“We?” Karou was incredulous. “What we?”
“I,” he hastened to clarify. He knew that no “we” would ever again stretch to encompass the two of them. “And in the seraph ranks there may be others who are tired, and who want life, not death.”
“They have life. Unlike my people.”
Akiva had been thinking of Brimstone’s last words—“It is life that expands to fill worlds”—but of course Karou couldn’t know that. He wanted to tell her what Brimstone had said. He thought she would want to know, but coming from him, wouldn’t it seem like a taunt? “It’s not a life worth living,” he said. “Not one worth handing on to children.”
“Children,” said Karou, and she was so bleak—and so beautiful. Akiva couldn’t help himself—he looked at her and looked at her, and he ached, looking, knowing he would never again touch her or see her smile. “When both sides start butchering children,” she said, “I think it’s safe to say life has lost.”
What did she mean? She saw his confusion. “Oh. You don’t know yet?” Grim. “You will.”
It hit him. Thiago. “What has he done?”
“Nothing you haven’t.”
“I’ve never killed a child.”
“You’ve killed thousands of children, Beast’s Bane,” she hissed. He flinched to hear her speak the name, and he couldn’t argue.
He hadn’t done it with his own swords, but he’d opened the way for the killers. There were things he had seen that he would never unsee. Images swelled in him like screams—strobe memories, flashing, ugly, ugly, unforgivable. Akiva closed his eyes. This was what he was to her: a killer of children, a monster. She was working side by side with the White Wolf, and it was Akiva who was the monster. How had the world gotten so twisted around?
If Thiago had not found them out and come to the requiem grove that night, what might they have gone on to do?
Maybe nothing. Maybe they would have died some other way and accomplished nothing.
It didn’t matter. The dream had been pure. Even in his despair, Akiva knew it, felt it, but he knew Karou couldn’t. He took a step back from her, ventured to look at her again. She had her arms wrapped around herself, and her face was desolation. She was broken, as he had been all these years. And… he had broken her.
“I’ll go,” he said. “I didn’t come to cause you pain, and please believe I didn’t come to kill. I came because… I thought you were dead. Karou, I thought…”
His hand went to the thurible. What would it mean to her, he wondered, this vessel and its message: Karou. If it wasn’t her soul, whose was it? His first thought on finding it had been that the name was a label, but it was clear to him now that it was an inscription.
“I found this in the Kirin caves,” he said, and held it out. “It must have been left there for you to find.” She looked startled by the sight of a thurible in his hands. He held it out; she hesitated, unwilling to come any nearer to him. “This is why I wanted to die,” he said, and he turned the small square of paper so that she could read it. “Because I thought it was you.”
Karou snatched the vessel from him and stared at the writing. She wasn’t breathing.
Karou.
How many times, back in Prague, had she gotten notes just like this? Then, they would have been pierced through by Kishmish’s claws and somewhat the worse for wear, but the paper was the same, and the writing… she would know it anywhere.
It was Brimstone’s.
She stared at it until a gust of sparks pulled her out of her shock, and she knew that Akiva had gone. She didn’t have to look around. She felt his absence, the way she always had—as cold rushing in to fill the void he left behind. Her heart was hammering, she held the vessel to her chest and imagined she could feel the soul within vibrating against her heartbeat. That was pure fancy; there could be no hint through the silver of what—who—was inside. But it had to be….
It had to be.
Her hands shook. All it would take was twisting the vessel open. An impression of the soul would filter out and she would know at once.
She held it ready. Hesitated. What if it wasn’t?
Her thoughts were scattershot; they came and cascaded away, but one came and came again. Akiva had brought her the thurible. Thiago—her ally—lied to keep her isolated and alone. Akiva—her enemy—brought her the thurible that might… that might… that might contain… Brimstone.
Did it?
A twist of the wrist and Karou opened the vessel. Half a second. The soul skimmed against her senses.
And she knew.
55
THE EMPEROR’S PROWESS
A bare foot, highly arched. A slender ankle festooned in golden bangles.
