Black as diamond, p.37
Black as Diamond, page 37
From down the shore, a cluster of figures approached. As they came into view, Palenisa realized they were eresh keyel, each a head or more taller than her. They moved like a flock of white-robed swans, adorned in gold. From their backs fluttered a wild assortment of wings: stained-glass flies’, moths’, falcons’, and even a pair that resembled a bat’s. At the head of the group was a woman with soft wheat ringlets cascading from her crown. Instead of a tail, her most striking feature was a pair of horns draped in a net of jewels like cobwebs. Her neck was ringed with a citrine halo, and on her face, she wore a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
After disembarking, Palenisa steadied the sides of the skiff to help Rishé. The boat sank deeper beneath the weight of their quarry. Half what it should have been, she feared it wouldn’t be enough. All that effort, and she didn’t know what she’d do if it wasn’t.
“Well,” the woman said, scrutinizing the two of them, the boat, and the bags. If she was surprised to see a wraith, it didn’t show. “You may call me Xerqet, the warden, and considering what the Chronicler told me, I expected . . . more.”
“Unforeseen circumstances. Sorry,” Palenisa muttered, extending a hand to the warden. Dainty fingers gripped hers, fingers that had never seen conflict. Smooth as the caress of velvet when they parted. “There was an incident.”
“An incident . . .” The warden’s lips pursed, and she appeared to readjust her expectations. Disappointment tinted her gaze—what a familiar sight. “Come along: The Doyisha have been awaiting your arrival at the temple for some time.”
Snapping, the warden gestured to her attendants with a slight tilt of her head and spun on a talon. Each move she made brought to mind the kharess, as if both women were layered atop each other.
It tugged at something bitter in Palenisa’s chest.
The sour-faced attendants unloaded the boat with a series of seamlessly cast spells. As petrichor clouded her senses, Palenisa cupped her mouth. She and Rishé glanced at each other before following the warden to a temple that bordered the beach. Conspicuously separate, it was pale as bleached bone, lacking the limestone and green-clay coating that dyed the distant structures in the ring. The entryway was a wide, colorless portal framed with raised carvings. Atop the lintel sat a relief of an eye, blending into the stone like the island’s foamy glass shoreline.
Through the arch stepped the warden, her attendants, and Rishé, but Palenisa hesitated beyond the threshold. As her throat bobbed, she swallowed down the scent that drifted from inside.
Rot.
With each breath, the smell of death thickened like smoke.
A chill crawled its way up her spine like the spindle legs of a spider. The somber air that hovered over the entire island came crashing into her. If she hadn’t seen the effects of the curse firsthand, she might’ve believed it could be stopped in time. Where she expected to hear the clamor of a city, it was all so still, tense. Though they tried to hide it, she’d glimpsed a tiny flicker in the eresh keyel’s eyes—fear.
Clamping her eyes shut, Palenisa inhaled sharply, exhaled deeply. And entered.
Inside the temple was just as pristine and unblemished. Horribly white and horribly clean, it looked more like a necropolis than a temple. The floor was a marble ocean brimming with cursed bodies. The densely packed cots thinned out at the edges of the room, creating a passage along which healers and Doyisha navigated, carrying medical swatches and diamondglass.
A constant stream of pain reeled into Palenisa’s ears. They pricked to the sides of her head, but she couldn’t hide from the moans and groans and choked-off sobs. Somehow the sterile, bloodless nature of it all made it that much worse.
She froze in the entryway, her eyes flitted around. On either side of her were stacks of swaddled bodies rising up the walls like a morbid mountain of flesh. Her breaths quickened. She was overwhelmed, and the scene blurred. From white and white and white emerged another image. Flashes of Chiroyn between blinks. Flashes of the other men she’d killed. She remembered her bloated near corpse as she lay there among them.
Everything inside her screamed to run, to leave this place and the memories behind. But her trembling knees held her in place, thigh wound pulsating. Legs like water, she clutched the frame of the arch to stay upright.
What she wanted more than anything right then was for things to make sense again. To know once more the way the world—her world—was supposed to work. What was she supposed to do with all that was spread before her? She could pray to the Zodiac. Then what? What use were her blessings there?
Heat formed in her eyes. She was a pillar of granite primed to crumble to pieces.
“Palenisa?”
The call of her name snapped her back to the present. She blinked and found Wren cocking his head at her. Wren. At least one thing hadn’t been lost in this whole mess.
In an atypical urge, she pounced. Wren started as she wrapped him in a hug. She hadn’t properly hugged anyone in decades; the movement felt stilted, even to her. But eventually his arms found her waist, and the embrace became less rigid the longer it lasted. The scent of blood lingered on him like a second skin.
After a heavy moment, she pulled away and coughed. The smile he sent her was a fragile thing, and the bags darkening his eyes were atrocious.
“What are you wearing?” Rishé asked, gesturing to all of him with a mild uptick of the lips.
