40
ASSUME THE WORST
In fascination, the Stelians watched the unfolding of the next hour in the caves, and they learned many things, but many more things remained baffling.
The magus went by the name of Akiva. Nightingale scorned to call him by it, because it was an Empire name, and a bastard’s no less. She called him only “Festival’s child,” and kept her sendings uncharacteristically austere. She was one of the finest telesthetes in all the Far Isles, an artist, and her sendings were generally effortless layers of beauty, meaning, detail, and humor. The absence of all of it now told Scarab that Nightingale was overwhelmed with emotion and intent on keeping it to herself, and she couldn’t blame her, and since she couldn’t see her—the five of them maintained their glamours, of course—she couldn’t begin to tell how the older woman was grappling with the abrupt existence of this grandson.
Or with what his existence suggested about the fate of Festival, so many years a mystery.
It was within Scarab’s rights as queen to touch her subject’s minds, but she wouldn’t intrude in something like this. She only pushed a simple sending of warmth to Nightingale—an image of one hand holding another—and kept her focus on the activity around her.
Preparations for war? What was this? A rebellion?
It was very strange, drifting among these soldiers who had been for so long mere archetypes in the stories she was raised on. Warnings, really, was what they had been, these kin from the far side of the world. Locked in war, century after century, all their magic lost, they were a cautionary tale. We are not that had been the tone of Scarab’s education, with their fair-skinned cousins serving as example—at a distance—of everything they eschewed. The Stelians had ever held themselves apart, shunning all contact with the Empire, refusing to be drawn into their chaos, leaving them to burn off their noxious idiocy in their wars on the far side of the world.
And if chimaera burned and bled for it from the Hintermost to the Adelphas? If an entire continent had become a mass grave? If the sons and daughters of a whole half world—seraphim included—knew no life but war, and had no hope of better?
It is nothing to do with us.
The Stelians shouldered their solemn duty, and it was as much as they could bear. Only the great rending drag on sirithar that had sucked at the skies of the world had drawn Scarab so far from her isles, because that was to do with them, in the deadliest way imaginable.
Find the magus and kill him, restore balance and go home. That was the mission.
And now? They couldn’t kill him, so they watched him, and he was a part of something very strange indeed, and so they watched that, too.
And when the two rebel armies, uneasily intermingled, gathered into battalions and left the caves, the five unseen Stelians followed them. South over the mountains and with a westward veer they flew, and they were three hours in the sky before they set down in a kind of crater in the lee of a sharkfin peak.
Three chimaera were waiting there—scouts, Scarab soon determined, making her silent way around the crowd to stand in the shadow of the wolf-aspect general called Thiago.
“Where are the others?” he asked the scouts, who shook their heads, somber.
“They haven’t come,” said one.
At the general’s side—and this was curious—stood not a lieutenant of his own race, but a severe seraph soldier of more than common beauty, and it was she whom he looked to first to say, “We have to assume the worst until we know otherwise.”
What worst? wondered Scarab, almost idly, because this was all so very abstract to her. She was a huntress and had marshaled stormhunters from the brink, and she was a magus and a queen and the Keeper of the Cataclysm, and she may have dreamt in childhood of scything the life threads of enemies to build a yoraya, but she had never been to war. Once her people had been warriors, but that was in another age, and when Scarab, from her place of isolation in the Far Isles, shrugged off the fates of millions with disdain for the foolishness of warmongers, she did so without ever having seen a death in battle.
That was about to change.
“But why is Liraz coming with us? Why not Akiva?” Zuzana asked. Again.
“You know why,” replied Karou. Also again.
“Yes, but I don’t care about any of those reasons. I only care that I’ll have to spend time with her. She looks at me like she’s planning to yank my soul out through my ear.”
“Liraz couldn’t yank your soul out, silly,” said Karou, to assuage her friend’s fear. “Your brain, maybe, but not your soul.”
“Oh, well then.”
Karou considered telling her how Liraz had kept her and Mik warm the other night in their sleep, but thought that if it got back to Liraz, she actually might yank out some brains. So instead she said, “Do you think I wouldn’t rather be with Akiva, too?” and this time maybe a little bit of her own frustration sounded in her voice.
“Well, it’s nice to hear you finally admit it,” said Zuzana. “But a little Machiavellian maneuvering would not go amiss here.”
“Excuse me? I think I’ve been pretty damn Machiavellian,” said Karou, as though it were an insult not to be borne. “There is the matter of hijacking an entire rebellion.”
“You’re right,” Zuzana allowed. “You are a conniving, deceitful hussy. I stand in awe.”
“You’re sitting.”
“I sit in awe.”
Here they were, back at the crater where they’d spent their cold night. They’d just arrived and soon they would be on their way again, toward the Bay of Beasts and the portal. At least, a few of them would, and Akiva was not part of that few. Karou had been trying to be cool about it, but it was hard. When her plan had come clear to her—when she was back in Akiva’s chamber with Ten dead at her feet, and her mind had raced through the scenario—it had been Akiva she imagined by her side, not Liraz.
But once she’d presented the idea to the council, she’d begun to realize that her plan was really only one slice in the much greater strategic pie, and that if they went forward with it, Akiva, as Beast’s Bane, would be needed here.
Damn it.
And so it was: Liraz would accompany her instead of Akiva, and it was just as well. The chimaera would have questioned Thiago sending Karou off through the portal with Akiva, and there was still the deception to manage. There was too much to manage, blast it.
At least once she got through the portal, Karou told herself, she wouldn’t have the entire chimaera army watching her every move.