Daughter of Smoke and Bone(24)

A bruxis. That was the one wish more powerful than a gavriel, and its trade value was singular: The only way to purchase one was with one’s own teeth. All of them, self-extracted.

The thought of pulling her own teeth out one by one made Karou feel woozy. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she whispered, appalled that he would even ask it. But then, he was a madman, and right now he certainly looked it.

She retreated.

“I wouldn’t ask, you know I wouldn’t, but it’s the only way!”

Karou walked rapidly away, head down, and she would have kept walking and not looked back but for a cry that erupted behind her. It burst from the chaos of the Jemaa el-Fna and instantly dwarfed all other noise. It was some mad kind of keening, a high, thin river of sound unlike anything she had ever heard.

It was definitely not Iz?l.

Unearthly, the wail rose, wavering and violent, to break like a wave and become language—susurrous, without hard consonants. The modulations suggested words, but the language was alien even to Karou, who had more than twenty in her collection. She turned, seeing as she did that the people around her were turning, too, craning their necks, and that their expressions of alarm were turning to horror when they perceived the source of the sound.

Then she saw it, too.

The thing on Iz?l’s back was invisible no more.





14





DEADLY BIRD OF THE SOUL



If the language was alien to Karou, it was not so to Akiva.

“Seraph, I see you!” rang the voice. “I know you! Brother, brother, I have served my sentence. I will do anything! I have repented, I have been punished enough—”

Akiva stared in blank incomprehension at the thing that materialized on the old man’s back.

It was all but naked, a bloated torso with reedy arms wrapped tight around the human’s neck. Useless legs dangled behind, and its head was swollen taut and purple, as if it were engorged with blood and ready to pop in a great, wet burst. It was hideous. That it should speak the language of the seraphim was an abomination.

The absolute wrongness of it held Akiva immobile, staring, before the amazement at hearing his own language turned to shock at what was being said in it.

“They tore off my wings, my brother!” The thing was staring at Akiva. It unwound one arm from the old man’s neck and reached toward him, imploring. “Twisted my legs so I would have to crawl, like the insects of the earth! It has been a thousand years since I was cast out, a thousand years of torment, but now you’ve come, you’ve come to take me home!”

Home?

No. It was impossible.

People were shrinking away from the sight of the creature. Others had turned, following the direction of its supplication to fix their eyes on Akiva. He became aware of their notice and swept the crowd with his burning gaze. Some fell back, murmuring prayers. And then his eyes came to rest on the blue-haired girl, some twenty yards distant. She was a calm, shining figure in the moiling crowd.

And she was staring back.





Into kohl-rimmed eyes in a sun-bronzed face. Fire-colored eyes with a charge like sparks that seared a path through the air and kindled it. It gave Karou a jolt—no mere startle but a chain reaction that lashed through her body with a rush of adrenaline. Her limbs came into the lightness and power of sudden awakening, fight or flight, chemical and wild.

Who? she thought, her mind racing to catch up to the fervor in her body.

And: What?

Because clearly he was not human, the man standing amid the tumult in absolute stillness. A pulse beat in the palms of her hands and she curled them into fists, feeling a wild hum in her blood.

Enemy. Enemy. Enemy. The knowledge pounded through her on the rhythm of her heartbeat: the fire-eyed stranger was the enemy. His face—oh, beauty, he was perfect, he was mythic—was absolutely cold. She was caught between the urge to flee and the fear of turning her back on him.

It was Iz?l who decided her.

“Malak!” he screamed, pointing at the man. “Malak!”

Angel.

Angel?

“I know you, deadly bird of the soul! I know what you are!” Iz?l turned to Karou and said urgently, “Karou, wish-daughter, you must get to Brimstone. Tell him the seraphim are here. They’ve gotten back in. You must warn him! Run, child. Run!”

And run she did.

Across the Jemaa el-Fna, where those attempting to flee were being hampered by those drawn to the commotion. She shouldered her way through them, knocked someone aside, spun off a camel’s flank and leapt over a coiled cobra, which struck out at her, defanged and harmless. Hazarding a glance over her shoulder, she could see no sign of pursuit—no sign of him—but she felt it.

A thrill along every nerve ending. Her body, alert and alive. She was hunted, she was prey, and she didn’t even have her knife tucked into her boot, little thinking she’d need it on a visit to the graverobber.

She ran, leaving the square by one of the many alleys that fed into it like tributaries. The crowds in the souks had thinned and many lights had been snuffed, and she raced in and out of pools of darkness, her stride long and measured and light, her footfall nearly silent. She took turns wide to avoid collisions, glanced behind again and again and saw no one.

Angel. The word kept sounding in her mind.

She was nearing the portal—just one more turn, the length of another blind alley, and she would be there, if she made it that far.