The Immortal City

by May Peterson

  If he had any qualm with Tamueji’s abstinence from the battle, he gave no sign. She was watching me. Hollowness, like a silent plea, suffused every line of her body.

  Umber roared again. “Enough hesitation! Strike them down!”

  And the fight rolled on, washing the room with thunder. The ominous height of Kaiwan’s skylight, the chasm in the mountain, echoed as if it were cracking, the tundra itself invested in this conflict. Despite Umber’s disdain, we continued to last somehow. The dance of blows blurred together like brush-strokes made with rainwater. By some chain of events, Kaiwan had ended up near us, she and Hei and I clustered in a knot as crow-souls threw themselves toward us, one or two at a time. With bulk and my wings, I poised myself as a bulwark, intercepting talons, punishing attempts to slip closer. I swung arms and legs with all the strength I had, bruising, crushing noses and hands, clawing faces. Kaiwan dodged as agilely as Hei, leaving puncture wounds as wide as mouths. And everywhere Hei moved, he cut, burned, snared, stunned, as if he were divine punishment itself.

  Wounds sparked my awareness, an ever-rising count of raked feathers, slashes, bruises. I healed quickly, but Hei and Kaiwan would only need to sustain a few wounds to be disabled. There was no way. Hei and I had barely taken down Kadzuhikhan by himself. Temporary victory against Tamueji had only been possible because of her conscience. One dove-soul and two mortals simply could not endure much longer against a dozen crow-souls.

  And yet we fought on. None of these crow-souls were true fighters. They hadn’t been trained, honed, certainly not equipped to answer skills and weapons like Hei’s. They were used to relying simply on immortal strength, and this was a task in which they couldn’t risk fully using that strength. They had no coordination, no plan except to avoid punishment. Hei had trained for this. Kaiwan had centuries of combat experience. And the same desperation that’d brought Hei here was now scouring my veins, channeled into every motion.

  For a chain of hope-drunken minutes, it seemed there must be a way. A light was impaling the mist, revealing possibility, dawn finally disintegrating the illusions of Umber’s night. We might win free. There had to be a way. To not be caged by Umber completely, by the loss and despair that he represented. There must—

  It happened then. Bloodied hands clasped like manacles around Hei, reddening as they held on. Hei had driven the blade through a crow-soul’s chest, next to the heart. But the man did not let go. His face was feverish with pain, blood streaking his face. Hei tried to pull the blade from him. One talon locked around his throat. I fell on them, kicking at the crow-soul’s arms, face. He was shrieking, wings ravaged and fluttering. Another joined in, eyes wide with the shock of contact. But she too did not release him. Another muscled grip cemented around Hei’s neck.

  “Let go!” I didn’t even know if my voice could be heard. It was just another hot stripe of pain. Their screeching was birdlike, devouring, maddening. Hei was gasping, struggling, and he couldn’t stab with the sword. I pulled at him with every muscle in me, to simply make them let go.

  It couldn’t last. None of it could last. The balance erupted, forces twisting us with mechanical certainty. I fell under Hei, but he was pulled from my arms. The two crow-souls, skittering like demons, split directions at once, maintaining the grip with every thew. A grisly snap marred the air.

  It was only the thin, gleaming edge of a second. In it, I saw Tamueji’s eyes widen with horror.

  The second passed, and all came into view. Hei, slumping against the chest of the man who’d trapped him. Lightray clattering to the floor. The unnatural angle of his neck. The complete void of light in his eyes.

  Hei. Hei. Hei, Hei, Hei—

  The man was still shrieking, but he pushed Hei from him, clawing at his own body as if to peel the virtue off. Hei descended like a stone, nothing left to sustain him.

  The words scrawled themselves in fire across my mind. Broken neck. And at some moment in the fight, a talon or weapon had crossed the barrier of Hei’s skin. Torn through his coat, his bandages. Because a pool of red widened around him, staining his hallowed garments with darkness.

  * * *

  The mist became crimson. All at once, it swallowed me like a tidal wave, eradicating everything I had ever believed.

  My own numbness carried me to Hei. It allowed me that. The crow-souls stepped back from Hei’s body, as if terrified at what they had done. As if they hadn’t known what we had been shaped to do.

