Daughter of Smoke and Bone (14 page)

Issa’s voice, hushed and secretive. “What can it mean, that they are in the human world?”

Yasri. “They must have found a way back in. It took them long enough, for all their high opinion of themselves.”

This was not part of the dream. Karou had come back into consciousness like swimming to a distant shore—effortfully—and she lay silent, listening. She was on her childhood cot in the back of the shop; she knew that without opening her eyes. Her wounds stung, and the smell of healing salve was pungent in the air. The two chimaera stood at the end of the aisle of bookcases, whispering.

“But why attack Karou?” Issa hissed.

Yasri. “You don’t think…? They couldn’t know about her.”

Issa. “Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“No, no, of course not.” Yasri sighed. “Oh, I wish Brimstone would come back. Do you think we should go and get him?”

“You know he can’t be interrupted. But it shouldn’t be long now.”

“No.”

After a fraught pause, Issa ventured, “He’ll be very angry.”

“Yes,” agreed Yasri, a tremor of fear in her voice. “Oh, yes.”

Karou felt the two chimaera looking at her and tried her best to appear unconscious. It wasn’t hard. She felt sluggish, and pain blossomed across her chest, arm, and collarbone. Slash wounds to keep her bullet scars company. She was thirsty, and knew she had only to let out a murmur for Yasri to scurry toward her with water and a soothing hand, but she kept silent. There was too much to think about.

Yasri had said, “They couldn’t know about her.”

Know
what
?

It was maddening, this secrecy. She wanted to sit up and scream, “Who am I?” but she didn’t. She feigned sleep, because there was something else nudging at her thoughts.

Brimstone wasn’t here.

He was
always
here. She had never before been granted admittance to the shop in his absence, and only the extraordinary circumstance of her nearly dying accounted for this breach.

This opportunity.

Karou waited until she heard Yasri and Issa moving away, peering through her lashes to be certain they had gone. She knew that as soon as she shifted her weight to stand the springs of the cot would creak and give her away, so she reached for the strand of scuppies around her wrist.

Yet another use for nearly useless wishes: to silence creaking bedsprings.

She stood and steadied herself, head spinning, wounds burning, without making a sound. Yasri and Issa had taken her boots off, along with her coat and sweater, so she was wearing only bandages and a blood-streaked camisole and jeans. She went barefoot around a pair of cabinets and under hanging strings of camel and giraffe teeth, then paused, listened, and peered out into the shop.

Brimstone’s desk was dark, and so was Twiga’s, no lanterns lit for the hummingbird-moths to flutter to. Issa and Yasri were in the kitchen, out of sight, and the whole shop was cast in gloom, which made the other door stand out all the more, a crack of light giving away its edge.

For the first time in Karou’s life, it was ajar.

Heart pounding, she approached it. She paused for a beat with her hand on the knob, then eased the door open a fraction and peered through it.

16

F
ALLEN

Akiva found Izîl cowering behind a garbage pile in the Jemaa el-Fna, his creature still clinging to his back. A half circle of frightened humans crowded in on them, menacing, but when Akiva dropped from the sky in an explosion of sparks, they fled in all directions, squealing like slapped pigs.

The creature reached out to Akiva. “My brother,” it crooned. “I knew you’d come back for me.”

Akiva’s jaw clenched. He forced himself to look at the thing. Bloated as its face was, its features held an echo of long-ago beauty: almond eyes, a fine, high-bridged nose, and sensuous lips that were perverse on such a wretched face. But the key to its true nature was at its back. From its shoulder blades protruded the splintered remnants of wing joints.

Incredibly, this thing was a seraph. It could only be one of the Fallen.

Akiva knew the story as legend and had never wondered whether it was true, not until this moment, faced with the proof of it. That there were seraphim, exiled in another age for treason and collaborating with the enemy, cast into the human world forever. Well, here was one of them, and indeed, he had fallen far from what he once had been. Time had curved his spine, and his flesh, pulled taut, seemed to snag on every ridge of vertebrae. His legs dangled uselessly behind him—that was not the work of time, but of violence. They had been pulverized with cruel purpose, that he should never walk again. As if it were not punishment enough that his wings were torn away—not even cut, but
torn—
his legs were destroyed, too, leaving him a crawling thing on the surface of an alien world.

