Nice try. Flattery will get you nowhere. I am the handmaid of death. I am the last thing a screaming victim ever sees.
Tamerlan’s skin crawled, as he tried to draw back from his own hands and feet. But he couldn’t run from his own body. He couldn’t stop gripping that belt knife even if he wanted to. Why had she drawn it? Why was it gripped so tightly in his hand, the blade running along his arm like he knew what to do with it? Why were his feet stalking toward the front of the Smudger Temple?
There was a shriek of laughter and a girl dressed like Maid Chaos ran from her group and stumbled into his arms.
“Ha! And who are you dressed as?” she asked drunkenly. Moonlight reflected from her Maid Chaos costume. “It doesn’t look very fun.”
And then Tamerlan heard his own voice saying, “Death is not fun.”
The blade flicked out and then her blood splashed hot across his face as she fell choking to the ground.
No!
No, no, no, no, no!
He tried to scream but his own voice was inaccessible to him. His voice was too busy laughing – and it was his laugh. It felt like it would never be his again, as if it had been stolen – snatched from his throat like the life from that poor girl’s body. Her eyes glazed over as he left her like refuse abandoned along the street.
No! He did this to save Amaryllis, not to kill anyone, certainly not an innocent victim!
His body raced forward, toward a knot of screaming people in costume. He had never guessed he was so fast or so strong as he tore into them, the small knife flicking into vulnerable places and past upraised hands and terrorized eyes.
Tamerlan desperately tried to shut his eyes, but they would not close as image after image of fear and death and horror burned across them like acid thrown across metal. His internal screams rang in his ears alone. His body was running down the street, already soaked in blood up to his elbows.
He turned over braziers as he ran – was he really so strong? He’d seen it take four men to move them into place! – letting the fire spill across the cobbles or light the edges of fleeing people’s costumes aflame. Smoke billowed into the night almost as fast and thick as the shrieks that accompanied it.
He raced down a horse as it fled, slicing his hamstring with a single motion, knocking him off his feet with the lamp post and then cutting his throat as he screamed into the night. An easy spin and slash and the carriage driver fell, clutching his ruined throat.
And now Tamerlan was sobbing inside as Maid Chaos used his body to cut the horse’s leg from its body. He raced down the street, brandishing the leg in his left hand, his fingers wrapping around the bloody bone, swinging the leg so that the metal horseshoe struck blows to anyone in his path as he howled out curses and mad prophecies.
“Before you see two more dawns your city will be destroyed! Plead for your salvation! Cry for your unmarked graves!”
There was no way to run from yourself. No way to hide. No way to dull the sights or sounds or smells.
All his life, Tamerlan had trained himself to notice the beauty around him, to see every tone of color, to hear the smallest sound, to take in the barest flicker of a scent and now this ... desecration ... of everything he was made him wish every one of those moments away. If he’d only chosen to dull his senses, perhaps he would have been able to do that now instead of being forced to taste every moment of this hellish descent into madness.
He swung and slashed, cut and burned, murdered and mutilated his way through the Temple District, nowhere near his sister in the Sunset Castle. Nowhere near what he’d hoped for, planned for, begged for. He’d convinced the Scenter to let him go. He’d sworn it was for the good. His sense of shame at betraying her was nothing compared to the overwhelming, sickening guilt he felt with every heartbeat as Maid Chaos worked her way from street to street, from panic-eyed look to desperate scream, from falling victim to slain defender.
If only someone would kill him. If only someone would slide a sword through his ribs or slash his throat, but no one was as fast or strong as Maid Chaos. She seemed to wrap herself around him as if she were here even more fully than Byron Bronzebow or Lila Cherrylocks had been.
Because I am. I am greater than those fools. There are no shades of grey with me. And certainly, no white. I am black as the night, black as the pupils of my screaming victims.
