by Laini Taylor
Yasri had said, “They couldn’t know about her.”
Know what?
It was maddening, this secrecy. She wanted to sit up and scream, “Who am I?” but she didn’t. She feigned sleep, because there was something else nudging at her thoughts.
Brimstone wasn’t here.
He was always here. She had never before been granted admittance to the shop in his absence, and only the extraordinary circumstance of her nearly dying accounted for this breach.
This opportunity.
Karou waited until she heard Yasri and Issa moving away, peering through her lashes to be certain they had gone. She knew that as soon as she shifted her weight to stand the springs of the cot would creak and give her away, so she reached for the strand of scuppies around her wrist.
Yet another use for nearly useless wishes: to silence creaking bedsprings.
She stood and steadied herself, head spinning, wounds burning, without making a sound. Yasri and Issa had taken her boots off, along with her coat and sweater, so she was wearing only bandages and a blood-streaked camisole and jeans. She went barefoot around a pair of cabinets and under hanging strings of camel and giraffe teeth, then paused, listened, and peered out into the shop.
Brimstone’s desk was dark, and so was Twiga’s, no lanterns lit for the hummingbird-moths to flutter to. Issa and Yasri were in the kitchen, out of sight, and the whole shop was cast in gloom, which made the other door stand out all the more, a crack of light giving away its edge.
For the first time in Karou’s life, it was ajar.
Heart pounding, she approached it. She paused for a beat with her hand on the knob, then eased the door open a fraction and peered through it.
16
FALLEN
Akiva found Izîl cowering behind a garbage pile in the Jemaa el-Fna, his creature still clinging to his back. A half circle of frightened humans crowded in on them, menacing, but when Akiva dropped from the sky in an explosion of sparks, they fled in all directions, squealing like slapped pigs.
The creature reached out to Akiva. “My brother,” it crooned. “I knew you’d come back for me.”
Akiva’s jaw clenched. He forced himself to look at the thing. Bloated as its face was, its features held an echo of long-ago beauty: almond eyes, a fine, high-bridged nose, and sensuous lips that were perverse on such a wretched face. But the key to its true nature was at its back. From its shoulder blades protruded the splintered remnants of wing joints.
Incredibly, this thing was a seraph. It could only be one of the Fallen.
Akiva knew the story as legend and had never wondered whether it was true, not until this moment, faced with the proof of it. That there were seraphim, exiled in another age for treason and collaborating with the enemy, cast into the human world forever. Well, here was one of them, and indeed, he had fallen far from what he once had been. Time had curved his spine, and his flesh, pulled taut, seemed to snag on every ridge of vertebrae. His legs dangled uselessly behind him — that was not the work of time, but of violence. They had been pulverized with cruel purpose, that he should never walk again. As if it were not punishment enough that his wings were torn away — not even cut, but torn—his legs were destroyed, too, leaving him a crawling thing on the surface of an alien world.
A thousand years he had lived like this, and he was beside himself with joy to see Akiva.
Izîl was not so happy. He cowered against the stinking mound of refuse, more afraid of Akiva than he had been of the mob. While Razgut gibbered, “My brother, my brother,” in an ecstatic chant, the old man shook with a palsy and tried to back away, but there was nowhere for him to go.
Akiva loomed over him, the brilliance of his unglamoured wings lighting the scene like daylight.
Razgut reached longingly toward Akiva. “My sentence is up, and you’ve come to bring me back. That’s it, isn’t it, my brother? You’re going to take me home and make me whole again, so I can walk. So I can fly—”
“This has nothing to do with you,” said Akiva.
“What… what do you want?” Izîl choked out in the language of the seraphim, which he had learned from Razgut.
“The girl,” Akiva said. “I want you to tell me about the girl.”
17
WORLD APART
On the far side of the other door, Karou discovered a passage of dull black stone. Peering out, she could see that the corridor went on for some ten feet before turning out of sight. Just before it did, there was a window — a narrow, barred niche at the wrong angle for her to see through from where she stood. White light washed in, painting rectangles across the floor. Moonlight, Karou thought, and she wondered what landscape she would see if she crept over and looked out. Where was this place? Like the shop’s front door, did this rear one open onto myriad cities, or was this something else altogether, some depth of Brimstone’s Elsewhere that she couldn’t begin to fathom? A few steps and she might know that, if nothing else. But did she dare?
She listened hard. There were sounds but they seemed far away, echoing calls in the night. The passage itself was silent.
So she did it. She prowled out. Quick silent steps, high on the balls of her bare feet, and she was over to the window. Peering through its heavy iron bars. Seeing what was there.
Her facial muscles, tense with anxiety, abruptly slackened with the onset of total awe, and her jaw actually dropped. It was a second before she realized it and snapped it closed, wincing when the sharp report of her teeth broke the silence. She leaned forward, taking in the scene before and below her.
Wherever this was, she was sure of one thing: It was not her world.
