Daughter of Smoke and Bone(30)

She circled back around to the first table, the white-haired man, and leaned against it. She was conscious of the scented smoke from the thurible and had a moment of anxiety when she realized her hair would be infused with the smell and give her away to Yasri and Issa when she snuck back into the shop. The shop. The thought of climbing back up that interminable corkscrew made her want to sink down into fetal position. Her wounds throbbed. They were seeping through the bandages, and Yasri’s balm was wearing off. She hurt.

But… this place. These dead. With her muddled head, Karou felt unequal to the mystery. The white-haired man’s hand lay right before her, its hamsa taunting her. She laid her own beside it to compare the marks, but his lay in the shadow of his body, so she reached out to lift it into the light.

The marks were identical. She saw that as her mind worked at something else, a too-slow warning from her sluggish senses.

His hand, his dead hand… it was warm.

It was not dead.

He was not dead.

A whip-crack movement and he came upright, spinning on his knees. His hand, which had lain inert in hers, caught her throat and lifted her off her feet, slamming her down onto the stone table. Her head. Against stone. Her vision blurred. When it cleared again he was above her, eyes ice-pale, lips drawn back over fangs. She couldn’t breathe. His hand still clutched her throat. She clawed at it, struggled to throw him off, managed to get her knees between them and kick out.

His grip loosened and she gasped a breath, tried to scream, but he was over her again, heavy and naked and bestial, and she fought him with everything in her, fought him with a wildness that plunged them over the edge of the table to the floor. It was chaos and thrashing, and bare limbs so strong Karou couldn’t break free. He was on her, straddling her legs, staring, and some kind of crazed madness seemed to clear from his eyes. His lips eased from their snarl and he looked human again, almost, and beautiful, but still terrifying and… confused.

He gripped her by the wrists, forced open her hands to see her hamsas, then looked sharply at her face. His gaze roved over all of her so that she felt as if she were the naked one, and then he gave a thick growl that sent shudders through her. “Who are you?”

She couldn’t answer. Her heart was pounding. Her wounds were on fire. And, as ever, she had no answer.

“Who are you?” He dragged her upright by her wrists and flung her back onto the stone table and was over her again. His movements were fluid and animal, his teeth sharp enough to rip out her throat, and all at once Karou saw how her trespass through the other door was going to end: in a pool of blood. She found her breath.

And screamed.





18





BATTLE NOT WITH MONSTERS



“Girl?” Iz?l squinted up at Akiva. “You… you mean Karou?”

Karou? Akiva knew that word. It meant hope in the language of the enemy. So not only did she bear the hamsas, she had a chimaera name. “Who is she?” he demanded.

Clearly terrified, the old man pulled himself up a little straighter. “Why do you want to know, angel?”

“I’m asking the questions,” said Akiva. “And I suggest you answer them.” He was impatient to get on and meet the others, but loathe to leave with this mystery hanging over him. If he didn’t find out who the girl was now, he would never know.

Eager to be helpful, Razgut supplied, “She tastes like nectar and salt. Nectar and salt and apples. Pollen and stars and hinges. She tastes like fairy tales. Swan maiden at midnight. Cream on the tip of a fox’s tongue. She tastes like hope.”

Akiva was stone-faced, unreasonably disturbed by the thought of this abomination tasting the girl. He waited until Razgut gibbered into silence before he said, his voice low in his throat, “I didn’t ask what she tastes like. I asked who she is.”

Iz?l shrugged, fluttering his hands in an effort at nonchalance. “She’s just a girl. She draws pictures. She’s nice to me. What more can I tell you?”

His voice was glib, and Akiva saw that he thought he could protect her. It was noble, and laughable. Having no time to waste playing games, he decided on a more drastic approach. He seized Iz?l by his shirtfront and Razgut by one of his jagged bone spurs and leapt airborne with the pair of them, hauling their combined weight as if it were nothing.

It was only a matter of wingbeats before all of Marrakesh glimmered below them. Iz?l was screaming, his eyes squeezed shut, but Razgut was silent, his face displaying such unutterable longing it shot pity into Akiva’s heart like a splinter—more painful, indeed, than the shard of wood Karou had stabbed him with. It surprised him. Over the years he had learned to deaden himself, and he had lived so long with the deadness that he believed pity and mercy were extinguished in him, but tonight he had experienced dull stabs of both.

Slowly spiraling downward like a bird of prey, he brought the two to rest on the domed peak of the city’s tallest minaret. They scrabbled to hold on and failed, sliding down its slick surface, paddling frenziedly for handholds and footholds before coming to rest against a low, decorative parapet that was all that kept them from plummeting over the edge, several hundred feet to the rooftops of the mosque below.

Iz?l’s face was gray, his breathing thin. When Razgut shifted himself on the old man’s back, they teetered perilously close to the edge. Iz?l let out a stream of panicked commands to stay low, not shift, hang on to something.