Days of Blood & Starlight (25 page)

On an unpaved road in southern Morocco, a car crunched to a stop, disgorging two passengers and their backpacks before pulling away with a backdraft of dust and Berber shouts for luck. Zuzana and Mik shielded their faces, coughing. The drone of the engine grew faint, and as the air cleared and they could look around, they found themselves at the edge of a vast emptiness.

Zuzana tilted back her head. “Holy. Mik. What are the creepy lights?”

Mik looked up. “Where?”

She gestured to the sky—the entire sky—and he shuttled his gaze back and forth twice before settling on her and asking, “You mean…
the stars
?”

“No way. I’ve seen stars. They’re, like, these faraway specks in space. Those are
right there
.”

What by the light of day was an austere land the unrelieved
color of dust became, in the dark, a midnight tapestry ludicrous with stars. Mik laughed, and Zuzana laughed, too, and they cursed and marveled, their necks craned all the way back. “You could pick those bastards like
fruit
,” Zuzana said, reaching up and waggling her fingers at them.

They soon fell silent and stood looking out over the rough and rugged crust that was this land. It was like something out of a documentary—and not the feel-good kind. His voice bright, Mik said, “We’re not going to die out there, are we?”

“No.” Zuzana was firm. “That only happens in movies.”

“Right. In real life, fool city folk never die in the desert and turn into bleached skeletons—”

“To be crushed under the hooves of camels,” added Zuzana.

“I don’t think camels
have
hooves,” said Mik, sounding less than certain.

“Well, whatever they have, I would kiss a camel right about now. We probably should have gotten some camels.”

“You’re right,” he agreed. “Let’s go back.”

Zuzana snorted. “Really, intrepid desert explorer. We’ve been here less than five minutes.”

“Right, and where is
here
, exactly? How do you know this is the right spot? It all looks the same.”

She held up a map. Overscribbled in red ink and fluttering with Post-its, it was not an object to inspire confidence. “
Here
-here. Don’t you trust me?”

He hesitated. “Of course I do. I know how much work you’ve put into this, but… it’s not exactly our area of expertise.”

“Please. I’m an expert
now
,” she said. She would have aced any quiz on southern Morocco after the research she’d done,
and thought she should qualify as an honorary nomad for her efforts. “I know this is where she is. I’m sure of it. Come on, I even learned how to use a compass. We have water. We have food. We have a phone—” She looked at her phone. “Which doesn’t get a signal. Well. We have water. We have food. And we told people where we’re going. Sort of. What’s the risk?”

“You mean, besides… the monsters?”

“Oh,
monsters
.” Zuzana was dismissive. “You’ve seen Karou’s sketchbooks. They’re
nice
monsters.”

“Nice monsters,” Mik repeated, staring out at the stark starlit wilds.

Zuzana wrapped her arms around his waist. “We’ve come all this way,” she cajoled. “It can be one of your tasks.”

He perked up at that. “You mean the fairy-tale tasks?”

She nodded.

“Well, okay then. In that case, we’d better get moving.” He hoisted his backpack on and held hers up as she slipped her arms through the straps.

They stepped off the road, and all lay before them.

“Maybe I should have asked before,” said Mik. “But how many tasks are there?”

“There are always three. Now come on. It should be about twelve miles.” She grimaced. “Uphill.”

“Twelve miles? My love, have you
ever
walked twelve miles?”

“Sure,” said Zuzana. “Cumulatively.”

Mik laughed and shook his head. “Good thing you left your platforms behind.”

“As
if
. They’re in your pack.”

“My—?”
Mik heaved his shoulders up and down, jouncing
his pack and the attached violin case with it. “I
thought
it felt heavier.”

Zuzana looked innocent. On her feet were her approximation of sensible shoes. They
were
sneakers, but their foam soles were thicker than was strictly necessary, not to mention zebra-striped. She gave Mik’s hand a tug and plunged into the desert. They were both alive with the thrill of adventure, but it was Zuzana who practically gave off a hum, so tightly wound was her excitement. She was going to see her friend again.

