Страница 88 из 117
All around the world, at the same moment precisely, dozens of doors, all marked with black handprints, had been devoured by the same u
Akiva had done it. All seraphim were creatures of fire, but igniting the marks from afar was a working of his own, and had made it possible for him to destroy every last one of Brimstone’s doorways in an instant, cutting his enemy off without warning.
When Karou had seen the blistered skin on Ten’s corpse back at the Kirin caves, the mark of Liraz’s hand scorched clearly into her chest, this had been her thought.
Smoke effused from beneath Akiva’s palm. Jael likely smelled it before he felt the heat eating through his clothing, though perhaps not, as he wore not armor but the pageant robes he’d dreamt up to awe humanity. Whatever it was, the heat or the smoke, Karou saw the understanding light his eyes, and the panic as he struggled to get out from under that pressing hand. She hoped Haxaya wouldn’t slit his throat by accident.
His scream was a wavering wail, and Karou watched him as Akiva stepped back. There it was: burned into Jael’s chest, reeking and charred, the black already peeling away to reveal the raw meat beneath. A handprint in flesh.
Persuasion.
“Go home,” said Akiva. “Or I will ignite it. Wherever you are, wherever I am. It doesn’t matter. Unless you do as I say, I will burn you to nothing. There won’t even be ash to show where you stood.”
Haxaya let Jael go and stepped aside. Her knife wasn’t needed any longer, and she wiped the blade clean on the emperor’s own white sleeve. He slumped as if his legs couldn’t hold him, pain and rage and impotence congealing on his countenance. He seemed to be grappling with his situation, trying to understand all that he had lost. “And what then?” he finally burst out. “When I’m back in Eretz wearing your mark? You’ll just burn me then. Why should I do what you want now?”
Akiva’s voice was steady. “I give you my word. Do this. Go home now. Take your army with you and nothing else. Make no chaos. Just go, and I will never ignite the mark. I promise you that.”
Jael gave a disbelieving snort. “You promise. You’ll let me live, just like that.”
Karou watched Akiva as he made his reply. He’d kept calm from the first moment Jael burst into the room, and had managed to conceal the depths of hatred this man stoked in him. “That’s not what I said.”
Was he thinking of Hazael? Of Festival? Of a future they were in the process, even now, of averting, when guns would have reshaped Eretz into something even more brutal than its citizens had yet known?
“I won’t burnyou.” He let his opinion of his uncle show on his face. “That’s my only promise, and it doesn’t mean you get to live.” He let his uncle’s foul imagination do the work. “Maybe you’ll have a chance.” A thin smile. “Maybe you’ll see me coming.” He leaned into the silence and let it lengthen, and then, just like that, he vanished. “But probably not.”
Karou followed his lead and vanished, too. Virko and Haxaya an instant later, as Akiva threw his glamour over the pair of them. Jael and the Dominion saw shadows move toward the window and then those were gone and there was nothing left here but a broken emperor’s raw breathing, a mad monster’s ragged sobbing, and two score soldiers standing quiet, not knowing quite what to do with themselves.
65
CHOSEN
He was one of twelve in the Long Ago, and glory had been his.
She was chosen one of twelve. Oh, glory.
Out of thousands did they rise, candidates come from every reach of the realm, young and full of hope, full of pride, full of dreams. So beautiful they were, all of them, and strong and of every hue from palest pearl to blackest jet, and reds and creams and browns and even—from the Usko Remarroth, where it was ever twilight— blue. This was what seraphim were then: a world’s richest offering, as jewels shaken out on a tapestry. Some came clad in feathers and others in silk, some in dark metals and some in skins, and they wore gold, and they wore ink, and their hair was braids or it was curls, it was golden, black, or green, or it was scraped to the scalp in a pattern of flame.
Razgut would not have been noted in the throng—not for his garb, which was fine but plain, or his color, which had never seemed drab to him until that day. Mid-beige, he was, and his hair and eyes were brown. He was beautiful, too, then, but they all were, and none more striking than Elazael.
She was out of Chavisaery, whence the darkest tribes of seraphim hailed. Skin as black as a raven’s wing at the umbra of eclipse, and her hair was featherine, the soft rose of sunrise, and falling in pale shoals about her dark shoulders. A white stripe painted on each cheek, a dot above each eye, and her eyes themselves: They were brown, not black, lighter than the rest of her and startling. And the whites. There never fell a purer snow than the whites of Elazael’s eyes.
Every tribe had sent their best.
All but one. One hue was absent from that crowd: There were no fire eyes in that massing of their world’s brightest youth. The Stelians alone opposed this choosing and all it meant, but no one cared. Not then. That day they were forgotten, dismissed. Even shu
Later, that would change.
Oh godstars, would it change.
Only the magi knew what they were looking for, and they didn’t tell. They tested, and the tests were arcane, and every day saw fewer candidates remaining—hope, pride, and dreams, sent back where they came from, no glory for them—but some lasted. Day by day, they rose while others fell, until they were twelve before the magi, and the magi, at last, smiled.
That day the twelve bid farewell to the lives they had known and became Faerers, the first and only. They were halved to two sixes, two teams for two journeys. They went into training to prepare for what lay ahead, and who they were at the end was not who they had been. Things were… done to them. To their anima—the incorporeal selves that are the true totality for which bodies were only as icons fixed in space. The magi were always striving and delving, and of the Faerers they shaped something new. It was fitting, for their work was new, and it was great.
The Faerers were chosen to be explorers, the lightbearers of their people, to voyage through all the strata of the Continuum that was the great All. The Magus Regent of the College of Cosmology had explained it to them:
“The universes lie one upon the next as the pages of a book. But in the Continuum, every page is infinite, and the book has no end.” That was to say, each “page” extended infinitely along the plane of its existence. One could never hope to come to a universe’s edge. They had none. An explorer traveling along a plane would fly forever and find nothing to come up against. Planets and stars, yes, worlds and vacuum, on and on and no boundary at all. Nothing to cross.
It was necessary to push through. Not along the plane, but right into it. Like the nib of a pen jammed right through the page to write itself onto the next. The magi had learned how to do it, after thousands of years of study, and such was to be the work of the Faerers: to press through, and write themselves and their race onto each new world as they met it.