Daughter of Smoke and Bone(22)

But that was before he’d been warped by the weight of a terrible choice he’d made, bent and twisted and driven mad. He wasn’t welcome in the shop anymore, so Karou came out to meet him here.

Seeing him now, tender pity overcame her. He was bent nearly double, his gnarled olivewood walking stick all that kept him from collapsing on his face. His eyes were sunk in bruises, and his teeth, which were not his own, were overlarge in his shrunken face. The mustache that had been his pride hung lank and tangled. Any passerby would be taken with pity, but to Karou, who knew how he had looked only a few years earlier, he was a tragedy to behold.

His face lit up when he saw her. “Look who it is! The Wishmonger’s beautiful daughter, sweet ambassadress of teeth. Have you come to buy a sad old man a cup of tea?”

“Hello, Iz?l. A cup of tea sounds perfect,” she said, and led him to the cafe where they usually met.

“My dear, has the month passed me by? I’m afraid I’d quite forgotten our appointment.”

“Oh, you haven’t. I’ve come early.”

“Ah, well, it’s always a pleasure to see you, but I haven’t got much for the old devil, I’m afraid.”

“But you have some?”

“Some.”

Unlike most of the other traders, Iz?l neither hunted nor murdered; he didn’t kill at all. Before, as a doctor working in conflict zones, he’d had access to war dead whose teeth wouldn’t be missed. Now that madness had lost him his livelihood, he had to dig up graves.

Quite abruptly, he snapped, “Hush, thing! Behave, and then we’ll see.”

Karou knew he was not speaking to her, and politely pretended not to have heard.

They reached the cafe. When Iz?l dropped into his chair, it strained and groaned, its legs bowing as if beneath a weight far greater than this one wasted man. “So,” he asked, settling in, “how are my old friends? Issa?”

“She’s well.”

“I do so miss her face. Do you have any new drawings of her?”

Karou did, and she showed them to him.

“Beautiful.” He traced Issa’s cheek with his fingertip. “So beautiful. The subject and the work. You are very talented, my dear.” Seeing the episode with the Somali poacher, he snorted, “Fools. What Brimstone has to endure, dealing with humans.”

Karou’s eyebrows went up. “Come on, their problem isn’t that they’re human. It’s that they’re subhuman.”

“True enough. Every race has its bad seeds, one supposes. Isn’t that right, beast of mine?” This last bit he said over his shoulder, and this time a soft response seemed to emanate from the air.

Karou couldn’t help herself. She glanced at the ground, where Iz?l’s shadow was cast crisp across the tiles. It seemed impolite to peek, as if Iz?l’s… condition… ought to be ignored, like a lazy eye or birthmark. His shadow revealed what looking at him directly did not.

Shadows told the truth, and Iz?l’s told that a creature clung to his back, invisible to the eye. It was a hulking, barrel-chested thing, its arms clenched tight around his neck. This was what curiosity had gotten him: The thing was riding him like a mule. Karou didn’t understand how it had come about; she only knew that Iz?l had made a wish for knowledge, and this had been the form of its fulfillment. Brimstone warned her that powerful wishes could go powerfully awry, and here was the evidence.

She supposed that the invisible thing, who was called Razgut, had held the secrets Iz?l had hungered to know. Whatever they were, surely this price was far too high.

Razgut was talking. Karou could make out only the faintest whisper, and a sound like a soft smack of fleshy lips.

“No,” Iz?l said. “I will not ask her that. She’ll only say no.”

Karou watched, repelled, as Iz?l argued with the thing, which she could see only in shadow. Finally the graverobber said, “All right, all right, hush! I’ll ask.” Then he turned to Karou and said, apologetically, “He just wants a taste. Just a tiny taste.”

“A taste?” She blinked. Their tea had not yet arrived. “Of what?”

“Of you, wish-daughter. Just a lick. He promises not to bite.”

Karou’s stomach turned. “Uh, no.”

“I told you,” Iz?l muttered. “Now will you be quiet, please?”

A low hiss came in response.

A waiter in a white djellaba came and poured mint tea, raising the pot to head height and expertly aiming the long stream of tea into etched glasses. Karou, eyeing the hollows of the graverobber’s cheeks, ordered pastries, too, and she let him eat and drink for a while before asking, “So, what have you got?”

He dug into his pockets and produced a fistful of teeth, which he dropped on the table.





Watching from the shadow of a nearby doorway, Akiva straightened up. All went still and silent around him, and he saw nothing but those teeth, and the girl sorting through them in just the way he knew the old beast sorcerer did.

Teeth. How harmless they looked on that tabletop—just tiny, dirty things, plundered from the dead. And if they stayed in this world where they belonged, that was all they’d ever be. In Brimstone’s hands, though, they became so much more than that.

It was Akiva’s mission to end this foul trade, and with it, the devil’s dark magic.