Days of Blood & Starlight(92)

“How you—? Uh. Battle? I assumed.”

“Wrong. I fell in love with Akiva, and Thiago had me beheaded.” Plain and brutal. Zuzana gasped. “So now you know,” said Karou. “Will you please let me get you to safety?”

“But what about you?”

“I have to take care of this. It has to be me. Zuze. Please.”

In as small a voice as Karou had ever heard her use, Zuzana said, “Okay.”

Mik asked, “Um… how?”

It was a good question. Karou was watched, that much was clear, and not just by Ten. She didn’t have Ziri to rely on now, and she couldn’t risk resurrecting Balieros’s patrol—it would be too transparent. There was no one else she could be sure of, but she did have one idea that didn’t involve any other chimaera.

She took another deep, uneven breath and considered Zuzana and Mik. They were emphatically not soldiers, and it wasn’t merely that they were human, but that they were supremely… first world, utterly unaccustomed to hardship of any kind. The hike here had almost done them in, and Zuzana had only been sort of joking when she said that losing at cakewalk was the worst day of her life. Could they handle the tithe? They would just have to.

“Could you walk back out of here, if you had to? At night, when it’s not so hot?”

They nodded, huge-eyed.

Karou scraped her lip between her teeth and worried it. “Do you think…” she asked haltingly, hoping it wasn’t the worst idea she had ever had, “that you might like to learn… to, um, turn invisible?”

She would have given much in that moment for a camera, to preserve forever the expression on her best friend’s face.

The answer, needless to say, was yes.




They worked at it all day.

“This is a little less awesome than it could be,” was as close as Zuzana came to complaining about the tithe, but her glee, when she came visible again after her first success at glamour, was bright and beautiful, as she was bright and beautiful, and Karou couldn’t help it—she grabbed her into the kind of overlong, too-tight hug that could really only mean: This is it, I’ve loved knowing you. When she finally drew back, Zuzana’s eyes were wet, her mouth skewed into an angry don’t-cry grimace, and she didn’t say a word.

Karou still had to pull off some resurrections so that she might present soldiers to Thiago, lest he guess that her attention had been elsewhere that day. She managed it with Issa’s help—three new soldiers—and she managed to get through dinner, too, eating mechanically, and now more than ever, she scanned the host and wondered: Who among them had the courage to stand up to the Wolf?

For such a reason as she was now ready to give them, she told herself, there must be some.

Zuzana and Mik gave away nothing, sitting as usual on the floor among soldiers, learning words in an otherworldly language they would never again have the opportunity to speak. Friend, fly, I love you. Virko thought this last one was hilarious, but Karou felt pulped by it. Mik played Mozart that night, and Karou saw Bast moved to tears, and later, much later, in her room, she handed vises to her friends, and put one on herself, and led them out unseen into the desert night. They took only what fit in their pockets—money, dead phones, passports, the compass—and canteens slung over their shoulders. Everything else they left.

Karou walked a little way with them, then flew back to the kasbah to watch and make sure that their absence went unnoticed.

It did.

Tucked into her tooth tray she found a folded paper: a drawing of Zuzana and Mik, and written out phonetically, the Chimaera for “I love you.” She broke down then, and Issa held her, and she held Issa, and they both wept, but by the time the sun rose and the kasbah came to life, they were calm again. Pale and subdued. Ready.

It was time.





Once upon a time, chimaera descended by the thousands into a cathedral beneath the earth.



And never left.





65


BEAST REQUIEM


It was a choice. When the end came, every chimaera in Loramendi had it to make. Well, not the soldiers. They would die defending the city. And not the children. Parents chose for them, and the seraph invaders would later remember very few children in the city when the siege finally broke the iron bars of the Cage. Maybe none, in fact. So much had already burned and collapsed. It was hard to make an accounting in all the rubble.

So the angels never guessed what lay buried beneath their feet.

Go down to the cathedral beneath the city. Carry your babies and lead your children by the hand. Go down into the airless dark and never come out.

Or stay above and face the angels.

It was a choice of deaths, and it was easy. The one below would be gentler. And perhaps… possibly… less permanent.

Brimstone didn’t promise. How could he? It was only a dream.

“You were always the dreamer between the two of us,” the Warlord said to him, when Brimstone came to propose it. They were two old men—“old monsters,” as the enemy would have it—who had risen from the most abject slavery to tear down their masters and carve out for their people a thousand years of freedom. A thousand years and no more. It was over, and they were very tired.

“I’ve had better dreams,” said Brimstone. “That the cathedral was for blessings and weddings, instead of resurrection. I never dreamed it a tomb.”