Archangel's Sun (Guild Hunter #13)(71)

Kiama coughed into the curve of her elbow to clear her throat. “Unfortunately,” she said afterward, “the only way to maintain security with our limited numbers was to shut things up after the basic clean.”

“I don’t like what I smell below the decay.” Sharine forced herself to take a deep breath in an effort to work out what it was that made her neck prickle and long-forgotten memories struggle to rise to the surface.

She’d scented something like this before.

Pinprick flashes of memory. The clash of swords. Wings crumpled and falling. Fangs in a pale face. Mortal bodies frozen in fear. “A mortal, caught in the crossfire of an archangelic battle—his leg was amputated. He became sick with gangrene.” Vivid memories now, of the crawl of green on his leg, the putrid odor. “Sickness, it is the taint of sickness that colors the air.”

“Why were you with the mortal?” Kiama asked without altering her intense focus on their surroundings.

“I—” Sharine frowned, followed back the thread. “I was a war artist . . . and I thought it was important to make note not just of immortal losses, but also of the other costs of war.” She shook her head. “I was na?ve, I think, to believe most immortals would care for a dying mortal.”

Yet Sharine was glad to have done it, her fingers curling in as she remembered holding the feverish man’s hand so he wouldn’t be alone as he slipped away into the finality of death. Going where Raan and her parents had already gone. A place from which there were no return travelers.

“Here, this is where we found the dead.” Kiama stopped at an archway framed in a glittering array of semiprecious gemstones that shimmered and flashed in the sunlight coming from the high windows at either end of the entrance hall.

Beyond it stood a set of heavy double doors.

“There are no functioning windows inside,” the warrior informed her, “but this switch will bring light.” She flicked it with her elbow before using her body to shove open one of the doors.

Sharine could swear she heard a soft pop of sound, a seal breaking.

Chest tight, she walked inside to discover another large gathering area, but the chaos here was magnitudes worse. No rugs softened their footsteps and the walls were almost equally as bare. Scorch marks covered the floor.

When she looked up at where windows should be, she found only boarded-up squares of darkness.

“Boards were in place when we came in,” Kiama said before she could ask the question. “Those bloody marks on there, too.”

Sharine felt a chill in her blood. “An attempt at freedom?”

“Bound to fail. Windows have pretty but strong ironwork on the outside.” The warrior’s lovely eyes held cold reason when they met Sharine’s. “Thanks to Ozias, we know the ironwork was an addition, done some months before battle.”

Charisemnon, Sharine realized, had been building a prison in preparation for his plans to experiment on his own people; this had never been a quick decision. Turning on that chilling realization, her intent to examine the wall behind her, she found herself facing a sprawling painting of a small region in a land now called Mali. It was a place she’d visited an eon ago, Raan by her side.

Shock, a sudden jolt of memory.

She’d been so young and full of hope, happy and in love, and the painting was a riot of joyful yellows, oranges, even hints of pink. It depicted the sun rising over a field in which farmers worked and animals grazed, while two angels stood talking with an elderly human woman.

A simple scene really . . . but one of those angels was Raan, and so this was a piece of her history. The other one was the angel who’d hosted them. A fellow artist, she’d taken them to the nearby mortal settlement to show Raan the origin of a specific cloth dye.

Too full of excitement and happiness to stay still, Sharine had left them to their talking and climbed a nearby hill. It was when she’d looked back down that she’d seen this snapshot of golden-hued life. “I remember being struck by the perfection and harmony of this scene.”

Her fingers wanted to trace the lines of Raan’s face, even though he was recognizable only by the colors of his wings. Thank you, she wanted to say. Thank you for teaching me that love can be gentle and kind. Had he lived, the young woman she’d been might’ve one day flown from his arms, but she would’ve done so with love in her heart.

“It’s an extraordinary work, Lady Sharine.” A touch of unexpected awe in Kiama’s voice. “The sire was so angry when he saw it here; he said Charisemnon had no right to display a work of such beauty and heart in a place he’d turned into a death chamber. The only mercy is that it escaped unscathed from the carnage.”

Sharine looked, could see no signs of staining, or of physical deterioration.

“The sire—we all—wanted to fly it right back to the citadel,” Kiama added, “but we couldn’t take anything out of this room. The risk was too great.”

“It was the only possible decision,” Sharine said, warmth in her heart for the arrogant and blunt archangel who had kissed her with such passionate hunger, and who she already knew would leave a memory she’d never forget. “Charisemnon must’ve had the painting a long time.”

She smiled; nothing could dull her joy in the memories associated with this work. “Raan, the first man I ever loved, asked if he could gift the piece to the friend who hosted us for the visit that inspired it.