Days of Blood & Starlight(60)

He had compared it to mending a slice in knitted wool: the wool skein had been one continuous fiber in the original creation and was now fraught with interruptions, each its own snafu of loose ends and lost stitches. The interruptions could be put right, but it took maniacal craft, and the whole was unlikely to emerge quite as it had been before.

Karou knelt to examine Ziri’s injuries. As terrible as the smile looked, she felt sure she could manage. It had been sliced clean by a very sharp blade, and the muscles affected were on the large side, their configuration straightforward. There might be some scarring, but what of that?

Thiago leaned over her shoulder. “Is that… ash?” he asked.

Karou realized that it was. It was ash blackening Ziri’s mouth and lips. The inside of his mouth was black, too. “It looks like he ate it,” she said.

“Or was fed it,” replied Thiago darkly.

Fed ash? By who? Karou reached for Ziri’s hands, gently curling them open. When she saw what had been done to him, a soft sound of anguish escaped her lips. His hands were pierced through, as if he had been crucified. The left one was torn entirely from the center of his palm out through the webbing between his third and fourth finger, as if he had wrenched it free of whatever had pinned it. The imagined pain brought a trembling white noise to her ears. She laid the hands back gently on Ziri’s chest.

“So. Can you heal them?” asked Thiago.

Karou heard skepticism in his voice, and didn’t blame him for it. Hands were ridiculously complex. She’d had to draw and label them in anatomy classes in art school: all twenty-nine bones, seventeen muscles just in the palm, and… over a hundred ligaments. “I don’t know,” she admitted.

“If you can’t, tell me now.”

She went cold. “Why?” she asked, though she knew the answer.

“If he can’t use his hands, this body is of no use to him—or to me.”

“But it’s his natural flesh.”

Thiago shook his head, not unsympathetic. “I know. And as rare a thing as that is, do you think he’ll thank you for salvaging it if he can’t hold his blades?”

Is that all that matters? Karou wondered, and the bleak answer was: yes.

She felt the Wolf looking at her, but she kept her eyes on Ziri. Broken, brutalized Ziri. Lovely, long-limbed Ziri, graceful echo of a dead people. What manner of monstrous body would Thiago ask for to replace this perfect one? It wouldn’t come to that. She would keep Ziri from the pit. She would. “I’ll heal him.”

Thiago began, “If it would be faster to make him a new—”

“I can do it,” Karou snapped, and the Wolf sat back.

When she turned to face him, he was giving her a considering look. “All right, then. Try. But first I need to question him.”

“What? Wake him?” Karou shook her head. “It’s better this way—”

“Karou, what do you think happened to him? He’s been tortured, and I need to know by who, and if he gave anything away.”

“Oh.” She saw the sense in that, and as much as she hated to wake Ziri to his pain, she did, as gently as she could.

It was terrible to see his eyes flutter open and cloud with agony. They sought her face, then flickered to the Wolf and back to her. Again she saw in them the urgency that had been there when he first arrived, and felt sure there was something he wanted to tell her.

Thiago was his best self as he knelt at his soldier’s side to question him. “Who did this?” he asked in a soothing tone, but it quickly became evident that Ziri couldn’t speak, not with the severed muscles in his cheeks. The Wolf had to settle for yes and no questions, which Ziri answered with nods and head shakes that clearly caused him pain.

“Did you tell them anything?” asked Thiago, who had learned no more than that “they” were seraphim.

Ziri gave a head shake, immediate and resolute.

“Well done. And… the rest of the team?”

Ziri shook his head again. Tears gathered in his lashes, and Karou understood that he meant they were dead. She had already supposed so, but the news still hit her like a punch. Five soldiers, dead. Balieros. Ixander. She remembered the unexpected softness of Ixander’s soul and how she’d wished to do better by him than that monstrous body.

“Were you able to glean their souls?” asked the Wolf, and Karou leaned forward, hoping.

Ziri hesitated. His eyes went to her. Despairing. Confused. He neither nodded nor shook his head. What did it mean? Thiago asked him again, but Ziri’s eyes fluttered shut, his lashes releasing tears to track down his ash-smudged face, and he moaned. He was lost in pain, and after a few more attempts, Thiago had to let it go with the reassurance that Ziri had not compromised their position. He stood. “Go ahead,” he told Karou, “and luck to you.”

She wished she could assert that luck had nothing to do with it, but the truth was she was praying for it herself. She was almost ready to ask Nitid for help. “Thank you,” she said, and as he went out, she reached for some vises from her table.

Ziri made an inarticulate sound and she looked to him to find him shaking his head, agitated. She didn’t understand at first, but then he hit himself on the chest with his mangled hands and she got it. He wanted her to use his pain.

“Oh, no. No. You’d have to stay conscious to tithe—”