Murder of Angels (43 page)

Neither awake nor dreaming, Niki Ky stands before Dezyin, and blood drips from its sickle, raptor beak. Its wings give birth to typhoons. “I am
not
your daughter,” she screams, “and you don’t get
anything
in my name!” but the god ignores her, as gods do, and leers hungrily down at the offering standing at its feet.

And Pikabo Kenzia’s arm swings round in an arc, drawing a vicious quarter circle, as her silver blade cuts the thick and smoky air.

And the god thing smiles, satisfied, ready to grant Pikabo’s wish.

Obsidian against skin, and the woman’s belly opens wide, spraying blood and releasing her intestines. And her scream wriggles up through the miasma of holy scents and the smoke and the swooping tapestry shreds suspended overhead. Not mute like Niki, this woman, and she screams again as the red witch’s knife continues to take her apart.

Her blood rushes down the trough and sizzles loudly in the fire pit.

And Niki feels herself

slipping

again.

Her mind anchored nowhere firm, no tether to her sleeping body, and this time it’s Dezyin, the old grifter whom the witches
call
Dezyin, who moves her like a wooden marionette.

The fish augur’s spells, and Spyder’s angels.

Dr. Dalby’s pills and books.

The Dragon’s jackals.

The witches’ flimflam man.

And the strings pull taut again as the dying girl crumples to the stone table, her eyes glazed with shock, eyes gone blank as any slaughter’s, and Pikabo Kenzia raises her knife again.

The blood, and the meaty smell of boiling blood, the chanting women and the drying lines traced on Niki’s body, all these and a thousand other things for strings.
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?

And the temple dissolves around her and, rising into that alien night, those Van Gogh stars, Niki looks down at moonlight rippling over the waters of the Yärin and falling on the ruins of the temple a thousand years from this moment, as the forest reclaims the stubs of shattered towers.

Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you

dance the ghost with me

And the wheels turn.

Daria lies on the dirt floor of the basement, curled fetus-small and round, watching as the flames from the ball bearing spread, consuming earth and wood and anything else they touch, and there is no smoke or burning sounds, and there is no heat.

Do not fail her. The Hierophant will need you, at the end,
and the black thing trapped inside the circle turns towards her and gurgles, as though her thoughts have grown so loud she may as well be screaming them through a bullhorn. When Archer Day fell, the blue glow illuminating the cellar flickered out, and now there’s only the strange light from the cocoon and the fire. It shimmers across the creature’s glossy hide, skin like living latex, across eight eyes that are all pupil. She recognizes the fear in those eyes, the fear she
ought
to feel, but doesn’t, because she knows she won’t live through this.

She thinks the ball bearing was meant to go
inside
the circle, but that can’t be helped now.

A few feet away, Archer Day’s body convulses inside its contracting, hardening shell, the midnight gout from the thing’s throat quickly setting around her like a polymer built somehow from the absence of matter and energy and sanity. Something from nothing, and
Yes,
Daria thinks,
something from nothing exactly,
and watches the creature’s face as it tries to catch her thoughts.

She’s pissed herself, and maybe that’s the very worst of it.

The fire spreads to the basement ceiling, and soon it’s eating away at the empty cocoon. There’s a sickening smell like burning hair, but still no smoke. This fire too complete for smoke, too intent upon consuming everything.

“I don’t know what to do next,” she whispers. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, Niki.”

The black thing gurgles pathetically once or twice and then turns away to watch the advancing fire.

“I found it for you, Niki, and I brought it here, but now I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do but die.”

Now the black thing has reared clumsily up on its splayed hind legs, and Daria realizes that it’s trying to crawl back inside the flaming chrysalis. The fire accepts it like an oblation, enveloping it in a heartbeat, and the thing begins to scream with the terrified, hurting voice of a teenage girl.

“You can’t even hear me, can you?” Daria asks Niki, as though she were sitting right there to answer the question. The creature stops screaming and collapses in a shriveling heap, and the fire begins to swirl around it, like a tornado trapped within the borders of the circle. Daria squints into the blazing whirlwind, the color that is no color, and wonders how long until it blinds her, how long until it devours her, too. When she closes her eyes, that alien light leaves no afterimages, and she opens them again.