“I . . . um, don’t fully know.” Wren smoothed a hand over his clothes as if just noticing he wasn’t wearing his coat. “I wasn’t all there when they dressed me.”
“They?” Rishé drew her finger out to the side and spoke aloud.
“The Chronicler. I think.” He doffed the hood of his scarlet cape. Glancing between the two of them, he bit his chapped lips and asked the question she’d been dreading. “Where’s Asaru.”
Well, it wasn’t really a question. Not with the detached affect of his voice. Looking closer, Palenisa noted his subdued eyes were bloodshot, like he’d been crying. Like he already knew and all she had to do was confirm the terrible truth.
“Dead,” she said in a husky croak. “Revenant. He attacked us on the ship, then fled.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault. He must have been possessed . . .” Wren stared blankly over her shoulder. His fingers twined together like black worms at his front.
Possessed. The one thing she’d forgotten to consider. As much sense as it made, a stubborn part of her didn’t want to accept the possibility that something—someone—had made Asaru do all that. Savagery—overkill to an indulgent degree. She knew the difference well.
Brow furrowed, Rishé frowned at her. She could have worded it better—but they didn’t need better. More than ever, they just needed honesty.
Rishé signed something. She squeezed Wren’s shoulder, an apology written over her face. From the look on Wren’s, he barely registered her signing. Instead, he pressed the heel of his palm inches from his heart and hummed.
“I’m fine. Really, I am.” He shrugged off their concern. “I should, um, I have to get back to work.”
Cape trailing behind him, he rejoined the effort, moving to a cot an eresh keyel similar in age to him lay on. There were too many people who needed his help for him to dwell on the betrayal. But that was exactly what discomforted Palenisa. It felt like it discomforted the Zodiac too. Their weightless presences curled around her neck like the drape of a snake.
The air shifted, and Palenisa felt a presence approach. She whipped around to grab it before it made contact.
Mask hanging from his neck, Sagan eyed her grip on him placidly. Damnable mismatched eyes examined her and Rishé. Lavender hair fell over his nose, and he blew it away. Two of her fingers wrapped nearly the entire span of his wrist, the rest held aloft to avoid as much contact as possible—she didn’t trust those palms, glowing or not. Frustratingly, she couldn’t read his expression.
“We could use a couple more hands,” he said casually.
Rishé jumped at the opportunity, though Palenisa took a ponderous beat before scoffing and shoving him free.
While Wren assisted the Doyisha, Rishé aided the healers tending to those in recovery. In place of mineral black, the ritual left their skin with a glowing prismatic sheen like mother-of-pearl. Palenisa herself had been guided by a ruddy Doyisha with mousy yellow-green eyes in preparing the cursed for the ritual. In rote motion, she performed ablutions on the afflicted, running silk soaked in oils over cursed faces, arms, and legs, dabbing away both bile and sweat.
The task was simple, but it slung a yoke of sadness across her back. The act reminded her of the coterie. Frankly, everything reminded her of the coterie, but the almost sacred nature of this was too similar to the funerary rites ashmakers performed, which she had occasionally seen as the Sister of Faith. Rites neither Ada nor her mother had received. The former because her body had been too badly desecrated, and the latter because there’d been no body at all.
“What is your name, miss?” asked the child whose fevered brow she wiped. Their glossy eyes watched her with the wonder only children had. Wings of black blood stained the clean sheets, fluttering with a child’s thrill of meeting a strange new person. And that round face reminded her of the Vana who had run from the wrath of her former sisters.
Broken bodies. Burning clan.
Screaming internally, she plastered on a thin smile. “Palenisa.”
She brushed a loc behind their ear and moved on before she could burst into tears.
In the next cot over was an elderly man who looked far too much like Khensu. Her hammering heart swelled as she knelt at his side. Fogged eyes stared at nothing, and delirious ramblings accompanied with bile spilled from his parted lips.
“So kind, so kind, so kind,” she caught him saying as she cleaned the blood from his halo. It made her feel like a liar as well as a failure. The spirits knew what she was; she knew what she was—a dishonorable fraud mimicking the kindness of others.
Don’t say that, she wanted to shout at him. It couldn’t be further from the truth.
Sometimes he muttered about children, grandchildren, the threads he could no longer see. He looked through her, but she sent him a strained smile, nonetheless. This was worse than Khensu. At least at her end, the warrior had mind enough to remember who and where she was. This man seemed to drift in the haze of visions that weren’t there.
He was too close to the end for the ritual to work.
The thought spiked the hurt in her.
Numb, Palenisa sat there holding the man’s hand. Just holding him. In a way, it felt like she wasn’t looking at him, but at her mother, at Ada. With their deaths as abrupt and violent as they’d been, she never got this. Never got to be there at the end for them. It was a poor substitute for the real thing.
“Excuse me,” someone called softly.