  Kaiwan was staring. I had no time to give her now. But I caught her staring before the polearm rattled to the floor.

  Then I was beside him, arms around him. He may as well have been on fire. The pain of his blessed water was biting, but the numbness let me ignore that too. I was allowed this.

  “What have you done?” Umber sounded almost puzzled.

  He could be healed. Through the curtain of anesthesia, I unraveled my virtue, poured it into Hei. I had to be able to heal him. The wound in his chest brushed my senses, indicated its depth. And his neck—

  No breath moved through him. No life lingered inside to grasp at my virtue. Moonlight flushed his body, and leaked out as impotently as his blood.

  Breathing. Gulping, helpless, crushed breathing. It dominated my hearing. But it was only mine. Sobs that did not seem to come from me, yet filled my mouth the same.

  Silence rushed to occupy the spaces around my sobs. They were peals of mourning now, emptying the last of my hopes on the stone floor. I didn’t care. No one moved. No one came to touch me.

  HeiHeiHEIHEIHEIHEI—

  All that wondering what my afterlife was worth. Of loss and graveyards and yearning, the fractured pieces of me. Of new horizons, of flying free, of the snow at our backs, of names carved in wood, all nothing, nothing, nothing—

  The silence snapped in half. “What have you done?”

  Umber sounded so enraged. It took a moment to remember—yes. He’d needed Hei alive. To...to get his memory back. It seemed absurd now, this anxiety over who we’d been. Hei wasn’t anyone anymore. He was dead, just like that, like something that’d fallen into a crack and could never be found again. He’d been something so sacred and raw and necessary and fucking deserving, and it was all seeping into the heartless stones.

  My senses opened somewhat, starting to reattach themselves to me. The floor stung as if it had become too cold to bear—except, no, it wasn’t the floor. It was Hei’s blood. It still sung with the virtue infused in it, searing and rebuking as silver.

  Kaiwan had bent to her knees, clutching her stomach as if she’d been struck there. Watching the blood’s slow march over her gray home.

  The crow-souls were muttering, some still erratic with muted shrieking. Steps thudded through the crowd, which cleared unexpectedly. A limp glance up revealed Umber, glaring down at me upon Hei’s body.

  The man that’d last held Hei was running nails over his face, blood and sweat and half-healed wounds rendering him haggard. “I—I didn’t, I wasn’t trying to—”

  Umber’s answer was a bestial scream, rich with violence. He tore fingers into the young man, talons plunging into his face, raking skin from bone. The two of them became a nightmarish flurry of motions. Blood spattered in an arc around them, and the youth’s body slapped to the floor. A gash remained where his chest had been.

  Umber heaved, scarlet and black streaks staining his talons, maw, raiment. Ravenous ruby eyes crawled over me, over Hei, but they seemed almost not to see us. To be inanimate. Maybe I just could not register anything beyond the bare physical facts of his presence. It didn’t matter. He was just a symptom. The corpse-like logic of Serenity was taking over, assimilating me into its decay.

  Someone else drew near, shadows and half-silence. Tamueji. Her hands were still, but her jaw trembled. Somehow, this pierced my numbness. I didn’t want to see it. But what plumed off her now had the scent of regret.

  Umber turned, neck
twisting monstrously, and screeched. “Do not believe the rest of you will avoid punishment for failing at such exceedingly simple commands. But for now, it—it means naught. There is another way.” He chained a damp hand around Tamueji’s forearm, yanked her to him. “You will offer your heart to the witch. And this time I will hear no complaint, no bargains—”

  Tamueji’s calm shattered. She whirled to bludgeon Umber back, clawing at his arms until he released her. Lurid animal fury swept through her. It was less like a shout than like wind, a terrible new storm brewing under the mountain.

  “Haven’t you had enough, you fucking bastard monsters?” Tears glistened on her cheeks with the purity of her hate. “Haven’t we had enough?”

  Umber hissed, strode back into her space, tried once more to take command of her limbs. But she retaliated with all the warrior’s grace she had shown the hour before dawn. Wings, talons, strikes from every side, and she flung Umber to his back. She stood, tremors overtaking her as if she were breaking.

