Days of Blood & Starlight (47 page)

Karou exhaled a long, shaky breath. Ziri was a soldier, and a Kirin, she told herself. He could take care of himself. At least, that was the surface of her thoughts. Underneath, in the sucking currents of her wild, fist-beating powerlessness, she knew… she knew that she would probably never see him again. “Tonight,” she said. “I’m getting you out of here.”

Zuzana started to argue.

Karou cut her off. “This is not a good place for you,” she said
in a rasping whisper, as emphatic as she could make it. “Have you wondered how I died?”

“How you—? Uh. Battle? I assumed.”

“Wrong. I fell in love with Akiva, and Thiago had me beheaded.” Plain and brutal. Zuzana gasped. “So now you know,” said Karou. “Will you please let me get you to safety?”

“But what about you?”

“I have to take care of this. It has to be me. Zuze. Please.”

In as small a voice as Karou had ever heard her use, Zuzana said, “Okay.”

Mik asked, “Um… how?”

It was a good question. Karou was watched, that much was clear, and not just by Ten. She didn’t have Ziri to rely on now, and she couldn’t risk resurrecting Balieros’s patrol—it would be too transparent. There was no one else she could be sure of, but she did have one idea that didn’t involve any other chimaera.

She took another deep, uneven breath and considered Zuzana and Mik. They were emphatically not soldiers, and it wasn’t merely that they were human, but that they were supremely… first world, utterly unaccustomed to hardship of any kind. The hike here had almost done them in, and Zuzana had only been sort of joking when she said that losing at cakewalk was the worst day of her life. Could they handle the tithe? They would just have to.

“Could you walk back out of here, if you had to? At night, when it’s not so hot?”

They nodded, huge-eyed.

Karou scraped her lip between her teeth and worried it. “Do you think…” she asked haltingly, hoping it wasn’t the worst
idea she had ever had, “that you might like to learn… to, um, turn invisible?”

She would have given much in that moment for a camera, to preserve forever the expression on her best friend’s face.

The answer, needless to say, was
yes
.

They worked at it all day.

“This is a little less awesome than it could be,” was as close as Zuzana came to complaining about the tithe, but her glee, when she came visible again after her first success at glamour, was bright and beautiful, as she was bright and beautiful, and Karou couldn’t help it—she grabbed her into the kind of overlong, too-tight hug that could really only mean:
This is it, I’ve loved knowing you.
When she finally drew back, Zuzana’s eyes were wet, her mouth skewed into an angry don’t-cry grimace, and she didn’t say a word.

Karou still had to pull off some resurrections so that she might present soldiers to Thiago, lest he guess that her attention had been elsewhere that day. She managed it with Issa’s help—three new soldiers—and she managed to get through dinner, too, eating mechanically, and now more than ever, she scanned the host and wondered: Who among them had the courage to stand up to the Wolf?

For such a reason as she was now ready to give them, she told herself, there must be some.

Zuzana and Mik gave away nothing, sitting as usual on the floor among soldiers, learning words in an otherworldly language
they would never again have the opportunity to speak.
Friend, fly, I love you.
Virko thought this last one was hilarious, but Karou felt pulped by it. Mik played Mozart that night, and Karou saw Bast moved to tears, and later, much later, in her room, she handed vises to her friends, and put one on herself, and led them out unseen into the desert night. They took only what fit in their pockets—money, dead phones, passports, the compass—and canteens slung over their shoulders. Everything else they left.

Karou walked a little way with them, then flew back to the kasbah to watch and make sure that their absence went unnoticed.

It did.

Tucked into her tooth tray she found a folded paper: a drawing of Zuzana and Mik, and written out phonetically, the Chimaera for “I love you.” She broke down then, and Issa held her, and she held Issa, and they both wept, but by the time the sun rose and the kasbah came to life, they were calm again. Pale and subdued. Ready.

It was time.

Once upon a time, chimaera descended by the thousands into a cathedral beneath the earth.

And never left.

65

It was a choice. When the end came, every chimaera in Loramendi had it to make. Well, not the soldiers. They would die defending the city. And not the children. Parents chose for them, and the seraph invaders would later remember very few children in the city when the siege finally broke the iron bars of the Cage. Maybe none, in fact. So much had already burned and collapsed. It was hard to make an accounting in all the rubble.

So the angels never guessed what lay buried beneath their feet.

Go down to the cathedral beneath the city. Carry your babies and lead your children by the hand. Go down into the airless dark and never come out.

