The Silvered Serpents

by Roshani Chokshi

  “Oh good, more brick,” said Hypnos.

  But this brick was different. A smell, like a stale pond in summer, hit her nose. The brick was damp, and when Zofia poked her head through the opening, she saw murky water far below. Above, but barely visible through the slats of boarded wood, she glimpsed cutouts of a blue sky. She could even hear the chittering of townspeople. Their language sounded close to her native Polish.

  “It opens into a well,” she said.

  Enrique moved beside her.

  “Do you see this writing?” he asked, pointing to marks on the dark bricks that made up the well. “These are signs of talismans and amulets, languages meant to ward away demons … There’s even a name carved into the stone … Horowitz? Does it ring a bell?”

  “It sounds Jewish,” she said.

  “Maybe it’s the name of the well builder?”

  Zofia didn’t answer. She’d already moved on to the third Tezcat. After all, a door that opened into a bricked-up well would not save Laila.

  “This one now,” said Zofia.

  “I think there’s still some writing here,” protested Enrique. “We’ve barely looked into the second door!”

  Hypnos followed after her and placed his palm on the third shield. Again, they waited. Again, it opened with that same puffing sound of release.

  A new scent flooded Zofia’s nose. It smelled of spices, like the kind Laila put in her morning tea. Hot sunlight spilled out onto the ice grotto. The wide door had flung open to reveal a three-foot drop into a deserted courtyard below them. Nine broken pillars surrounded the walls of the stone courtyard. The wall on the opposite side wasn’t made of stone like the others, though, but appeared to be slatted pieces of wood, through which Zofia glimpsed what looked like the green waters of a lake. Above the courtyard, open sky appeared between wooden slats draped in stained ribbons. There was writing along the wall in a language Zofia couldn’t decipher. Beside her, Eva’s hands had dropped to her side, her mouth slightly agape, and Enrique quickly crossed himself.

  Hypnos sucked in his breath and then clapped his hands. “I’m going to get Séverin and Ruslan! No one move! Say ‘promise’!”

  “Promise,” muttered Zofia, her eyes never leaving the statues.

  The moment she knew Hypnos had gone, Zofia took a step forward. She had everything they needed already packed from her venture into the leviathan: rope, torches, sharp-edged knives, and the folded-up tools around her necklace. She needed to know whether this place held the answers they sought. Whether this place could save Laila. But no sooner had she taken a step, then Enrique caught her arm.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m only taking a look,” she said, shaking him off.

  “But,” said Enrique in a smaller voice, “you said ‘promise.’”

  Zofia looked over her shoulder, one hand on the entrance to the courtyard. “I did say ‘promise.’”

  Out the corner of her eye, she saw Eva grin.

  “I am only taking one step,” said Zofia.

  “Just the one,” warned Enrique.

  Small hairs on Zofia’s arm bristled. Just the one. Stay in sight. Don’t move. She could do this, she told herself. She could save Laila. Zofia brought out her Mnemo bug and toggled the switch to record as she hopped onto the ground. Eva landed gracefully beside her. Enrique craned his neck, but the rest of him stayed in the ice grotto.

  “This place looks abandoned,” he said.

  Broken glasses and rusted knives littered the hard-packed dirt floor. Gouged-out holes, like the divots left behind from bullets, dotted what remained of the walls, and Zofia’s stomach lurched. Her parents talked of riddled walls like this, witnesses to moments where their own people were driven out of villages. Whoever had been here had also been chased out.

  And then there was the writing along the wall … the way the blasted pillars were not pillars after all, but statues of women. Women with their hands behind their backs. It looked familiar. Hadn’t Enrique pointed out something similar when they had first walked down the hall that led to the ice grotto? She took another step forward.

  “Zofia, wait!” called out Enrique.

  “Oh, don’t be such a coward,” said Eva. “This place is practically dead.”

  Zofia shrugged off her fur coat.

  “I recognize the writing on the wall,” said Eva. “I think … I think we’re in Istanbul.”

