Days of Blood & Starlight

51 The Better To Kill You With

Karou bent to examine Ziri’s hands and see more closely the healing that she had worked on them. She felt the disturbance in the air behind her, but Ziri’s fingers closed on hers in the moment she would have turned, and the sparks that gusted in the window skittered across the dirt floor and spent themselves unseen.

“You’re awake,” Karou said. Had he heard what name she called out?

“I’m glad we’re alone,” Ziri said, and her reaction was to pull her fingers free and shift away from him. What did he mean? But he looked stricken by her response and seemed to become aware all at once of the unexpected intimacy of the scene. “No, not…” He broke off, flushed, sat up and back, putting space between them on the bed. His blush made him look very young. He added with haste, “I mean, because I have to tell you what happened. Before he comes back.”

He? Who? For a breathless instant Akiva’s name came again to Karou’s mind and she pushed it away in frustration. “Thiago?”

Ziri nodded. “I can’t tell him what really happened, Karou. But I need to tell you. And I… I need your help.”

Karou just looked at him. What did he mean? What kind of help? She felt slow, still wrapped in the haunting spell of her dreams, and there was something nagging at her that she couldn’t seem to focus on.

Ziri rushed to fill the silence. “I know I don’t deserve your help, not with the way I’ve treated you.” He swallowed, peered down at his hands, and flexed his fingers. “I don’t deserve this. I shouldn’t have listened to him.” Shame weighed heavily on his expression. He said, “I wanted to speak to you, and I should have. He ordered us not to, but it always felt wrong.”

Karou processed this. “You mean… Thiago ordered you not to speak to me? All of you?”

Ziri nodded, tense and miserable.

“What reason did he give?”

With reluctance, he told her, “He said we couldn’t trust you. But I do. Karou—”

“He said that?” She felt slapped. She felt stupid. “He told me he was working on you all, that you’d come to trust me as he did.”

Ziri said nothing, but the message was clear. Thiago had been lying to her all along, and how could it even surprise her? “What else did he say?” she demanded.

Ziri looked helpless. “He reminded us, often, of your… treason.” His voice was soft, his posture hunched. “That you sold our secret to the seraphim.”

She blinked. “Sold—?” What? This did surprise her, the magnitude of this lie. “He said that?”

Ziri nodded and Karou reeled. Thiago had been telling the chimaera that she sold secrets to the seraphim? No wonder they hissed traitor at her. “I never sold anything,” she said, and it occurred to her: She hadn’t sold anything, and she hadn’t told anything, either. She’d been so busy wallowing in her shame these past weeks that she hadn’t even questioned whether it was justified. What exactly was her crime? Loving the enemy, that was a grave thing; setting him free, graver still, but they didn’t know she had done that, and anyway… she had not told Akiva the chimaera’s deepest secret.

Thiago had.

The White Wolf was blaming her for his own breach, keeping her isolated from the rest of the company, feeding steady lies in both directions. All to control her, and her magic, and it had been working neatly for him, hadn’t it? She’d done everything he asked.

Not anymore. Her heart was beating fast. She looked at Ziri. “It’s not true,” she said, and it came out like a twisted whisper. “I didn’t tell… the angel.” She couldn’t say his name again. “I never told him about resurrection. I swear it.” She wanted him to believe her, for someone to know and believe that though she might be a traitor in some measure, she had not done that. And then it came to her that Brimstone might have thought she had.

She felt sick. If he had, he must have forgiven her for it, because he had given her life, safety, and even—though she hadn’t realized it until she lost him—love. And it killed her to think he might have believed she had betrayed his secret, his magic, his pain. Even more, it killed her that she would never be able to tell him the truth. Whatever he had thought, he had died thinking it, and the finality of it brought his death home to her in a way that nothing really had so far.

“I believe you,” Ziri said.

That was something, but not enough. Karou held her stomach, which, in spite of being empty to concavity—or maybe because of it—was rolling with nausea. Ziri reached out an uncertain hand and drew it back. “I’m sorry,” he said, distressed.

She nodded, steadied herself. “Thank you for telling me.”

“There’s more—”

But then, shocking in its volume: a sound from outside. A shriek, a wail. Karou’s heartbeat was midskip when it hit her what it was that had been nagging at her. It was absence. Zuzana’s and Mik’s. Where were her friends?

And who had just screamed?

Out in the court, Zuzana covered her ears and gritted her teeth.

Mik was more diplomatic. He nodded to the chimaera named Virko, who had just drawn an earsplitting skreeek from his violin. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s, um, how it makes sound.”

Virko was holding the instrument more or less correctly. Though it was dwarfed by the jut of his jaw, his big hands managed the bow all right. One thing Zuzana had noticed was that many of the chimaera had human hands—or human-ish—even though the rest of their body might be solidly beast. Judging from the array of swords and axes and daggers and bows and other implements of killing and dismemberment that they carried around, she gathered that manual dexterity was an imperative.

The better to kill you with, my dears.