Not to mention a giant sandcastle.

Full of monsters.

40

Another night crawled above the kasbah, the stars never so slow in their arc as when lives were in question.

Karou distracted herself with work, a new urgency in the building of bodies. She tried not to think as if she were starting from scratch, but it was hard, with such grim odds.

It could be days before they knew anything. It was an epic long way to the Hintermost, with all the free holdings and the vast southern continent between here and there. Without wings, it would have been several weeks’ overland trudging, but overland trudging was a thing of the past, and thank goodness for that. Karou remembered, when she was Madrigal, chafing at the unbearable pace of her battalions. But with wings, depending on what happened, the patrols could be back in days.

Or never.

The possibility that no one would come back at all was very real, and the strain of knowing that, and waiting, waiting to
know something by
never actually knowing
, it was as old as war itself and it was the worst kind of dragged-out, miserable, gradual understanding she could think of.

So she was startled to hear the sentry’s call just after dawn—too soon—and she was out the window in a stride, a string of teeth still clasped in her hands. She leapt up the parapet on tiptoe and kept going, up and into the sky. It was barely thirty-six hours and there were shapes on the horizon, a full patrol. It seemed like a miracle.

Another minute and they were near enough that she could make out Amzallag’s bulk. It was Amzallag’s team.

No Ziri then.

Yet.
She ignored her disappointment, glad at least to see Amzallag, and just marveled that a team—any team, if not the one she was most hoping for—had returned intact from such a fight, and so quickly! She settled to perch on the green palace roof tiles and watch them land. Thiago came out to meet them as he always did, clasping arms and not seeming out-of-the-usual pleased or surprised. She couldn’t hear what they said, but she could see that the soldiers’ sleeves were stiff with blood.

Another patrol returned, and another.

The sun climbed, the squadrons came home to roost one by one, and the miracle of it began to feel suspect. How was it possible that they had lost no one? By midmorning every team was accounted for but Balieros’s, and Karou could barely swallow around the lump in her throat.

“Where did they go?” she asked Ten back in her room, making a fidgeting effort at work.

“What do you mean? They went to the Hintermost,” said
the she-wolf, but Karou knew it was a lie. Aside from the fact that they were back too soon, too
alive
, and the mood was wrong. It was
heavy
.

From her vantage point she saw the soldier Virko, who with his spiraling ram’s horns reminded her a little of Brimstone, go behind the piss-rampart and fall to his knees to vomit. The sound of his retching rose and fell, traveling in waves across the court where the rest of the company, milling in a queerly quiet way, fell even quieter, and seemed to avoid looking at one another.

Amzallag sat under the arcade cleaning his sword, and when Karou looked down an hour later or even longer, he was still cleaning it, his movements jerky, angry.

The sight, though, that made Karou’s mouth fill with the sweet saliva that precedes gagging, was Razor. Whatever the teams had been doing for the past day and a half—which was not by any calculation enough time to reach the Hintermost and return—had added a swagger to his whisper-smooth reptilian stride, and… he carried a sack. It was a brown cloth sack, heavy and full, and… stained with some fluid seepage, its color indeterminate, thanks to the brown of the sack. Fighting back the gag, Karou knew what the seepage was, and its color, and no matter how she had berated herself for her willful ignorance just a couple of days earlier, she did not want to know any more than that.

She found the antelope teeth again in her hand and put them down. She kept going to the window. Ten snapped at her for aimlessness, but she couldn’t focus. This was wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

And then, finally, at the slow waning of the day’s hottest hour, the sentry called again.
Ziri.
Karou was out the window and into the air. The sky was pure cobalt, cloudless and depthless, hiding nothing.

It was also empty. She turned to the sentry tower, confused. Oora was standing duty, and she wasn’t even looking in the direction of the portal. The Wolf appeared beside her, and Oora pointed downhill, into the distance. Karou had to squint to see what they were looking at, and when she did, she breathed, “No. No no.
No.
”

Humans, two of them, slipping as they climbed the scree.

They were headed straight for the kasbah.

41

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.