Days of Blood & Starlight

67 The Only Hope Is Hope

Amzallag bulled forward and fell to his knees before Issa. “Who?” he asked, almost whispering. “Who went into the cathedral?” A few other soldiers leaned forward with intense, restrained yearning.

“Thousands.” Issa’s voice was tender. “There was no time to make a record. I’m sorry.”

Karou stepped forward. “All the children went,” she said, looking to Issa for confirmation. “And all the mothers. The chances are very good for your families.”

Amzallag looked stunned. On his tiger features “stunned” came across as a wide-eyed version of his constant ferocity—ferocity that was more Karou’s doing than his. His soul was as plain as tilled earth and as steady as a carthorse, but with this body she had given him he could hardly help but look ferocious. His jaws with their kitchen-knife fangs were agape and his deep orange eyes were unblinking. Although he was kneeling—his stag forelegs buckled before him and tiger haunches bunched in a crouch—he still towered above Issa, and his arms, when he reached for her hands, were huge and gray. Before he sees his family again, Karou thought, I can give him a gentler form.

But that was getting ahead of herself. Way ahead.

While Amzallag’s big hands took Issa’s, Karou watched Thiago. When Amzallag said “Thank you,” in a voice like the saddest pull of a violin, Thiago’s fangs showed in a fleeting snarl.

“I am only a messenger,” said Issa.

At that, Thiago’s eyes slid from her to Karou. “Tell us again,” he said, “how exactly that was accomplished.”

“How what was accomplished?” Issa asked. Amzallag released her hands and rose, turning himself with smooth tiger movements to stand at her side—and Karou’s side—across the court from the Wolf. The move was deliberate, and sent a clear message of allegiance. Karou’s feeling of triumph was compromised, however, by the inquisition she felt coming.

“How you arrived among us,” Thiago said. “One morning, here you were. It is very strange.”

“Strange it may be, but I can’t satisfy you. The last thing I remember before waking is, of course, dying.”

“And where was it Brimstone planned to send your soul, in the grip of his squall? You must know that at least.”

Karou interrupted. “Is this all you have to say? We’ve just told you that thousands of our people can still be saved, and you talk of squalls? Thiago, our children can live again. This is enormous news. Can’t you be glad?”

“My gladness, my lady, is tempered with realism, as yours should be. Live where? Live how? This changes nothing.”

“It changes everything!” she cried. “Everything you’re doing is hopeless. Can’t you see? It is futureless. This brutality, the civilian attacks? Your father would be sick. Everything you do to the seraphim, Joram will return a hundredfold, a thousandfold.” She was appealing to the host now. “Did Thisalene give you satisfaction? The angels must die?” She pinpointed Tangris and Bashees, and fought against the fear that would have snatched her voice right back into her throat. To call out the Shadows That Live? Was she mad? Remember the chicken impression, she told herself with a surge of hysteria.

“In Thisalene,” she said, “you slew a hundred angels.” The sphinxes met her look in their inscrutable way. “And hundreds of chimaera died for it.” One sphinx blinked. Karou continued, taking in the others. Oh, her heart, it was beating furious-fast. “And the rest of you. You let them die. You gave them hope—the Warlord’s smiles, the messages. We are arisen? And then? All those folk of the south, they couldn’t believe that you would start this fight, call the enemy down on them in such impossible numbers, only to abandon them. Do you know…” Karou swallowed. Her own cruelty felt icy, spiky, to put it to them like this. “Do you know that they died watching the sky for you?”

She saw Bast take a stagger-step back. Some others were breathing as though their throats had gone tight. Virko was staring at the ground.

“Don’t listen to this,” snarled Ten. “She can’t know what happened there.”

“I do know what happened,” said Karou. She hesitated. Was it betrayal to tell of Balieros’s defiance? He would tell them, if he were here; she felt sure of it. The future of the rebellion hung in the balance, and she had this weight to slam heavy on the scale. How could she not use it? “Because one team did what none of the rest of you would. Do you really believe Balieros and Ixander, Viya, Azay, and Minas succumbed to some town guard? They died fighting Dominion in the south. They died defending chimaera. While you were doing what?”

The sun was climbing, the heat growing heavy. The court was bright and still. Thiago answered her. “While we were doing what the angels were doing, and yet it’s us you scathe, not them. Would you have us lie down and bare our throats to them?”

“No.” Karou swallowed. This was difficult ground she was treading: how to argue for a different course without coming across as some starry-eyed peacenik—naive at best, an enemy sympathizer at worse, which they already believed she was. It all came down to this: She could offer them no real alternative to fighting. When she had dreamed together with Akiva of the world remade, she had believed that he would bring his people forward as she would somehow bring hers—as if the future were some country they could meet in, a land with different rules, where the past might be overcome—or overlooked?—like a seraph knuckle tally erased from the skin.

