You can’t drag the curtain back. Grief persists. But you can crash through it, can’t you? If they had to suffer, Zuzana wondered, couldn’t they at least suffer together?
And when the knock came at the door—their food—she thought that maybe she could help. At least with physical proximity.
“Just a minute,” she called out. “You three, into the bathroom. You don’t exist, remember?”
There followed a brief whispered argument that they could simply glamour themselves, but Zuzana would hear none of it. “Where would they put the food, with an enormous chimaera taking up half the floor, an angel perched on the window ledge, and a girl on the bed? Even if you’re invisible, you still have mass. You still take up space. Like, all the space.”
And so they went, and if the room was small, the bathroom was much more so, and Zuzana saw fit to arrange them within it as she chose, pushing Karou by the small of the back and then giving Akiva an imperious look and toss of her head that said, You next, and she pressed them together into the shower and shut them in. It was the only way Virko could fit into the room, too. It was all perfectly reasonable.
She closed the bathroom door. They’d have to take it from there. She couldn’t do everything for them.
49
AN OFFER OF PATRONAGE
“Patience, patience.”
Thus had Razgut counseled Jael half a day earlier. Patience. Even then, he’d been feeling the pinch of impatience himself. Now, with two full days gone by since their arrival, it was more of a stab. He’d belittled Jael for his expectations, but secretly he was beginning to worry.
Where were all their offers of patronage? Had he miscalculated? This was all his own plan. Only arrive in glory, he had said, and they will fall all over themselves to give you what you want. Oh, not the presidents, not the prime ministers, not even the Pope. They would roll out every red carpet, yes. There would be no shortage of bowing and scraping, but the powers that be would have to practice caution when it came to arming a mysterious legion. There would be scrutiny. Oversight.
Committees.
Oh, give me a half-mad butcher of a tyrant, thought Razgut, at his wit’s end. Only save me from committees!
But while presidents, prime ministers, and popes entertained them, the quicker, darker currents of the world’s will should have been shaping themselves into action. Private groups, the crazy ones, the hellfire chasers, the doomsday gloaters. They should have been lining up, sending offers, paying bribes, getting word to the angels no matter what it cost them. Take us! Take us first! Burn the world, flay the sinners, only take us with you!
The world was rife with them, even on a normal day, so where were they all? Had Razgut misjudged humanity’s love affair with the end of the world? Was it possible this pageant would not play out quite so easily as he had thought?
Jael had been in foul humor, pacing the suite of magnificent rooms, alternating cursing with icy silence. He kept the cursing low, to his credit, doing nothing “un-angelic” that might ruffle the feathers, so to speak, of their pious hosts. He played his part whenever called upon: the diplomatic posturing, the feasting, the dazzling. The Catholic Church seemed determined to match pageant with pageant, and certainly their costume collection won the day. If Razgut had to endure one more ceremony clinging to Jael’s back and listening to an old man in a fancy gown drone in Latin, he thought he might scream.
Scream and let himself be seen, just to spice things up.
So it was with a churning gutful of… hope… that he observed the curious shuffle-dance of faintheartedness being performed in the doorway by one of the Papal Palace servants.
A step forward, a step back, arms aflutter, chickenlike. The man was one of the few approved to enter their chambers and see to their needs, and he had until now kept his eyes fixed on the floor in their “holy” presence. Razgut had thought, on several occasions, that he could probably release his glamour and not even be noticed. That was the level of discretion these servants displayed. They were very nearly ghosts, though the thought of such an afterlife made Razgut bilious.
Or perhaps it was the prodigious output of the Papal Palace kitchens doing that.
He had not indulged in so much rich food in many a century, and found it interesting that the discomfort of his overtaxed intestines had not yet induced him to reduce his intake. Perhaps soon.
Or perhaps not.
The servant cleared his throat. You could almost hear his heartbeat from across the room. The Dominion guards remained motionless as statues, and Jael was in his private chamber, resting. Razgut considered speaking up. Would a disembodied voice really be the oddest thing that happened to this man all day? But he didn’t have to. The man managed to summon some spine and mince forward, drawing an envelope from the pocket of his starched and immaculate coat and laying it down upon the floor.
An envelope.
Razgut’s field of vision narrowed in on it. He knew what it must be, and his hope sharpened.
Finally.
Jump forward one minute, though—the servant gone, Jael summoned, and Razgut visible, splayed across the refreshment table with the envelope in his hand—and he gave no hint of his own very deep relief and curiosity. He only peeled a slice of paper-thin prosciutto free of its fellows and made sure to give audible proof of his delectation.
“Well, what does it say?”
Jael was impatient. Jael was imperious. Jael was, thought Razgut, at his mercy.
“I don’t know,” he replied casually, and also truthfully. He hadn’t opened it yet. “It’s probably a fan letter. Possibly an invitation to a christening. Or a proposal of marriage.”
“Read it to me,” Jael commanded.
Razgut paused as though he were thinking up a reply, and then he farted. Squinching up his face, he did so with effort. The reward was slight in resonance but grand in aroma, and the emperor was not amused. His scar went white in that way it had when he was extremely put out, and he spoke through clenched teeth, which, on a positive note, did help contain the flying spittle.
“Read it to me,” he repeated in his deadly quiet voice, and Razgut judged himself to be one step removed from a beating. If he did as he was bid now, he might spare himself some hurt.
“Make things easy for me,” Jael had said, “and I’ll make things easy for you.”
But where was the fun in easy? Razgut crammed as much prosciutto into his mouth as he could while he still had the chance, and Jael, seeing what he was about, ordered the beating with a dull twitch of his head.