“He is alive, then.”
“For now,” I said. She suddenly pinched her nose. “What is it?”
“Le Vieux Orphelin. He is . . . sending me an image. A door.” She blinked several times. “I will search the north wing and start to move prisoners toward the reservoir, as planned. With any luck, I will intercept Léandre and Ankou.”
“We’ve got the south wing,” I said. “Good luck.”
Renelde was gone without a sound. Pain throbbed deep in the flesh of my calf, and my trouser leg was damp inside. Arcturus turned to the front doors.
When he opened them, the frigid air hit me again. So did a shimmer of sleet. As we strode across the black-and-white marble at the front of the palace, I dared not look over my shoulder. The windows of the King’s Apartment watched over this courtyard. In the distance, through the fog, I could make out the vanguard of soldiers, their silhouettes sketched out by gas lamps.
Don’t turn around.
Arcturus silently opened another set of doors, and we were back inside, out of sight of the soldiers. A wide staircase took us up to the former apartments of the queens of France. With my fatigue tided back again, I took them two at a time.
“Jaxon will be in the King’s Apartment. I’m sure of it,” I said to Arcturus, once we reached the top. “Free any prisoners in this wing and wait for that flare to go up. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”
“Very well.” His gaze flicked across my face. “Good luck.”
“And to you.”
We took off in opposite directions.
Faded gold leaf shone dully on the walls, reflecting the torches that burned at regular intervals. I crossed a room that must once have been a bedchamber, so ornate and floral it was like being inside a chocolate box. Next was a square antechamber. When I tried the gilded doors inside it, neither of them budged.
I listened. There was no sound from within, but I could just perceive a dreamscape.
Jaxon had locked himself in.
Then I heard it. Music. “The Thieving Magpie”—one of his favorites—was playing beyond the doors. The volume climbed until it was booming through the corridors.
He knew.
Like wasps in a nest, dreamscapes stirred across the palace, as if the music were some hellish public alarm clock. Sensing a gust of movement on the floor below, I spun on my heel and pelted back through the apartments. The music was a grindstone on my ears and jaw.
Arcturus had forced the doors to the south wing. I shoved through them. The Rephaite keepers must carry keys. I would need his strength to take one of them down.
Jaxon could lock himself in as tight as he liked. He was the one who had taught me not to let any lock bar my way.
The music became frantic, deranged. I skidded into a hall with an arched ceiling, four hundred feet long, where chandeliers dripped wax and cast small ripples of gold on the floor. Paintings towered on the walls, each showing a victory in the history of Scion. No dreamscapes called out from the æther here, but I no longer fully trusted my sixth sense. Emite blood could be hiding them.
Two mirrored doors flanked a wall-sized depiction of the Battle of the Iron Gates, which dominated the end of the gallery. I made for them.
The music came to a sudden halt. I stopped, too, sensing a presence behind me. When the sixth sense failed, human intuition stepped in, warning me of danger, a predator. I lowered my hands from my ears and turned.
A Rephaite had appeared at the other end of the hall. Golden hair, long and unbound. Hooded eyes, hot as the ninth circle of hell, the yellow of molten steel.
“XX-59-40.” His voice, and that number, froze my blood. “What an unexpected delight.”
Thuban Sargas. I snapped my arm up, aiming my revolver at him.
He stepped closer, cloak grazing the floor. Even in the half-light, I could see that his gloved hands were slick, and that he was holding something. Something like a dead animal.
“Your friend had a pitiful tolerance for pain.” Darkness dripped from his trophy. “I put him out of his misery once he told me who he had brought with him. Such is my mercy.”
That thing in his hand was no animal. It was cinnamon hair, still attached to a bloody lappet of skin.
Malperdy.
Thuban had scalped him.
“I wasn’t sure you had any more marbles to lose, Thuban.” As I spoke, I was searching the æther for Malperdy. Nothing. “I thought you liked to play for a while before you killed.”
I had to keep Thuban occupied. If he was talking, he wasn’t chopping pieces off me.
