Days of Blood & Starlight(102)
The Dominion were holding out hands. Dried, severed hands, marked with the devil’s eyes. Revenant hands, as powerful as they had ever been when upheld by their true owners: the chimaera rebels they had killed and burned in the Hintermost.
Akiva felt the assault of the magic as if it entered his bloodstream and curdled him from the inside. He tried to hold out against it, but it was no good. He began to shake and couldn’t stop.
“Thank the godstars,” he heard the counselors murmuring. “We are saved.” Fools. Did they not yet wonder what Dominion were doing inside the Tower of Conquest?
Their captain was with them. “Nephew,” he said. For a second Akiva thought Jael was addressing him, but he was looking at Japheth. “Allow me to be the first to offer my congratulations,” he said. He was flushed—from the heat, from fear?—his scar a long gnarl of white. He moved to Japheth, who remained on his knees, and told him, “This is no meet pose for the ruler of the Empire of Seraphim. Get up.”
He held out his hand.
Akiva understood what was going to happen, but the pulsing sickness of the hamsas met the dullness that had descended in the aftermath of sirithar, and he could do nothing to stop it.
Japheth reached for his uncle’s hand and Jael took it, but did not raise his nephew to his feet. He pivoted behind him. Japheth gave a gasp of pain as Jael crushed the prince’s soft hand in his swordsman’s grip and prevented him from rising. A glint of metal, a jerk of the arm, and it was done inside a second: Jael drew his dagger across his nephew’s throat and a fine red line appeared there.
Japheth’s eyes were wide and rolling. His mouth gaped and no sound came out but a gurgling. The red line grew less fine. A drip became a rivulet. A rivulet a rush.
“The emperor is dead,” Jael said before it was strictly true. He smiled and wiped his blade on Japheth’s sleeve before dropping him with a shove that sent his body to join Joram’s in the red water. “Long live the emperor.”
Akiva felt himself as stunned and fish-mouthed as the counselors.
As for Jael, he couldn’t have looked more pleased. He turned to Akiva and executed a mocking bow. “Thank you,” he said. “I was so hoping you would do that.”
From there, Akiva’s best-case scenario went very badly wrong.
71
THE PIT
By the time Karou reached the pit, it was already done.
Amzallag, Tangris, Bashees. They lay dead in the starlight and Thiago stood by their bodies, calm and shining in all his white, waiting. Waiting for her. Others stood by in a loose semi-circle, and Karou should have taken one look at the scene, spun right around in the air, and fled back to the questionable safety of her room. But she couldn’t, not with those bodies lying there, Amzallag and the sphinxes, their slashed throats still pumping blood into the scree and their souls anchored by failing tethers. Because they had taken her side.
This was to be the price? She would never have another ally. If she let this stand, she might as well abandon the chimaera cause right here and now.
She was dazed with disgust and fury as she dropped down, landing heavily before the Wolf. The blood spatter across his chest and sleeve read as black in the night. Behind him: mounds of earth from the excavation of the pit; a line of shovels standing upright like fence pickets; Karou could hear a low drone, as of a distant engine, but realized it was flies. Down in the dark. She was a moment surveying the terrible scene before she found her voice. Choking, she said, “And here stands the great hero of the chimaera, murderer of his own soldiers.”
“They weren’t my own soldiers, apparently,” he replied. “Their mistake.” And he turned to Amzallag’s body. It lay at the very verge of the pit. Thiago braced himself and, with one clawed wolf’s foot, dug in and gave a powerful shove so that the body rolled. It had to weigh five hundred pounds, but once the shoulders overbalanced the edge, their bulk dragged at the rest. It was slow, so slow… and then sudden. Amzallag’s body tipped into the pit and disappeared into that foul darkness.
Lisseth did the same to the sphinxes’ bodies, which were much lighter, and there was almost no sound, as if the landings were soft—Karou knew, and didn’t want to picture, what it was that cushioned them—but stench rose, and flies, flies by the hundreds. They rose in a buzz of black and seemed to carry the putrescence with them. She backed away, fighting her gag reflex. She could almost feel the air in her mouth, thick and choking, fume and liquid. She staggered back, looked aghast at Thiago.
“They aren’t all monsters like you,” she said. “Like the rest of you.” She scanned the captains assembled around them—Nisk, Lisseth, Virko, Rark, Sarsagon—and they met her eyes, blank and unashamed except for Virko, who looked down when she lit on him.
“Monsters, yes, we are monsters,” said Thiago. “I will give the angels their ‘beasts.’ I will give them nightmares to haunt their dreams long after I am gone.”
“Is that it, then?” she snapped. “That’s your objective, to leave a legacy of nightmares when you die? Why not? Why wouldn’t it be all about you? The great White Wolf, killer of angels, savior to no one.”
“Savior.” He laughed. “Is that what you want to be? What a lofty goal for a traitor.”
“I was never a traitor. If anyone is, it’s you. All of that today about excavating the cathedral? Was it all lies?”