In the sky were two moons. That was the first thing. Two moons. Neither was full. One was a radiant half disc high overhead, the other a pale crescent just rising to clear a crust of mountain. As for the landscape they illuminated, she saw she was in a vast fortress. Huge, bermed defensive walls met at hexagonal bastions; a generous town was laid out in the center of it all, and crenellated towers — in one of which, Karou gauged by her high vantage point, she must be — reared above it all, with the silhouettes of guards pacing at their peaks. But for the moons, it might have been a fortified town of old Europe.
It was the bars that made it something else.
Extraordinarily, the city was banded over by iron bars. She’d never seen anything like it. They arched over the whole of the place from one expanse of rammed-earth walls to the next, beetle-black and ugly, enclosing even the towers. A quick study gave away no gaps; the bars were spaced so closely that no body could possibly squeeze between them. The streets and plazas of the town were entirely screened from above as if they existed within a cage, and moonlight cast rickrack shadows over everything.
What was it about? Were the bars meant to keep something in or out?
And then Karou saw a winged figure sweeping down out of the sky and she flinched, thinking she had her answer. An angel, a seraph — that was her first thought, her heart starting to hammer and her wounds to throb. But it wasn’t. It passed overhead and out of sight, and she clearly saw that its form was animal — some sort of winged deer. A chimaera? She had always supposed there must be more, though she had only ever seen her four, who would never say if there were others.
It hit her now that this whole city must be inhabited by chimaera, and that beyond its walls lay an entire world, a world with two moons, also inhabited by chimaera, and she had to grip the bars to hold herself upright as the universe seemed to tremble and grow larger around her.
There was another world.
Another world.
Of all the theories she’d dreamed up about the other door, she’d never imagined this: a world apart, complete with its own mountains, continents, moons. She was already light-headed with blood loss, and the revelation made her reel so she had to clutch at the window bars.
It was then that she heard voices. Near. And also familiar. She had listened to their murmurs all her life as their incongruous heads bent tog
ether in discussions of teeth. It was Brimstone and Twiga, and they were coming around the corner.
“Ondine has brought Thiago,” Twiga was saying.
“The fool,” Brimstone breathed. “Does he think the armies can afford the loss of him at a time like this? How many times must I tell him, a general need not fight at the front?”
“It is because of you that he knows no fear,” said Twiga, to which Brimstone only snorted, and that snort sounded dangerously close.
Karou almost panicked. Her eyes darted back to the door she had come from. She didn’t think she could reach it. Instead, she pressed herself into the window niche and held stone-still.
They passed her, near enough to touch. Karou feared that they would go into the shop and close the door behind them, trapping her in this strange place. She was ready to cry after them to prevent it, but they bypassed the door. Her panic subsided. In its wake, something else flared: anger.
Anger at the years of secrets, as if she weren’t worthy of trust or even the barest details of her own existence. Her anger made her bold, and she determined to find out more — as much as she could while she was here. This chance, she suspected, would never come again. So when Brimstone and Twiga turned into a stairwell, she followed.
They were tower stairs, a tight corkscrew down. The spiraling descent made Karou dizzy: down, around, down, around, hypnotic, until it seemed as if she were caught in a purgatory of stairs and would go down like this forever. There were small slot windows for a while, and then they disappeared. The air grew cool and still, and Karou had the impression of being belowground. She heard Brimstone and Twiga in snatches, and could make no sense of their conversation.
“We will need more incense soon.” Twiga.
“We will need more of everything. There has not been an onslaught like this in decades.” Brimstone.
“Do you think they have their eye on the city?”
“When have they not?”
“How long?” Twiga asked with a quaver. “How long can we hold them off?”
Brimstone. “I don’t know.”
And just when Karou thought she couldn’t bear any more turning, they reached the bottom. It was here that things got interesting.
Really interesting.
The stairs spilled out into a vast, echoing hall. Karou had to hold herself back to make sure Brimstone and Twiga had gone on, but when she heard their voices moving away, rendered small by the immensity of the space that swallowed them, she crept out after them.
It seemed she was in a cathedral — if, that is, the earth itself were to dream a cathedral into being over thousands of years of water weeping through stone. It was a massive natural cavern that soared overhead to a near-perfect Gothic arch. Stalagmites as old as the world were carved into pillars in the shapes of beasts, and candelabras hung so high they were like clusters of stars. A scent was heavy in the air, herbs and sulfur, and smoke wreathed among the pillars, teased into wisps by breezes emanating from unseen openings in the carven walls.
And below it all, where Brimstone and Twiga walked down the cathedral’s long nave, there weren’t pews for worship, but tables — stone tables huge as menhirs, so huge they must have required elephants to haul them there. Indeed, they were large enough to accommodate an elephant reclining, though only one of them actually did.
An elephant, laid out on a table.
Or… no. It was not an elephant. With clawed feet and a head that was some nightmare of a massive, tusked grizzly bear, it was elsething. Chimaera.
And it was dead.
On each of the tables lay a dead chimaera, and there were dozens of them. Dozens. Karou’s gaze fluttered, erratic, from table to table. No two of the dead were alike. Most had some human quality to them, head or torso, but not all. There, an ape with the mane of a lion; an iguana-thing so huge it could only be called a dragon; a jaguar’s head on the nude body of a woman.
Brimstone and Twiga moved among them, touching them, examining. They paused the longest over a man.
