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“My family,” she said, “are miserable, vicious, pitiless people, and I will never forgive them for what they did to me, but… they’re right.” She raised her eyebrows and turned to Dr. Amhali. “And yes, I do still have visions, and I hate them. I didn’t want to believe any of it. I didn’t want to be part of it. I tried to escape from it, but it doesn’t matter what I want, because I am. Fu
47
THE BOOK OF ELAZAEL
There was nothing for it, after that. After they perp-walked her through the site, every set of eyes drilling into her, malicious and condemning. After they put her in a car and slammed the door and ordered her returned to Tamnougalt to await her escort home. It was a couple of hours’ drive, the sere pre-Saharan landscape of the Drâa Valley surrounding her in all directions, and she had nothing to occupy her but her strange coursing exaltation and outrage.
Well, nothing but that and… all the things known and buried.
All the many stirring things. A corner protruding from a floodplain—maybe a cask or maybe a world. All she had to do was blow away the dust. Eliza started laughing. There, in the backseat of the car, laughter poured from her like a new language. Later, when the government agents came to fetch her, the driver would report it, as preamble to explaining what happened after.
When she stoppedlaughing.
Back in the “good old days” when she’d had nothing to worry about but building a monster army in a giant sandcastle in the wilderness, Karou had periodically driven a rusty truck over rutted earth and long straight roads to reach Agdz, the nearest town where she might, with her hair covered by a hijab, pass unremarked while buying supplies. Bulk bags of couscous, crates and crates of vegetables, chewy, hardscrabble chickens, and a king’s treasury of dried dates and apricots.
She looked down on Agdz now, from the sky. Unremarkable. She passed over it, feeling the pull of the others in her wake, and kept going. Their destination lay a little farther on, and was somewhat more remarkable. She spotted the palm grove first, an oasis, the green as surprising as spilled paint on brown ground. And there, within: crumbling mud walls so like the crumbling mud walls they’d just left behind. Another kasbah. Tamnougalt. It had a hotel, Karou remembered, the sort of sprawling out-of-the-way place that would allow for a quiet interlude for their small, strange band, while not so out of the way that they wouldn’t find what they needed.
“We can get ourselves together here,” she said. “They should have Internet and outlets. Showers, beds, water. Food.”
Their tiny shadow-moths grew larger as they dropped down to meet them, and they set themselves down in the shade of the palms and released their glamours. Karou took in the sight of her friends first. Zuzana and Mik looked weak and dehydrated, sweaty and showing signs of sunburn— Note to self: You can sunburn while invisible—but the worst was the strain etched into their expressions, and a disturbing laxness about their eyes that made them look unfixed, not fully present. Shell-shocked.
What had she done, bringing them into war?
She looked to Virko next, still afraid of what she would see in Akiva’s eyes. Virko, who had been a lieutenant of the Wolf, and one of those to leave her alone at the pit with him. The only one to look back, true, but he had left all the same. He had also saved Mik’s and Zuzana’s lives. He was stalwart and weathered, well accustomed to the rigors of flight and battle—no sunburn for him or fatigue, but the strain was there in his face, and the shock. And still the shame, Karou saw. It had been there since the pit, in every glance.
She gave him a look that she hoped was focused and clear, and she nodded. Forgiveness? Gratitude? Fellowship? She didn’t quite know. He returned the nod, though, with a solemnity that was like ceremony, and then, finally, Karou turned to Akiva.
She hadn’t really looked at him since the portal. She had seen him, in brief moments unglamoured, and she had been, every second, attuned to his presence, but she hadn’t looked, not at his face, not into his eyes. She was afraid, and… she was right to be afraid.
His pain was undisguised, so raw it made her own pain sing straight to the surface, pure enough for tithing, but that wasn’t the worst part. If it was only pain, she might have found a way to go to him, to reach for his hand as she had on the other side of the portal, or even for his heart, as she had in the cave. We are the begi
But… the begi
Later, in Prague, she had seen his humanity return to him, like a thaw releasing a heart from ice. She hadn’t been able to fully appreciate it at the time, because she hadn’t understood what it meant, or what he was coming back from, but now she did. He had resurrected himself—the Akiva she had known so long ago, so full of life and hope—or at least, he had begun to. She still hadn’t seen him smile the way he had back then, a smile so beautiful it had cha
She had just begun to feel that smile was possible again, and the feeling of effortless rightness, too, but, looking at Akiva now, it felt very far away again, and so did he.
As she understood it, there had been several thousand Misbegotten soldiers as recently as last year, and the final berserk push of the war had reduced that number to those she knew from the Kirin caves. Akiva had endured that, survived it, and then he had endured and survived the death of Hazael, and now he was here, safe, while possibly—probably—he lost all the rest.
What Karou saw in him was vengeance still molten, and it was wrong, it wasn’t where they were supposed to be, but it felt… inevitable. Brimstone had told her, just before her execution, “To stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength,” but maybe, thought Karou, sick at heart, it was just too much to expect. Maybe that strength was too much to ask of anyone.
The feeling of half death was with her still. She felt flattened out, or hollowed out. Again.
She turned to her friends and, with effort, spoke almost evenly. “Could you two go in and get a room? Maybe it’s best if the rest of us aren’t seen.”
She thought—hoped—Zuzana might make some sarcastic comment to that, or suggest riding right up to the gate on Virko-back or something, but she didn’t. She just nodded.