by Mike Allen
“Forgive me. I did not think I would be so overcome.”
She fled, out into the morning fog.
The greyness was disorienting, and she stayed close to the buildings as she hurried along. Her heart thumped against her ribs—terror at what he might’ve done during the night, had his compulsion overcome him sooner.
The top of the hill was clear of the mist. The black tower stood stark against the chill blue sky, unrelieved by the bright sunshine. The buildings at the plaza’s edge stuck up like jagged teeth, the city beyond them lost beneath a white blanket of cloud.
Yesterday’s near-riot had become an encampment. Handcarts and wagons did service as sleeping shelters. Would-be supplicants hunched around cookfires. There were soldiers among them, now. A delegation of Reaver captains camped closest to the gate.
She rubbed her mate’s frigid toes.
The Reaver captains thumped on the gate and hollered up to the angel’s balcony. The tower remained silent. The captains argued briefly among themselves, and several left with their men.
A cloud of copper-coloured bees buzzed around her head. She watched them dance patterns in the air. A starling swooped, scattering the cloud. The bird alighted on her mate’s outstretched arm. One beady eye met hers. A bee struggled vainly in its beak. The rest buzzed about erratically.
The starling flapped its wings and was gone.
“Bet you’re hungry, eh?”
She jumped. An Yng’finail soldier in mismatched conscript armour held up a torn loaf of bread, just out of her reach. Her stomach complained loudly.
“Need to agree on a price first, love,” he said. “It’s not coin I have in mind, you understand.”
She backed away, only to bump into a second man.
He sneered. “Too good for the likes of us, eh?”
She cried out and swatted at him with her stone hand. He caught the blow on the shoulder of his cuirass, cursing. His companion grabbed her arms from behind. The man she’d struck pulled back his fist and punched her in the mouth.
She tasted hot metal and salt. Pain radiated from her crushed lips. They took her by an arm each and began to drag her away. She struggled feebly, dazed from the blow.
The man to her left punched her again, under the ribs, driving the air from her lungs. She sagged, gasping.
She heard a sharp enquiry. A Reaver captain had risen, over by the tower gate, and stood watching them with hands on hips. His scrutiny was enough to make the two men falter. Their grip on her arms slackened.
She wrenched free. They shouted after her as she tottered into a run. One of them started to pursue, but a bark from the Reaver captain stopped him. Only their curses chased her from the plaza.
She didn’t run far. The press of traffic soon forced her to slow. She found refuge in a doorway alcove. Gradually, her pulse slowed, her panic settled.
A memory floated to the surface of her thoughts, of festival dances beneath the tower: Avalae twirling in silk and gauze, each the focus of a ring of ecstatic slaves, competing for their masters’ attention with the energy of their dancing. Every so often a slave would be chosen, and their masters would lead them by the hand through the black tower’s gate.
She paused, thinking of cold and hunger, curled in her nest of briars and not knowing when the angel might open his gate. She thought of the men who’d seized her today, of the one who’d first found her, and thought of what might have happened had the first man been more wary, or had the Reaver captain not taken an interest.
She weighed the price of Cassiann’s roof and hearth. Made to adore those whose shape you wear, he’d said.
* * *
She found his door unlocked, the apothecary speaking to a patient in his surgery room. He faltered, as she went past down the hall.
She perched on his tall chair, until she heard the front door shut, and Cassiann came into the kitchen.
“Our angel keeps his tower closed, then,” he said.
She nodded.
Heart hammering, she placed her hand on his belly. She slid her fingers downward, felt him quicken. He grunted and caught her wrist. He touched a finger to her battered lips, questioning. She held his gaze, resolute, for the long moment that he stared.
He swept her up and carried her up the stairs.
He was gentle, but hurried. She cried out in pain when he entered her, wound her one fist in his cassock and buried her face against his chest as he thrust between her thighs.
Afterwards, she felt between her legs, found the blood there. She wiped her fingers on the bedsheet, and for a long time couldn’t sleep.
