She had to put a halt to small talk and make herself understood. “We need an audience. This needs to be witnessed, and spoken of far and wide. Sung. I want songs to be written about this. Do you mind? Could you go get everyone? And Karou?”
At which point Ziri and Liraz both got all bashful and weird, and Mik suggested, delicately, that perhaps Karou and Akiva were… busy.
Collision of emotions! Thrill at the thought that at last Karou and Akiva were “busy”! And injustice, that it should coincide with her own moment of glory. “We can interrupt them for this, though, right?” she begged. They were coasting in circles now, forestalling the moment they would have to disembark and enter the caves on foot.
“No,” spake Mik, voice of sanity.
“But—”
“No.”
“Fine. But I want someone to see us.”
Everyone saw them. Liraz went to fetch them, and they crowded into the crescent, and there were gratifying gasps and shouts. Zuzana heard Virko’s affectionate bellow of “Neek-neek!” and then felt, finally, that it was okay to bring this ride to an end.
They brought the huge creature as close as they could to the rock face and jump-scrambled from its back, hugging its vast neck first in thanks and farewell. They supposed it would go now and leave them, but hoped that it wouldn’t (“If it doesn’t, we’re naming it.”), and they paused to watch, wistful, as it rose higher and higher until it was just a shape cut from the glittering vault of the sky.
Only then, turning toward the gathered chimaera and seraphim, did they realize that something was wrong. There was a pall over their manner, and… Karou was there. Not busy. Why not? And why was she standing way back there? And where was Akiva?
Karou gave them a wave, and a brief marveling smile and head shake, and her eyes popped at the sight of Eliza’s wings, of course, but even that didn’t draw her forward to greet them. She was talking to Liraz, and Liraz was no longer laughing like a person who laughs. She was back to her most terrible self. Tight-lipped and white-nostrilled with ire, more savage than ever the White Wolf had looked.
Zuzana forgot all her glory and rushed to her friend. “What? What what what? God, Karou, what?”
“Akiva.” So lost. Karou looked so lost. That wasn’t how she was supposed to look. “He’s gone.”
82
ABERRATION
—There is a reason—
(“What have I done?”)
—There is a reason for the tithe.
This wasn’t speech. What Nightingale conveyed to Akiva, she did so in silence, in sending, and it was more than words. It was memory opened to him, in sound and image, and emotion unfolded for him, in horror and heartache. It was not possible to misunderstand. He stood before Nightingale and Scarab and outwardly he saw them, and the other three behind them. But inwardly, he experienced something else, and shrank from it.
—Be calm. You are my child’s child.
Festival. Nightingale gave her to Akiva in a memory so saturated with yearning that he understood, for its duration, what he himself could have no context for: a parent’s love for a lost child.
—I wish to know you. To help you, and not to hurt you. And so you must listen to me. You are my child’s child, but I never knew of you. Festival was lost to us. Vanished. Only because you exist do I know what became of her. I know that my beloved daughter was a concubine in the harem of a warmonger who tore half a world apart.
She didn’t disguise the desolation this caused her, and Akiva felt himself to be the root of it, as though time worked backward, and he had caused his mother to make the choice that would create him.
—I also know that this could not have befallen her… against her will. She was Stelian, and mine. She was strong. And so she must have chosen this.
The memories were as seamless as though they were Akiva’s own. Running beneath the surface of Nightingale’s words: a pure distillation of the woman who had been Festival, beautiful and troubled. Troubled? By a dowser’s sense for the veins of fate, and a compulsion to follow them, even into the dark.
—And so. And so she must have had a reason.
From Nightingale’s mind to Akiva’s passed the understanding that for many Stelians, fate was as real as love or fear—a dimension of their life with weight enough to shape it. It was called ananke, this sensitivity to the pull of destiny. If your ananke was strong, well then, you could follow or resist, but with resistance came an oppressive sense of wrongness that would haunt your every choice.
—And the reason must be you.
The memories evanesced, leaving a void, and Akiva bereft in it.
You, you, echoing in the emptiness, and finding other words there, waiting. “My son will not be tangled in your feeble fates.” But before he could begin to process this, a new sending bloomed in the space where Festival had been. It was very different: cold, and remote, and immense.
—The Continuum that is the great All is bound and bounded by energies. We call them veils. They have other names, many, but this is the simplest. They are beyond our compass. They are the first and nest of all things, and this we know: The veils hold the worlds intact, and they hold them distinct. Touching, but separate, as the worlds are meant to be. When you pass through a portal, you’re transgressing a cut in a veil.
Veils, the Continuum, the great All. These were not terms that Akiva had heard, but he was gifted an idea of them, and there was reverence in it bordering on worship. It wasn’t a picture or a memory, because that was impossible. No one can have seen the Continuum. It was everything. The sum of the worlds.
Until now, Akiva had known of two: Eretz and Earth. In Nightingale’s sending, he understood… many.
It was dizzying. What he glimpsed in the idea of the Continuum was enough to make him want to fall to his knees. He beheld space, all around him and peeling open. And open, and open, no end to its opening, no limit to its dimensions. Like a god rearing its thousand-thousand heads, one after another after another after another, opening its thousand-thousand mouths to loose a tremendous, world-echoing roar—
—We draw energy from the veils to make magic. They are the source. Of everything. It is no simple matter. Power can’t just be taken. There is a price, a trade of energies. This is the tithe.
“The pain tithe,” Akiva said. He spoke it, not knowing how to communicate in kind, and saw Scarab’s brows knit, while Nightingale’s, which had been knit, fell smooth. She regarded him curiously, and her reply imparted gentle pity.