“I no longer have a great deal of patience for the sound of human beings,” Thuban confessed. “Once I relished your screams, your pleas, your weeping. Now I find I prefer your absolute silence. Even the cadence of your breathing is a vexation.”
Something had come unhinged in him. Even the façade of his restraint had evaporated.
“I will make an exception for you, fleshmonger.” He started to close the space between us. I backed away. “Your screams will ring in every corner of this palace before I present what remains to the blood-sovereign. Perhaps I will give her that lovely hair . . . separately.” He cocked his head. “If you are here, then the concubine is close. Unwise of him to leave you alone. I wonder how many fingers I will have to remove before he hears your cries.”
I kept moving, trying to maintain a safe distance. “You couldn’t beat Arcturus at a game of cards, let alone a duel.”
“We shall test that theory when he comes.” A mockery of a smile. “Tell me, now. Is 24 with you?”
At this, I stopped.
“Ivy,” I said, my voice full of loathing, “is alive and fighting. She survived you, Thuban.”
“Did you expect to disappoint me with that news?” he asked. “No. It pleases me. What a pity it would have been if she had succumbed after our games. We have so many more to play, she and I.” He let the scalp drop to the floor with a wet slap. “What passed between us in the colony was nothing. When I have her back in my possession, you will wish you had slit her throat.”
“You will never lay a finger on her again, you twisted hellkite.” I clicked back the hammer. “I’m curious, Thuban, if you’ll indulge me. Why haven’t they made you the blood-heir?”
Taunting him was a dangerous game. The sight of him filled me with such revulsion and anger that it made my hands shake.
“I have one idea,” I went on. “Nashira finds you embarrassing. Your clairvoyance is nothing special. You torment humans—who stand no chance against you—because you have nothing else to recommend you.”
I had touched a nerve. His eyes burned hotter.
“To be a Sargas,” he said, “is to be power.” Another step. “I do not care to be blood-heir. Pleasure would then have to bow before duty, and there are such pleasures to be tasted here. I learned where to cut a human to make it bleed, but not to let it slip away into death. I learned how many pieces I could slice. Which bones cause most agony when broken.”
As he spoke, memories pounded through me. Flux warping my mind. The branding iron on my shoulder.
“I wonder why you look at me with such disgust,” Thuban said, “when humans have invented so many creative ways to inflict agony on each other. I would never have thought of some of them myself. Have you heard of a brazen bull, or a breaking wheel, or keelhauling?”
“Medieval brutality,” I said. “You’re nothing, Thuban. Just a low grunt who does filthy work, so pathetic he has to prey on the helpless.”
“You will come to regret each word that just left your rotting mouth.”
He flew at me.
A ringing bang, and the first slug pierced his chest. The sound barked against my ears. I fired again and again, the shock of the recoil shuddering up my arms, but Thuban kept coming, impervious to the onslaught of hot lead. He was a colossus, a god, his sarx like metal. After five shots, I lashed out with my spirit.
Power crested in me like a wave. Thuban stopped in the face of it, his tee
th set against the pressure of my dislocation. I retreated as fast as I could toward the doors, just about keeping him at bay. Then his features morphed, and he was Suhail Chertan, and I was strapped to the waterboard, at his mercy. A spasm of terror made me lose my grip.
Thuban was on me before I could so much as gasp. His gloved hands locked around my throat, lifted me right off my feet, and slammed me against a painting. He choked off my cry.
“I could kill you now,” he said against my ear. My eyes streamed, and a tortured sound escaped the burning pinhole of my throat. “You say I prey on the helpless. You are not. Your spirit is a weapon. Yet now we are here, which of us has true power? Is it you, with your wayfaring spirit—or is it me, with enough strength in a finger to snap you in two?”
He spends his time pulling the wings off mayflies, Kornephoros had said. I prefer prey that fights back.
The taste of blood was in my mouth. I pushed with my spirit as hard as I could, but Thuban Sargas was a Rephaite—a god without gifts, but a god nonetheless. I could feel my face turning puce for want of air, my hands beating of their own accord at his chest, my boots scuffing the columns of his legs. His hands turned me into a trapped moth, brittle and fluttering. He could crush my windpipe on a whim.