When at last she did, she dreamed of her mate. He stood with his back to her, and no matter how fast she ran around his plinth, his face remained stubbornly turned away.
* * *
She awoke to find Cassiann kneeling beside the bed. His mouth was agape, his eyes squinting half shut. She realised he was smiling.
He held up a plain-spun dress. “I got these for you.” He showed her a felted cloak and sheepskin boots.
“And this.” He held out his palm. Across it was draped a simple wire necklace. Twined in its grasp was a small black orb.
Hesitantly, she reached out and touched it with her forefinger.
“It’s a pearl,” he said, then shyly: “I thought it a good name for you, since you lack one.”
Her eyes felt suddenly hot. She tried the word out, under her breath, “Purr.”
“Here.”
He held the wire loop to her throat and clasped it behind her neck. She held the pearl between her fingertips and let him nuzzle at her neck, as his arms came around her.
* * *
Snowflakes greeted her when she pushed the window open. The street was clogged with wagons and handcarts and families afoot. A flock of gargoyles flew low over the rooftops, bearing infants and bundles of trinkets. Soldiers passed along the traffic jam, dragging men and boys from the line.
She felt the boards beneath her feet shift with the weight of Cassiann’s tread. His hand clasped her shoulder. He peered down into the chaos below.
“Come,” he said.
He tarried only long enough for them both to dress. She had to run to keep up with him as the minotaur ploughed through the press. She tucked her stone hand into the crook of her stump and hooked her fingers through his.
She felt a guilty relief when he turned downhill instead of up. She’d lost count of the days since she’d last gone back to the tower. The guilt she felt, standing beside her mate’s plinth, touching him, had been too much to bear. She’d taken to lingering at the edge of the plaza, just long enough to see that the gate remained closed, and to drink in the sight of her mate. Then she’d stopped doing even that.
Cassiann’s hurried pace brought them quickly to the harbour, emerging onto the waterfront near the city’s arsenal.
The songships, few that survived, slept in a row, hulls bumping gently together as they rocked on the tide, their figureheads with faces bowed, arms folded across their wooden chests. They awoke a bitter longing in her, who would awake from their stillness, where her mate would not. But the songships were guarded by soldiers in armour and helms of good steel. She averted her eyes from their unfriendly regard, and hurried after Cassiann.
Further on, the docks became crowded. Gil-Gadin dhows lined the piers. Quar-Akech was fallen, were the words on many lips—the last of the sheikdoms, these ships escaped from the jaws of the invading fleet. Cassiann stopped to question some sailors. “Grahodden,” she heard, in regard to the conquerors, and “Uiggrahodd,” from whence they came, terms she did not know but she heard the fear and hate they owned when spoken.
These dhows were not staying, save a handful of battered warships. People on the docks shouted their bids for passage to the crews. A few were allowed to board. Other merchantmen were readying to flee as well, offering refuge on their decks for a price. A pair of Melkurran triremes remained aloof, their crews of flat-chested warrior women treating the goings-on about them
with stoic indifference.
All along the harbourfront, soldiers were fortifying buildings and barricading streets. Cassiann led her past one such barrier, through a gap left just wide enough to allow foot traffic, past an angry carriage driver and his passengers, arguing with soldiers who wanted to divert them two streets over.
The minotaur did not speak until they were back inside his house. He went straight into his surgery and started filling a long wooden case with jars. She put her stone hand on the bench beside the scales and watched.
“The city will fall,” he said. “If the angel will not come from his tower, the city’s mages will not suffice to turn the invaders back. I must flee while I can. The Grahodden slaughter magic users in all the realms they conquer. And those who rule in Uiggrahodd have styled themselves as gods, and tolerate no other shapings of men, so I am doubly damned.”
He stopped his packing and took her flesh hand in both of his. “Come with me. We’ll take the East Road, through the mountains. Winter will not have closed the passes, yet.”
