Zuzana frowned, waiting for her to say something that made sense. Mik, though, in much the same blasé way as he’d reacted to Karou telling them, months ago, that she was a chimaera, said only, “Cool.”
Eliza laughed, and then she told them about Elazael. The real Elazael, and what she had been and done, and about the dream that had plagued Eliza all her life, and what it meant, and Zuzana had thought she’d lost her capacity for surprise, but she found it again in a corner bar in Rome. No, it wasn’t surprise. It was bigger than that.
Zuzana found flummox in a corner bar in Rome. Universes. Many. And split seams in the linings of the space-time continuum. Or something. And angels who were like space explorers without ships, like science fiction but with magic in the place of science.
“The magi did something to the Faerers’ minds,” Eliza explained. “Their anima, actually. It’s more than mind; it’s self. Part of their duty was to bear children on their journey, who would be born with all their maps and memories… coded into them. Like genetically coded ancestral knowledge. Crazy. So one day they could find the way home.”
“And you’re one of the children,” said Mik.
“Many-greats, or something.”
“And you have the maps,” he said. “The memories.”
Eliza nodded. It was Mik’s intensity that clued Zuzana in that something more than storytime was going on here. Maps, memories.
Maps. Memories.
“There’s a lot of information in here,” Eliza said, tapping her head. “I haven’t processed it yet. Throughout my family history there’s been madness. I think it’s too much for the human mind to take. It’s like an overloaded server. It just crashes. I was crashed. You uncrashed me. I’ll never be able to thank you enough.”
Zuzana’s slumpy self-pity jag was already over. She sat up straight. “If you’re saying what I think you’re saying, you can totally thank us enough.”
Eliza skewed her lips into a contemplation pucker. “That depends. What do you think I’m saying?” Mischief gleamed in her eyes.
Zuzana wrapped her hands lightly around Eliza’s throat and mimed throttling her. “Tell. Us.”
“I know another portal,” said Eliza. “Duh.”
70
WHITE NO LONGER
Jael’s wingbeats were clipped with fury, anything but smooth as he returned to Eretz. He practically tore his way through the portal, wishing he could damage it, damage something. Akiva. Yes. See the bastard shot full of arrows like an archery-range dummy, dancing from the Westway gibbet for all to come and goggle at.
He looked around uneasily. Damn the bastard, he could be anywhere. Had he preceded Jael through the portal? Would he come behind? By the terms of their agreement, the moment Jael passed back into Eretz, Akiva was free to kill him in any manner other than igniting the suppurating handprint on Jael’s chest. That left him a lot of options.
And Jael had just as many. More, because he wasn’t held back by honor, which does shorten a list of ways to kill your enemy.
It was not lost on him that his very survival depended upon his enemy having honor, but this did not in any way oblige him to play by the same rules. On the contrary, it was critical that he draw first blood. He would not be able to rest until the bastard was dead.
Once through the portal, Jael didn’t stay to oversee the tedious return of his army but flew straight on to camp in the center of a phalanx of guards, with archers wide at their flanks in case Akiva should make an appearance.
The landscape here was much the same as the one they’d just left behind: dun-colored mountains and nothing to see. The camp was in the foothills, some half hour distant. In a field of grasses flattened by the wind, rows of tents stood orderly in a rough quadrangle with guard towers at its corners, manned by archers in case of aerial onslaught. It was a skeleton defense. Up here, there was nothing to defend against. The bulk of Jael’s forces were deployed south and east, hunting down the rebels.
And how had they fared? He should know soon enough.
Sooner even than expected.
The camp was scarcely in his sights when saw what awaited him on the piked palisade.
Karou saw it, too, though from a greater distance, and she couldn’t stifle her gasp. From the palisade, billowing in the wind, hung a banner that had been white and was now fouled with blood and ash. She knew it at once. Its slogan was clear, even if the wolf-head emblem in its center was… concealed. Victory and Vengeance, it read, in the chimaera tongue. It was the White Wolf’s gonfalon—not the copy he’d hung at the kasbah but the original, plundered as it must have been from Loramendi after the fall.
But it wasn’t the gonfalon that had made Karou gasp. If the banner alone hung here, it might be interpreted as a sign that the White Wolf had conquered and overtaken this camp. But with what dangled in front of it, obscuring the wolf emblem, no such misconception was possible.
Karou thought that she had managed her hope. She’d believed, flying back through the cut, that she was prepared for the possibility—the likelihood—of bad news.
Delusion.
Sometime since leaving their comrades behind, she had begun to believe, without admitting it to herself, that all would be well. Because it had to be. Didn’t it?
But it wasn’t. All was not well.
Also once white, and white no longer, by a noose around its neck, swung the stained and broken body of Thiago.
And here was the answer, sooner than expected, to the question of what had happened when they left the battle raging in the Adelphas, and made the hard decision to complete their own vital mission before returning.
Did I do enough? Karou had asked herself then, already knowing the answer. Did I do everything I could?
No.
And their comrades had lost. And died.
Akiva caught her and held her, and they didn’t speak but watched, helpless, moving in the air with the steady tide of Akiva’s wingbeats, as Jael landed before the corpse of the White Wolf and laughed.
71
ABSENCE
Karou went to the body, after Jael was gone. Just for a moment, just in case. Drawing close, she remembered the last time this flesh had bled out. Her own small knife had killed him then, and the neat wound was easily knit back up to prepare the vessel for Ziri’s soul.
This wound was… not neat.
Look away.
This death had not been easy, and Karou’s mind screamed for the brown-eyed orphan who once upon a time had trailed her around Loramendi, shy and gangly as a fawn. Whom she’d kissed once on the forehead, and only remembered it because he’d told her. Blushing.