A ruined monastery is attached to the crematorium, worn down entirely, shredded as if someone specifically demolished it. Roof absent, walls done with. A few jagged spaces that used to be monks' sleeping chambers. She spots a dot of red on the white ground and thinks that it is blood, but it's only a fragment of detritus that once brightened some pillar. She puts it back down, where it gleams in the frost like a single jewel in a filigree the size of eternity.
Past a broken gate, she surveys the smaller buildings that ring the crematorium. A shed or two. A central column where offerings were left: bronze and brass bells whose tongues have long rotted off, a collection of singing bowls that have lost both their gleam and music. It surprises her that these remain at all—they should be a fine bounty to historians and archeologists. But perhaps the scholars of Kemiraj, before winter or otherwise, think Sirapirat's precursor or offshoots beneath notice. They thought themselves the greatest before the Winter Queen came, and now they think themselves the finest still, beloved and ascendant.
Nuawa strains her ears. After more than a decade in Sirapirat her senses for such things have tarnished, and she's no longer as alert to the rustling in the leaves and the scraping of claws on snow. But her quarry is not a wolf or a bird of prey. People are much easier to find, on balance, than deer or bear cubs. So far, she has spotted no sign of the Heron. He may not need heating so she hasn't been looking for fires, yet some fraction of him must remain human, answer to human needs—shelter, food, sleep.
Eventually she sees it, a red print turning the brown of dead leaves. She kneels and takes off her glove to touch, sinking her finger into the damp. This time it is not a stray pebble.
The trail is not fresh, but it is steady, uninterrupted. A drop of russet, another drop. Up she goes on crumbled steps, to the first, then the second floor of the main building. Her footfalls are loud in the purity of absence, the stasis of ruin. She encroaches.
On the third floor, among decayed pallets and dissolved furniture, the corpse of a pig sprawls. It has been slaughtered hastily, torn down the middle the way a stuffed toy might be ripped by a tempestuous child. For an animal so crude and filthy there is hidden elegance to the symmetry of its ribs, those refined parabolas doubling in on themselves. The Heron does need to eat, after all. There is not much left inside the pig: the offal has been devoured, even the brain has been gouged out for sustenance, the skull scraped until it shines like expensive ivory.
A day old, two at most.
She replays the snap of throat, the impact of body on hard sediment. But she was not around to watch what occurred after. Maybe he pulled himself back together piece by piece. Bones knitted, tendons reformed, those wings retracted. And then he stole a pig from some city pen and brought it to this fort to fall upon like a ravenous dog.
Even in his state, he can still move. Track him by the things that seem to you a trick of refraction, the things that should not be there, that you believe are products of an unsteady mind. Track him by the traces and prints that you alone can see. Those will lead you to the Heron.
Much as it galls to follow the queen's instructions, she has no alternative. Nuawa shuts her eyes and lets herself drift, emptying her thoughts. When she opens them again, she begins to see it, the places where air fractures and an opal radiance leaks through. Like phosphenes they are not truly there, a phenomenon visible to her eyes and no other, hallucinogenic. Sometimes it flickers out and she finds something else, frost flowers that have formed where there is no plant to give them skeleton, feathers that are too long and large to belong to any bird. She picks one up, turns it in her hands to see the daylight run rainbow along the vane. The quill is harsh white, with a wan undercurrent of gold.
The trail starts and stops, or rather her senses fall out of synchronization with it. She approximates the direction as she leaves the crematorium, keeping west with an eye out for landmarks: some rock formations ahead, jutting black out of the white. Now she can hear birds—very distant, either a repopulation that ran away from the city or some miraculous species that survived the transition from desert to tundra.
