War of the Magi: Azrael's Wrath (Book 2) (30 page)

He stood in the cold water, letting it seep into his boots, letting the soft sounds of the waves ripple along the shore over the noise of the city behind him.

It doesn’t matter. Nothing’s changed. It was just an idea, just a thought, and now it’s gone again, and everything’s the same as before. So it’s fine.

It doesn’t change a thing.

Already he found himself losing sight of the faces in his mind, the names he had chosen, the wet nurses he planned to seek out. All of the plans and futures that had seemed so clear and real just an hour ago faded like a thin mist before the rising of the desert sun.

Edris sat on a rock and watched the reflected sun float slowly across the lake.

“There you are.”

He nodded. “Here I am.”

Zerai sloshed out into the water to stand beside his rock. “We’ve been looking for you.”

“Really.”

“You’ve been gone for hours.”

Edris frowned.

Hours? Has it really been hours? I don’t think I’ve had enough thoughts to account for hours.

“Okay.”

“Well, it’s not okay,” Zerai said. “Petra is gone.”

The singer shrugged. “Okay.”

“No, I mean gone. She slipped out when no one was looking and now we can’t find her anywhere. Samira’s run through the whole city twice already.”

Edris rubbed his eyes. “Why are you telling me this?”

Zerai squatted down. “Don’t you care?”

“Not really. It’s over. The baby’s gone.”

“But…? I thought you and she…?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“She never loved me, and I never loved her. And she only wanted the child for her little revenge fetish against the Almighty. And I… I just wanted to sleep with a djinn. At first.” Edris tried to get a flicker of his old smile out, but he felt his face hanging just as stonily as ever from his skull, weighing him down along with his dark thoughts. “I certainly didn’t think I’d be around long enough to see the child, if there ever was a child. But these djinn, they’re a little too quick, aren’t they?”

Zerai nodded.

“So I realized that I was going to be around to see the baby after all. My baby. My son, my daughter. I started using those words in my head. My son. Father. Family. It started to feel real. As real as this new arm and this new eye. And I was excited about it. Just the idea of it. The possibilities. Names. Things we would do, places we would go.” He shook his head, unable to bind his thoughts any more concretely into words.

“You really wanted the child.”

“I really wanted the child.”

“I’m sorry.”

Edris shrugged.

“I don’t know if you’ve thought about this, but she still has to give birth,” Zerai said very quietly. “The baby still exists, it still has to come out.”

Edris shuddered.

“You could at least see if it’s a boy or girl. You could see its face. If you want.”

Edris said nothing. The falconer’s words had frozen his ability to think or imagine or feel. The idea that the baby still existed, that it had a face, that there were still things to be done… He cleared his throat. “What would you do?”

“You mean, would I want to see it?”

Edris nodded.

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“I mean, I know it would be terrible, having to live through that moment, looking at my dead child, holding my own dead child.” Zerai’s voice faltered, just a little. “But I’d want to know. I wouldn’t want to live with the question, not knowing, wondering, for the rest of my life.”

Edris nodded. “That makes sense.”

Zerai straightened up. “So, I’m going to go keep looking for her. Do you want to come?”

“You go. I’ll be along in a minute.”

The falconer left.

Edris washed his face and felt the cold water trickle down the back of his scalp, and for a moment he wondered if drowning himself would be less painful than looking into his dead son’s dead eyes as he held his tiny, cold, dead body in his arms. Whatever the answer was, he didn’t have the courage to walk out into the lake, so he stood and turned, and walked back into the tent city of Jerinoba.

He walked slowly through the narrow corridors between the fabric walls, stepping carefully around children and animals, and all the people who were working much harder than he was. There was no rush. He didn’t expect to find the djinn woman at all.

If that seer and that djinn cleric can’t find her, then there’s no chance I will.

Which was a relief. The thought of seeing Petra again, of having to talk to her, to share the raw pain of this moment with her, of all people, was almost enough to drive him back to the lake. But since he trusted that she was long gone, he was content to wander the streets and wait for someone else to find him and tell him what had become of his child.

