Laughing. His breath on her face; she turned away from it, struggled, every muscle straining against him, every gasped breath a lungful of stench from the pit.
She was strong, too. Her body was Brimstone’s work as much as his was, and it wasn’t empty strength, either—she had trained all her life. She got an arm free and twisted, wedged her shoulder between them, pulled up a knee and threw him off, rolled clear as he came lunging right back at her and she was up and reaching for the sky, for escape, when he tackled her from behind and she went down hard again. Her face in the scree this time and pain flaring through her and she was pinned, his weight so heavy on her shoulders she could get no purchase to throw him off, and then his voice was in her ear—“Whore,” he breathed—and his breath was hot, his lips were on her earlobe, and then the sharp points of his fangs.
He bit her. Tore her.
She screamed, but he slammed her head into the scree again and the scream choked off.
She couldn’t see him. He was holding her facedown in the dirt and rocks when she felt his clawed fingers dig under the waistband of her jeans and tug. For a second, her mind went blank.
No.
No.
The screaming wasn’t her voice. It was her mind, and it was the same foolish, outraged loop again: He can’t, he can’t.
But he could. He was.
The jeans stayed put, though, even when he yanked so hard it dragged her a foot across the ground, her cheek feeling every rock, and so he rolled her over again to get at the button and he was on her and he was smiling and her blood was on his lips, on his fangs, it dripped into her mouth and she tasted it. The stars were above him and it was when he let go of her arm to grab both sides of her jeans and try to lever them off that her fingers closed on a rock and she smashed his smile from his face.
He gave a grunt of pain, but his face stayed right there. His blood joined hers on his fangs and his smile came back. His laugh, too. It was obscene. His mouth was a grimace of red and he was still on her.
“No!” she cried, and the word felt like it pulled from her soul.
“Don’t act so pure, Karou,” he said. “We’re all just vessels, after all.” And when he yanked at her jeans this time they peeled down and caught on her boots, bunching around her calves. She felt rocks beneath her bare skin, gouging. The screaming in her head was deafening and useless, useless, as his knee came down between hers and wedged them apart. His snarl was pure animal and Karou fought. She fought. She didn’t fall still. Every muscle was in motion, working against him. His clawed fingertips lacerated her arms holding her, and the rocks tore at her back, at her legs, but the pain was so far away. She knew that she must not lie still, she must never lie still. He shifted his grip on her arms so he was holding both her wrists with one hand—to free his other hand, to free his other hand—but she tore out of his grip and reached for his eyes. He pulled back just in time and she missed and dug grooves in his cheeks instead.
He backhanded her.
She was blinking and the stars were swimming. She was shaking her head to clear it when she remembered her knife.
In her boot.
Her boot seemed such a very long way from her hands. He held her wrists so tightly she could barely feel her fingers, and when he paused and drew himself up again to fumble at his own clothes—not so white now, she heard herself think from very far away—he had to let one of hers go. She let it fall aside this time, limp. She closed her eyes. Outside the circle of their ragged breathing, the desert silence was like a void, eating sound, swallowing it. She wondered: If she screamed, would they even hear her at the kasbah? If they did, would anyone even come?
Issa. Issa should have been here by now.
What had they done to Issa?
Karou didn’t scream.
Thiago forgot her free hand as he lowered himself onto her, and she turned her head aside and squeezed her eyes shut. She didn’t look at him. His breath came in wolfish pants now, and she shifted her h*ps and turned, twisted to deny him, and she didn’t look as she groped under the bunched denim of her jeans for the top of her boot. For her knife. That small hilt, it was cool in her hot hand. In the pain and breathlessness, the squeezed-shut blindness, the fug of rot and the buzz of flies, the scraping, shifting scree and the press and wrench of flesh, that hilt was everything.
She eased it free. Thiago was trying to push her h*ps flat. “Come, love,” he said in his purr of a voice. “Let me in.” Nothing had ever been as perverse as that soft voice, and Karou knew that if she looked at him she would find him smiling. So she didn’t look.
She sank her blade to the hilt in the soft hollow of his throat. It was a small knife, but it was big enough.
Heat poured over Karou and it was blood. Thiago’s hands abruptly forgot her hips. And when she did open her eyes, he wasn’t smiling anymore.
72
A SAD WASTE OF PAIN
“Kill everyone,” Jael commanded his soldiers with morbid good cheer.
Akiva still stood in the center of the bath, his brother and sister with him, and they still held their swords, though with the sick pulse of the devil’s marks, he knew they were in no condition to defend themselves against so many soldiers.
“Not everyone,” corrected Ur-Magus Hellas, who had moved to Jael’s side, and who, unlike the rest of the council members, was manifestly unshocked by all that had transpired. A conspirator.
“Of course,” said Jael, all lisping courtesy. “I misspoke.” To his soldiers: “Kill everyone but the Misbegotten.”
Hellas’s look of smug complacency vanished. “What?”
