Days of Blood & Starlight(113)

The wound was under Hazael’s left arm. His heart. It would have been a quick death.

“Please,” Liraz said again. “Save him. I’ll give you anything. Name your price.”

Price? Karou looked at her sharply, but there was no trace of the cruelty or severity she remembered, only anguish. “There is no price,” she said. She glanced at Akiva. Or if there is, she could have added, you’ve already paid it.

“You’ll do it?” Liraz’s words trembled with hope.

Would she? Karou knew she was their only hope—she whom they would have slain in Prague just for bearing the hamsas on her hands—and there was irony there, but she took no pleasure in it. She couldn’t bear the sight of Liraz’s hands—they were so black—but they were so tender on her brother’s neck, her fingers so soft on his dead cheek, and Karou knew she should not feel sympathy for this killer of her people, but she did. Who among them, after all, had clean hands? Not her. Oh, Ellai, my hands will never be clean again. She clenched them suddenly and her blisters burned from her work with the shovel. It felt to her as if to do this one thing, save this life… it might be a salve. Not just for these seraphim but for herself, after the horror of the pit and the shovel and what she had had to do, and… and the lie she was now forced to live. She wanted to do this. A tick on her knuckle for a life saved instead of taken.

“I can’t preserve this body,” she said. “It’s too late. And I can’t make him look the same, either.” Maybe Brimstone would have known how to conjure those fiery wings, but they were far beyond her. “He won’t be a seraph anymore.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Akiva said. She met his eyes, his red, red eyes, and she wanted to do this for him. “As long as he is himself,” he said. “That’s all that matters.”

Yes, she told herself, and wanted to believe it as firmly as he did. Soul is what matters. Flesh is vessel. “Okay.” She took a deep breath and looked down at Hazael. “Give me the thurible.”

Her words were met with a silence that was like sinking.

Sinking.

Oh no. No. Karou stared at Hazael’s dead face, his open blue eyes, his laugh lines, and her upwelling sorrow overwhelmed her with its force. No. She bit her lip, willing it to stillness. She was rigid. She had to be. Her grief… if she let it out, it would be a magician’s scarf, one grief tied to another to another, it would never end. She didn’t want to look up again, to see the stricken faces frozen in that terrible silence.

“We didn’t… we didn’t have one.” Liraz. Whispering. “We brought him here. To you.”

Akiva was hoarse. “It’s only been a day. Karou. Please.” As if it were a matter of persuading her.

They didn’t understand. How could they? She had never told Akiva how it worked, how tenuous the soul’s connection grew after death, or how easily it could be cast adrift if it was not contained. She had never told him, and now there was nothing in the air or aura of this dead angel—soldier, killer, beloved brother—no impression of light or laughter to go along with those blue eyes and laugh lines, no stir of any kind to brush against her senses and tell her who he was because… he wasn’t.

She looked up. She forced herself to meet Akiva’s red eyes and Liraz’s so they would see and understand her sorrow.

And know that Hazael’s soul was lost.





77


TO LIVE


It was her sorrow that undid Akiva. One look and he knew. Hazael was gone.

“No!” Liraz’s cry was choked, airless, nearly soundless, and she was in motion.

Akiva didn’t have the strength to restrain her. She couldn’t have much strength left, either. Even after the sickness of the hamsas, she had borne most of Hazael’s weight on the long journey here—and for what, all for nothing—and sometimes his weight, too, catching him by an arm and screaming at him to wake up when he would start to slide into the darkness. The darkness, the darkness. Even now it was lapping at him.

What had he done in Astrae?

He didn’t know. He had known only the thrum in his skull and the gathering, the pressure, the pressure, and he had grabbed Liraz and held her to him, fallen on Hazael and held him, too, and the blast when it came—from where?—had carried them clear. Far away, far, and not one dagger of all the glass of the shattered Sword—not one splinter—had touched them.

They had brought Hazael to a field and he was already dead. But what is death? Akiva had thought of Karou. Of course he had. Hope, he had told himself, on his knees in the grass, weak and dazed and numb. Her name means hope.

But not in their language, and not for them.

Liraz lunged at Karou and Akiva reached after her but he was too slow. She hit Karou and slammed her backward. There was a chair lying on its side. They went down. Karou cried out in pain.

Liraz found air. “You’re lying!” she screamed.

Screamed.

Akiva was moving, but it was like wading through darkness; the serpent-woman was faster—the serpent-woman was Issa, he knew her from Karou’s drawings. She must have been the one in the thurible. Thurible thurible thurible. Why hadn’t he had a thurible? But maybe the blast had torn away Hazael’s soul; maybe it was already gone when they laid him in the field, and there had never been a chance of saving him. They would never know. Hazael was gone, that was all that mattered.