  “In the Ottoman Empire?” asked Enrique from above her.

  But Eva didn’t have time to answer. Because from the wall on the right came the sounds of a chair scraping back. The next second, she saw a plume of smoke. Someone stepped into the shadows of a statue. Instantly, the pillars lurched to life, the broken faces of nine statues swiveling toward them.

  An old, smoke-rasped voice declared:

  “You shall not take another.”

  20

  LAILA

  When Laila was a child, her mother made her a doll.

  It was the first—and last—toy she ever owned.

  The doll was made from the husks of banana leaves, stitched together with the ends of the gold thread that had once fringed her mother’s wedding sari. It had burnt eyes of charcoal, and long black hair fashioned from the mane of her father’s favorite water buffalo.

  Every night, Laila’s mother rubbed sweet almond oil into the scar on her back, and every night Laila held still, terror gripping her heart. She feared that if her mother pressed too hard, she would split down the middle. And so she held her doll tight, but not too tight. After all, the doll was like her: a fragile thing.

  “Do you know what you and this doll have in common, my love?” her mother had asked. “Both of you were made to be loved.”

  To Laila, the doll was a promise.

  If she could love its stitched-together form, then she too could be loved.

  When her mother died, she took the doll everywhere. She took it to dance practice, so it could learn the same movements she did and remember her mother with each sharp stamp of her heel and flick of her wrist. She took it to the kitchens, so it could learn the harmony of spice and salt, and the relief that this place was a sanctum. Every night, when Laila held the doll close, she felt her own emotion and her own memory replaying behind her eyes like a dream that would not end, and though she had grief, she did not have nightmares.

  One morning, she awoke to find it gone. She rushed into the hall … but it was too late. Her father stood by the hearth, watching as scarlet flames fed upon the doll, charring out its eyes, gulping down the single braid of its hair that Laila had so carefully arranged to match her own. The room smelled of singed parts. All the while, her father did not look at her.

  “It would’ve fallen apart sooner or later,” he said, crossing his arms. “No use keeping it around. Besides, you’re far too old for such childish things.”

  Afterwards, he left her to kneel before the flames. Laila watched until the doll was nothing more than soft ash and the muted glimmer of golden thread. Her mother was wrong. They were not made to be loved, but to be broken.

  After the fire, Laila stopped playing with dolls. But despite her father’s efforts, she had not stopped carrying around her own death. Even now, all she had to do was look down at her hand and the bright garnet ring waited to taunt her.

  Laila stood in the icy makeshift morgue, the only living girl in the room. For today, she wore a funereal-black dress. On a small table beside her lay pen and parchment, and the diamond necklace Séverin forced her to wear. It hadn’t felt right to lean over these girls with such extravagance on her skin, even if it was only a fancy means of summoning her.

  Spread out on nine ice slabs were the dead girls taken down from the walls of the ice grotto. In the dim light of the Forged lanterns, the girls looked as if they were made of porcelain. As if they were simply playthings that had been loved too hard, and that was why their pearl-pale legs were mottled, why the thin shifts they wore clung to them in tatters, why the crowns placed on their he
ads had been knocked askew and tangled into the frigid clumps of their hair. At least, it seemed that way until one looked at their hands. Or, rather, the lack of them.

  Laila fought back a wave of nausea.

  It had taken all the attendants of House Dazbog, House Kore, and House Nyx combined to remove them from the walls. Forging artists brought in from Irkutsk had created a morgue, and House Kore’s artist gardeners had crafted ice blossoms that gave off heat without melting. A physician, a priest, and a member of the Irkutsk police force had been summoned to administer final rites and identify the bodies, but they would not be here for a couple of hours, which left Laila some time alone with them. The others thought she was there to document what she saw, but the real reason lay in her veins. Her blood let her do what no one else could for these girls—know them.

  “My name is not Laila,” whispered Laila to the dead girls. “I gave that name to myself when I left home. I have not said my true name in years, but since I don’t know if we’ll ever discover who you were … I hope you find peace in this secret.”

