Days of Blood & Starlight(49)

“A better us?” Liraz asked. “Look at us, Akiva.” She held up her hands to show her ink. “We can’t pretend. We wear what we’ve done.”

“Only the killing. There are no marks for mercy.”

“Even if there were, I would bear none,” she said. Akiva met her eyes, and he saw a kind of torment in her.

“You have only to begin, Lir. Mercy breeds mercy as slaughter breeds slaughter. We can’t expect the world to be better than we make it.”

“No,” she said, faint, and for a moment he thought she was going to say more, go deeper, demand his secrets. Confess hers? But when she turned away, it was only to say, “Let’s get out of here. They’re burning bodies, and I don’t want to smell the char.”




Ziri watched the blaze. He was upslope on a ridge, in the safety of the trees.

Safety. The word felt absurd. There was no safety. The angels might as well light the whole world on fire and be done with it. The things he had seen burn in these last months. Farms, entire rivers slick with oil. Children running, fleet and screaming—aflame—until they could run and scream no more. And now, friends.

His grip on his knife hilts was so fierce it felt as if his fingers would gouge through the leather to the steel beneath, and through that, too. Safety, he thought again. It was worse than absurd, it was profane. It had also been his mandate on this mission: to be safe.

Balieros had ordered him to hide.

In every engagement there was to be someone kept back, designated safety against such an eventuality as this, to glean the souls of the others should they be slain. It was an honor, a deep trust—to hold his comrades’ perpetuity in his hands—and it was torture.

Lucky Ziri, he thought with bitterness. He knew why Balieros had chosen him. It was such a rare thing for a soldier to be in his natural body; the commander had wanted to give him a chance to keep it. As if he cared about that. Being the one left alive was worse. He’d had to watch the slaughter and do nothing. Even that Dashnag boy had fought—and well—but not Ziri, though his mind and body had screamed to fly into the fray.

The one breach he had permitted himself was to cut down a seraph who pursued the little Dama girl, the deer centaur, pretty as a doll. She was the same girl he’d helped free from the slavers up in the Marazel Hills, and she was holding the knife he’d given her. To think that they had come so far and nearly died right here. He saw the group of them, Dama and Caprine, vanish into a crease in the rocks, and that was good. It had been something solid to hold on to as he watched his comrades die. To know that it was not for nothing.

The five of them had taken fivefold the lives they gave, and the Dashnag boy added to the count. Ziri had watched the seraphim gape and gesture over the corpses—Ixander, especially, whom it took three of them to drag when it finally came to it. They pulled the bodies into a pile, and then, unholy butchers, they hacked off their hands before setting them alight, hacked them off and kept them—why? As trophies?—then lit the whole clearing and watched the blaze devour the mutilated remains. Ziri smelled them now—mingled with the sweet char of grass was the odor of scorched fur, horns, and, horribly, the cookfire scent of meat—and he imagined his comrades’ souls hovering over the clearing, maintaining a tenuous connection with their burnt bodies for as long as they could.

He couldn’t wait much longer. Burning hastened evanescence, and it had been hours already. Soon it would be too late. If Ziri hoped to save his comrades, he had to do it now.

The angels had lingered from morning into afternoon, but finally they were going, lifting skyward in all their abominable grace, and flying away.

He moved steadily down the slope, keeping to the thickest cover, and by the time he came to the edge of the clearing the enemy was gone from the horizon. He surveyed the clearing. The seraph fire was an infernal thing, and burned so hot that the bodies had been eaten to nothing. A wind was rising, stirring the mound of ashes, carrying it into Ziri’s eyes and worse: sundering what little the souls had left to cling to. He lit four cones of incense in his thurible and held it steady. Five soldiers and one volunteer. He hoped he had them all, the boy, too.

He’d done all he could. He closed the thurible with a twist and slipped the gleaning staff back through its loop across his back. He scanned the sky. It was empty, but he knew he had to wait until dark to fly—more hiding, more waiting. The Dominion were everywhere, still spreading the emperor’s message with their terrible efficiency, and, as he had seen… enjoying themselves.

At first, in the rebels’ opening strike, Ziri had hated cutting the Warlord’s smiles on the dead, but right now, all he could think was that the angels’ black joy must be answered.

And what if the act of answering sparked a black joy of its own? What would Karou think of that? No. Ziri pushed down the thought. He had taken no joy in it, but he couldn’t blame Karou for her scorn. It had surprised him, at the river, how deeply it cut—how she looked at him, how she walked away. He’d covered his shame with anger in the moment—who was she to scorn him?—but he couldn’t fool himself anymore. When Balieros had pulled the patrol aside to ask if they were with him—if they wished to slaughter enemy civilians or aid their own—Ziri’s first thought had been of Karou, of erasing her scorn and replacing it with something else. Respect? Approval? Pride?