The day bleeds out, losing gradually all the brightness from its veins. By then Nuawa has entirely lost the trail, and no amount of remaining still and letting her vision haze will regain the Heron's track. She locates a copse of stone and a place to shelter beneath them. She covers herself with the extra coat she brought—warm enough, though it shouldn't be, in this weather. She does wonder at these changes, what would happen to them when the queen is no more: would the shard simply thaw and dissolve, or would it burst through her cardiac valves. All of them—Guryin, Lussadh, Nuawa—it would kill, and no skill at arms or thaumaturgy would stop the fact. Winter's end would be instantaneous, not just its monarch but its commanders, the heads of its army. Nuawa has not mulled on this before, what lies beyond her immediate future, the potential aftermath should she succeed.
She huddles in her coats and studies the small, yellow flowers that have managed to find foothold here. The stone above her is draped in lichen in burnt orange, in anemic gray.
In the morning, she eats her strips of cured pork, a length of dry sweet sausage, red and shot through with fat. She drinks out of a copper bottle: no time to melt the snow. Slowly she rises, chasing the stiffness out of her joints and stretching until she is sure her muscles are limber, and she is quick on the draw of the gun or the blade.
The dawn brings with it a return of the Heron's mark, a flicker in the corner of her eye, a ringing of bells. She turns to that and follows on.
Another outcrop of crags and boulders that look as though giant hands have stacked them into precarious, uneven towers. Beneath one such formation, Nuawa finds him. The Heron curls fetal in a shroud of his own feathers, the wings furled high and tight. They are as whole and exquisite as they were on that roof, perhaps even more. The wingspan is broader, the plumage brighter, the tips of primary feathers shining as though they have been dipped in rose gold and mercury.
She keeps her distance and keeps her gun out of its holster. Quietly she says, "Man from Yatpun."
One of the smaller wings at his hip twitches, but there is no other response. She takes a step closer. "In Sirapirat you met two women and you left them a shard of glass. Do you remember?" She speaks slowly, clearly.
A tremor of feathers. The wings part and she sees that his face is hardly human. It was gaunt before; now it is a skull, and from the sides of his neck extend sharp, thin beaks like a hummingbird's. His throat bends at an odd angle, not entirely recovered from the queen's strength. His eyes have gone strange, the dark of pupils leaking into the white of sclera, and when his gaze darts around rather than at her she sees that his sight is either lost or severely impaired. He opens his lips and a rattle comes out. He gathers a fistful of snow with a trembling hand and pours it into his mouth. As his throat labors to swallow it she thinks, This is my test, the monster I've been sent to kill. Yet all that remains is a terrible ruin.
The consequence of stealing power and wielding it without permission: perhaps that is what the queen wants Nuawa to bear witness, not a test but a warning.
The glob of snow disappears, and he licks his lips, mouth twisting as though trying to reacquaint itself with speech. He turns his head this way and that, and she hears the crunch of bones warping. In a moment his neck is straight, almost unmarred save for the imprint of the queen's hand. It did not bruise—there is no blood in him to bloom beneath the skin—but there is a dark blemish all the same, vivid and blue. "You," he croaks. "Ytoba should have brought you."
Her pulse jumps. "Ytoba." The Heron has not, quite, said it but she can already guess. And that would mean—
"Ey was to bring you to me. The prize I sought. Fate is a peculiar tide. Ey and I could never have crossed paths, yet something between us pulled, aligned ..."
Nuawa stares down at him, at this architect of misfortune. Whether he meant it or not, he set into motion all of this. First Tafari. Then Indrahi. He does not seem awar
e of—or alarmed by—her gun.
His tongue laps at the air, as if to taste her scent. Like the rest of him, the tongue is as colorless as dead scars. "I remember it now. I know what you are after and we share a common goal. Your mothers, they gave this glass to you, didn't they? I can see it in you, a seed that's harbored in the richest soil, piercing soul after soul. Now with you it has grown to fullness, a fruit at last ready for the reaping."
Nuawa blinks, trying to force her eyes to see it again the tributaries of radiance running over his skin. Right now, he seems only flesh, wings or not. "That was your purpose? To plant the mirror shards and come back for them when they were ripe?" Piercing soul after soul. How many glass-bearers have held this exact sliver of mirror.