And notices the child near the bottom of the basement steps. For a while, the child just stands there, indecisive, looking at Daria, and Daria thinks maybe she should tell her to run. Run for help, or just run, but she doesn’t. The girl turns her head and glances up the stairs, so Daria thinks she’ll run after all, until she turns back and warily descends the last few steps to the basement floor. She walks past what’s left of Archer Day, staying clear of the flames, and a few seconds later, she’s kneeling between Daria and the whirlwind. A silhouette against Hell, mouse-hair and eyes so blue they’re almost a bruised sort of white. Her overalls are ragged and threadbare, and she’s wearing nothing under them.

“You’re the lady that found my book, ain’t you?” she asks, and Daria feels the wet heat of the tears beginning to leak from her eyes.

“Yeah, that was me. I found your book.”

“No one was ever supposed to find my book.”

“I know that. It was an accident. I didn’t mean to find it.”

The child glances over her shoulder at the fire and then back at Daria. “I know that,” she says. “Did you read it?”

“Just a little bit,” and the girl reaches out and brushes Daria’s wet cheek with her fingertips.

“Are you going to die here, too?” she asks.

“I don’t know. What do you think I should do?”

The girl’s eyes seem to spark with some inner light of their own, some suspicion or misgiving, and then she leans close and whispers in Daria’s right ear.

“I’m only a moment. I can’t answer questions like that,” and then she sits up again.

“A moment,” Daria whispers, and looks past the child at the fire, still held within the circle, but straining at its circumference.

“If you stay, I’ll show you the rest,” the girl says. “I have it all in here,” and she touches an index finger to an angry pink-red scar between her eyebrows, a coarse sort of cross carved into her skin. “Where the angels can’t ever find it.”

“If I stay, will I be a moment, too?” Daria asks, wiping her eyes, sitting up, and she can see that the fire has swept over Archer Day’s body, and there’s no path left back to the stairs.

“You’re
already
a moment,” the child says, as though it’s the silliest question in the world, something everyone should know without having to ask.

“And you’ll stay here with me?”

“Yes,” the girl says. “I’ll stay here and tell you stories. I know so many. I didn’t write them all down. There wasn’t time.”

Daria puts her arms around the child and holds her close, holds her tightly as she dares. The girl doesn’t protest or struggle, only returns the embrace, and they hold each other as the silent inferno gorges itself, burning its way through the basement ceiling to the house overhead.

“Don’t you be afraid,” the girl tells her and rests her head on Daria’s shoulder. “Niki knows what to do now, I think, even if Spyder doesn’t. But don’t look up, please.”

And then the old house at the end of Cullom Street begins to come apart, collapsing in on itself, drawn down by the fire, and Daria does as the child’s told her to do and doesn’t look up.

Niki Ky stands alone near the center of the bone and wire span of the Dog’s Bridge. She stares into a blistering, acid wind, trying to glimpse the other side through spiraling veils of smoke and ash and brimstone, and waits for the nausea to pass. The clothes she was given in Padnée are all gone now, and her blue fur coat and backpack, too. Instead, her body is protected, head to toe, in what she first thinks is a suit of armor, part sci-fi animé and part Hollywood Joan of Arc, but then she realizes that it isn’t something that she’s
wearing
. It’s her own skin, changed somehow by the red witches, her skin grown smooth and shiny and jointed, a hard exoskeleton tinted the somber color of winter storm clouds—the bluest gray or grayest blue. Only her wounded right hand is unchanged; she’s lost the bandage and the Dragon’s bite shines red and swollen with infection. She knows now that there’s a poison festering in that hand that will kill her, that will make her no more than food for the maggot-god, if something else doesn’t kill her first. In her left hand is a broadsword, its tip resting on the bridge, the hilt clutched in her jointed, gauntlet fingers.