  The youth that’d faced us at the hostel appeared through the crowd, eyes wide and helpless. “Boss! Boss, we can’t just—”

  “No!” Tamueji spat blood, flecking his face and forcing him to recoil. “Do you know how many hearts I watched him break, just enough to lose function, just enough to not quite die? And then feed to her like carcasses?” She turned eyes to me, perhaps pleading or hoping I’d see the change in her.

  But I felt nothing. It meant nothing. It was too late.

  “This may have ended it.” The gesture she threw at Hei’s body seemed too harsh—but then, all movements seemed harsh now. “But the cost was too high. It was too high when it began. I wanted you to pay it at last. But you would never pay it yourself. So I will die, and die, and die before I ever aid you again. I have counted more deaths at your hands than there are stars in the sky, and you will finally pay for every one!”

  The sound that poured from her then was like a scream. But it couldn’t have been a scream. This towered above any vocalization, swiftly taking on the proportions of a train howling through the cavern. Shadows whirred and frothed around her, occurring so quickly I hadn’t yet put it together. She wasn’t merely crying out her defiance—she was crow-shaping.

  The outlines of her body ruptured into a black expanse, as if the crow were exploding outward. Transformation rocked her with terrifying speed, faster than I’d ever seen a living-again change. She seemed to bring the whole night sky with her, now turned to a new purpose. Wings shredded the atmosphere, swung with such mass she almost touched the walls. The younger-looking crow-souls were stepping back, loud with fear. Tamueji swelled to the dimensions of a cataclysm, a whirlwind of beak, darkness, and jewel-bright eyes. Talons cleft the stone, casting rubble in circles around her feet.

  Somewhere, a pulse within me was still pounding out the rhythm of my afterlife. Slowly, I lifted my head.

  I had been wrong about the path.

  Tamueji did scream then. A feral, apocalyptic sound, eviscerating the air. Two wing strokes scattered the debris in the room, knocked over tables and chairs. The seat of the cavern seemed to tremble with her wrath. Yet Umber was unmoved. He leveled his bloody indifference at her, and smiled.

  “Oh, my dear,” he crooned. “Leave some scrap of faith left to me, that you do not believe I am cowed by this display. Greater moon-souls than you have been made to bow to me before I relieved them of suffering. You will be no great matter.”

  The crow-souls were rallying around Umber, forming a shell at his back. But their heads were higher, arising from the pall of terror that rolled off Tamueji. Yes. Umber had not even joined the battle yet. And they would remember who they truly feared, that it was their scavenging lord who held true power.

  “Ari.”

  I may not have heard it. At this point, it could have been a hallucination. Everything happening now could have been a blighted dream, as unreal as it felt. Numbness shielded me from the weight of this outcome.

  Then, again. “Ari. Stay with me.”

  The wording pulled me out of the stupor. Hei saying, Stay with me. I turned my head, as if he might be standing there instead of crumpled in my arms. Seeing that it was Kaiwan who spoke almost crushed me again.

  She stooped over me, hands empty, whispering conspiratorially. “Listen to me. It’s not finished yet. Ari. Are you hearing me?”

  I pushed fully to my knees, disentangling raw hands from Hei. The searing of his hallowed blood rushed to the surface of my awareness, turned my body into a mapwork of dull pain. But it didn’t matter.

  I had taken the wrong path. This must not have been the hour of redemption. This way led only to one thing.

  I absorbed the sight of Umber, a shadow that decomposed life, studded with red venom-spots. He grinned with sickle-like glee up at Tamueji’s towering form, a clash of blacknesses, of two kingdoms of night.

  It led only to vengeance. And Kaiwan was right—it wasn’t finished yet. Not yet.

  Kaiwan continued speaking, but I had already received the only message I had room for. I slumped back down over Hei, began opening his coat. My arms wound around him once more.

  Umber had hollowed out thousands of souls, each too fragile or isolated to deny his brutality. He had intentionally scouted children to drain of memory. To harrow with loneliness and misery until they became suitable donors for Kaiwan. Emptied them of their whole lives, until they had nothing but drugged haze and the unheard beats of their hearts.