A thousand years he had lived like this, and he was beside himself with joy to see Akiva.

Izîl was not so happy. He cowered against the stinking mound of refuse, more afraid of Akiva than he had been of the mob. While Razgut gibbered, “My brother, my brother,” in an ecstatic chant, the old man shook with a palsy and tried to back away, but there was nowhere for him to go.

Akiva loomed over him, the brilliance of his unglamoured wings lighting the scene like daylight.

Razgut reached longingly toward Akiva. “My sentence is up, and you’ve come to bring me back. That’s it, isn’t it, my brother? You’re going to take me home and make me whole again, so I can walk. So I can
fly—”

“This has nothing to do with you,” said Akiva.

“What… what do you want?” Izîl choked out in the language of the seraphim, which he had learned from Razgut.

“The girl,” Akiva said. “I want you to tell me about the girl.”

17

W
ORLD
A
PART

On the far side of the other door, Karou discovered a passage of dull black stone. Peering out, she could see that the corridor went on for some ten feet before turning out of sight. Just before it did, there was a window—a narrow, barred niche at the wrong angle for her to see through from where she stood. White light washed in, painting rectangles across the floor.
Moonlight,
Karou thought, and she wondered what landscape she would see if she crept over and looked out. Where was this place? Like the shop’s front door, did this rear one open onto myriad cities, or was this something else altogether, some depth of Brimstone’s Elsewhere that she couldn’t begin to fathom? A few steps and she might know that, if nothing else. But did she dare?

She listened hard. There were sounds but they seemed far away, echoing calls in the night. The passage itself was silent.

So she did it. She prowled out. Quick silent steps, high on the balls of her bare feet, and she was over to the window. Peering through its heavy iron bars. Seeing what was there.

Her facial muscles, tense with anxiety, abruptly slackened with the onset of total awe, and her jaw actually dropped. It was a second before she realized it and snapped it closed, wincing when the sharp report of her teeth broke the silence. She leaned forward, taking in the scene before and below her.

Wherever this was, she was sure of one thing: It was not her world.

In the sky were two moons. That was the first thing.
Two moons.
Neither was full. One was a radiant half disc high overhead, the other a pale crescent just rising to clear a crust of mountain. As for the landscape they illuminated, she saw she was in a vast fortress. Huge, bermed defensive walls met at hexagonal bastions; a generous town was laid out in the center of it all, and crenellated towers—in one of which, Karou gauged by her high vantage point, she must be—reared above it all, with the silhouettes of guards pacing at their peaks. But for the moons, it might have been a fortified town of old Europe.

It was the bars that made it something else.

Extraordinarily, the city was banded over by iron bars. She’d never seen anything like it. They arched over the whole of the place from one expanse of rammed-earth walls to the next, beetle-black and ugly, enclosing even the towers. A quick study gave away no gaps; the bars were spaced so closely that no body could possibly squeeze between them. The streets and plazas of the town were entirely screened from above as if they existed within a cage, and moonlight cast rickrack shadows over everything.

What was it about? Were the bars meant to keep something
in
or
out
?

And then Karou saw a winged figure sweeping down out of the sky and she flinched, thinking she had her answer. An angel, a seraph—that was her first thought, her heart starting to hammer and her wounds to throb. But it wasn’t. It passed overhead and out of sight, and she clearly saw that its form was animal—some sort of winged deer. A chimaera? She had always supposed there must be more, though she had only ever seen her four, who would never say if there were others.

It hit her now that this whole city must be inhabited by chimaera, and that beyond its walls lay an entire world, a world with
two moons
, also inhabited by chimaera, and she had to grip the bars to hold herself upright as the universe seemed to tremble and grow larger around her.

There was another world.

Another world.

Of all the theories she’d dreamed up about the other door, she’d never imagined this: a world apart, complete with its own mountains, continents, moons. She was already light-headed with blood loss, and the revelation made her reel so she had to clutch at the window bars.

It was then that she heard voices. Near. And also familiar. She had listened to their murmurs all her life as their incongruous heads bent together in discussions of teeth. It was Brimstone and Twiga, and they were coming around the corner.

“Ondine has brought Thiago,” Twiga was saying.

“The fool,” Brimstone breathed. “Does he think the armies can afford the loss of him at a time like this? How many times must I tell him, a general need not fight at the front?”