Days of Blood & Starlight(93)

The cathedral was the massive natural cavern that lay beneath the city. Few had ever seen its carved stalactites but the revenants who woke on its great stone tables. Whatever blessings and weddings Brimstone had dreamed for it when first he found it and built a city on it, it had only ever seen the one purpose: revenant smoke and hamsas.

And now this.

“Not a tomb,” said the Warlord, putting a hand on his friend’s hunched shoulder. “Isn’t that the point? Not a tomb at all, but a thurible.”

In a thurible, properly sealed, souls could be preserved indefinitely. And if the cathedral were sealed, its vent shafts blocked and its long corkscrew stair collapsed and concealed, Brimstone had proposed that it might serve, in essence, as a massive vessel for the preservation of thousands of souls.

“It may only ever be a tomb,” he warned.

“But whose idea is this?” asked the Warlord. “Am I to convince you, who brought it to me? You could look out the window today, see the sky raining fire, and say that it has all been for nothing, everything we’ve ever done, because now we’ve lost. But folk were born and lived and knew friendship and music in this city, ugly as it is, and all across this land that we fought for. Some grew old, and others were less lucky. Many bore children and raised them, and had the pleasure of making them, too, and we gave them that for as long we could. Who has ever done more, my friend?”

“And now our time is done.”

The Warlord’s smile was all rue. “Yes.”

The tomb—the vessel—could not be for them, because the angels would leave no stone unturned until they found the Warlord and the resurrectionist. The emperor must have his finale. This might be Brimstone’s dream, but its fulfillment would depend on another.

“Do you believe that she’ll come?” the Warlord asked.

Brimstone’s heart was heavy. He couldn’t know if Karou would ever find her way back to Eretz; he hadn’t prepared her for anything like this. He’d given her a human life and tried to believe that she might escape the fate of the rest of her people, the endless war, the broken world. And now he would hang it all around her neck? Heavy, heavy, keys to a shattered kingdom. The weight of all these souls would be as good as shackles to her, but he knew that she wouldn’t shirk them. “She will,” he said. “She’ll come.”

“Well then, we do it. You named her aptly, old fool. Hope, indeed.”

So they put it to the people to choose, and the choice was easy. Everyone knew what was coming; their lives had shrunk down to huddling and hunger—and fire, always fire—as they waited for the end. Now the end was here, and… like a dream this hope came to them; it came in whispers to their dark dwellings, their ruins and refugee squats. They knew, all of them, the devastation of waking from hopeful dreams to darkness and the stench of siege. Hope was mirage, and none trusted easily to it. But this was real. It was not a promise, only a hope: that they might live again, that their souls and their children’s souls might bide in peace, in stasis until such a day…

And this was the other hope, heavier still, that Brimstone hung around Karou’s neck, and the greater task by far: that there may come such a day at all, and a world for them to wake to. Brimstone and the Warlord had never been able to achieve it with all their armies, but Madrigal and the angel she loved had shared a beautiful dream, and, though that dream had died on the executioner’s block, Brimstone knew better than anyone that death is not the end it sometimes seems.

By the thousands the folk of the united tribes filed down the long spiral stair. It would be crushed behind them; there would be no way out. They beheld the cathedral and it was glorious. They pressed in tight and sang a hymn. It was possible that it would never be more than their tomb, and yet, this was the easy choice.

The hard choice and true heroism was in those who chose to stay above, because they couldn’t all go. If every chimaera vanished from Loramendi, the seraphim would guess what they had done and go digging. So some citizens—many—had to stay and give the angels satisfaction. They had to be the angels’ satisfaction, the hard-won corpses to feed to their fires. The old stayed, as did most who had already lost their children, and an undue number of the ravaged refugees who had endured so much and had but this one thing left to give.

They sacrificed themselves that some might yet know life in a better time.

This was what Karou went armed with this morning, as well as her literal arms: her crescent-moon blades slung at her hips and her small knife pushed down the side of her boot. With Issa at her side, she headed to the court where the Wolf and his soldiers were already awake and gathered in the clean, crisp air, several teams armed and ready to fly. Amzallag’s team was one, and Karou felt her heart reaching toward the soldier. She wished she could tell him her news alone, and some of the others, too, who would be most powerfully affected by it.

Amzallag had children. Or he had had them, before Loramendi fell.

“We’ll hit them north of the capital,” Thiago was saying. “The towns are poorly fortified, and sparsely guarded. The angels haven’t seen battle there for hundreds of years. My father had let his edge grow dull. He took a defensive stance. Now we have nothing left to defend.”

It was a bold statement, and was met with a shifting of weight by some soldiers. It sounded almost as though he were blaming the Warlord for the fall of their people.