  The lord of crows raised his voice. “Tear the bitch apart!” A stampede fell on Tamueji.

  I opened Hei’s coat, stripped it from him. I took him against my chest, gentle with his neck, cupping a hand over his still-running wound. But it wasn’t to mourn him. Not yet.

  With as much courage as remained to me, I began smearing his blood across my skin.

  “Ari.” Kaiwan’s voice was hardening, growing more urgent. “What are you doing? You can’t bear it. The blessing—”

  —would be upon me now.

  A cacophony of shrieking and stomping thundered outward. Tamueji was meeting the tide head-on, as she had me. She was the mountain, and like the mountain she would not bow. Half-shaped crow-souls leapt to attack her face, body, wings, tried to climb on her. They dodged back and forth to avoid the lashing of talons, danced around the pounding of her beak. It was one against ten—but she held firm. Those who climbed her she shook away, or slammed to the floor with blinding agility. Two already she had lanced with talons, dragged under her to grind into the stone. And her mass dwarfed them all. Deflecting attacks, trapping foes in her beak, cutting swaths of blood with each swipe of a talon.

  The same truth loomed over her as it had for us. She could not withstand forever. Eventually, they would exhaust her fury. But for now, she was like a living disaster. Outrage radiated from her like waves of cold. Her cries attained the menace of a tornado, ravaging a path across the earth.

  My fingers were going numb. But I didn’t care. Numbness would be my weapon now. With insensate fingertips, I unwound the cloth from Hei’s torn chest.

  Movements stole a fragment of my attention. Umber was standing before me, staring down as if in disgust at my reverence for Hei’s corpse. Even living things, immortal things, did not receive his regard. Surely the mere dead were less than nothing to him.

  And if no other good would ever emerge in this world, if no other just act was done—he would finally die for it.

  “My boy.” His words were acid crawling over my skin, more painful than the holy burn of Hei’s blood. “I had hoped that if all else failed, this might finally awaken your heart.”

  Hei’s cords hung like inert fire in my palms, making an intaglio of pain as I wound them around my wrists and arms. This virtue was as potent as silver. Eventually, it might burn entirely through me. Let it. Let me be consumed for this.

  The pain was cultivating a trance in me
, tuning my senses into something serene and extreme. I looked up at Umber. “I am not your boy.”

  He ignored me. “I had hoped that if nothing else would inspire you to test yourself, it might be learning who you were—and losing it again. It saddens me to see you, reduced to this. A simpering, heartbroken coward.”

  The words were simply more wounds, more bites that immorality would heal while leaving the sting behind. And at the moment, pain was sweeping over my skin like a wildfire, burning down the distinctions in my mind. His blood soaked into the fabric, more potent than water, bright with his intentions. It was as if the blessing came not from some benefactor, but from Hei’s spirit itself. Like his devotion made even silver burn more fiercely. My eyes lost focus, and I had to breathe deeply to keep going. Before, the rush of pain was enough to stun me. But as I leaned into it, mixed with the agony that was Hei’s loss, it stretched out over me, became something I could bear, as long as my body held out.

  Umber’s voice thrummed on like the rhythm of wings. “I wonder how much you could have loved him, then. If your fire is so easily quenched. If you cannot even risk your heart for him.”

  I wasn’t oblivious. My senses let the erosion of the world in, just as it filled everyone else. My heart still beat. I had never become numb to it, as I had once believed, as so many believed about me. And I knew Umber was trying to use me one more time. He was desperate, and Tamueji and I may be his only chances to succeed now. In another life, I may have felt a perverse pity for him, straining to achieve the same goal.

  This was such an eloquent expression of everything he had been to me. That he could trap me, bleed me dry, lead to the unceremonious death of the only person who wanted me—and then say it was because I had not loved enough. That I had not mourned enough.

  No heart could ever mourn enough.

  I lurched over the stone, my feet unsteady. Blood trailed in my steps, sticking to my boots. One step at a time, I adjusted. It felt like I was crumbling, like my skin would peel off. But I made my way around Hei’s body, to where Lightray lay.