Days of Blood & Starlight

52 A Summoning Of Birds

“Akiva.” Liraz’s voice, sharp. She’d pointed down and away, down the slope where rock furrows met green, to a small clearing hazed by the smoke of a dead fire, a blot of ash at its center. And angels. “Jael,” she’d hissed, then looked to her brothers, grim, as they saw the rest for themselves.

Jael’s soldiers had a chimaera surrounded.

From such a distance, all Akiva had known was that it was a Kirin, the first he had seen since Madrigal died, but as soon as the Kirin moved—cutting, killing, like dance—Akiva understood that here was no fleeing freed slave, but a soldier.

Jael had found a rebel. All Akiva’s unspent mercy and thwarted purpose came down to this moment. And when the Dominion finally fought the Kirin to the ground, and when Jael stood over him, rolling up his sleeves, Akiva had known that all his hope came down to this moment, too. A resurrectionist. The thurible. Karou. Would Jael find the rebels, or would he?

How had Hazael put it? “Do you suppose there will be many birds out today?”

As it happened, there were. From his high slope perch, Akiva had scanned the deep distance: blood daubs and squalls circled in great numbers, disappointed by the fires that cheated them of flesh. Of course, Hazael hadn’t meant literal birds.

But even Hazael didn’t know what Akiva was capable of.

It began as a sound, Ziri told Karou. Gathering and building, a tremulous, encircling murmur growing to a roar. At first he had thought it was something of the angels’ making, but it distracted them, too. His captors looked around, alarmed. They were holding him down, two to a side. He was on his back in the ash, his arms wrenched wide, hands… secured. Jael had him pinned, each hand speared through by a sword from a soldier he had killed.

Every kick jarred the blades, and the pain only began in his hands but didn’t end there. It got in his head; it possessed him. It was everything, and in the small moments between kicks, when he could keep still and let it abate, the fear came back—the fear of what he would do and say to make it stop.

He had told them nothing yet, but they were far from through with him. Jael knelt over him with a helm full of ashes. “This was a friend of yours just a few hours ago,” he said. “Open wide.”

“No!”

They clawed his mouth open with their fingers. Ziri felt the hot steel of the helm against his lip, and tasted ash as it began to spill. He fought, he struggled, but in it fell and filled his throat and he was choking on his own dead, drowning in death. His struggling gasps sucked it into his lungs and he was burning from within, all ash and no air, and time spun interminable. Bright lights in pinpoints and the seraphim blurred: their leering faces, Jael’s sucking hole of a mouth flecked with spittle from his exertions. The pain closed in, the burning and the gasping, the hot awful closing-in airless dying…

Dying.

And then water.

It choked him, too, but it cleared the ash and then he was coughing it all out and breathing water and ash but also air, and not dying.

“Is this helping your memory any?” Jael asked. “I can do this all day.”

The physical misery was overwhelming. Ziri saw how it could take over, how pain could become puppet master and make you do things. Tell things.

No.

The helm came again. He tensed, fought. Clenched his teeth, and they couldn’t pry his mouth open.

That was when they cut his smile.

The helm was again to his lips when… the sound. The angels stopped, the helm fell aside as they spun in confusion. They drew their weapons, and the hum grew to an overwhelming, all-encompassing drone and kept growing. It became more than sound. It became shade.

The sky took on a life of its own. Chaotic and every-colored. Shifting. Loud. Pressing in.

It was a phenomenon.

It was… a distraction.

“Birds,” Ziri told Karou, shaking his head in wonder. “Blood daubs first and then others. Every kind. I don’t know how many thousands. The sky filled with birds, Karou, filled with birds, and they were on us.”

“They attacked?” Karou was leaning forward, her eyes wide.

Ziri shook his head. “They just came. Around us. Between us. Driving the angels back.”

She cocked her head in that way she had, and it made Ziri want to reach out and lay his hand—his newly healed hand—full against the long, fair column of her neck—or, he thought, flushing as he recalled the feel of her body’s warmth against his when they had lain side by side, to just draw her to him and tuck her against him and hold her. He looked away again, stared hard and unblinking at the wall.

His hand pulsed as if the small thing he held were still alive; it wasn’t. It was his own blood thrumming in his veins… because he was alive. He didn’t understand it, and he didn’t know what to say next, so he held out his hand and opened it.

