, never mind that Karou hadn’t wanted her. It wasn’t
safe
for her to go off alone, Thiago had said, even to the shallows of the river that spilled out of the mountains and passed just downhill of the kasbah,
in plain sight of the sentry tower
—with some large rocks that she valued for the hiding of nudity from keen eyes. The chimaera were as intrigued by her humanity as Issa and Yasri had always been, but were less kind about it.

“What a queer plain thing you are,” Ten had observed today,
with an up-and-down look that took in Karou’s tailless, clawless, hoofless, and otherwise
less
self.

“Thanks,” Karou had said, sinking into the river. “I try.”

She’d had a fleeting impulse to let the current carry her away under the water, just downstream a ways where she could be free of the she-wolf’s presence for, oh, a half hour? Ten had been quite the fixture over the past several days: her assistant and chaperone, overseer and shadow.

“What will you do when I have to go back out for teeth?” Karou had asked Thiago that morning. “Send her with me?”

“Ten? No. Not Ten,” he’d replied, in such a way that Karou had instantly taken his meaning.

“What,
you
?
You’re
going to come with me?”

“I admit, I’m curious to see this world. There must be more to it than this desert. You can show me.”

He was serious. Karou’s stomach had seized. She’d been joking about Ten, but
him
? “You couldn’t. You’re not human—you’d be seen. And you can’t fly.”
And you’re
vile,
and I don’t
want
you.

“We’ll think of something.”

Will we
, Karou had thought, imagining Thiago in Poison Kitchen with his wolf feet kicked up on a coffin, spooning goulash into his cruel, sensual mouth. She wondered if Zuzana would swoon over his beauty as she had Akiva’s, and immediately thought:
No. Zuze would see right through him.

But there was a flaw in that. Zuzana hadn’t seen through Akiva, had she? And neither had she. Apparently Karou was a poor judge of monsters, which was most unfortunate considering her current situation.

“Who took it?” she demanded. Her heartbeat was out of whack, coming in little staccato bursts.

“What are you carrying on about? It’s only a piece of wood.”

“It’s only my
safety
.”

This was to be the cost of clean hair? How was she supposed to sleep when anyone could waltz right in? She slept poorly enough as it was. It struck her then, a swift little thought like the jab of a needle, that she had slept just fine with Akiva only a few feet away, that night in her flat in Prague. What was wrong with her sensors that she had felt safe with
him
? “This was
your
idea, wasn’t it? Because I locked you out the other day?” Even the wall brackets had been pried away, so she couldn’t just find another beam and slot it in place. “Do you want someone to kill me in my sleep?’

“Calm down, Karou,” said Ten. “No one wants to kill—”

“Oh, really. No one
wants
to, or no one
will
?”

Did she expect Ten to sugarcoat it? “Fine. No one
will
,” said the she-wolf. “You are under the White Wolf’s protection. That’s better than any piece of wood. Now, come. Let’s get back to work. There’s Emylion to finish, and Hvitha goes to the pit tonight.”

And that was that? She was just supposed to sidle meekly into her room and get back to work on the Wolf’s resurrection wish list? Like hell. Karou turned back toward the stairs, but Ten stood in her way, so she crossed the room to where the window stood open. If Thiago wanted her watched, she thought, he’d do better to assign a shadow who could
fly
.

Ten realized what she was about to do and said, “Karou…” just as she stepped into the air and, after floating there just long
enough to throw a defiant glare Ten’s way, let herself fall.
Fast
. A great whoosh of air, and she pulled up short at the last second to land in a crouch four stories down.

Ow.
Pulled up a little
too
short. The soles of her feet smarted, but it had surely looked dramatic. Ten’s head was out the window, and Karou fought the impulse to flip her off—the British V version, which was so much cooler than the American single-finger—but it was ridiculous either way.
Don’t be such a human
, she told herself, and went looking for the Wolf.

He was probably in the guardhouse, the half-razed structure where he held court with his captains, drawing maps in the dirt and then scuffing them away, pacing, ranting, planning. Karou started in that direction and passed Hvitha, who gave her a sharp nod and didn’t slow his steps.
I guess I’ll see you later
, thought Karou with a twist of pity. Hvitha hadn’t exactly been kind to her, but he hadn’t been unkind, either—he hadn’t been anything—and it couldn’t be very nice walking around knowing he was scheduled to have his throat slit in a few hours. Such a waste, it seemed, of Brimstone’s craftsmanship.

