Days of Blood & Starlight(118)
Issa and Ten returned, minus Nisk and Lisseth.
“I want them gone,” said Issa in a dangerous tone, and Karou knew that she meant Nisk and Lisseth, not the angels. “They’re savages, leaving you out there with him like that. The others, too.”
Karou tended to agree, but still. “They were following orders.” She pointed out that they had followed worse orders than that.
“I don’t care,” said Issa. She was even more disgusted with the pair because they were Naja, and she wanted to believe better of her own kind. “There has to be some basic understanding of right and wrong, even when it comes to orders.”
“If we made that a rule, we’d have no one left. Well.” She glanced at the Wolf. At Ziri. “Very few.” Balieros’s team must be resurrected soon, along with Amzallag and the sphinxes, whose souls she had gleaned from the pit. She needed soldiers she could trust. “Anyway, we can’t start disappearing everyone we don’t like. That would be suspicious. And,” she added somewhat after the fact, “wrong.”
In fact, they had disappeared no one, and she didn’t plan to start. Razor didn’t count. He had died attacking a seraph stronghold called Glyss-on-the-Tane—the same engagement in which Ziri had been lost, to the sorrow of all. No one need ever know what had really happened when Razor had tried, and failed, to carry out Thiago’s order, or that one of the two of them had returned—though only to the comfort of a shallow grave and the starring role in this enormous subterfuge.
“Let me have the two Naja,” said Ten, clicking her teeth together. “This wolf mouth has a hunger. I’ll say they asked me to eat them.”
“Don’t be terrible,” Issa protested mildly.
“No?” Ten peered around at Karou. “But wasn’t that the whole inducement?”
Karou couldn’t help but smile, which hurt her raw cheek. Ten was no more Ten than Thiago was Thiago; she was Haxaya, and it was easier with her. As much as Karou had grown to hate the she-wolf, there just wasn’t the same level of physical aversion as with the Wolf. It was good to have Haxaya’s dark humor in the mix—even if one couldn’t quite tell when she was joking. When Karou had awakened her old friend in Ten’s body—Ten having fatally underestimated Issa and her usually docile bands of living jewelry—she had put it to her straight: the terrible situation, and what she must do or else be returned forthwith to her thurible.
Haxaya’s answer, with a smile that seemed made for Ten’s wolf jaws, had been, “I’ve always wanted to be terrible.”
“Can you be slightly less terrible?” she asked her now. “No eating the Naja, or any other comrades, even despised ones.” As an afterthought, she added, “Please.”
“Fine. But if they do ask me—”
“They’re not going to ask you to eat them. Ten.”
“I suppose not,” she conceded with what sounded like true disappointment, and maybe it was.
And here they were, Karou’s allies: Thiago, Ten, and Issa. And they were looking to her. Oh god, thought Karou, feeling tipsy with panic. What now?
“The angels,” she said, willing her pulse to even itself out.
“They escape,” said Issa. “Simple. He’s done it before.”
Karou nodded. Of course, that was it. Get them gone, see the last of Akiva, finally and forever. That was what she wanted.
So what was that ache in her chest?
We dreamed together of the world remade, she kept thinking. It had been the most beautiful dream, and could only have arisen as it did: born of mercy and nurtured in love. And she couldn’t think of the future, and peace, without remembering Akiva’s hand to her heart and hers to his. “We are the beginning,” she had said then, in the temple, and everything had seemed possible with his heart beating under her hand.
And now, his heart was beating right over there, in the dark, in the granary. So near, and yet so very far away. There was no way she could imagine, no collision of impossible events, that would bring his heartbeat under her hand ever again, or join the two of them back together in the dream that was theirs—not hers and Ziri’s, not even hers and Brimstone’s, but hers and Akiva’s.
No way she could imagine.
81
VEINS OF CHANCE
One world on its own is a strange enough seethe of coiling, unknowable veins of intention and chance, but two? Where two worlds mingle breath through rips in the sky, the strange becomes stranger, and many things may come to pass that few imaginations could encompass.
82
TOP THREE REASONS FOR LIVING
Zuzana and Mik were at A?t Benhaddou when it began. It. The thing that would never be eclipsed, that would own the third-person singular, neuter pronoun “it” forever.
Where were you the day it began?
A?t Benhaddou was the most famous kasbah in Morocco, much bigger than monster castle, though lacking the zest of monsters. It had been restored by World Heritage funds and movie money—Russell Crowe had “gladiated” here—and it was sanitized and set-dressed for tourists. Shops in the lanes, rugs draped over walls, and at the main gate, camels batting their astonishing eyelashes as they posed for photographs—for a price, of course. Everything for a price, and don’t forget to bargain.