Daughter of Smoke and Bone(28)

A thousand years he had lived like this, and he was beside himself with joy to see Akiva.

Iz?l was not so happy. He cowered against the stinking mound of refuse, more afraid of Akiva than he had been of the mob. While Razgut gibbered, “My brother, my brother,” in an ecstatic chant, the old man shook with a palsy and tried to back away, but there was nowhere for him to go.

Akiva loomed over him, the brilliance of his unglamoured wings lighting the scene like daylight.

Razgut reached longingly toward Akiva. “My sentence is up, and you’ve come to bring me back. That’s it, isn’t it, my brother? You’re going to take me home and make me whole again, so I can walk. So I can fly—”

“This has nothing to do with you,” said Akiva.

“What… what do you want?” Iz?l choked out in the language of the seraphim, which he had learned from Razgut.

“The girl,” Akiva said. “I want you to tell me about the girl.”





17





WORLD APART



On the far side of the other door, Karou discovered a passage of dull black stone. Peering out, she could see that the corridor went on for some ten feet before turning out of sight. Just before it did, there was a window—a narrow, barred niche at the wrong angle for her to see through from where she stood. White light washed in, painting rectangles across the floor. Moonlight, Karou thought, and she wondered what landscape she would see if she crept over and looked out. Where was this place? Like the shop’s front door, did this rear one open onto myriad cities, or was this something else altogether, some depth of Brimstone’s Elsewhere that she couldn’t begin to fathom? A few steps and she might know that, if nothing else. But did she dare?

She listened hard. There were sounds but they seemed far away, echoing calls in the night. The passage itself was silent.

So she did it. She prowled out. Quick silent steps, high on the balls of her bare feet, and she was over to the window. Peering through its heavy iron bars. Seeing what was there.

Her facial muscles, tense with anxiety, abruptly slackened with the onset of total awe, and her jaw actually dropped. It was a second before she realized it and snapped it closed, wincing when the sharp report of her teeth broke the silence. She leaned forward, taking in the scene before and below her.

Wherever this was, she was sure of one thing: It was not her world.

In the sky were two moons. That was the first thing. Two moons. Neither was full. One was a radiant half disc high overhead, the other a pale crescent just rising to clear a crust of mountain. As for the landscape they illuminated, she saw she was in a vast fortress. Huge, bermed defensive walls met at hexagonal bastions; a generous town was laid out in the center of it all, and crenellated towers—in one of which, Karou gauged by her high vantage point, she must be—reared above it all, with the silhouettes of guards pacing at their peaks. But for the moons, it might have been a fortified town of old Europe.

It was the bars that made it something else.

Extraordinarily, the city was banded over by iron bars. She’d never seen anything like it. They arched over the whole of the place from one expanse of rammed-earth walls to the next, beetle-black and ugly, enclosing even the towers. A quick study gave away no gaps; the bars were spaced so closely that no body could possibly squeeze between them. The streets and plazas of the town were entirely screened from above as if they existed within a cage, and moonlight cast rickrack shadows over everything.

What was it about? Were the bars meant to keep something in or out?

And then Karou saw a winged figure sweeping down out of the sky and she flinched, thinking she had her answer. An angel, a seraph—that was her first thought, her heart starting to hammer and her wounds to throb. But it wasn’t. It passed overhead and out of sight, and she clearly saw that its form was animal—some sort of winged deer. A chimaera? She had always supposed there must be more, though she had only ever seen her four, who would never say if there were others.

It hit her now that this whole city must be inhabited by chimaera, and that beyond its walls lay an entire world, a world with two moons, also inhabited by chimaera, and she had to grip the bars to hold herself upright as the universe seemed to tremble and grow larger around her.

There was another world.

Another world.

Of all the theories she’d dreamed up about the other door, she’d never imagined this: a world apart, complete with its own mountains, continents, moons. She was already light-headed with blood loss, and the revelation made her reel so she had to clutch at the window bars.

It was then that she heard voices. Near. And also familiar. She had listened to their murmurs all her life as their incongruous heads bent together in discussions of teeth. It was Brimstone and Twiga, and they were coming around the corner.

“Ondine has brought Thiago,” Twiga was saying.

“The fool,” Brimstone breathed. “Does he think the armies can afford the loss of him at a time like this? How many times must I tell him, a general need not fight at the front?”

“It is because of you that he knows no fear,” said Twiga, to which Brimstone only snorted, and that snort sounded dangerously close.

Karou almost panicked. Her eyes darted back to the door she had come from. She didn’t think she could reach it. Instead, she pressed herself into the window niche and held stone-still.