  One by one, she walked among them and told them her real name … the name her mother had given her.

  When she finished, she turned to the girl closest to her. Like the others, her hands been removed. There was a crown around her head, and in some places frosted petals still clung to the wire. Laila withdrew a piece of cloth from a basket at her feet. For what she had to do, she could not bear to look at the girl. What was left of the girl’s face reminded her too much of a young Zofia … the suggestion of a pointed chin and a delicate nose, the slightest lift of her cheekbones and the fey-like sharpness of her ears. This was a girl who was too young to be beautiful, but might have become so had she lived long enough.

  Laila covered the girl’s face, her eyes stinging with tears.

  And then, she read her.

  Laila started with the crown of wire, the cold metal burning her hand. Her abilities had always been temperamental. The memories—sights, sounds, emotional impressions—of an object lingered close to its surface for a month before vanishing. After that, what remained was residue, an impression of the object’s defining moment or emotion. Usually, they were textures to Laila—the spiked-rind of panic; the silk-melt of love; the thorns of envy; the cold solidity of grief. But sometimes … sometimes when it was strong, it was like living through the memory, and her whole body would feel strung out from the weight of it. That’s how it had felt with Enrique’s rosary, like witnessing a scene.

  Hesitantly, Laila closed her eyes and touched the crown. In her head flowed a piercing tune. Haunting and vast, like what a sailor might grasp of a siren’s song seconds before drowning. Laila drew back her hand, her eyes opening. The wire had been taken from an instrument, like a cello or harp.

  Next, her fingers coasted over the cloth covering the girl’s mauled face and the strange symbols cut into it. Laila’s soul recoiled at the thought … whoever had done this to them hadn’t even seen them as people, but something to be writ upon like so much parchment.

  She didn’t want to look, but she had to.

  Laila touched the strap of the girl’s dress. Immediately, the taste of blood filled her mouth. The force of the girl’s last moments of life shrieked through her thoughts like a thunderstorm—

  “Please! Please don’t!” screamed the girl. “My father, Moshe Horowitz, is a moneylender. He can pay whatever ransom you name, I swear it, please—”

  “Hush, my dear,” said an older man.

  Laila’s skin prickled. The man’s voice was kind, like someone soothing a child in a temper tantrum. But Laila felt the pressure of the knife as if it was pushed to her own throat. She tasted the ghost of blood in her mouth, the same iron-tang the girl must have felt when she realized what was happening and bit down too hard on her own tongue.

  “It’s not about money. It’s about immortality … we are the made creatures that have surpassed our creator, why should we not become His equals? The sacrifice of your blood shall pave the way, and you shall be an instrument of the divine.”

  “Why me?” whimpered the girl. “Why—”

  “There now, my flower,” said the man. “I picked you because no one will look for you.”

  Laila clutched her throat, gasping for breath.

  For a moment it had actually felt as if … she touched the skin of her neck and looked at her fingertips, wondering if they would come away red … but they didn’t. It was just a memory from long ago, strong enough that it grabbed hold of her whole person. Laila forced herself not to cry. If she wept now, she wouldn’t stop.

  Though the ice blossoms kept her warm, Laila couldn’t stop shivering. When Enrique had shared his findings about the symbols on the girls, he had told them he believed they were meant to be sacrifices … and he was right. She couldn’t get the sound of the man’s voice out of her head. He had to be the patriarch of the Fallen House, and yet she hated how sickeningly kind he sounded. Nothing at all like the flat affect of the doctor when he’d descended upon them inside the catacombs.

  Laila gripped the edge of the ice slab, her stomach heaving. Months ago, she remembered hearing Roux-Joubert’s confession:

  The doctor’s papa is a bad man.

  They had all assumed it meant the doctor’s father had once been the patriarch the Fallen House. It had sounded so silly. “A bad man.” Like something a child would say. But the girls, their mouths, the ice … they didn’t fit in the scope of words like “bad.” Laila had always thought that the Fallen House’s exile was about power. They wanted to access the power of God by rebuilding the Tower of Babel, but all they achieved was exile. And yet, he had sacrificed these girls, cut off their hands, and for what? She needed to find out.