He was naked, too. He was what Karou and Zuzana would have called, with the smug smiles of connoisseurs, a “physical specimen.” Heavy shoulders tapering to neat hips, abdomen corrugated, all the muscles Karou could identify from life drawing study ruggedly pronounced. On his powerful chest was a down of pure white hair, and the hair of his head was white, too, long and silken on the stone table.
A fug of incense hung thick around him. It was coming from a kind of ornate silver lantern suspended from a hook above his head, exhaling a steady fume. A thurible, Karou thought, like those twirled about in Catholic Mass. Brimstone laid a hand to the dead man’s chest, let it linger there a moment in a gesture Karou couldn’t decipher. Fondness? Sadness? When he and Twiga moved on and vanished into the rearing wall of shadow at the far end of the nave, she crept out of hiding and went to the table.
Up close, she saw that the man’s white hair was an incongruity. He was young, his face unlined. He was very handsome, though blank and waxen in death, and seeming not quite real.
He was also not quite human, though nearer to it than most of the chimaera here. The flesh and musculature of his legs transitioned at mid-thigh to become the white-furred haunches of a wolf, with long backward-bending canine feet and black claws. And his hands, she saw, were hybrid: broad and furred across the backs like paws, with human fingers tapering to claws. They were lying palm up, as if they had been arranged that way, and that was how Karou saw what was etched on his skin.
In the center of each palm was a tattooed eye identical to her own.
She took a startled step back.
This was something. Something critical, something key, but what did it mean? She turned to the next table, the lion-maned creature. Its hands were simian, the flesh black, but she could still make out the hamsas on them.
She went to the next table, and the next. Even the elephant-creature: The soles of its mammoth forefeet were marked. Each of these dead creatures wore the hamsas, just like she did. Her thoughts hammered in her head the way her heart thumped in her chest. What was going on? Here were dozens of chimaera, and they were dead and naked — without, she noted, any visible wounds — and laid out cold on slabs in some kind of underground cathedral. Her own hamsas connected her to them in some way, but she couldn’t imagine how.
She circled back around to the first table, the white-haired man, and leaned against it. She was conscious of the scented smoke from the thurible and had a moment of anxiety when she realized her hair would be infused with the smell and give her away to Yasri and Issa when she snuck back into the shop. The shop. The thought of climbing back up that interminable corkscrew made her want to sink down into fetal position. Her wounds throbbed. They were seeping through the bandages, and Yasri’s balm was wearing off. She hurt.
But… this place. These dead. With her muddled head, Karou felt unequal to the mystery. The white-haired man’s hand lay right before her, its hamsa taunting her. She laid her own beside it to compare the marks, but his lay in the shadow of his body, so she reached out to lift it into the light.
The marks were identical. She saw that as her mind worked at something else, a too-slow warning from her sluggish senses.
His hand, his dead hand… it was warm.
It was not dead.
He was not dead.
A whip-crack movement and he came upright, spinning on his knees. His hand, which had lain inert in hers, caught her throat and lifted her off her feet, slamming her down onto the stone table. Her head. Against stone. Her vision blurred. When it cleared again he was above her, eyes ice-pale, lips drawn back over fangs. She couldn’t breathe. His hand still clutched her throat. She clawed at it, struggled to throw him off, managed to get her knees between them and kick out.
His grip loosened and she gasped a breath, tried to scream, but he was over her again, heavy and naked and bestial, and she fought him with everything in her, fought him with a wildness that plunged them over the edge of the table to the floor. It
was chaos and thrashing, and bare limbs so strong Karou couldn’t break free. He was on her, straddling her legs, staring, and some kind of crazed madness seemed to clear from his eyes. His lips eased from their snarl and he looked human again, almost, and beautiful, but still terrifying and… confused.
He gripped her by the wrists, forced open her hands to see her hamsas, then looked sharply at her face. His gaze roved over all of her so that she felt as if she were the naked one, and then he gave a thick growl that sent shudders through her. “Who are you?”
She couldn’t answer. Her heart was pounding. Her wounds were on fire. And, as ever, she had no answer.
“Who are you?” He dragged her upright by her wrists and flung her back onto the stone table and was over her again. His movements were fluid and animal, his teeth sharp enough to rip out her throat, and all at once Karou saw how her trespass through the other door was going to end: in a pool of blood. She found her breath.
And screamed.
18
BATTLE NOT WITH MONSTERS
“Girl?” Izîl squinted up at Akiva. “You… you mean Karou?”
Karou? Akiva knew that word. It meant hope in the language of the enemy. So not only did she bear the hamsas, she had a chimaera name. “Who is she?” he demanded.
Clearly terrified, the old man pulled himself up a little straighter. “Why do you want to know, angel?”
“I’m asking the questions,” said Akiva. “And I suggest you answer them.” He was impatient to get on and meet the others, but loathe to leave with this mystery hanging over him. If he didn’t find out who the girl was now, he would never know.
Eager to be helpful, Razgut supplied, “She tastes like nectar and salt. Nectar and salt and apples. Pollen and stars and hinges. She tastes like fairy tales. Swan maiden at midnight. Cream on the tip of a fox’s tongue. She tastes like hope.”