When he finally released my throat, I coughed until I almost retched. As my head dropped, I spotted them.
Keys. An iron ring of them, attached to his belt.
“I will soon find the concubine,” Thuban whispered, “and when I do, I will keep you together somewhere for a time, before I present you to the Suzerain.” I turned my head in disgust. “You can watch each other writhe in agony.”
Heat filled my eyes as he drew my aura toward him. Red branched through his irises.
“Exquisite,” he said, soft as velvet. “But no. The blood-sovereign would be very angry if I damaged your aura.”
Tenderly, like a lover, he peeled the brace off my left hand.
“This happened in the first colony.” He curled his own hand around my wrist. “Can it truly still pain you?”
“Not as much as your fucking voice,” I bit out.
He tightened his grip until I felt the drumbeat of blood through my arm. His thumb dug into the middle of my palm, and fingers vised the back of my wrist. Like a child discovering a toy, he began to turn my wrist clockwise, as if to find the point at which a light would come on.
Unlike a child, he knew exactly what he was doing. What he wanted to know was how I differed from the other humans he had tortured. What dialect of pain my body spoke.
My palm now faced my shoulder. My face scrunched up as he forced it farther, and a warning ache radiated into my palm, my fingers.
“Such delicate bones,” Thuban breathed into my damp hair, his eyes so close they tripled in number. I could smell the blood on his gloves. My skin was smeared with it, my whole frame trembling in revulsion. “Scream, now. Scream for the flesh-traitor who dares to call himself a Rephaite.”
Cheeks streaked with blood, I clenched my teeth and steeled myself, even as the fine bones ignited. I would not cry out when my wrist broke again. I would not give him the satisfaction.
“Thuban,” a voice barked.
The pressure lifted. I gasped in relief. As if he was tossing a rag aside, Thuban hurled me across the hall. I crashed to the floor, rolled over, and slewed along the marble, throat on fire, until a pillar stopped my slide. Coughing, I looked up to see Arcturus, his sword bright in the gloom.
Without even knowing it, I had summoned him to my side.
“Concubine.” Thuban let out a chuckle. “I knew you would come for the human. Like a hound to its master.”
“I have come for you.” Arcturus held his gaze. “Let us end this, Thuban.”
“Do you not consider this rotting meat capable of fighting its own battles?” Thuban sneered, while I used the pillar to drag myself up. My wrist throbbed with each brutal cough. “Do you admit now that they are the inferior species?”
“I did not come here to answer your questions,” Arcturus said. “I came for the song of swords.”
Gone was the temperate musician who had fashioned me a music box. The mere sight of a Sargas—his enemy—had transfigured him into a metal soldier, a soulless giant. Even to me, in that moment, he was chilling.
One step took him over the threshold, into the hall where Scion commemorated its battles. Thuban swept back his cloak and drew his own sword with a sound like ice being cut. With all the mental clout I could muster, I called a word to Arcturus.
Keys.
His gaze flicked to me, then to Thuban. To his belt. When he looked back up, his eyes kindled, and I followed his line of sight. Four figures had emerged, like specters, from the darkness at my back.
A deathlike cold stole over my flesh as the silent Rephaim strode toward us, each holding a sword. Leading them was Situla Mesarthim, who I remembered well from the first colony. She was a ruthless mercenary, and resembled Arcturus so strongly it was unnerving. The other three were unfamiliar. I was caught between the newcomers and Thuban.
Arcturus could beat one Rephaite. Maybe two. Five against one was a death sentence.
Run!
I willed him to hear me again, but all he did was stare out his fellow Rephaim. His executioners.
“You spineless piece of shit,” I wheezed at Thuban. “Can’t even fight one Ranthen on your own.”
“This is what is known as a trap, fleshmonger. And you just led your lapdog directly into it,” Thuban sneered.
He bore down on me again and hauled me up by my hair. My boots squeaked on the marble. Arcturus started forward, eyes ablaze.
