Memories held him in limbo.
It wasn't until the Queen's izha became pregnant that Mihai acknowledged to himself the plan that had been growing in the shadows of his mind -- the life within the red-haired girl, like a pearl enclosed. Thirteen times had he slid his own animus into the darkness of an unformed soul and concresced with it. But it was not his own animus he thought of when he looked at the smooth curve of the girl's swelling belly. It was the Queen's.
He was careful. He waited, and on a full moon late in the girl's pregnancy, when all the other Druj -- including Isvant -- had shifted into wolves and owls and stags, he went to the Queen.
"Mazishta," he said. "What if I told you I knew how you could go into the mists and capture the memories that dance away from you as you reach for them?"
Her eyes grew bright.
"The old god breathed the mist into our minds. It's meant to keep us blind, to keep us from learning what we were and finding our way back to it. There is a way, but it is barred by taboo."
"Which taboo?" she demanded.
"The unborn," Mihai said, and she understood at once, as he knew she would. It was so simple. Her hunger was so great it took no urging from him at all. Together they descended to the girl's chamber and went in to her. The boy had been taken away months ago and she was alone. She saw the excitement in their faces, and terror bloomed in hers. She clasped her hands over her belly and ducked her head, trying to hide her eyes from them, to close herself up tight like a flower bud.
But there was nothing she could do. The Queen tilted back her head by force and Mihai's heart ached to see the girl's terror.
"You'll understand everything," he assured the Queen, and then, suddenly, it was done. Her perfect body stood vacant. Mihai waited for an agonized moment to see if she had done as he instructed. He watched the girl. Her eyelids fluttered and she looked up at him, bewildered. She had felt the Queen pass into her but instead of possessing her entirely, the cold had seemed to pour right through her. Before she could wonder where it had gone, Mihai whispered her to sleep, catching her body and cradling her for a moment in his arms, his hand splayed tenderly over her belly, before laying her down on her bed of furs.
He did not want her to suspect what she carried within her.
He took the Queen's body down to her Tabernacle of Spies, kissed her on the brow, his lips lingering against her icy flesh, and he left her there. He locked her in and tucked the key into his pocket. He broke the manacle that chained Zaranya to him and set the lizard free, almost sad to part company with it, and then he returned to the girl. It was still night when he took her away through the glimmering window to London and closed the air behind them, sealing Tajbel from their sight. The wolves still howled at the brilliant moon and the owls and ravens and hawks still spun in the sky, and their sounds choked off when the window closed.
When the dawn came in Tajbel, those Druj would go in search of the Queen to receive her whisper and be restored to their human cithrim, but they wouldn't find her. In the tabernacle her body was vacant, no animus for them to scent or trace. They would remain as beasts, their sharp teeth and beaks unable to speak the magic that was locked within them. Nor could they ever prostrate themselves before other tribes to beg their whispers; rivalries ran too deep. Their brother and sister Druj would be all too happy to see the Tajbel tribe powerless and without the protection of their Queen.
In London, Mihai felt no remorse. Better they be animals in the skins of animals, he thought, than in the guise of humans. He watched from the corner as Yazad comforted the pregnant girl with his soothing voice, saw how she cowered like a hunted creature, spooked by the firelight, overawed by everything. He remembered the twist of her hair on the chain of the Queen's amulet, and remembered the boy's hair, how he had been hunted down and captured because of it, and he felt nothing at all for the Druj in Tajbel.
He took one long look at the izha's full, ripe belly and imagined what silent weaving was at work within her, what fibers of soul and animus were even now growing together like roots interlocking in soil. He left through the window, leaving the girl in Yazad's care.
He had only to wait.
Those fourteen years were the longest of his very long life.
SIXTEEN Ashes and Dust
Once, many centuries ago," Mihai said in a low, strained voice, holding Esme to his chest as she writhed and screamed, "a sect of worshippers went in secret to the dakhma outside their city. It was not a place for the living. It was the high, lonely tower of silence where the dead were left so their putrefaction would corrupt neither sacred earth nor holy fire. It was a place of vultures and mysteries.
"The moon shone down on the raw bones of the dead and the worshippers decided they would never die. They were not simply worshippers, these black-haired men and women. They were sorcerers, theosophists, and scholars. Among them was a woman with a mind as sharp as a blade of obsidian, brilliant as the moon. Mysteries unfurled themselves for her like flowers and revealed to her their quiet centers. Secrets gathered for her out of the stars and she drew them down from the sky and shaped them into a new faith, gifting herself and her followers with power, and with immortality.
"But the old god would not have it. He snatched out their souls and laid them flat on a rock and he made them choose between what he had given them and what they had taken for themselves. The woman made the choice.
"She chose immortality and the others followed her. And so the god scorched their souls to ash and scattered them in the wind. He dubbed them Druj. Demons. He breathed a mist into their memories and he plucked their children from their arms to grow old and die as humans, and he flung the Druj to the mountains where they could begin their immortality in landscapes of desolation that reflected the emptiness within them. He told them they would be purged by fire at the end of time, when the whole world would be transfigured by light. If they could gather their scattered souls by then, he said, they would be transfigured too. If not, they would plunge forever into the abyss. And until they found their souls, fire, he said, which was sacred to him, would be anathema to them. Even ash would burn them.
"He told them all of this, but the mists ran rampant in their minds and they forgot everything, remembering only their fear of the holy fire and ash, but not the reason for it.
"They forgot their humanity and they forgot the children who had been wrested from their arms. They forgot the drifting ash of their souls that was as dust upon the skin of the world.
"The centuries passed. They lived and lived. They grew weary of immortality but remembered nothing else. And then one day, something happened that led one among them to discover all that had been forgotten."