Not my call.

Karou passed clothes draped over a wall to dry in the sun, and it came to her that this place was beginning to feel downright inhabited—thanks to herself. Nine more soldiers in the past few days—her pace was improving with Ten’s help, but holy hell, her arms were a mess—and life seemed everywhere amplified. She could hear Aegir’s hammer and see smoke rising from the forge, smell the almost-but-not-quite-nothing smell of boiling couscous, and also the not-nearly-nothing-
enough
waft of rankness from the buttress that had become the default piss
wall of soldiers who couldn’t bother to walk out of the kasbah—or, hello,
fly
.

You’re welcome for the wings, now use them to pee farther away please thank you!

An argument, a hoot of laughter, and from the court: the
ching
of newly wrought blades heaved in newly wrought hands as her most recent revenants got the feel of their bodies, wings and all. She paused under an arch to watch and caught sight of Ziri at once. He was with Ixander, her greatest monstrosity to date, and was positively dwarfed by him.

Ixander had always been big—he was Akko, one of the larger tribes and a mainstay of the army—but now he stood grizzly height, maybe ten feet, thickset and tusked to Thiago’s specifications. His wings were almost as big as a stormhunter’s, and the muscle required to anchor them made his hunched bear back enormous. The body was inelegant, and Karou was sorry about it. Her brief contact with his soul had surprised her with its… meadowiness.

The impression of souls was synesthetic: sound or color, flashes of image or feeling, and Ixander’s had been meadowy. Dappled light and newbloom and quiet—the opposite of the colossal beast body that he seemed now, with Ziri’s help, to be mastering.

Ziri cast himself to the sky, graceful and silent, and beckoned Ixander to follow, which he did with neither grace nor silence. His wingbeats gave the air a sonic thrashing and kicked up flurries of dust that reached Karou even across the court. In the air, the pair began to drill fighting stances, and Karou found her focus not on Ixander but on Ziri, as she forgot her outrage
and her errand and was sucked back across years by the sight of a Kirin in flight.

Every time, it was like falling backward into Madrigal. She never felt more chimaera than in the first instant of catching sight of Ziri—and never more human than in the next, when it caught up to her what she was now. It wasn’t disappointing. She was who she was. It was just the slightest bit disorienting, a brief vibration between two selves that would always be separate, like two yolks in one shell.

“You could be Kirin again, you know,” Ten had told her at the river.

“What?” Karou, rinsing her hair, had thought she must have misheard.

“You could be chimaera. It might be easier for the others to accept you.” Again she’d given Karou that up-and-down look and chuffed at her unfortunate humanness. “I could help you.”

“Help me?” She had to be joking. “What, you mean
kill
me? Thank you sooo much!”

But Ten was not joking. “Oh, no. Thiago would do that, of course. But I would resurrect you. You’d just need to show me how.”

Oh, is that all?
“Tell you what,” Karou had said with a big mock-cheerful smile. “Let’s do
you
instead. I have
all kinds
of ideas for your next body.” Ten hadn’t particularly liked that, but Karou did not care much what Ten liked. She was still annoyed. Was this something Ten and Thiago had discussed? Maybe it would be easier to blend in if she looked like a chimaera, but it didn’t make sense to even think about it now. Karou needed to be human to get the rebels’ food for them, as well as cloth for
clothes, and material for Aegir’s forge, not to mention teeth. But would they expect it of her, eventually?

Well, they could expect all they wanted. She looked at the hamsas on her palms; they almost seemed like a signature. Brimstone had made her this body, and she was keeping it.

Laughter called her back to the moment. Ziri and Ixander were sparring, and Ixander had lost his balance and begun to spiral groundward. Trying to right himself, he thrust back on awkward wingbeats to crash into the crumbled parapet that edged the court, where he set off a cascade of dirt and ended up hanging by one hand from the wall.
Laughing.
And Ziri was laughing, and others, and the sound was so alien, so light. It made Karou realize she was spying, because they never laughed when she was around and would surely stop if they saw her. She drew back, not wanting that to happen.

Ziri darted forward in the air and smacked Ixander’s hand with the flat of his blade, making him lose his grip on the parapet and drop to the ground with a roar. He landed with concussive force and tried to swat at Ziri, who was taunting him from above, still laughing as he darted just near enough to whack Ixander on the helmet before pulling clear. Some of the others gathered around taunting—in unmistakable good humor—and when Ixander leapt airborne in pursuit, they cheered.