  Heart pounding, Laila reached for the next girl. Then the next, and the next. She read them in a daze, the same words knifing into her thoughts over and over:

  You shall be an instrument of the divine.

  No one will look for you.

  The patriarch had grabbed the girls too dark to be visible in the world’s eyes; whose languages fell on deaf ears; whose very homes at the edge of society pushed them too far into the shadows for notice. A part of Laila hoped he was still alive, if only so she could show him what vengeance meant.

  When she reached the last girl, her hands shook violently. She felt as though she had been stabbed and strangled, dragged through the snow by her hair and thrown into the dark and kept there for hours. In her head, she heard what sounded like the slosh of water. On the soles of her feet, she felt the slide of freezing metal. Always, she tasted blood and tears. And at the very back of her thoughts curled a terrible dissonance. What decided that they should die while she—born dead, as it were—would walk between their bodies? Laila wanted to believe in gods and inscrutable stars, destinies as subtle as spider silk caught in a shaft of sunlight and, beautiful above all, reason. But between these walls of ice, only randomness stared back at her.

  Laila forced herself to turn to the last girl. Her hair, dark and threaded with ice, fanned out behind her neck. Though her skin had long since paled and turned mottled from the cold, Laila could tell she was dark-skinned. Like her. Laila steeled herself as she reached out and heard the girl’s last moments:

  “My family will curse you,” spat the girl. “You will die in your filth. You will be slaughtered like a pig! I will be a ghost and rip you to shreds—”

  The patriarch of the Fallen House gagged her mouth.

  “Such a sharp tongue for a pretty face,” he said, as if scolding her. “Now, my dear, if you please … hold still.”

  He raised the knife to her face and began to cut.

  “You were to be my last attempt,” he said, talking over the muffled sound of her screaming. “I thought the others would be instruments of the divine, but it would seem as though my greatest treasure wants a particular sort of blood … picky, picky.” He sighed. “I thought you might be the one to see it, to read it, but you’ve disappointed me.”
/>   Laila winced, her eyes rolling back at the ghost of the girl’s pain.

  “I know one of you is out there, and I will find you … and you will be my instrument.”

  Laila pushed back from the last slab, a terrible numbing sensation creeping through her body. It happened when she read too much, as if there wasn’t enough left of her to be in the present. Her mouth felt dry, and her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. All those girls had been killed as a sacrifice that hadn’t even worked. They were dead for nothing.

  Laila slid to the ground, her face in her hands, her back pressed to the ice slab. She didn’t feel the cold. She felt nothing but the aching thud of each heartbeat.

  “I’m sorry,” she choked out. “I’m so sorry.”

  Moments, or maybe hours later came the urgent footfall of someone outside the morgue. Her back was to the door, and she didn’t turn right away. It was probably an attendant come to tell her the physician, priest, or police officer would take it from here. She would look like a fool to them, standing and weeping, her hands shaking. But instead, she heard:

  “Laila?”

  Séverin. His voice sounded choked, out of breath.

  “Laila!” he called out again, just as she grabbed the slab and hauled herself up to see Séverin standing in the doorway.

  In his sable coat with his snow-damp hair, Séverin looked like something summoned by a curse. And when he stepped forward, the ice-light of the morgue rendered his eyes the color of deep bruises.

  For a moment, they merely regarded each other.

  Mistress she might be in name, but not in any practice.

  He might walk with her to the bedroom suite they shared at night, but he had never stayed there since that first night, much less ever got into the bed with her. The past few mornings, she had woken up alone. To see him now—standing hardly five feet from her—jolted her. So much reading rippled her own perspective, and she felt, for an instant, dragged back into a past that belonged to another life. A past where she was happily baking a cake in the kitchens of L’Eden, her hands dusted with sugar and flour. A past where his eyes were once lit up by wonder and curiosity. A past where he once jokingly demanded to know why she called him Majnun.