Karou saw the tiny feathered corpse. She just looked at it, blank, not making the connection, and Ziri doubted for the hundredth time that this blue-haired human girl was truly Madrigal. Surely she couldn’t forget this.

And then her eyes flew wide and her gaze lifted to his, startled.

It was a hummingbird-moth. Its furred wings were soft gray and crushed; its body was brilliant viridian with a band of scarlet at the throat. When the birds had descended—birds of every kind, birds of the day and the night, shadowlarks, evangelines, bat-winged crows and blood daubs, songbirds, raptors, even stormhunters, their wings still flecked with snow—Ziri had seized the opportunity to escape. It had meant tearing one hand free. The swords that held him were driven too deep into the earth to shift, so he had set his teeth and… pulled. The blade had been blessedly sharp. His hand came away in a scream of agony, red pulsing filling Ziri’s vision, chaos and adrenaline drowning out some of it, maybe, and somehow he had used that mangled hand to free the other.

The seraphim tried to grab him. He couldn’t hold blades, so he lowered his head and used his horns, caught one soldier in the side, but his horns weren’t sharp enough to pierce mail and the soldier only fell and Ziri had to drop a knee, crushing his throat. Another he swept off his feet with a long low kick, and he was looking for Jael, intent on doing what he had said he would and killing the Captain of the Dominion, but he couldn’t find him. The gleaning staff still stood in the earth, so he grasped it in his mangled hands as the thickness of birds became a maelstrom and he could scarcely see his enemies through the fury of feathers. Or they him.

In the rushing of wings, he chose flight.

He didn’t stop then to consider how or why this thing had happened, and certainly not who—it didn’t occur to him that there was a who until he got well away, clear and unpursued, far, far, and fell against a tree to breathe. The hummingbird-moth was dead when he discovered it. It was entangled in his mail, a small victim of the chaos, and—it seemed to him at once—a sign.

Hesitating, he told Karou, “I can’t say for certain that… he… did this—”

“He?” Karou was wary. “I don’t know who you mean.”

Ziri looked at her long and searching. In no single detail did she resemble Madrigal. The shape of her face was different; her eyes were black, not brown. Her mouth was less wide, her hair was blue, she had no horns, she was human. With the memory of Madrigal bright in his mind—and the night of the Warlord’s birthday that had been the beginning of the end—Karou seemed unconnected to it all, and he could almost believe her denial. He asked himself, did she really need to know? It wasn’t as if he wanted to talk about the angel. Her lover. Maybe it was enough that he had shown her the bird. Let her think what she wanted. As he had said, he didn’t know for certain.

But… he believed there was only one possible explanation for his being alive, and he couldn’t keep silent. “I never saw him,” he said, and Karou didn’t ask who he meant. She was silent, still wary, guarded. “Maybe I’m wrong,” Ziri said, “but I don’t know what else to think. I’ve never heard of a summoning of birds but that one night, at the Warlord’s ball. The… the shawl.”

Her eyes widened in surprise. “How did you know about that?”

Ziri’s face grew hot. He looked down and admitted, “I was watching you.”

Eighteen years ago at the Warlord’s ball, Ziri had been a boy in a crowd, and he had watched Madrigal dance with a stranger and wished it were him, wished he were grown, wished, wished, uselessly wished. Of course he hadn’t guessed that the stranger was a seraph, but he had seen what no one else there had: that he was the same man in different masks, and she danced with him again and again. There had been something melting and supple about her movements that hinted at adult mysteries—as opposed to the brittle way she held herself with Thiago—and when the drifting hummingbird-moths fanned down from the constellations of lantern light to settle on her bare shoulders, Ziri had seen that, too, and understood that it was magic, and that the stranger had done it. The man had lifted Madrigal up, cloaked in her living shawl, and brought her back down again, and even a boy could see that there was magic between them, and more than magic.

Ziri had been a watchful child, and had seen many things he was too young to understand. He’d had to watch Madrigal die, and he hadn’t understood the fervor—the ecstasy—of the crowd. He hadn’t understood why the only one who mourned her was the enemy, driven to his knees and bloody from torture. Ziri would never forget Akiva’s screams—absolute despair, rage, helplessness. It remained the worst thing he had ever heard.

He had seen Thiago that day, too, a chill white presence on the palace balcony, motionless and unmoved.

Ziri had begun to hate someone on that day, and it wasn’t Akiva.

“I don’t know why, Karou,” he said. “But I think the angel saved my life.”