She looked into his human eyes, sincere in his inhuman face. She thought of her mate, still stone, and the angel in his tower—and her hope, the same—alive or dead, she did not know. And though she could form its sound upon her tongue, she could not bring herself to say the word, “Yes.”
Cassiann withdrew his hands, and smiled, sadly, insomuch as his face allowed. He rummaged in the pockets of his cassock, and placed on the table beside her stone hand the key for his house, and a drawstring purse that clinked, full of coin. She knew, then, that he had expected no different answer.
She followed him about the house as he gathered food and a few small, precious things. He tied them in a bundle and slung it from his shoulder, then stood, his head bowed beneath the ceiling, and looked down at her once more.
He brushed his fingers on her cheek. “Live, Pearl,” he said.
He turned away abruptly, and strode down the hall. He scooped up his case of medicines as he ducked to get through the front door, and was gone.
She sat alone for a while, touching the key, and the purse, and her stone hand. Then she too, went to the larder, and made a bundle of food. Upstairs, to find a blanket to supplement her cloak. Then she picked up the key and the hand from the table and went out, locking the door behind her, and up the hill, to wait for one last time.
Most of the crowds had fled. The tower gate stood unscarred by their efforts. She stroked her mate’s petrified ankle, gazed up at cold stone features, male mirror of her own. She cringed from the disdain she saw there.
Her fingers strayed to the black pearl at her throat as she lowered herself into her briar nest.
After a time, the wind brought the brave chorus of the songships, leading the war fleet out to meet the enemy. She heard the song disintegrate, before it faded, into the bitter laments of the dying. She twisted to peer around the plinth’s edge. In the spaces the streets made between the buildings, she saw galleys beaching outside the city walls.
Too soon, the sounds of battle reached her ears: the clatter of steel and the hoarse shouts of officers rallying their men, the whine of killing spells and the wails of the injured.
She remembered those sounds, covered her ears with hand and stump, unwilling, yet, to abandon her mate, as the last diehards fled the plaza. Defenders ran past, few of them armed. Arrows cut some down. A rat-headed soldier dodged around the plinth, barely an arm’s length away, and sprawled, a white-feathered shaft between his shoulder blades. He reached out, to drag himself onward with his fingers. He spat blood and shuddered violently, his jaw smacking the cobbles, and was still.
A rock smashed into the tower’s face. Another followed, then a barrage. She screamed in terror. Missiles lit with magic were tossed among the stones. They spattered on impact, their fires eating gouges in the tower’s face. Some fell short. A rock hit the cobbles only yards away, showering her with splinters of stone.
It was too much. With a howl, she broke from the shelter of the plinth. A spinning rock bounced in front of her. She tripped and fell. Her stone hand slipped from her grasp. She watched helplessly as it arced to strike the cobbles, broken pieces skittering apart.
A fireball detonated near her mate’s plinth. Its flaming offspring rained around her. She thrashed and rolled as the magic flame ate through her cloak and into tender flesh beneath. Sobbing and wailing, trailing embers from her hair, she fled.
She ran through streets already littered with corpses, houses already aflame. Hulking figures loomed out of the smoke. She reached Cassiann’s house. Mad with fear and grief, she gave no thought to the key tucked into her waistband. She sat, moaning more than weeping, rocking herself back and forth, in the alcove before the door.
* * *
In time, she calmed, but remained where she was, shocked and numb, feeling keenly the absence of the cold weight from her lap.
Ash-blackened snow began to fall. People slunk past, hollow-faced and cowed, snowmelt leaving streaks of soot on their faces. Others emerged from the houses, to ask where they were going.
“They’ve brought our angel from his tower,” was the reply.
Her heart thudded. She joined the flow. The snow settled as slush, soaking through her boots and freezing her toes. Only those of fully human shape were abroad. Whatever others had survived had gone to ground.
She got her first clear sight of the city’s conquerors, squads of Grahodden soldiers guarding the intersections of major streets. They were huge men, Cassian’s size, and as burly, with skins like brown citrus peel. Their bulk was made greater by the cloaks of mottled feathers and fur caps they wore against the cold. In their fists they gripped halberds and glaives with cruel curved blades.
