Страница 60 из 77
T EETH
It was the secret at the core of the chimaera resistance, the thing that plagued angels, kept them awake at night, strummed at their minds and clawed at their souls. It was the answer to the mystery of beast armies that, like nightmares, kept coming and coming, never diminishing, no matter how many of them the seraphim slaughtered.
When Chiro took the arrow at Kalamet a year ago, Madrigal was at her side. She held her while she died, blood frothing at her sharp dog teeth as she kicked and jerked and finally fell still. Madrigal did what she had trained to do, and what she had done many times before, though never for so close a friend.
With steady hands, she lit the incense in the thurible that hung, lantern-like, from the end of her gleaning staff—the long, curved crook that chimaera soldiers carried strapped to their backs—and she waited as the smoke wreathed around Chiro. Arrows rained down, profuse and dangerously near, but she didn’t leave until it was done. Two minutes to be certain; that was the standard. Two minutes felt like two hours in the thickness of arrows, but Madrigal didn’t retreat. There might not be another chance. A furious seraph sally was driving them back from the Kalamet wall. She could drag Chiro’s body with her, or she could complete the gleaning and leave it behind.
What was not an option was to leave it with Chiro’s soul trapped in it.
When Madrigal did finally fall back, she took her foster sister’s soul with her, safe within her thurible, just one of many souls she would glean that day. The bodies were left to rot. Bodies were just bodies, just things.
Back in Loramendi, Brimstone would already be making new ones.
Brimstone was a resurrectionist.
He didn’t breathe life back into the torn bodies of the battle-slain; he made bodies. This was the magic wrought in the cathedral under the earth. Out of the merest relics—teeth—Brimstone conjured new bodies in which to sleeve the souls of slain warriors. In this way, the chimaera army held up, year after year, against the superior might of the angels.
Without him, and without teeth, the chimaera would fold. It wasn’t even a question. They would fall.
“This is for Chiro,” Madrigal had said, handing Brimstone a necklace of teeth. Human, bat, caracal, and jackal. She had labored over it for hours, neither sleeping nor eating since her return from Kalamet. Her eyelids were lead weights. She had handled every jackal tooth in the jar and listened to each until she was certain she had the most favorable—the cleanest, smoothest, sharpest, strongest. The same with the other teeth, and the gems strung with them: jade for grace, diamonds for strength and beauty. Diamonds were a luxury not usually accorded a common soldier, but Madrigal had used them defiantly, and Brimstone let her.
He needed only hold the necklace for a moment to see that it was correct. As he had taught her, she had strung teeth and gems in careful configuration for the conjuring of a body. If they were strung in a different order, the body would manifest accordingly: bat head, perhaps, instead of jackal, human legs instead of caracal. It was part recipe and part intuition, and Madrigal was certain this necklace was perfect.
Resurrected, Chiro would look almost exactly as she had in her original flesh.
“Well done,” Brimstone said, and then he did something rare: He touched her. One big hand came to rest briefly on the back of her neck before he turned away.
She blushed, proud; Issa saw and smiled. A “well done” from Brimstone was uncommon enough; the touch was something special. Everything between the two of them was uncommon, really, and hard-won on Madrigal’s part.
Brimstone was a hermit, rarely seen outside his domain in Loramendi’s west tower. When he did make an appearance, it was at the left hand of the Warlord, and he inspired equal reverence, though of a different sort. The two of them were living myths, almost gods. It was they, after all, who had orchestrated the uprising in Astrae that left their angel masters dead in lakes of blood, and the survivors foundering for years to come as the chimaera found their footing as a people and gouged huge swaths of land back from the Empire to establish the free holdings.
The Warlord’s role was clear—he had been the general, the face and voice of the rebellion, and he was beloved as the father of the allied races. But Brimstone’s part in things was shadowier, and his fearsome persona rendered him a figure of mystery and speculation, rather than adulation. He was the subject of many imaginative rumors—some of which hit on the truth, others nowhere near.
He did not, for example, eat humans.
He did have a doorway to their world, as Madrigal had occasion to learn firsthand when, at the age of ten, she was assigned to be his page.
The youth mistress selected her because of her wings; pure chance. She might as easily have chosen Chiro, but she didn’t. She chose Madrigal, three years an orphan, ski
What was she going to learn? The secrecy of it at once set young Madrigal’s mind on fire, and it was with wide eyes and jitters that she presented herself in the west tower, to be ushered into the shop by a sweet-faced Naja woman—Issa—and offered tea. She accepted it but didn’t drink, so preoccupied was she with staring at everything: Brimstone, for one thing, bigger up close than she had imagined from her few distant glimpses of him. He hulked behind his desk, ignoring her. In the shadows, his tufted tail switched like a cat’s, making her nervous. She looked around at the shelves and dusty books; she looked at the broad door on its scrollwork bronze hinges that maybe, just maybe, opened to another world; and, of course, she looked at the teeth.
That was unexpected. Everywhere, the clitter-clack of teeth strings, the dusty jars of them, sharp teeth and blunt, huge and strange and tiny as hailstones. Her young fingers itched to touch, but no sooner did the thought enter her mind than, as if he heard it flittering there, Brimstone cut her a look with those slit-pupil eyes of his, and the impulse froze dead. Madrigal froze. He looked away, and she sat rigid for at least an entire minute before venturing one finger out to tap a curled boar tusk—
“Don’t.”
Oh, his voice! What a thing it was, deep as a catacomb. She should have been afraid, and maybe she was, a little, but the fire in her mind was primary. “What are they all for?” she asked, awed. The first question of many. Very, very many. Brimstone didn’t answer. He only finished the message he was writing out on thick cream paper and sent her off with it to the Warlord’s steward. That was all he wanted her for, to carry messages and run errands, to save Twiga and Yasri scurrying up and down the long spiral stairs. He certainly wasn’t looking for an apprentice.
But once Madrigal learned the fullness of his magic—resurrection! It was nothing less than immortality, the preservation of chimaera and all hope for their freedom and autonomy, forever—she was not content to be a page.
“I could dust the jars for you.”
“I could help. I could make some necklaces, too.”
“Are these alligator or crocodile? How can you tell?”
By way of proving her value, she presented him with sheaves of drawings of possible chimaera configurations. “Here’s a tiger with bull’s horns, see? And this one is a mandrill-cheetah. Could you make that? I bet I could make that.”