Nevo didn’t mean to see, but the music of the bangles drew his attention at the moment the girl stepped through the door and he glimpsed this secret sight before he could jerk his chin down and pin his gaze to the ground.
The concubine of the night, leaving the harem to be escorted across the skybridge to the emperor’s inner sanctum. She was veiled and cloaked as the women always were, in a hooded robe that concealed even her wings, and she would scarcely have registered as a person at all but for that glimpse of foot. It was the most Nevo had ever seen of one of Joram’s concubines, and he was caught off guard by its effect on him.
Instantly he wanted to help her.
Help her what? Escape? That was rich. It was his duty to ensure that she didn’t. He was part of the Silversword escort standing ready to deliver her across the bridge. They were six, a virtual parade. It was ludicrous: six guards to walk a girl across a bridge.
A girl—not a woman? Nevo couldn’t have said why he thought so—it was hardly the foot—but he guessed that she was young. And then, she hesitated.
When the harem doors clanged shut behind her, she stood frozen in place.
Nevo sensed frantic energy beneath all that gauzy cloth. He could see her veil stirred by too-quick breathing, and her cloak by courses of shivers, not from cold, but terror. It had to be her first time making this walk.
The thought pierced him.
Several times a week he drew parade duty, as they called it, and he had learned that you could infer a lot from the manner of a woman’s bearing, even beneath so much concealment. Slow, steady steps, short quick frantic steps; head held high or darting left and right, peering through the screen of her veil at the world outside her prison. He had seen—or guessed at—weariness and resignation, pride, dejection, but he had never seen a girl freeze before, and he tensed, thinking she was going to bolt.
The skybridge was a slender span of glass, the city far below, and sometimes the women chose to leap rather than be delivered across it. Under those cloaks their wings were pinioned, and to fall was to die—or try to die. A guard would leap after her. If he caught her, she was punished; if he didn’t, he was.
It had happened before, though not in his own time here. Nevo was only twenty; he had had his silver sword only two years, and been promoted to the emperor’s personal detail just two months ago. He didn’t know what to do in a situation like this.
Not a one of his fellow guards moved or spoke. They waited, and so he waited, too, unaccountably nervous. And when the girl began, finally, to propel herself so-slowly forward, trembling, Nevo came to understand something. He had thought the six-guard parade a ridiculous display: Lest anyone fail to take note of the emperor’s prowess, or to count the women who were his and the bastards he sired, here were six guards standing each over eight feet tall in their extravagant helmet plumes to draw all eyes to the spectacle.
But maybe there was more to it than that. Because in this moment, if Nevo alone were this girl’s escort, he couldn’t swear that he would do his duty. As powerful as his loyalty to the emperor was, there were stronger impulses, like the urge to protect the helpless.
Fool, Nevo, he chastened himself with an inward snarl. Some said Joram’s magi could read thoughts, and he hoped it wasn’t true, because in the space of seconds he had allowed such ridiculous visions to flit through his head—saving this girl, taking her somewhere safe. Godstars, there was even a lean-to dwelling in the picture, a garden behind it, and a great overarching sky with no spires as far as the eye could see, no Tower of Conquest, no Astrae, no Empire. Just a small, safe place, and himself hero to an unknown, faceless girl.
All because of a glimpse of foot?
Pathetic. Maybe his bunkmates were right, that Nevo needed some “tending to” in the soldiers’ comfort house. He told himself he would go, resolved on it as he marched, his boot heels too slow on the glass walk. The escort was grouped in two triads with the girl between, so that Nevo walked right behind her, adjusting his steps to match her mincing pace. She looked so small—they always did, framed by the giants of the guard. He could hear her uneven breathing—the high, fluting gasps of near-hysteria—and feel the waves of heat rolling off her cloaked wings.
Her perfume was so delicate it might almost have been her natural scent.
He wondered what color her hair was, and her eyes.
Stop it. You’ll never know.