When no one came to find him after the first half hour, he grew tired of pretending to search for Petra, and decided to go back to his tent and wait there, out of the sun, away from the people and their noise… and their children. When he pushed through the entrance of the tent, he was relieved to see it was empty.

No one waiting for me, to talk to me, to ask me how I feel. Maybe there is a God.

He eyed the pile of blankets where Petra had sat in silence earlier, and then went to sit on the far side of the tent on a patch of trampled grass. He lay back and stared up at the cloth ceiling that rippled and shook slightly with the wind.

A stone in the earth nudged his shoulder blade, so he rolled onto his side, facing the wall. A gust of wind slipped under the old, tattered cloth and chilled his skin, and he opened his eyes to slits. The cloth in front of him flipped up at the edge, revealing the ground outside.

Something dark lay in the tall grass.

Slowly, the singer stood up and went outside, circling around to the back side of the tent, which faced the rock wall of the Well, where no one would ever pass by, where no one would ever see.

And there in the grass was his son.

There was also blood on the ground, and the cord, and something purple and hideous which took him a moment to recognize. Dimly, he wondered if Petra had run off and then circled back to deliver the child here, and then run off again. The thought came and went in an instant. He didn’t care what Petra had done, or why.

Edris knelt in the grass and touched the tiny boy’s fat cheek, gazing in wonder at the gray, wrinkled face that looked so much like his grandmother’s face the last time he had seen her. The hands, the fingers, were impossibly small. He nudged them with the tip of his finger, unable to fathom how anything so tiny could be real fingers with muscles and bones like his own, but then the coolness of the baby’s skin made him pull his hand away.

The infant’s eyes were mercifully closed, and although the thought did enter his mind, he didn’t dare touch the boy’s face again to see them.

A matted, wet mass of black hair swirled around the small, pointed head. He almost smiled at that. Almost.

He sat in the grass, staring and wondering and shivering.

It was hours later before anyone found him there.

Chapter 21
Iyasu

As they paced along the edge of the lake, the sun sank below the rim of the Well and the small world of Jerinoba quickly sank into a shadowy dimness. Iyasu tried to keep his eyes on the lake, on the smooth dark surface that only occasionally rippled or bubbled, and the only mysteries it offered up were in the shapes of fish and insects and birds.

Maybe we should just replace all the people with fish and birds.

He looked over at Azrael walking beside him. Her hood had slipped back and her dark hair hung loose around her solemn face.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She looked at him with a strange mixture of surprise and confusion. “Am I…? Yes, I’m fine. Are you?”

“Not really.” He shrugged. “This baby… Did you free its soul too?”

“I did. It was quiet. No pain or fear.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“I didn’t expect the singer to be so upset by it.”

Iyasu looked up at her again, searching her eyes. It was the first time she had said anything so conversational, so revealing of her own thoughts and opinions about the world. But when he looked at her, there were no strange cues or angelic signs. There was only a woman walking beside him, the same woman who had walked the streets of Tagal with him before. He nodded. “He told Zerai that he was looking forward to being a father. He was thinking about names.”

“Do you want to be a father?”

Iyasu blinked. “I don’t know. I suppose, some day. Zerai does.”

“But Veneka doesn’t?”

“I think she does, but something is holding her back. Some fear, maybe.”

“You can’t tell what it is?”

He smiled a little. “I’m a seer, not a mind reader or a prophet. And she’s a friend. I don’t want to pry. I spend most of my time prying. It makes me feel a little guilty sometimes. More than a little, actually.”

“Even when you help people?”

“Especially when I help people. I can’t remember how many times I’ve burrowed into the secret corners of some poor person’s life and then used that knowledge to tell them what to do, how to live. At first I felt noble and righteous, after all, I am the voice of truth. And what could be more pure and holy than the truth?”

“What?”

“Kindness. Just… kindness. There’s nothing kind about the truth. It’s like a hammer. Blunt, painful, inescapable, unfeeling. Unkind.”

They walked on a bit farther from the noise and lights of the tent city.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“With Darius. With the war.”