Perhaps he had gone mad, for it seemed that they fought priests, seizing their staves and polearms and fighting with one in each hand before turning on Watch Officers who ran into the fray, bells jangling on their hips.
Perhaps one had even been sweet Marielle. In the chaos, who could tell who had fallen?
I can tell.
In all the death, who could keep track of how many lives had been lost?
Me, again. I’m very good at this.
The world had gone mad. It was a hurricane of evil, a slaughterhouse that never ended.
And so it has been since the beginning, since the minds of men invented me to blame for their evil deeds. When you see trouble, look for the woman, they said. I have shown them trouble a thousand times a thousand, and I will show it to them again and again, world without end.
He’d lost hope hours ago. Lost sanity soon after. He was nothing more than a gibbering mass of agony as the hours passed and they leapt up into the roofs, burning temples and killing priests and slaughtering anyone whose path intersected with theirs.
The first light of dawn was breaking on the horizon and they were back where they started passing the All Spirits Welcome Smudge House – only this time they were on the tiled roof instead of the city street, the canal just behind them.
I fade.
She leapt from the roof into the canal and Tamerlan closed his eyes but not his nose, letting the cloudy canal water fill his lungs. Death would be close. Would it wash him of his last hours? Could even the fires of death erase the guilt of what he’d done?
He let his body sink into the water, not fighting it, not trying to stop it at all.
Something clamped onto his shoulder, dragging him upward through the water. He was pulled up into the air and his lungs gasped for breath on their own. Traitors.
Hands hauled him upward as cursing filled the air.
“What did you do now, boy? That whole Temple District on fire! You burned more than your boat this time!”
Tamerlan sank into unconsciousness, desperate for the relief of insensibility it brought. If only he could wake up as someone else. If only he could never have been born.
26: Shaking Shame
Tamerlan
TAMERLAN WOKE, SHAKING uncontrollably. A rattling like dice in a cup filled his ears. His teeth. That was his teeth chattering together. He shook his head, trying to dislodge the blood-soaked thoughts, but nothing could block them out. It was dark where he was and wailing sounded out from above him. He tried to sit up, but something hard hit his back.
“Stay down!” Jhinn whispered fiercely. “Keep down. I’m taking you somewhere safe.”
There were shouts from above and a gondola passed by. Someone on it was wailing.
“My Danica! My sweet Danica! Only sixteen and gone!” and then the voice had passed in the swoosh of the oars.
Tamerlan wrapped wet arms around his head and sobbed silently until it felt his chest was cleaving in two and his heart was spilling into the hull of the little boat. The gentle beating of the water against the hull wasn’t soothing this time. It was more like the drums of war being beaten in triumph when the enemy marches by the piles of the dead.
What had he done?
He shied away from the flood of memories. He knew exactly what he had done. He was soaked with the blood of his victims. He had seen their last thoughts flash over their eyes as he took their lives. And he’d been powerless to stop it.
He was a monster. Worse, a devil.
“Stay still. We’re almost there.”
It seemed darker under the canvas tarp. Perhaps the small boat had docked under a bridge or a buildin
g. Some buildings along the canal had little channels that ran right under them so that supplies could be unloaded right into their storerooms.
Or perhaps it was merely the blackness of his soul covering over his living eyes. The light was too good for him. Warmth too much to ask for, now.
There was a dull thunk and then the canvas ripped off him.
They were somewhere dark and wet stonework was overhead. Jhinn stood over him and before he could move, a bucket of frigid, stale water was upended over him. He shivered against the deluge.
“Strip and then we’ll do it again. Throw your clothes over the side.”
The boy was smart. If he was caught with a bloody Tamerlan it would be more than his boat that they would take.
“You shouldn’t be with me,” Tamerlan said through chattering teeth as he stripped out of his clothing, throwing it over the side one article at a time.
Jhinn pushed the clothing under water with his oar, stuffing it under the edge of some rock. “You saved my boat. I will help save your sister. It’s fair.”