The march was short over that span of glass, Astrae opening beneath them and closing again when they came to the other end. The girl was delivered. A steward met her at Alef Gate and she went in and was gone without a glance at her escort.
Absurdly, that stung. As if she should have taken note of him, somehow understood that he felt sorry for her?
Nevo knew that in his Imperial Guard uniform he was as anonymous to her as she should have been to him, and the thought made him restless and angry. He had lost himself to a uniform—this shining silver costume of a uniform with its bouffant plumage and its overlong bell sleeves that would interfere with a clean draw, if ever he were called on to draw his sword, which he never was, except in the training arena, and even that was more dancing lesson than fighting. The Silverswords were not what he had thought when he was selected from the ranks of the common army to join them. He’d been chosen for his height, not even for his swordsmanship, which he had once been proud to know was exceptional. But the recruiter hadn’t seen him fight. He had been interested only in his look, the upshot of which was that in all his finery Nevo was indistinguishable from any other Silversword in Astrae. Maybe his own mother could pick him out, but certainly the emperor’s terrified concubine wouldn’t recognize him if she saw him again, two times or two hundred.
And why should he care if she did?
He didn’t care.
Alef Gate closed, and the concubine’s perfume was too frail to linger on the air. She was gone to her duty, and Nevo would go to his and think no more about her.
As it happened, his post was here at Alef Gate. With another of his triad, he relieved the standing guard and took their places. The other guards of the parade went on to their own posts, most of them farther inside the great glass tower than Nevo had ever been. The emperor’s private quarters had been described to him as a kind of castle-within-a-castle, occupying the deep inner core of the Tower of Conquest. Alef Gate was the outermost entrance; inside it, corridors branched labyrinthine, so that there was no direct conduit to successive gates—Beit, Gimel, Dalet, and on through the alphabet. Nevo had been only as far as Beit, but the other guards said that it tested the memory to find one’s way within. It was all clouded glass, so much glass, thick and rich with a sheen like honey, and strong. In training they were invited to test it with their swords, and strong as Nevo was, he’d been unable to breach the walls even with his booted foot, even with the hilt of his sword. The corridors curved, layer upon layer of that glossy unbreakable glass, and were riddled with false doors and dead ends, all of it designed to confuse and trap invaders or assassins.
Good luck to them, thought Nevo. Ten guarded gates stood between himself and the emperor; no one was getting through there. Tonight he himself was glad to be as far from the center as possible. Guards on Samekh Gate sometimes heard… weeping.
Weeping.
The women at the comfort house might not weep, but Nevo knew he would not be going there, and as he stood at his post through the long, dull night, it felt as if his true work and challenge—other than standing still for long stretches of time—was in keeping himself from wondering what was happening within. It was ridiculous, how that merest of glimpses had made this girl real in a way that all the women and girls of the past two months had not been. Well, they had been, certainly, but he had managed to overlook it. Would that he could now.
He indulged in a different folly to distract himself. It was equally futile but less likely to drive him mad, and it was: wishing that he had never been plucked from the army to join the Silverswords.
It was not a rational wish. The guards’ pension was better—it went to his family—and the chances of survival much better than in the army, but unlike most Silverswords, Nevo had been a soldier first and knew the difference, and the difference was profound.
Out beyond Astrae, across this land and the next, soldiers had kept the beasts at bay for centuries, fighting and dying and finally winning. There was honor in that, even glory, though Nevo would have given up the glory for simple honor—to feel right in his days and nights, to do something….
Of course, it was more complicated now. The Chimaera War was over and a new one was brewing, but it was hard to feel the simple righteousness there had always been when fighting beasts.
The Stelians were seraphim. Beyond that, he knew next to nothing about them; no one did. The Far Isles were, quite literally, on the far side of the globe, trading suns and moons with the Empire in turn, never sharing day or night or anything else; if they had wronged the Empire in some way, it had not been felt by ordinary folk, who bore no animosity toward their distant, mysterious cousins. Nevo’s gauge was his own family, and he could well imagine the talk there would be when it got out that Joram had declared war.