Dreams of Gods & Monsters

But she just shook her head and smiled, and Jael wanted to howl, because her smile had… plans in it, and in those plans, he saw, there would be no easy death.

73

A BUTTERFLY IN A BOTTLE

Karou and Liraz met, without prearrangement, to take Thiago’s body off the palisade.

There had been a great deal of activity in the camp since the Dominion surrender, and there just hadn’t been time to see to it earlier. Reunions and introductions, exclamations and explanations, logistics and strategies to debate and implement, and celebration, too—though cut with a fair portion of grief, because there had been losses in the Adelphas, many of them irretrievable.

There were some thuribles, and Karou had opened every one of them and let the impression of souls brush against her senses, but in none of them had she found what she was looking for.

She came with heavy steps to the body that she had such reason to hate, and found that she couldn’t. Was it all for Ziri, her grief, or was some small measure of it for the true Wolf, who, for all his great faults, had given so much—so many years, so many deaths, and so much pain—for his people?

To her surprise, Liraz was there, facing the palisade and the corpse that dangled from it. “Oh,” said Karou, caught off guard. “Hi.”

No hi in return. “I put him here,” said Liraz without turning her head. Her voice was tight.

Karou understood that she mourned him—Ziri—and though she didn’t know how it had happened, how any feeling had had time to grow between them, she wasn’t surprised. Not by Liraz, not anymore.

“It was for Jael, in case he was suspicious, coming into camp.” She cut Karou a tense look. “It wasn’t… disrespect.”

“I know.”

This seemed inadequate, so Karou added, softly, “It isn’t him. Not in any way.”

“I know.” Liraz’s voice was gruff. They didn’t speak again until they’d cut the ropes and lowered the body to the ground. They tore the gonfalon down, too. Those words— victory and vengeance—belonged to another time. Karou laid it over the body, a shroud to conceal the desecration of violent death.

“Would you burn it?” she asked. It, not him, she said, because that’s all it was. An empty thing, as a shell left on a beach.

Liraz nodded, and knelt beside it to touch fire to the broad, dead chest. Wisps of smoke curled up around her hand, and—

“Wait,” said Karou, remembering something. She knelt, too, on his other side, and reached into the general’s pocket. What she withdrew was a small article the length of her little finger. It was black and smooth, coming to a point on one end. “From his true body,” she said, and handed it to Liraz. The tip of his horn. “That’s all.”

Then, he burned. The fire reached high, clean and splendid and u

Only then did Karou notice the silence that had fallen inside the camp, and turn to the gate to see the host clustered there, watching. Akiva stood in front, and so did Haxaya, and she looked at Liraz, and Liraz looked back, and there was no more enmity between them.

“Come,” Akiva said, and he turned the watchers aside, and then it was just Karou and Liraz again. No corpse. Not even ash. Karou lingered. There was a question she wanted desperately to ask, but she fought against it.

“I didn’t see him die,” said Liraz. She clasped the horn tip in her fist, tight against her ribs.

Karou held her silence, and held a stillness with it, sensing that it was coming: the thing that she wanted greatly to know. “Coming back from the portal, it was chaos. Once, I saw him but couldn’t reach him, and when I looked again, he wasn’t there. After…” She looked troubled, cast Karou a sidelong glance, and said, plainly, “I don’t know how it happened. How we won. There is no explanation. I saw soldiers fall from the sky, no arrows, no injury, and no one near to have hurt them. Others fled. More fled, I think, than fell. I don’t know.” She shook her head as if to clear it.

Karou had heard much this same account already, from Elyon’s initial report to Akiva, seconded by Balieros. A mysterious—an impossible—victory. What could it mean?

“I found his body, finally. It had fallen into a ravine. Into a stream.” She cut Karou a glance, and everything about her was wary and on guard. She seemed to be waiting for Karou to say something.

Did she think that Karou would blame her? “It’s not your fault,” Karou said.

Whatever it was Liraz wanted her to say, that wasn’t it. She let out a short huff of impatience. “Water,” she said. “Does water, moving water, does it… hasten… evanescence?”

Karou looked at Liraz as her words sank in. Her stillness deepened. She was caught between breaths. This was what she hadn’t been able to ask. Did she mean…? So clearly Karou remembered the devastation on Liraz’s face when she’d had to tell her, as gently as she could under the circumstances, that Hazael’s soul was lost. How, for nothing, she had hauled his corpse through two skies, and how, in the process of bringing him to a resurrectionist, instead cast his soul adrift.

Surely that wasn’t why she’d dragged Thiago’s body all this way?

Karou’s glance flickered to where the corpse had been, which did not go u

And with that, Karou almost dared to hope. “Did you?” she asked, and her voice was very small.

Did you learn?

Did you glean Ziri’s soul?

Dear gods and stardust, did you?

Liraz started to tremble. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.” Her voice shattered, and just like that she was crying. She fumbled at her belt, and then she was holding something out to Karou with wildly shaking hands. It was her canteen.

“It’s not a thurible, but it closes. I didn’t have incense, and I couldn’t find anyone, not nearby, and I thought it might be worse to wait, but then I couldn’t tell if anything happened. I couldn’t feel anything, or see anything, so I’m afraid… I’m afraid it was already gone.” Now rushing over words, now pulling back in a series of taut silences, and there was a war in her eyes between hope and caution. “I… I sang,” she whispered, “if that matters,” and Karou felt her heart pulled to pieces. This Misbegotten warrior, fiercest of them all, had crouched in an icy stream bed to sing a chimaera soul into her canteen, because she hadn’t known what else to do.

The singing wouldn’t have mattered, but she wasn’t going to tell Liraz that. If Ziri’s soul was in that canteen, Karou would happily learn whatever song Liraz had sung and make it part of her resurrection ritual forever, just so that the angel would never feel that she’d been foolish.

And who knows?Karou thought, reaching for the canteen. Who really knows? Because I sure as hell don’t.

And her hands were shaking, too, as she twisted the cap loose. She tried to still them against the jug’s metal neck, which should have been cool in the mountain air but was warm from resting against Liraz’s body.

Then, as delicately as she could with her jittery fingers, she lifted the cap aside.

She strained, listening with her senses. Reaching, hoping. It was like leaning forward and breathing deeply—without leaning, without breathing. Some unknowable part of herself shifted forward, unwound, reached. What had Akiva said? A scheme of energies, more than mind and more than soul. She reached with it, whatever it was, and felt…