“You should leave your boat and go, Jhinn. You don’t want them to catch you.” Tamerlan threw his belt knife over the side. His hands throbbed with every movement. They were crisscrossed with cuts where the handle of the belt knife had slipped in all the blood and slid the blade too far down. It had cut Tamerlan’s own hands with every slash through the flesh of someone else. He looked at his palms. The flesh was ragged and bleeding.
Another bucket of water surprised a gasp from him as Jhinn poured it over him.
“That’s better,” the boy said. “And we don’t leave the boats. I already told you that. Here. Bail the water out of the bottom.”
He shoved a rough wooden bowl at Tamerlan to bail with.
“You don’t leave because the things on land aren’t real,” Tamerlan remembered. If only that was true. If only last night had been a nightmare. But it wasn’t. It was almost more real than this moment was. He shivered as revulsion filled him. Revulsion at himself. Deep, bone-deep shame at who he had become in a single night.
“And because the land is the place of the Satan. He roams up and down and to and fro, looking for who he may devour.”
Tamerlan’s wry laugh was harsh in the silence of wherever they were. Superstitions. Old dogma. As useful as the pink-tinged water he was bailing over the side.
“Laugh all you want, boy. You think there’s no Satan out there? Then why did you fall off that roof covered in blood and shaking so hard your teeth sound like the clink of coins? Why are your eyes haunted? Why did I hear the wails of many mourners as they came to collect their dead? Try and tell me that’s not the Satan.”
Tamerlan clenched his jaw at the overwhelming pain of the thought. There were parents up there collecting children. Lovers collecting their beloved. Children their parents. And he had ruined all their lives. If he hadn’t smoked the mixture, if he hadn’t opened the Bridge of Legends, none of this would have happened.
But you didn’t know, a part of his mind kept telling him. But he should have known. After all, hadn’t he threatened Sian’s life? Hadn’t she seen what he was capable of when he was possessed by the Spirits of the Legends? Not all Spirits were Byron Bronzebow. And to his horror, not all spirits were even Lila Cherrylocks.
No, they aren’t.
He was going mad. He was hearing her voice in his mind.
Mad?
Jhinn slid one of the rocks in the wall aside, pulling an old jute sack from the depths of it, and then another, and then another and then closing it again.
“Put these on,” he said, shoving the sacks at Tamerlan. “It’s a Seven Suns Palace guard uniform – blue cloak and all! – I found it hanging on a washing line over the canal and I thought that something like this might be important to have someday.”
Tamerlan nodded. “Thank you.”
He opened the sacks and began to dress mechanically. They were a little loose in the waist, a little tight against his broad shoulders. But they were the right length. Even the boots fit. And the cloak was warm, warmer than he deserved. When he was finished, Jhinn gathered the sacks, stuffing them in the little compartment behind him with the bags Tamerlan had brought him.
“No one will ask questions of a Palace Guard. We can leave this District before the City Watch come. Some people say they can smell you like a strong curry. We don’t want them smelling you, boy. I bet you stink of the Satan.”
Tamerlan nodded, trying one more time to send the boy to freedom. “You should not be with me.”
“Where else would I go?” Jhinn pulled a small canvas kit from his hiding spot in the stern of the boat, unwrapping it to reveal a needle and bandages. “Let’s fix those hands. You’re torn like a sail after a storm.”
Tamerlan felt like that. Torn. But unlike his hands which Jhinn could stitch, the rest of him was unrepairable.
“I just wanted to help my sister.” It came out close to a sob.
“You haven’t failed yet, boy.”
“Tomorrow night they’re going to kill her.”
“Then you have all of today and tonight. That’s not failure yet. Unless you give up.”
Tamerlan drew a stuttering breath, sucking in his tears. Jhinn was right that there was time, but he didn’t dare smoke again. Not when it could mean the lives of dozens of people. He felt like he was a deck of black and white cards – more white than black – but he’d been shuffled and all the black were on top. Any play he made could only be black, black, black until they’d all been played. There weren’t enough hands left to find a white.