She knows that Daria’s dead, because she saw that much in the shimmering, lantern-show passage from Nesmia Shar to the Dog’s Bridge. And she also knows that the portal Spyder would have opened has been sealed shut at the other end. Maybe that means it’s all over and done with, and now she can lie down and
really
die. Or maybe it only means that everything will be worse somehow.

Niki stares down at the sword in her hand, certain that she doesn’t have even half the strength to lift such a ridiculous thing, but when she tries, it seems to weigh almost nothing at all. It might as well be a child’s sword of cardboard and aluminum foil, and she holds it up so that the broiling light of this place gleams hot across the blade.

“A sword,” she says incredulously, and the greedy wind snatches at her voice. “A goddamned sword.” Behind her lies the interior limit of the final counterclockwise turning band, and ahead of her are the scabby hills and igneous wastes of the hublands, and the Dragon, too, waiting for her deep inside the ruins of Melán Veld. But Niki knows that the red witches haven’t given her the sword and this armored skin for fighting the Dragon. When she looks to the far side of the bridge again, she sees Spyder walking slowly across the bones towards her, and Niki bends over and lays the sword down in front of her, because she isn’t going to use it against Spyder, either.

“It’s over!” Niki shouts, shouting to be heard above the roaring wind, and Spyder stops and gazes up at the low, sulphurous clouds. Niki follows her gaze and notices the Weaver’s portal for the first time, a point not very far above the bridge where the clouds have begun to swirl, a nascent, inverted cyclone, and she looks back at Spyder.

“It is fucking
over
!” she screams, but Spyder only shrugs and starts walking again; in another minute or two, she’s standing in front of Niki.

“Did the witches do that to you?” she asks and points at the shiny new skin. “Not half bad.”

“Listen to me, Spyder. Something’s happened. The portal’s been sealed shut from the other side. Can’t you feel it?”

“Yeah. Daria’s failed you again,” Spyder Baxter says and looks down at the sword lying on the bridge between them. “I’d hoped, when the Nesmidian’s mole got cold feet and jumped sides like that, that
she
might see that the philtre reached its nexus. But no, she was a fuck-up, too.” And when Spyder raises her head again, Niki sees that her pale blue eyes have gone a luminous, opalescent ultramarine, a blue so bright and piercing that Niki can hardly stand to face it.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she says. “Even if you could lure the Dragon into that thing, and even if I’d help, or even if you don’t
need
me, there’s nowhere for it to go.”

“As long as the fire burns and a single stick of that house remains, there’s time, Niki. As long as the surrogate’s ashes are caught up in the tempest, there’s time. So, no, it’s
not
over, not just yet.”

“Spyder—”

“Is that thing meant for me?” Spyder asks and kicks at the sword. “Is that the best they could come up with? A sword? Do you think it’s at least magical?”

“I’m
not
going to fight you. I don’t care how many women died to send me here.”

Spyder’s blue eyes flare, bleeding so much color that Niki has to look away. “Well, you can’t sit on the sidelines this time. And I can’t let you go on thinking that you can. It’s like Bob Dylan said, you know? You gotta serve somebody, and it might be the devil or—”

“Then I serve
me,
” Niki says and reaches for the sword. But Spyder kicks it, and the weapon goes spinning end over end and comes to a stop mere inches from the edge of the Dog’s Bridge.

“Nope. Sorry. That’s not one of the options. It’s either me or the Dragon. And that old cunt Pikabo can’t help you this time.”

“You
used
me,” Niki growls and hits Spyder hard, slaps her, and Niki can feel bone and teeth breaking beneath the blow, beneath the hammer that the exoskeleton has made of her hand. Blood spurts from Spyder’s nostrils, pours from her lips, and she staggers backwards a step or two and shakes her head like a stunned animal. Her blood spatters across the cracked, bleached bones at their feet, thick drops that quickly turn to glittering beads of crimson glass. She spits out part of a tooth, and it lands near Niki’s right foot.

“Nice piece of work, Pikabo,” Spyder mumbles and spits again, more blood and so, in only a moment, more red glass. “But it doesn’t make any difference.”

“The Dragon
belongs
here,” Niki says. “You’re the one who doesn’t. You and me both.”