"Do you not desire the queen's fall?" He extends a hand covered in eiderdown, pallid and cadaverous. "Give me your heart. Your piece."
"Didn't you tell my mothers that the queen becomes mortal at the moment of her kiss? You, I have a feeling, won't be able to persuade her to that gesture." Drawing him out, pushing to see if she can extract more answers. Whatever else, that must be paramount.
"I could, once." His mouth stretches, baring teeth and gums the hue of ash. "She may become breakable flesh for that one instant, but you're insufficient, child. You are not mighty—her mirror is—and that has fooled you into believing you are more than its vessel."
She studies his near-blind eyes, his desiccated stomach. A husk of foiled schemes. "Then there's nothing more to discuss." She levels her gun.
The Heron's grin stretches wider and he raises his hand, clenching it into a fist. "The mirror links us all, child of Sirapirat. In one like you, whose mirror has matured so well, the sympathy between you and me tugs like a fishing line. Watch."
Nuawa's hand moves in tandem with his, as if he is the person and she the reflection. This happens without her—she does not even feel it, the flexing and undulating of tendons, the intricate mechanisms that animate even the simplest human motion. She stares down as her treasonous hand returns her gun to its holster. She tries to resist, but there is nothing to push against, no force with which to contend. There is only a searing chill that radiates from her chest. Her heart pounds and it is as though her body has gone hollow, an acoustic chamber for cardiac percussion.
"By and by I came to learn that a single mortal body can bear no more than a single shard. It is not the quantity then, but the quality. One potent fragment of her mirror is better than a dozen weak ones, and taking that potent piece on I'll come very, very close to being her equal. I thought the glass in her favorite general was my answer. But yours. Yours is the one I planted myself, and how it has grown ..." He sweeps his arm—hers follows—a theatrical flourish to show his control is absolute. "Where you will fail, I shall succeed. All the burden you bear that you inherited from your mothers, it shall be put right. I can be your vengeance."
She bats uselessly against the possessed arm, hitting it hard enough to bruise. "Why do you seek the queen's fall?" Stalling. "You were her first retainer."
"Perhaps she did not grant me my dues. Perhaps I came to disagree with her goals. Simply because you are dying does not entitle you to revelations, child of Sirapirat. Even ghosts may rise up once more and disgorge secrets. There are many arts in the world, and most of them traffic in the dead. The fabric of existence is stitched by souls."
Her sword has left its sheath. He makes her brandish it, swing it through the air as though sparring against a phantom opponent. The blade-shadows splay out, wild writhing shapes like the lashes of a whip. One laps at her. A gash opens in her hip, hot and thick. Blood steaming in the snow, the smell of butchery.
The Heron rolls his wrist. Her trapped hand spins the blade, the way she might if she's putting on a show for the arena. The steel whistles as it cleaves through the air. "Had we met sooner. Something might have come out of it. But you hardly seem the sort to serve as a tool. You think yourself a force of your own, a free agent—" He reverses his grip.
Nuawa twists away, dodging her own blade. It grazes her coat, a bright, sharp line above her breast. "I'm not so hubristic as that." She is almost choking on her own breath and spit. To anyone watching it must be a farcical sight. "A spy in the queen's palace—" She grits her teeth. A thought emerges, between the thunderclaps of her panic. "I could do much for you."
"Reduced to begging after all? But no. I have waited for tenfold longer than you've been alive—more. It is time I take the fight to her. And to do that I require your part of her heart." He adjusts the angle of his arm, the direction of the sword. But he takes his time, relishing the control, the power that allows him to forget the state of his physical coil, the ruin in which he abides.
His savoring gives her time to draw her gun and fire it, point-blank, into her left wrist.
She has never seen so much of her own blood, and she has spent nearly two decades in arenas. It douses everything: her legs, her front, the Heron. Her sword falls and its shadows gutter out. The Heron recoils, capable of shock after all.
He still looks surprised when she shoots him in the face.
"I am," she whispers, "my own vengeance."
