Dreams of Gods & Monsters

Your dream is my dream.

Yes, well. Karou imagined that Brimstone’s vision of “harmony between the races” probably involved less kissing than hers did.

Stop mooning about kissing. There are worlds at stake. Cake for later; emphasis:later.

It should have happened when she’d followed Akiva into the alcove—dear gods and stardust, the sight of his bare chest had brought back very… warm… memories—but it hadn’t happened, because he’d become agitated, insisting there was someone or something there with them, unseen, and had proceeded to search for it with a sword in his hand.

Karou didn’t doubt him, but she hadn’t sensed anything there herself, and couldn’t imagine what it might have been. Air elementals? The ghosts of Kirin dead? The goddess Ellai in a bad mood? Whatever it was, their brief moment alone together had come to an end, and they hadn’t been able to say good-bye properly. She thought it might have made parting easier, if they had. But then she recalled their predawn good-byes in the requiem grove years ago, and how hard it had been, every single time, to fly away from him, and she had to admit that a good-bye kiss doesn’t make things any easier.

And so she focused her mind on her task and tried not to look for Akiva, who was somewhere on the opposite side of the cluster of soldiers coming in to land.

This was the plan:

Instead of going through the portal to attack Jael in unfamiliar territory, Thiago and Elyon would take the main force of their combined armies north to the second portal and be there to greet Jael when Karou and Liraz sent him home.

And here things became interesting. They didn’t know yet where Jael had his troops staged, and couldn’t predict what they would find at the second portal, up in the Veskal Range north of Astrae. They would take it as it came, but they anticipated, of course, a vast force. Ten-to-one ratio if they were lucky, worse if they were not.

So Karou had given them a secret weapon. A pair of them.

There they were, sitting quietly by themselves, apart from and above the mass of soldiers, on the rim of the crater, looking down. As Karou watched, Tangris lifted one graceful panther paw and licked it, and the gesture was purely cat in spite of the fact that the face—and tongue—were human. The sphinxes were alive again.

Karou had given the rebellion the Shadows That Live. She had deeply mixed feelings about it. It had provided a pretext for resurrecting the sphinxes, Tangris and Bashees—and Amzallag along with them, since his soul was in the same thurible and she defied anyone to argue with her about it—and that was good. But she’d always had a horror of their particular specialty, which was to move unseen, in silence, and slay the enemy in their sleep.

Whatever their gift or magic, it transcended silence and slyness. It was as though the sphinxes exuded a soporific to ensure their quarry didn’t awaken, no matter what was done to them. They didn’t even wake up to die.

Maybe it was naive to hope that a bloodbath could be avoided at this stage, but Karou wasnaive, and she didn’t want to be responsible for any more bloodbaths.

“The Dominion are irredeemable,” Elyon had told her. “Killing them in their sleep is a greater mercy than they deserve.”

No one ever learns anything, she’d thought. Ever.“The same would be said of the Misbegotten by anyone in the Empire. We have to start being better than that. We can’t kill everyone.”

“So we spare them,” Liraz had said, and Karou was primed for more of her icy sarcasm, but, to her surprise, none was forthcoming. “Three fingers,” she’d said, and she was staring at her own hand, turning it over and back again. “Take the three middle fingers of a swordsman’s or archer’s dominant hand and they’re useless in a fight. At least, until they can train in the use of their other hand, but that’s a problem for another day.” She looked straight into Karou’s eyes and lifted her brows as if to say, Well? Will that do?

It… would. They’d all agreed to it, and Karou had had time in flight to register the strangeness of mercy—for Dominion, no less—coming from Liraz. And this on the heels of her puzzling response to Ten’s attack. “I deserved her vengeance,” she had said, angerless. Karou didn’t want to know what she deserved it for; it was enough to marvel at the end of a cycle of reprisals. How seldom it happened, in a long-standing war of hatred, that one side said, “Enough. I deserved that. Let it end here.” But in effect, that was what Liraz had said. “What you do with her soul is your affair,” she had also said, leaving Karou free to glean Haxaya’s soul from the she-wolf body that should never have held it to begin with.

She didn’t know what she would dowith it, but she had it, and now Liraz had not only proposed sparing the Dominion soldiers their lives, but even a usable portion of their hands. They might not be drawing bowstrings or swinging swords again in a hurry, but they’d be much better off than if their whole hand was severed at the wrist. It was more than mercy. It was kindness. How odd.

So that was settled. The Shadows That Live would, if they could, disable the soldiers guarding Jael’s portal, or as many of them as they could.

As for Akiva, he would fly due west to Cape Armasin, which was the Empire’s largest garrison in the former free holdings. His role—and it could make all the difference—was to seed mutiny in the Second Legion, and attempt to turn at least a portion of the Empire’s might against Jael. While the Dominion forces were elite, aristocratic, and would fight to protect the privilege they were born to, the soldiers of the Second Legion were largely conscripts, and there was reason to believe that their hearts weren’t in another war—especially a war against the Stelians, who weren’t beasts but kin, however distant. Elyon thought that Akiva’s reputation as Beast’s Bane would count for something in the ranks, on top of which, he’d proven himself persuasive with his brothers and sisters.

Karou had need of persuasion, too, to urge Jael to leave, but it was a particular breed of “persuasion” that Liraz could manage as well as Akiva, and so it was arranged.

“I’m going to go find out what the scouts have to say,” she told Mik and Zuzana, dropping her gear with a thud and rolling her shoulders and neck. She was passingly bothered by the fact that there had been only three scouts waiting for them: Lilivett, Helget, and Vazra. Ziri had dispatched four pairs of scouts, and each pair was to have sent one soldier to rendezvous here and make report on any seraph troop activity around the bay.

So there should have been four.

Probably just late, Karou told herself, but then she heard the Wolf tell Liraz, “We have to assume the worst.”

And so she did.

And… so it was.

41

UNKNOWNS

There were just so many unknowns. From their perch in the Adelphas, the rebels were blind. Up here it was all ice crystals and air elementals, but a world lay beyond the peaks, full of hostile troops and slaves in chains, shallow graves, and the blowing ash of burned cities, and it was all as a play behind a closed curtain to them.

They didn’t know if Jael had sent troops to hunt them down.