“I don’t know anymore.” He shook his head. “I still don’t understand how I could I have chosen him, how I could have missed what a monster was inside him.”

“Because it was inside. It couldn’t be seen, not even by a seer.”

“Maybe.” He stopped and she stopped beside him. “So what happens now? We have a choice. Go back again, or go away again. I’ve done both already, and Darius is still out there. What would you do?”

The Angel of Death looked at him thoughtfully. “To end suffering, we would need to take power away from those who cause suffering.”

“So we go back again?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to ask you to fight for us. I don’t want to use you as a weapon. But without you…” He looked at the black expanse of the lake. He could no longer see the ripples or bubbles, but he could hear the water lapping at the stones near his feet.

She nodded. “Of course I’ll go, and fight. For you, for the innocent, for the wicked.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. Besides, I have the time.” A pale ghost of a smile played across her dark lips. “Can you do something for me, Iyasu?”

The sound of his name in her mouth sent a shiver up the back of his neck. “Anything.”

“Have hope.”

“Have hope?”

“Just that. Have hope. Hope is a strange weapon. It doesn’t tend to make for victories, but it does tend to ward off defeat. Hope will keep the beaten, the broken, and the dying alive and crawling toward salvation long after all reason, all the world, has abandoned them. So have hope. It may not stop Darius, but it may save you.”

“And I’m worth saving? Me? The person who created Darius?”

“Yes, you are.”

“Why?”

“Because you care.”

“And that’s enough?”

“Yes.” She paused. “That, and the fact that you keep going back.”

Iyasu exhaled and closed his eyes. “I just want to put it right. People are dying because of what I did. One would be too many. But hundreds… thousands…” Yet another vision of the slain lying in the streets of Tagal, of the butchered lying in the halls of the palace. The faces. The blood. The blank, staring eyes.

Suddenly there were arms around him, holding him tightly, and he collapsed against her, sobbing into her shoulder. He wrapped his arms around her, clutching her as though he would die if he lost her, and he cried so hard he could barely breathe, gasping silently with his face contorted in pain, the tears pouring down his cheeks.

They knelt on the grass together, and slowly he felt his body grow calm and still. His breathing became slow and regular, and the burning pain in his eyes and throat subsided. She loosened her hold on him and he leaned back, and raised his hand to wipe his face dry, but instead Azrael took his head firmly in her hands and pressed her lips to his.

Again he clung to her, this time plunging his hands into her hair, and around her waist. This time he felt the firmness of her breasts pressed against his chest and the heat of her skin. Her lips controlled his, biting and caressing together, as though she were drawing her own life from his touch.

A tiny voice in Iyasu’s mind cried out that this was an angel, that this was too far, too strange, too wrong. He didn’t listen.

Clothing was pushed and pulled away. His white and yellow robes slipped swiftly to the ground in a mound of linen, and her Daraji dress seemed to simply fall apart once she had loosened her sash and belt. He blinked and saw her naked form all at once, his perfect eyes capturing her perfectly beautiful, perfectly ordinary flesh in an instant. Hard muscles, soft skin, dark nipples… but he hurried back to her face, cupping her cheeks, drinking from her lips and seeking out the hot taste of her tongue.

She pulled him down beside her and they wrapped their arms and legs together, entwined in the tall grass, their skin growing hotter against the cool night air as they gently raked each others’ backs with their finger nails, and bit each others’ nipples, and clutched each others’ waists to press their hungry flesh together.

He felt himself grow hard and harder, throbbing and pulsing, straining against his own skin as his blood yearned for her, to be inside her, to be held by her, loved by her, owned by her in every way possible. And he felt her swell against him as she gently took hold of his neck and forced his mouth against the hollow of her throat.

They rolled together in the grass and he looked down on her face painted silvery brown by the newly risen moon, and she gazed up at him, her face utterly serene except for the naked yearning in her wide, black eyes. She pulled him inside her, and he inhaled sharply as he felt her muscles contract around him, tightening until it began to hurt.