“I can’t go back. I can’t do it again.”
“You were willing to die for your sister,” Jhinn said. “Right? That was your plan?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t have a sister.”
“That’s probably for the best,” Tamerlan said. If this was what love did to a heart, then no one should ever love again.
“I think you need to ask, what is she worth? Is she worth your life?” Jhinn asked as he pulled the needle through Tamerlan’s shredded palms.
Of course, she was.
Jhinn wasn’t done. “Is she worth someone else’s? And if she is – how many lives is she worth? If I could pull my parents back from the breast of Queen Mer ... if I could do that ... there wouldn’t be a price too high to pay. There wouldn’t be a limit I would put on what I would do.”
“I can’t even get the Legends to go in the palace with me,” Tamerlan said. Why was he considering this? He shouldn’t be talking about it. Talking only made it feel possible and it shouldn’t be possible. “Every time I try, they go their own way. But I need them to fight and pick locks and do the things I can’t once I get in there.”
“Try asking a hard question next time,” Jhinn said, tying a deft knot. “That one is easy to solve. You sneak in the palace in that pretty uniform I just gave you. Then you call the Legends when you get there. Can it work like that?”
“I don’t think so. I throw the mixture into a brazier or fire and breathe it in. If I did that in the palace, it would draw a lot of attention and it might affect other people, too. Who knows how many Legends can cross the Bridge at once.”
Jhinn laughed. “You’re a fool, boy. Another easy solve. Just wrap the mixture in paper and smoke it when you’re ready – real simple. No big smoke. No one else affected. Just you. And you would waste less of it that way, too.”
It was a brilliant idea.
And a terribly dangerous one.
And Tamerlan should not be considering it at all. He kept thinking of what Jhinn said – what was his sister worth? And then seeing the images of what he’d done last night flash through his mind. Shame and hope mixed in a foul brew that nauseated him at the same time that he clenched his newly repaired hands in determination.
It wasn’t too late to save Amaryllis.
If he dared to try again.
There was a clinking sound in the distance and Jhinn motioned to him hurriedly. “Str
ip down again and put your clothes in the bag. Hurry!”
“I just got dressed!”
“Hurry!”
27: Cold Regret
Marielle
MARIELLE WOKE TO HURRIED footsteps and the door slamming open, hitting the wall. She shook herself, straightening and wiping her mouth. She hadn’t meant to sleep here, but after Tamerlan had snuck away she couldn’t just go back to the Watch House. Without him in hand, she had to wait the night out in his room. It still smelled like him.
“No luck, I see,” Carnelian said, the glow of the dawn streaming into the room around her. “Looks like we both missed the excitement tonight but come on. Captain Ironarm wants every Scenter in the Watch on this investigation and you’re going to help me turn my dry streak around.”
Marielle stood, wiping at the corners of her eyes.
“No time for that,” Carnelian said, grabbing Marielle by the arm and pulling her behind her. She smelled of cilantro anticipation. “We’re already late. I was at that decadent party all night in your place. What a waste of time! Nothing happened there and everything happened out here.”
She was so full of pent-up energy that she practically bounced as she stormed through the quiet halls of The Copper Tincture, leading Marielle back out to the streets beyond.
“It’s a good thing you fell asleep,” Carnelian said. “Because there won’t be any sleep for anyone tonight.”
“What happened?” Marielle asked as Carnelian shoved a flask onto her hands. “It’s too early for drinking.”
“It’s water. Take a swig. Try to get your wits about you. We’re about to walk into hell.”
“In the Alchemist’s District?” Marielle took a swig of the water, using a tiny splash to clean her face and then handing it back to Carnelian. She felt like she was five steps behind her friend already.
“No, the Temple District. By the time I left that Landhold Party and all the frills and lace, it was all over except the sobbing.”
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