The instant he goes limp, pain comes in full force. Her eyes stream; her vision warps and the world is as seen through a concave glass. Still she fires into him.
The gun clicks empty. On her knees she retches; when she tries to support her weight on the shattered wrist it draws all her nerves into that one point, the entirety of her a single concentration of agony. Her stomach cramps and bile gurgles out of her.
She blacks out and comes to intermittently. When she finally has hold of her consciousness again, she is facedown in snow soaked in blood and vomit. Her breath is sour, filthy; she spits it all out. The Heron has not moved, has not made a second miraculous recovery. He lies in his own collapse, covered in a funeral shroud of stained feathers.
She crawls on her knees toward him, panting. With her good hand she picks up her sword and turns to the corpse. The only way to be sure is to carve out the Heron's heart. Through the reek of her own waste and in the heat of her own blood, she sets to work.
* * *
Lussadh does not bring a map; she does not require one. The terrain around the imperial city is as familiar to her as the lines of her palm, the topography of her history. It may be buried under snow, but this was once her childhood ground, the limitless space granted to a prince. The world belonged to her, she was told, and all she surveyed was her birthright. These lands and these people, body and soul. Even the ruins of the defeated were hers to own. The al-Kattan, descended from the sun.
Now the land is unrecognizable to her ancestors, and those who stood with her as she beheaded Ihsayn are gone.
She swings down from the carriage and stands at the crematorium's gate. Looking for footprints will prove fruitless. The desert retains its nature and, even beneath snow, sand shifts like water. Instead she circles the area and waits for her senses to find their level. The scent is the thing that, to her, has changed the most about her homeland: there is dampness, there are low sedges that never grew in the desert and lichen that clings to ruins once coated only in dust, and they have laced the air with the smell of scrabbling life. Earthy, faintly green. In a few decades more, maybe this land will grow truly other, entirely removed from its desert past. Birds other than vultures and desert hummingbirds would perch on wrecked architecture and preen and build nests. The edges would run green and soft with dew, and at last the vision that inspired the al-Kattan founders—that infinity of sunlit gold—would dissolve.
Lussadh glances backward at the behemoth, the metropolis, that looms and cuts against the horizon. A city far more elevated, more resplendent, than Ihsayn's wildest ambitions and made in a shape the king would never have comprehended or accepted. Even from here, its cadences are visible—the carriages along the bridges, the trains arriving and departing, the rhythms of more than two hundred thousand lives.
She shields her face from the sun-glare. T
here is a possibility that her particular talent will fail; it has always worked best when another glass-bearer is near, a room or two away. But she has no other compass. Another possibility still is that she has ridden out like this for nothing, that her chase is as needless as the queen insisted, and she will find her lieutenant standing over the Heron, effortless and victorious. Or the pull between them will contract and they will draw toward one another, meeting at the precise midpoint between crematorium and city: Nuawa carrying the Heron's heart in a box and marching toward Kemiraj, then laughing bemused when she sees Lussadh. Why are you here, General? I was just on the way, but what a delightful surprise. Let me take your arm.
These are all possibilities. Some are more remote than others.
She strides in ever-widening circles. She can estimate neither distance nor direction, nor even when or if her senses will stir and rouse to Nuawa's presence. But she does not permit herself to panic.
When Lussadh does feel the tug, it is as fierce and jagged as thirst. She breaks into a run. The wasteland blurs, seams of silver light and charred stone, a sky as flat as paper and which presses down like a war-weight of dead.
Eventually she slows down, her breath knocking in her chest. This is how she finds her lieutenant:
A tableau in black and gray and white, untidily limned in blood. An impossible quantity, as if an abattoir has burst open here and drenched the earth. Lussadh feels nothing and then she does. Her throat closes as she draws near and kneels next to Nuawa. One hand pulped and shattered, the other loosely gripping her blade. She has fallen next to the Heron, whose chest lies bared to the sky, a cavity in which bloodless muscles and ice glitter. There isn't much of his head left.
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