She stumbled past the ruined barricades that had walled the harbour. A great throng was gathered on the waterfront, its focus a gigantic quinquereme, pulled tight against the wharf. The bare masts of other war galleys filled the harbour, a skeleton forest through swirling snow.
The crowd was packed tight, but she threaded through, crawling in the slush when she could find no other way, desperate to see the angel. A voice rang out, unnaturally amplified, but she did not know its language. She wriggled between the last few rows of legs, heedless of the curses and kicks she earned. She tucked her burning cold fingers beneath her cloak and peered past the kilted thighs of a Grahodden soldier.
The angel knelt in the centre of a wide semi-circle of clear ground, the crowd held back by a ring of halberd blades. A wooden block was set before him, and a basket. A giant Grahodden stood over him, stripped to the waist to reveal the slabbed muscle beneath his pocked hide, a headsman’s axe in his hands.
The angel’s back was bowed, his complexion drained from Yng’finail red to leprous yellow. Shudders wracked his limbs. His grey swan wings drooped behind him, broken and roughly plucked.
Gazing down at him from the rail of the ship sat three lords of Uiggrahodd. They wore the heads of Grahodden folk, but outsized. Their bodies were those of lions. One raised a prehensile paw, a black talon springing from the thumbtip.
The headsman pushed down the angel’s unresisting neck, then stepped back and took a grip on his axe.
The moment dilated. The thumb turned down.
The crowd groaned and surged at the soldiers’ line. The Grahodden kept their discipline, laying about the rioters with the butts of their weapons as they closed ranks.
Like a rabbit breaking from cover, she sprang past the soldiers’ legs and dashed across the space. Deep voices bellowed behind her.
She skidded to her knees in front of the angel. Holding hand and stump before his face, she shaped a word: “Please.”
The angel raised his head, looked at her through a veil of filthy feather-hair. Grey eyes, half-mad with pain, stared into hers. The brows above them creased, as he recognized the shape of those his Reavers had vanquished, generations before. The frown cleared, eyes widened, as he perceived the stuff of his own self that animated her.
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��Please,” she said again.
His cracked lips worked. An incantation. A string of blood-flecked drool fell. She caught the precious spittle in her palm, closed her fingers around it as the headsman’s boot came up under her ribs.
She balled around her hurt, rolling away through the slush. Rough fingers caught her hair and dragged her by it. She gritted her teeth against the pain, clutching her hand against her chest as she felt the phlegm become dust. She saw a halberd silhouetted against the sky.
A voice rose above the melee, a roar of command. It came from the ship. The command repeated. The soldier who held her lowered his weapon. Again, the sphinx spoke, and the noise of the crowd stilled.
The soldier jerked into motion, towing her backwards across the cobbles. The angel was forced down again. The axe rose, fell. The basket rocked. The broken body flexed, a pump of blood from the severed neck. A gasp and a sigh from the crowd. The tattered wings folded limply around the corpse.
The soldier deposited her at the feet of the mob, delivered a casual thump from the butt of his halberd as she found her feet. She averted her face from wondering eyes, pushed past the front rows, moving then in the roil of the crowd, toward and away, the collective beast suddenly lacking its head. She kept her fist pressed tight against her.
She trekked alone up the hill to the tower, past Grahodden soldiers, splintered doors and smouldering frames, and defenders’ corpses already vanishing under drifts of snow. The black tower’s gate hung twisted on its hinges, rent aside by magic, the stone face a mess of scars. Soldiers leaning in the shelter of the arch glanced at her, and away, dismissive.
Her mate was gone from his plinth. Only the stumps of his legs remained. Her stomach convulsed, she dry-retched. The dust in her palm felt like ash.
She crossed the space to the plinth at a faltering run, tripping once but catching herself, the ground turned unsteady beneath her. She slowed, had to force her feet to take her around the plinth, visions of her hand shattering on the cobbles replaying before her eyes.