For all that, though, weapons and claws and such, they weren’t that scary. Oh, well, they were scary as hell to look at, but their manners weren’t menacing. Maybe it was because Zuzana and Mik had crossed paths first with Bast, the one from Karou’s floor, who had understood their pantomime of eating and brought them with her to the food, introducing them around with words Zuzana and Mik could not understand.

“Do you want these humans grilled or minced in a pie?” Mik had translated under his breath, but Zuzana could see that he was in awe more than he was scared. The chimaera had seemed more curious than anything else, really. Maybe a bit suspicious, and there were some who turned her blood cold for no better reason than the unblinkingness of their stares; she stayed away from those, but overall it had been fine. Dinner was bland but no worse than what they’d eaten at a tourist trap in Marrakesh on their way here, and they’d learned a few words of Chimaera: dinner, delicious, tiny, the last—she hoped only the last—in regard to herself. She was quite the object of fascination, and submitted to pats on the head with unusual good grace.

Now, in the court, it was Mik’s violin that was the object of fascination. Virko produced a few more hellish shrieks and a sawing sound before another chimaera shoved him and growled something that must have meant give it back, because Virko handed it over and gestured to Mik to play, which he proceeded to do. Zuzana had learned to recognize his signature pieces, and this was the Mendelssohn that always raised the hairs on the back of her neck and made her feel happy and sad, salty and sweet at the same time. It was big and intricate, kind of… cute in some places, but epic in others, and wrenching, and Zuzana, standing back and watching, saw the change it worked on the creatures arrayed around her.

First: the startle, the surprise that the same instrument that had produced Virko’s skreeek could do this. There was some exchange of glances, some murmurs, but that fell away quickly and there was only wonder and stillness, music and stars. Some soldiers hunkered down on haunches or settled on walls, but most stayed standing. From doorways and windows others peered and slowly emerged, including the unsoldierly stooped figures of the two kitchen women.

Even the Other White Meat looked transfigured, standing stock-still in all his weirdly repellant beauty, a look of deep and terrible longing on his face. Zuzana wondered if she could have been wrong about him, but dismissed the thought.

Anyone who would wear all white like that clearly had issues. Just looking at him made her wish she had a paintball gun, but hell, you couldn’t pack for every eventuality.

Karou shook her head in wonder. Zuzana swaying lightly in the court while Mik played his violin for such an audience; back in Prague she could never have imagined this scene.

“How did they come to be here?” Ziri asked. He had risen, too, and stood behind her looking over her shoulder.

“They found me,” Karou said, and the simplicity of it filled her with warmth. They had looked for her, and found her; she wasn’t alone, after all. And the music… It rose and swelled, seeming to fill the world. She hadn’t heard music in weeks, and felt like some gasping part of her was gulping it and coming back to life. She climbed onto the window ledge, ready to step off and drift down to join her friends in the court, but Ziri stopped her.

“Wait, please.”

She looked back.

“I don’t know when I’ll have another chance to talk to you. Karou, I… I don’t know what to do.”

“What do you mean?”

“The souls.” He was agitated. He turned and paced away from her, stooped to reach for something, and came back up with a thurible. “My team,” he said.

“You saved them?” Karou stepped back into the room. “Oh, Ziri. That’s wonderful. I thought—”

“I’ll have to report to Thiago, and I don’t know whether to tell him.” He weighed the vessel on his palm.

Karou was confused. “Whether to tell him that you saved your team? Why wouldn’t you?”

“Because we disobeyed his order.”

Karou didn’t know what to say to that. Disobeyed the Wolf? That just didn’t happen. After a pause, she asked, “Why?”

Ziri was very grave, very careful. “Do you know what the order was?”

“The… the Hintermost. To defend against the Dominion.” She said it, but she didn’t believe it.

He shook his head. “It was a counterattack. On seraph civilians.”

Karou’s hand flew to her mouth. “What?” she asked, her voice paper-thin.

Ziri’s jaw worked as he nodded. “It’s a terror campaign, Karou.” He looked ill. “It’s all we can attempt, he says, being so few.”

Terror, thought Karou. Blood. Blood. How many had died in Eretz on both sides over the last days?

“But we disobeyed him. We went to the Hintermost. It was…” His eyes were out of focus, haunted. “Maybe Thiago was right. There was nothing we could do. There were too many of them. I was safety, and I watched the team die.”

“But you got their souls. You gleaned—”

“It was a trap. I walked right into it.”

“But… you escaped.” She was trying to understand. “You’re here.”

“Yes. That’s what I don’t understand.” Before she could ask what he meant, he took a deep breath and reached into his bloodied, ash-stained tunic, taking something from an inner pocket. Karou saw a flash of vivid green, but that was all. Whatever it was, it was small and fit neatly into his hand. He said, “They had me, Karou. Jael had me. He was going to make me tell him.” His eyes, large and brown and bruised with exhaustion, were wide with a strange intensity. “About you. And… I would have. I wanted to think I wouldn’t break, but I would have.” He choked out the words. “Eventually.”

“Anyone would.” Karou kept her voice even, but a panic was building in her. “Ziri, what happened?”