Or stay above and face the angels.

It was a choice of deaths, and it was easy. The one below would be gentler. And perhaps… possibly… less permanent.

Brimstone didn’t promise. How could he? It was only a dream.

“You were always the dreamer between the two of us,” the Warlord said to him, when Brimstone came to propose it. They were two old men—“old monsters,” as the enemy would have it—who had risen from the most abject slavery to tear down their masters and carve out for their people a thousand years of freedom. A thousand years and no more. It was over, and they were very tired.

“I’ve had better dreams,” said Brimstone. “That the cathedral was for blessings and weddings, instead of resurrection. I never dreamed it a tomb.”

The cathedral was the massive natural cavern that lay beneath the city. Few had ever seen its carved stalactites but the revenants who woke on its great stone tables. Whatever blessings and weddings Brimstone had dreamed for it when first he found it and built a city on it, it had only ever seen the one purpose: revenant smoke and hamsas.

And now this.

“Not a tomb,” said the Warlord, putting a hand on his friend’s hunched shoulder. “Isn’t that the point? Not a tomb at all, but a thurible.”

In a thurible, properly sealed, souls could be preserved indefinitely. And if the cathedral were sealed, its vent shafts blocked and its long corkscrew stair collapsed and concealed, Brimstone had proposed that it might serve, in essence, as a massive vessel for the preservation of thousands of souls.

“It may only ever be a tomb,” he warned.

“But whose idea is this?” asked the Warlord. “Am
I
to
convince
you
, who brought it to me? You could look out the window today, see the sky raining fire, and say that it has all been for nothing, everything we’ve ever done, because now we’ve lost. But folk were born and lived and knew friendship and music in this city, ugly as it is, and all across this land that we fought for. Some grew old, and others were less lucky. Many bore children and raised them, and had the pleasure of making them, too, and we gave them that for as long we could. Who has ever done more, my friend?”

“And now our time is done.”

The Warlord’s smile was all rue. “Yes.”

The tomb—the vessel—could not be for them, because the angels would leave no stone unturned until they found the Warlord and the resurrectionist. The emperor must have his finale. This might be Brimstone’s dream, but its fulfillment would depend on another.

“Do you believe that she’ll come?” the Warlord asked.

Brimstone’s heart was heavy. He couldn’t know if Karou would ever find her way back to Eretz; he hadn’t prepared her for anything like this. He’d given her a human life and tried to believe that she might escape the fate of the rest of her people, the endless war, the broken world. And now he would hang it all around her neck? Heavy, heavy, keys to a shattered kingdom. The weight of all these souls would be as good as shackles to her, but he knew that she wouldn’t shirk them. “She will,” he said. “She’ll come.”

“Well then, we do it. You named her aptly, old fool. Hope, indeed.”

So they put it to the people to choose, and the choice was
easy. Everyone knew what was coming; their lives had shrunk down to huddling and hunger—and fire, always fire—as they waited for the end. Now the end was here, and… like a dream this hope came to them; it came in whispers to their dark dwellings, their ruins and refugee squats. They knew, all of them, the devastation of waking from hopeful dreams to darkness and the stench of siege. Hope was mirage, and none trusted easily to it. But this was real. It was not a promise, only a hope: that they might live again, that their souls and their children’s souls might bide in peace, in stasis until such a day…

And this was the other hope, heavier still, that Brimstone hung around Karou’s neck, and the greater task by far: that there may come such a day at all, and a world for them to wake to. Brimstone and the Warlord had never been able to achieve it with all their armies, but Madrigal and the angel she loved had shared a beautiful dream, and, though that dream had died on the executioner’s block, Brimstone knew better than anyone that death is not the end it sometimes seems.

By the thousands the folk of the united tribes filed down the long spiral stair. It would be crushed behind them; there would be no way out. They beheld the cathedral and it was glorious. They pressed in tight and sang a hymn. It was possible that it would never be more than their tomb, and yet, this was the easy choice.

The hard choice and true heroism was in those who chose to stay above, because they couldn’t all go. If every chimaera vanished from Loramendi, the seraphim would guess what they had done and go digging. So some citizens—
many
—had to stay and give the angels satisfaction. They had to
be
the angels’ satisfaction,
the hard-won corpses to feed to their fires. The old stayed, as did most who had already lost their children, and an undue number of the ravaged refugees who had endured so much and had but this one thing left to give.