Daughter of Smoke and Bone(29)

They passed her, near enough to touch. Karou feared that they would go into the shop and close the door behind them, trapping her in this strange place. She was ready to cry after them to prevent it, but they bypassed the door. Her panic subsided. In its wake, something else flared: anger.

Anger at the years of secrets, as if she weren’t worthy of trust or even the barest details of her own existence. Her anger made her bold, and she determined to find out more—as much as she could while she was here. This chance, she suspected, would never come again. So when Brimstone and Twiga turned into a stairwell, she followed.

They were tower stairs, a tight corkscrew down. The spiraling descent made Karou dizzy: down, around, down, around, hypnotic, until it seemed as if she were caught in a purgatory of stairs and would go down like this forever. There were small slot windows for a while, and then they disappeared. The air grew cool and still, and Karou had the impression of being belowground. She heard Brimstone and Twiga in snatches, and could make no sense of their conversation.

“We will need more incense soon.” Twiga.

“We will need more of everything. There has not been an onslaught like this in decades.” Brimstone.

“Do you think they have their eye on the city?”

“When have they not?”

“How long?” Twiga asked with a quaver. “How long can we hold them off?”

Brimstone. “I don’t know.”

And just when Karou thought she couldn’t bear any more turning, they reached the bottom. It was here that things got interesting.

Really interesting.

The stairs spilled out into a vast, echoing hall. Karou had to hold herself back to make sure Brimstone and Twiga had gone on, but when she heard their voices moving away, rendered small by the immensity of the space that swallowed them, she crept out after them.

It seemed she was in a cathedral—if, that is, the earth itself were to dream a cathedral into being over thousands of years of water weeping through stone. It was a massive natural cavern that soared overhead to a near-perfect Gothic arch. Stalagmites as old as the world were carved into pillars in the shapes of beasts, and candelabras hung so high they were like clusters of stars. A scent was heavy in the air, herbs and sulfur, and smoke wreathed among the pillars, teased into wisps by breezes emanating from unseen openings in the carven walls.

And below it all, where Brimstone and Twiga walked down the cathedral’s long nave, there weren’t pews for worship, but tables—stone tables huge as menhirs, so huge they must have required elephants to haul them there. Indeed, they were large enough to accommodate an elephant reclining, though only one of them actually did.

An elephant, laid out on a table.

Or… no. It was not an elephant. With clawed feet and a head that was some nightmare of a massive, tusked grizzly bear, it was elsething. Chimaera.

And it was dead.

On each of the tables lay a dead chimaera, and there were dozens of them. Dozens. Karou’s gaze fluttered, erratic, from table to table. No two of the dead were alike. Most had some human quality to them, head or torso, but not all. There, an ape with the mane of a lion; an iguana-thing so huge it could only be called a dragon; a jaguar’s head on the nude body of a woman.

Brimstone and Twiga moved among them, touching them, examining. They paused the longest over a man.

He was naked, too. He was what Karou and Zuzana would have called, with the smug smiles of connoisseurs, a “physical specimen.” Heavy shoulders tapering to neat hips, abdomen corrugated, all the muscles Karou could identify from life drawing study ruggedly pronounced. On his powerful chest was a down of pure white hair, and the hair of his head was white, too, long and silken on the stone table.

A fug of incense hung thick around him. It was coming from a kind of ornate silver lantern suspended from a hook above his head, exhaling a steady fume. A thurible, Karou thought, like those twirled about in Catholic Mass. Brimstone laid a hand to the dead man’s chest, let it linger there a moment in a gesture Karou couldn’t decipher. Fondness? Sadness? When he and Twiga moved on and vanished into the rearing wall of shadow at the far end of the nave, she crept out of hiding and went to the table.

Up close, she saw that the man’s white hair was an incongruity. He was young, his face unlined. He was very handsome, though blank and waxen in death, and seeming not quite real.

He was also not quite human, though nearer to it than most of the chimaera here. The flesh and musculature of his legs transitioned at mid-thigh to become the white-furred haunches of a wolf, with long backward-bending canine feet and black claws. And his hands, she saw, were hybrid: broad and furred across the backs like paws, with human fingers tapering to claws. They were lying palm up, as if they had been arranged that way, and that was how Karou saw what was etched on his skin.

In the center of each palm was a tattooed eye identical to her own.

She took a startled step back.

This was something. Something critical, something key, but what did it mean? She turned to the next table, the lion-maned creature. Its hands were simian, the flesh black, but she could still make out the hamsas on them.

She went to the next table, and the next. Even the elephant-creature: The soles of its mammoth forefeet were marked. Each of these dead creatures wore the hamsas, just like she did. Her thoughts hammered in her head the way her heart thumped in her chest. What was going on? Here were dozens of chimaera, and they were dead and naked—without, she noted, any visible wounds—and laid out cold on slabs in some kind of underground cathedral. Her own hamsas connected her to them in some way, but she couldn’t imagine how.