Days of Blood & Starlight

76 Dead Weight

He wasn’t alone. Karou felt the presence of others even before the glamours fell away and revealed them. The two from the Charles Bridge. She knew them at once, though they looked so different now. The sister—Liraz—whose beautiful face had been so sharp and dangerous; it was transfigured by misery. She was gasping, and her eyes were red pits of grief—though nowhere near as red as Akiva’s, which looked as they had that long-ago day when Madrigal had worn a hijacked body to free him from his cell in Loramendi. The whites had gone bloodred from burst capillaries. What had done that? He looked waxen, ravaged by exhaustion.

But neither of them was so altered as their brother. Who was… dead.

They cradled his body between them, and neither seemed up to the task. As they lowered him to the floor, he slipped and landed heavily. A moan came from Liraz, who dropped to her knees and picked up his head with such gentleness.

Hazael, Karou remembered. His name was Hazael. His eyes were open and staring, his skin livid, neck and limbs already rigid. His wings had burnt out; his flame feathers were nothing but bare quills now, the barbs all turned to ash and fallen away. He had been dead for some time.

Karou’s body was still flashing from hot to cold and back; she stood frozen in place, trying to make sense of the scene. It was Issa who moved slowly forward and bent over Hazael to touch his face. Karou only watched, a queer detachment settling over her—that old unreality returned, as if her life were a shadow play cast on a wall—and she expected the fierce sister to snarl and shove Issa away, but she didn’t. Liraz reached for Issa’s hand and gripped it. The serpents in Issa’s hair and around her neck grew still and taut, ready to strike if it came to that.

“Please.” Liraz’s voice was strangled. Her eyes shifted from Issa to Karou and they were wild. “Save him.”

Karou heard the words, but in her slowed-down state they seemed to drift in the air. Her gaze swung to Akiva. The way he was looking at her… it was like touch. She took an involuntary step back. His face was a silent plea; he was nearly as gray as the corpse of his brother, which they had laid down on the space of floor where Karou conjured bodies. The resurrection floor. They were all looking to her. Even Issa had turned to her.

Save him?

They had come to her for help? After burning Brimstone’s portals—and Brimstone—after destroying her people, they had brought her their slain brother to resurrect?

How far had they carried him? They were racked with tremors from the effort. Akiva slumped against the wall. His arms hung at his sides. He looked more dead than alive, more dead even than when she had first seen him, bleeding on the battlefield at Bullfinch.

“What happened to you?”

It might have been her asking him that question, but it wasn’t. It was Akiva, and he was looking at her cheek, her lip, and her newly stitched earlobe. Self-consciously, she untucked her hair from behind her ear and concealed it. “Who did that to you?” he asked. Weak as his voice was, it burned with anger. “It was him, wasn’t it? It was the Wolf.”

He was not wrong, and all Karou could think of, seeing the fury on his face, was the living shawl he had made her once, the so-soft touch of moth wings on her shoulders. Once upon a time, Thiago had torn her dress, and, down from the false stars of the festival lanterns, Akiva had summoned a living shawl to cover her.

She had made a choice that night, and it had not been the wrong choice.

But that was then. So much had happened since.

Too much.

She ignored his question, hating the physical evidence of her vulnerability, wishing her arms were covered, and wishing she had mended herself. What was a little more pain, after all? She must not show weakness, not now. She stepped forward, turning her attention to Hazael. Akiva had brought her his dead brother? Well, he had also brought her Issa. And he had given her Ziri back, she mustn’t forget that, whatever may have happened since. She lowered herself to her knees beside the body—slowly; everything hurt—and wondered that they had brought his body so far.

Bodies are only dead weight—we’re all just vessels, after all—but knowing that was one thing; leaving a body behind was another. Karou understood that well enough. It is bodies that make us real. What is a soul without eyes to look through, or hands to hold? Her own hands trembled and she clasped them to keep them still.

The wound was under Hazael’s left arm. His heart. It would have been a quick death.

“Please,” Liraz said again. “Save him. I’ll give you anything. Name your price.”

Price? Karou looked at her sharply, but there was no trace of the cruelty or severity she remembered, only anguish. “There is no price,” she said. She glanced at Akiva. Or if there is, she could have added, you’ve already paid it.

“You’ll do it?” Liraz’s words trembled with hope.

Would she? Karou knew she was their only hope—she whom they would have slain in Prague just for bearing the hamsas on her hands—and there was irony there, but she took no pleasure in it. She couldn’t bear the sight of Liraz’s hands—they were so black—but they were so tender on her brother’s neck, her fingers so soft on his dead cheek, and Karou knew she should not feel sympathy for this killer of her people, but she did. Who among them, after all, had clean hands? Not her. Oh, Ellai, my hands will never be clean again. She clenched them suddenly and her blisters burned from her work with the shovel. It felt to her as if to do this one thing, save this life… it might be a salve. Not just for these seraphim but for herself, after the horror of the pit and the shovel and what she had had to do, and… and the lie she was now forced to live. She wanted to do this. A tick on her knuckle for a life saved instead of taken.

“I can’t preserve this body,” she said. “It’s too late. And I can’t make him look the same, either.” Maybe Brimstone would have known how to conjure those fiery wings, but they were far beyond her. “He won’t be a seraph anymore.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Akiva said. She met his eyes, his red, red eyes, and she wanted to do this for him. “As long as he is himself,” he said. “That’s all that matters.”

Yes, she told herself, and wanted to believe it as firmly as he did. Soul is what matters. Flesh is vessel. “Okay.” She took a deep breath and looked down at Hazael. “Give me the thurible.”

Her words were met with a silence that was like sinking.

Sinking.

Oh no. No. Karou stared at Hazael’s dead face, his open blue eyes, his laugh lines, and her upwelling sorrow overwhelmed her with its force. No. She bit her lip, willing it to stillness. She was rigid. She had to be. Her grief… if she let it out, it would be a magician’s scarf, one grief tied to another to another, it would never end. She didn’t want to look up again, to see the stricken faces frozen in that terrible silence.

“We didn’t… we didn’t have one.” Liraz. Whispering. “We brought him here. To you.”

Akiva was hoarse. “It’s only been a day. Karou. Please.” As if it were a matter of persuading her.

They didn’t understand. How could they? She had never told Akiva how it worked, how tenuous the soul’s connection grew after death, or how easily it could be cast adrift if it was not contained. She had never told him, and now there was nothing in the air or aura of this dead angel—soldier, killer, beloved brother—no impression of light or laughter to go along with those blue eyes and laugh lines, no stir of any kind to brush against her senses and tell her who he was because… he wasn’t.

She looked up. She forced herself to meet Akiva’s red eyes and Liraz’s so they would see and understand her sorrow.

And know that Hazael’s soul was lost.