“Concubine,” Thuban called to him, “perhaps you would like to choose which part of her I cut off first.” He angled the blade across my abdomen. Even through my clothes, I could feel how keen that edge was, how effortlessly it would rip skin and muscle. One wrong move, and my viscera would be on the floor. “You know her parts far better than I do, after all.”
Unfortunately for Thuban, he had forced me into a position that let me reach my combat knife. In one movement, I drew it and rammed it into his neck, right under his jaw.
Thuban let out an ear-piercing note of Gloss. The instant his grip loosened, I forced his elbow up and twisted myself under it. The iridescent blade caught my skin at an angle, leaving a trail of searing cold pain, like an ice burn. A cry of shock tore from my throat. I regained my footing and sped to Arcturus, who swept me behind him and lifted his sword.
“Are you hurt?” he asked roughly.
Blood seeped beneath my undershirt. I rucked it up to see a shallow cut from navel to hip.
“It’s not deep,” I rasped. Across the hall, Thuban pulled the knife free and spattered the floor with luminous blood. “I need his keys. Jax locked himself in.”
Arcturus widened his stance. “I will see to it.” The other Rephaim kept coming. “Stand back.”
Before I could, Situla rushed us. Arcturus flung me out of the way of her blade before he blocked it with bone-shattering force, the movement so fast I almost missed it. He disarmed his next challenger and slashed his back clean down the middle, drawing enough ectoplasm to cast them all in queasy light. Now he wielded a sword in each hand. On cue, music struck up again —this time, the infernal gallop from Orpheus in the Underworld. Spirits came swarming from all over, drawn to a clash between Rephaim.
Situla sent her blade shivering toward Arcturus. It glanced off one of his swords, and his next swing came close to cutting her in half—but the others were already on top of him, attacking like a pack of wolves.
Thuban let out an appalling not-laugh. The fight took them to the middle of the hall. I watched Situla crack Arcturus in the jaw— hard enough to dislocate it on a human – before she hurled a spool at him. He swept it aside and locked one of his swords with hers, fending off more blows with the other.
Fuck this. Stiletto in hand, I ran straight for the Rephaim, charging the æther with pressure as I went, and launc
hed myself at Situla. She tried to shake me off, but I impaled her hand with the blade. I dropped from her back, ducked her sword—its gleaming flat passed over my head, so close my scalp turned cold—and stabbed again, right through her boot and into her heel. Though I evaded her next blow, she caught me by the back of my oilskin, and before I knew it, she had latched onto my aura like a tapeworm.
Blood ran from my eyes. I kicked wildly at her. The æther was sucked away from me as Situla wrung my connection to it. Her eyes turned a terrible red. Arcturus saw and threw one of his swords at her back, forcing her to release me to avoid it. I hit the floor. When her blade seared up again, I was still too shaken to move.
She hesitated.
Her sword hung over me, an inch from splitting my skull. I stared at her, disconcerted. Her face was drawn, eyebrows knitted tight, knuckles straining against her glove.
Then Arcturus attacked his cousin, bringing the fight with him. He was sure-footed, his bladework assured and formidable, fluent in violence. Situla fended him off with one sword. With her free hand, she lifted me, and—with what felt like all her inhuman might—lobbed me toward the doors. I slammed into the floor a third time and groaned.
“Paige!”
Arcturus tossed something after me. The ring of keys. One of the other Rephaim went for them just as I did. I snatched them by my fingertips and kicked her as hard as I could in the nose.
Arcturus could hold his own here. He had been charged with protecting the god-sent family—defensive fights were in his bones. My presence would distract him. I rolled to my feet and barreled out of the gallery.
“Stop her,” Thuban bellowed over the music. “Mirzam, Heze, bring the dreamwalker to me!”
Back across the checkered floor. The two Rephaim tried to come after me, but Arcturus blocked the doorway in my wake. I sprinted like I never had through the royal apartments, my heart in my throat, wrist still pounding, and almost crashed headlong into the locked white doors.
The keys were sticky with blood. One after the other, I tried them, unable to still my trembling. The knell of blades continued in the distance. While I could hear it, Arcturus was alive.
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