Days of Blood & Starlight

16 The Inheritors

In her doorway, Karou thrust out her hand and said, “Thiago, just give me the tooth.”

He stepped closer, so that his chest butted at her fingertips and she had to pull them back. Her pulse stuttered. He was so near; she really wanted to move away, but to do so would give him space to enter, and she must not do that. Since joining with him, she had tried hard never to be alone with him. His nearness made her feel small, so weak by contrast, and so… human.

With a magician’s flourish, he opened his hand, revealing the molar as if he were daring her to take it. What would he do if she did—grab her hand?

She hesitated, wary.

“Is it for Amzallag?” Thiago asked.

She nodded. He had asked her for a body for Amzallag, and that’s what he was getting. Aren’t I the compliant little helper, she thought.

“Good. I’ve brought him.” He raised his other hand, which held a thurible.

Karou’s belly flipped. So it was already done. She didn’t know why this part of the process unsettled her so much; she supposed it was the image of two creatures going off into the scree and only one coming back. She hadn’t seen the pit, and she hoped she never would, but some days she could smell it: a fug of decay that gave reality to what was usually remote. Thuribles were clean and simple; the new bodies she made were as pristine as Thiago’s clothes. It was the other bodies that bothered her—the discarded ones.

But in that way, as in pretty much every way, she was alone. Thiago was unfazed. He swung Amzallag’s thurible as if he had not just murdered a comrade and pushed his body into a pit of rotting corpses. The comrade had been willing, after all; anything for the cause, and the old bodies just didn’t serve the new purpose, so Karou was replacing them, one by one.

The Wolf fixed her with his pale stare, so intense it made her want to back up a step. “It has begun, Karou. What we’ve been working for.”

She nodded. A chill ran through her. Rebellion. Revenge. “Has there been news?” she asked.

“No. But it’s early yet.”

Several days ago Thiago had dispatched five patrols of six soldiers each. What exactly their missions were, Karou didn’t know. She had asked, but she hadn’t exactly argued when Thiago told her, “Don’t worry about that, Karou. Save your strength for resurrection.”

Wasn’t that what Brimstone had done? He had left the war to the Warlord, and she was leaving the rebellion to the Wolf.

“I admit I’ve been pacing.” Thiago tossed the tooth up and caught it. “I was glad to have a reason to come up. Won’t you let me help you, Karou?”

“I don’t need help.”

“It will help me, to have something to do.” With that, he moved forward so that she had to step aside or risk something like an embrace, and then he was past her. He was in her chamber, and it seemed to grow smaller around him.

It was a beautiful room, or had been once. The high ceiling glinted with mosaics, and faded silk panels lined the walls. A pair of windows with carved shutters stood open to the night, their ledges three feet deep, revealing the fortress thickness of the walls. It wasn’t very big; there were other rooms that would be more suitable to Karou’s work, but she had claimed this one because of the crossbar at the door and the feeling of safety it gave her—though a fat lot of good that did her now that Thiago was on the wrong side of it.

Stupid, she thought. Hanging back at the open door, she told him, “I’d rather work alone.”

He approached her worktable. Setting the tiger molar down with a click, he looked at her. “But you are not alone. We are in this together.” His intensity—his seeming sincerity—was piercing. “We are the inheritors, Karou. What my father and Brimstone were to our people, you and I are to those who remain.”

And what a heavy inheritance it was: no less than the fate of the chimaera races and all their hopes for survival.

The chimaera were barely clinging to the world. Thiago’s band of soldiers was all that remained of the chimaera army, and only through Karou’s collaboration did they have any hope of mounting a real opposition.

When she’d joined them they were hardly more than sixty: a handful of wounded survivors of the defense of Cape Armasin, who had escaped through the mine tunnels, along with others they had met as they moved across the ravaged land. They were mostly soldiers, with a few useful civilians such as the smith Aegir and a pair of farmwives to see to the cooking. And though sixty was a paltry number for a rebel force, they did have more hope than that.

They had thuribles. They had souls.

Karou’s best guess: Several hundred slain soldiers waited in stasis in the silver vessels, and it was up to her to bring them back to the fight.

“We are in this together,” Thiago had said. She looked at him hard and waited for the usual revulsion to rise, but it didn’t. Perhaps she was just too tired.

Or… perhaps Fate laid out your life for you like a dress on a bed, and you could either wear it or go naked.

Across the room, he had found her case of tools. It was a pretty thing, embossed leather the color of saffron, and looked like it might be a cosmetics case.

It was not.

He spilled its contents onto the table. There were some everyday objects—straight pins, a small blade, a hammer, pliers, of course—but mostly there were vises. They weren’t flashy: just plain brass screw clamps like the ones Brimstone had used. It was amazing the pain you could cause with such simple objects, if you knew what you were doing. Karou had had them handmade to order by a smith in the medina of Marrakesh who hadn’t asked questions but had guessed their purpose and smirked at her with a knowingness that had made her feel dirty. As if she enjoyed this.

“I’ll tithe,” said the Wolf, and Karou felt, in the void of her curiously absent revulsion, relief rush in.

“Really?”

“Of course. I would have before, if you had ever let me come in. Do you think I like knowing that you’re locked in here alone, suffering?”

Yes, she thought, but at the same moment she experienced a twinge of doubt for all her suspicion, and all the nights of barred doors. Thiago would give his pain to her magic so that she didn’t have to. How could she say no to that? Already he was stripping off his impeccable white shirt. “Come.” He smiled, and she saw in him a fatigue to mirror her own. “Let’s do it and be done.”

Karou gave in. She pushed the door closed with her foot and went to him.