Pressure was building, the weight of the air defying the thin altitude. And then…
Laughter.Incredulous and uneasy.
“And will we all sleep head to toe, beast-seraph-beast-seraph?” asked Xathanael, one of Akiva’s many half brothers, and not one he knew well.
Beast’s Bane wasn’t known for jokes, but surely thiswas a joke: the enemy coming to shelter with them? To join with them?
“And brush each other’s hair before bed?” added Sorath.
“Pick their nits, more like.” Xathanael again, to more laughter.
Akiva suffered an acute physical memory of Madrigal sleeping by his side, and the joke was not funny to him. It was all the less funny here, in the echoing caves of her slaughtered people, where, if you looked closely, you could still make out the blood tracks of dragged bodies on the floor. What would it be like for Karou to see that evidence? How much did she remember of the day she was orphaned? Her first orphaning, he reminded himself. Her second was much more recent, and his fault. “I think it would be best,” he replied, “if we kept separate quarters.”
The laughter faltered and gradually faded. They were all staring at him, faces caught between amusement and outrage, unsure where to settle. Neither end of that spectrum would suit. Akiva needed to bring them to a different place altogether: to acceptance, however reluctant.
Right now it felt very remote. He’d left the chimaera company in a high-mountain valley until he could make it back to bring them to safety. He very much wanted to bring Karou to safety—and the rest of them, too. This impossible chance would never come again. If he failed to persuade his brothers and sisters to try it, he failed the dream.
“The choice is yours,” he said. “You can refuse. We have removed ourselves from the Empire’s service; we choose our own fight now, and we can choose our allies, too. The fact is that we’ve shattered the chimaera. These few who survive are the foes of yesterday’s war. We face a new threat now, not just to us, though indeed to us, but to all of Eretz: the promise of a new age of tyranny and war that would make our father’s rule look soft by comparison. We must stop Jael. That is primary.”
“We don’t need beasts for that,” said Elyon, stepping forward. Unlike Xathanael, Akiva did know Elyon well, and respected him. He was among the older of the bastards left living, and not very old at that, his hair barely beginning to gray. He was a thinker, a planner, not given to bravado or unnecessary violence.
“No?” Akiva faced him. “The Dominion are five thousand, and Jael is emperor now, so he commands the Second Legion as well.”
“And how many are these beasts?”
“These chimaera,” replied Akiva, “currently number eighty-seven.”
“Eighty-seven.” Elyon laughed. He wasn’t scornful, but almost sad. “So few. How does that help us?”
“It helps us eighty-seven soldiers’ worth,” said Akiva. For a start, he thought, but didn’t say. He hadn’t told them yet that it was true the chimaera had a new resurrectionist. “Eighty-seven with hamsas against the Dominion.”
“Or against us,” pointed out Elyon.
Akiva wished he could deny that the hamsas would be turned on them; he still felt the sickness of their furtive palm flashes as a dull ache in the pit of his belly. He said, “They have no more reason to love us than we do them. Less. Look at their country. But our interests, for now at least, align. The White Wolf has given his promise—”
At the mention of the White Wolf, the company lost its composure. “The White Wolf lives?” demanded many soldiers. “And you didn’t kill him?” demanded many more.
Their voices filled the cavern, bouncing and echoing off the high, rough ceiling and seeming to multiply into a chorus of ghostly shouts.
“The general lives, yes,” confirmed Akiva. He had to shout them down. “And no, I didn’t kill him.” If you only knew how hard that was.“And he didn’t kill me, either, though he easily could have.”
Their cries died away, and then the echoes of their cries, but Akiva felt as if he’d run out of things to say. When it came to Thiago, his persuasion ran dry. If the White Wolf were dead, would he be more eloquent? Don’t think of him, he told himself. Think of her.
He did.
And he said, “There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it’s hurtling forward—toward what? All our lives, it’s been the Empire propelling us—toward the annihilation of the beasts—and that has come and gone. It belongs to the past, but we’re still alive, less than three hundred of us, and we’re still hurtling forward, toward something, but it’s not up to the Empire anymore. And for my part, I want that something to be—”
He could have said: Jael’s death.It would have been true. But it was a small truth overshadowed by a greater one. In his memory dwelt a voice deeper than any other he had ever heard, saying, “Life is your master, or death is.”
Brimstone’s last words.
“Life,” he told his brothers and sisters now. “I want the future to be life. It isn’t the chimaera who stand in the way. They never did. It was Joram, and now it’s Jael.”
When it’s a question of greater and lesser hates, Akiva knew, the more personal hate will win, and Jael had gone far to ensure himself that honor. The Misbegotten didn’t yet know, though, how far.
Akiva held the news to himself for a moment, not wanting to tell it. Feeling, more than ever, at fault. Finally, he laid it like a corpse atop their hard silence.
“Hazael is dead.”
There are breeds of silence. As there are breeds of chimaera. Chimaeraessentially meant nothing more specific than “creature of mixed aspect, creature not seraph.” It was a term that took in every species with language and higher function that lived in these lands and was not an angel; it was a term that would never have existed if the seraphim had not, by their aggression, united the tribes against themselves.
And the silence that preceded Akiva’s news, and the silence that followed it, were no more kin to each other than a Kirin to a Heth.
The Misbegotten had, in the last year, been pared to a sliver of itself. They had lost so many brothers and sisters that those who remained could have drowned in the ashes of those who had died. They were bred to expect it, though this had never made it any easier, and in the last months of the war, when the body count crested to levels of hollow absurdity, a shift had occurred. Their fury had been growing—not merely over the losses but the expectation that they, being nothing but weapons, would not grieve. They grieved. And by any hallmark, Hazael had been a favorite.
“He was killed by Dominion in the Tower of Conquest. It was a setup.” Speaking of it, Akiva was right back init, seeing it, and the way that, in the extraordinary radiance of siritharcome to him too late, he had watched his brother die. He didn’t tell the rest: that Hazael had died defending Liraz from Jael’s unbearable plans for her. It was hard enough for her without it being known by all.
“It’s true that I killed our father,” he said. “It’s what I went there to do, and I did it. Whatever you might have heard, I did not kill the crown prince, nor would I have. Nor the council, the bodyguards, the Silverswords, the bath attendants.” All that blood. “All of that was Jael’s doing, and all of it his plan. No matter how it fell out that day, he was going to lay it to me, and use it as pretext to exterminate us all.”