Now, on the outside of the bubble of that foolish love, Karou saw how grim their dream would have become had they been left to pursue it, how dirty, how bruised. Those tally marks would never have faded. They would have remained always—between herself and Akiva, chimaera and seraphim—and the hamsas would, too. They couldn’t even touch properly. To have believed that they might join two such sets of hands together, the dream seemed madder than ever. And yet… the only hope is hope. Brimstone’s words, back then and again now, as gifted her by Issa.

“Daughter of my heart,” was the message Brimstone had sent just for Karou. She wanted to cry again right here in the court, thinking of it. “Twice-daughter, my joy. Your dream is my dream, and your name is true. You are all of our hope.”

Her dream. A dream dirty and bruised is better than no dream at all. But she had had Akiva then, and the hope that he might bring the seraphim to their new way of living. What did she have now? Nothing to promise, and no plan. Nothing but her name.

“No,” she said again. “I would not have us bare our throats. Nor would I have you thrust our people to their knees in your rush to slaughter theirs. Nor would I have you leave our future buried under the ash, so that you might bury theirs.”

Thiago’s eyes narrowed as he tried but couldn’t at once find words to answer that.

Karou went on. “Brimstone once told me that to stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength. If we let them turn us into monsters…” She looked at Amzallag, the gray hue of his flesh, at Nisk and Lisseth, who stood just behind Thiago, still recognizable as Naja but with none of Issa’s beauty and grace. At all the others, overlarge, overfanged, winged and clawed, and unnatural. She had done this, the literal work of turning these chimaera into the monsters the angels believed them to be.

“Someone has to stop killing,” she implored Thiago. “Someone has to stop first.”

“Let it be them, then,” he said, so cold, his lips trembling with the effort not to fall into a full wolf snarl. His fury was palpable.

“We can only decide for ourselves. At least we can stop the assaults long enough to think of another way, instead of making it worse, always worse.”

“We are destroyed, Karou. It can’t get any worse.”

“It can. It has. The Hintermost? The Tane? What is Razor doing right now, and how will it be answered? It can get worse until there is no one left. Or maybe… maybe it can get better.” Again Akiva’s words came into her head, and again Karou spoke them, this time without blushing. “Eretz will have chimaera in it or not, depending on what we do now.”

And that was when the Shadows That Live spread their silent wings and lifted with the grace of dreams and nightmares to float over the heads of their comrades and land lightly at Karou’s side. They didn’t speak; they rarely did. Their stance was clear: elegant heads held high, eyes defiant. Karou was breathless with a sudden swell of emotion. Of power. Amzallag, Tangris, Bashees, Issa. Who else? She looked to the rest. Most seemed stunned. In more than a few pairs of eyes, though, Karou saw malice to match the Wolf’s, and knew that there were those among them whose hate would never again be touched by hope. In others, she saw fear.

In too many others. Bast would come, though; Karou willed her to take a step. She was on the verge. Emylion? Hvitha? Virko?

And Thiago? He stood staring at Karou, and she remembered the way he had looked down at her in the requiem grove in another life. She saw that savagery in him again, the flaring nostrils and wild eyes, but then… she saw him pull it back. She witnessed the moment that he mastered his fury, and, with calculation and cunning, and effort, put his mask back in place. It was worse than hate or fear, this lie of mildness. This huge, huge lie. “My lady Karou,” he said. “You make a powerful argument.”

Wait, Karou thought. No.

“I will take it under consideration,” he said. “Of course. We’ll consider all possibilities, including—as we now may, with glad hearts—how to glean the souls from the cathedral.”

Her new surge of power shrank to nothing. By giving her this small victory, the Wolf took away her chance for a greater one. Now none of the other soldiers need gather their courage to come to her side, and their relief was profound. She could see it in their posture, in their faces. They didn’t want to choose. They didn’t want to choose her. How much easier it was to let themselves be led by their general. Bast wouldn’t even look at her. Cowards, she thought, starting to shake as all of her pumped-up courage collapsed into frustration. Could they really believe that the White Wolf would consider ending—or even pausing—in his crusade? Victory and vengeance. He would have to tear his gonfalon down, make a new one. She thought with yearning of the Warlord’s symbol: antlers sprouting leaves. New growth. How perfect, and how out of reach.

And now, so quickly, the rest of these soldiers were out of her reach, too. Thiago was accustomed to wielding power, and she was so very not. Effortlessly he took back what little she had gained and turned the army’s energy to his plans.

His plans for gleaning the buried souls from the cathedral.

Amzallag himself was the first to volunteer. He went forward, avid, and others followed him. Karou stood rooted in place, all but forgotten. Issa took her hand and squeezed it, communicating her shared dismay, while the Shadows That Live melted away before she could even thank them, and soon the direct heat of the sun drove most of them from the court.

The day passed away in this atmosphere of new energy. Karou and Issa watched and listened, and Thiago did entirely appear to be doing what he had said he would: considering all possibilities, such as how they might conduct an excavation in enemy-patrolled territory, and even what they might do in the south to help more chimaera reach the Hintermost. It was exactly what Karou wanted, and she could barely breathe, because she knew it was just another move in the Wolf’s game. A feint. But what did it conceal? What was his true game?

Night fell, and she found out.