“Certainly. Traitors must have a public execution, must they not?” said Jael, deliberately not taking Hellas’s meaning. He turned to the bastards, still with that repulsive cheer. “As my brother said earlier, room can always be made on the gibbet.”
“My lord,” said Hellas, affronted and only just beginning to be afraid. “I mean myself.”
“Ah, well. I am sorry, old friend, but you have conspired in my brother’s death. How could I trust you not to betray me?”
“I?” Hellas went red. “I have conspired? With you—”
A cluck of the tongue, and Jael said, “You see? Already you are singing songs about me. Everyone knows it was Beast’s Bane who killed Joram and poor Japheth, too, his own blood. How could I let you leave this room, to go and spread lies about me?”
The magus’s red face drained white. “I wouldn’t. I’m yours. My lord, you need a witness. You said—”
“The bath girl will serve as a witness. She will serve better, because she will believe what she says. She saw the bastard slay the emperor. The rest, well, she’ll be distraught. She’ll believe she saw it all.”
“My lord. You… you need a magus—”
“As if you are capable of magic,” Jael scoffed. “I’ve no need of frauds or poisoners. Poison is for cowards. Enemies should bleed. Take heart, my friend. You die in noble company.” He gave the slightest of gestures—little more than a twitch of his hand—and the soldiers moved forward.
Hellas cast wildly about for some protector. “Help!” he cried, though he had certainly played a part in ensuring that no help would be forthcoming.
The other council members cried out, too. Akiva felt more pity for them, though there was little enough space in his own mounting misery to waste pity on this coterie of cruel, hand-picked fools.
It was a bloodbath. The Silverswords, big useless brutes and already disarmed, struggled and died. One Dominion soldier dispatched both Namais and Misorias—still unconscious—with light sword strokes to their throats. He might have been scything weeds, so dispassionate was the gesture. The bodyguards’ eyes flew open and both experienced the moments of their death with a brief thrash and skid in the dregs of the red bath. The remaining servant girls were not even spared; Akiva saw that coming and tried to shield the one nearest him, but there were too many Dominion, and too many hamsa trophies arrayed against him. The soldiers shoved him back to Hazael and Liraz before silencing the girl’s screams with no evidence of remorse.
They were their captain’s men through and through, Akiva thought as the scene played out before his eyes. He had witnessed—and partaken in—more than his share of carnage, but this massacre staggered him in its callousness. And its cunning. Watching it, and knowing that he would be blamed for it—that the infamy would be his while Jael took up the mantle of emperor—Akiva burned hot and cold, furious and powerless.
He cast wildly about for some trace of the clarity and power that had earlier possessed him, but he sensed nothing beyond his mounting desperation. He looked to his brother and sister; they stood back to back. He could see their strain.
There were four council members besides Hellas; they died more or less as they had watched their emperors die: shocked, outraged, and helpless. Hellas squealed. He tried to get airborne, as if there were any escape in the vaulted glass ceiling, and the soldier’s sword caught him in the gut instead of the heart. The pitch of the squeals sharpened, and the magus grabbed at the blade where it entered him; he clutched it as he sank back to the floor, staring down at it with disbelief, and when the soldier jerked the blade free, fingers scattered. Hellas lifted his maimed hands up before his face—blood, so much blood; it fountained from stumped fingers—and that was what he was looking at, in abject horror and still squealing, when the soldier corrected his aim and delivered a clean thrust to the heart.
The squealing stopped.
“I don’t believe he even tried to do any magic,” Jael observed. “And all that pain to tithe, too. What a waste. A sad waste of pain.”
Then he turned a piercing look Akiva’s way and pointed to him. Akiva tensed to defend himself—or try. His grip on his sword was weak and worsening as sickness pulsed at him from all sides. But the soldiers were well attuned to their captain’s gestures; they did not attack.
“Now here,” Jael said, “stands a magus.”
Akiva was still standing, though he thought not for long. The sensation of so many hamsas trained on him, it dragged him back years to the scaffold in the agora of Loramendi, Madrigal, and how she had looked at him, and how she had laid her head down on the block; how it had fallen and echoed and he had screamed and been able to do nothing. Where had that state of true sirithar been then? He shook his head. He was no magus; a magus could have saved her. A magus could save himself and his brother and sister from these soldiers with their clawed, gnarled trophies, their stolen strength.
Jael mistook his reaction for modesty. “Come now,” he said. “You think I don’t know, but I do. Oh, this display of glamour, the swords? That was very good, but the birds? That was marvelous.” He whistled wetly and shook his head: a heartfelt compliment.
Akiva took care to give away nothing. Jael might suspect, but he couldn’t know the birds had been his work.
“And all to save a chimaera. I’ll admit, that puzzled me. Beast’s Bane, help a beast?” Jael was looking at him, drawing out a pause. Akiva didn’t like the look or the pause. Always, their encounters had played like a high-stakes game: exaggerated courtesy veiling mutual distrust and deep dislike. They had gone far beyond the need for courtesy now, but the captain kept up the charade, and in it there was a ghost of glee. He was toying with a smile.