Over her shoulder, Palenisa saw an eresh keyel with brown hair across which rainbow light banded. A tan tunic was tied at her hip and collar below a blue halo. Worried cornflower eyes alighted on her as the woman gave a lukewarm smile. Shuffling, she meshed her fingers together in nervous patterns.
“My apologies, but I just arrived. I am searching for my sons,” she said, toying with numerous bangles. “Their names are Asaru and Alvarys. Have you seen them?”
Spirits damn it all.
Palenisa’s hand coiled into a fist on her thigh, pressing, pressing at the injury she deserved. Her lead heart sank under the knowledge she would have to disappoint Asaru’s mother. A childless mother and a motherless child. Oh, cruel merciless fate.
“They’re dead,” she blurted indelicately, and regret immediately swept in like a rogue wave. She tried to tack on an apology, but Asaru’s mother looked stricken. Clearly falling apart at the seams, trying to hold it together—failing to hold it together. Her thanks was a garbled mess as she fled. Not fast enough to hide the tears carving down her weathered face.
Pressing the dying man’s hand to her cheek, Palenisa groaned. It took every bit of her to keep from crying.
Through the pervasive smell of khetry, something sharp and acrid flared—her eyes grew wide.
Dead and sweet and all too familiar. Like death come walking. The curse. As the smell grew, she bit the inside of her mouth to keep from gagging. But she wasn’t alone in her olfactory daze. The temple had quieted enough to hear a pin drop. Everyone held their collective breath.
Then it started. The low buzz like hundreds of thousands of bees. Louder and louder—the hair on her nape rose as the sound stung her skin. Her head shot back, and she looked up through the glass capstone. Crimson flecks of energy swam in her vision. Above, where there should have been light, darkness blotted out the sun. Not night, more the absence of light.
The black cloud draped the temple in cold shadow that scooped a cavern inside her. It was formed from what looked to be hundreds of individual particulates. No—hundreds of revenants. Uncountable dead things melding together and pulling apart like viscous, magnetic liquid. As the swarm closed in, the sizzle of burning skin filled the temple.
From outside came a yell: “Deathless!”
The wails of the afflicted rose in a crescendo. And the ceiling shattered. Glass showered the temple in splintered rainfall.
The hand in hers seized and went limp. Terror plunged ice into her veins as Palenisa whipped around to see the man—her mother, Ada—convulsing. A black arrow transfixed his throat. It was buried so deep his head was nearly torn from his neck. What if he hadn’t been too far gone for the ritual to work? She would never know. He sputtered, once, twice, then slouched onto the cot—dead.
A scream echoed, high enough to break a heart. It almost didn’t sound real.
Was it her? Was her face wet? Why was her face wet?
Blood.
Rotted golden gray spattered her face, and Palenisa found herself back with the Vana. They were burning, and they were fleeing, and as her former sisters advanced, she stood in the rear watching them all, horrified. No, no, don’t, she tried to call out, but the words stuck because she was not there. She was in the temple as death descended.
The temple burst into frenetic commotion, wailing and shouting. As more deathless touched down, arrows flew and swords sheared and lances skewered. Darkness sprayed in every direction.
“Palenisa!”
She spun to the twin cries of Rishé and Wren. Sparks rained from their skin. Panic pulsed in dilated eyes as their edges faded into a sparkling white.
No. Not this. Not again.
Palenisa’s heart wrenched in two. She shot forward, hand outstretched, desperately reaching and reaching and reaching. In turn they mirrored her, reaching and rushing for her as their bodies dissolved. Amid the violence, there was less than a breath between their fingers. So close. Not close enough. She was a precious moment too late.
The sparks enveloped them entirely, and they vanished, no trace left but ash and amber.
Wren
Wren did and did not feel the heat of the sun and the shift of sand beneath his knees.
He did and did not know where he was; the thin stretch of land that was Hadii, sea lapping the sand in fervent licks. He was within and without, static fuzzing the edges of his vision. In his periphery were indiscernible smudges that may have been people.
He did not belong to himself.
In his hand was a burning needle. In his hand was a piece of bone that resembled a needle. Ceremonial in nature, glinting with the sheen of fresh ichor. It was the sun, it was the molten heart of a forge—it was blood.
At his knees, Wren saw and didn’t see the woman. Fogged eyes took her in uncomprehendingly. Black curls haloed her in splendid night. Her hands crossed daintily over her stomach, skin inked with blooming flowers through which silver stitches swam. One finger was adorned with a ring resembling a pair of hands clasped.
Resist.
He knew this woman. Knew the lines of her face, the freckles numerous as the stars, the warmth of her touch. He’d known her all his life.
Resist.
In her sleep, the woman looked more peaceful than she had in years. The sight sparked something in the back of his mind. He searched for a name and came up empty.
Resist.
But why was she there?
Who was she?
Something clicked in his brain—and he caught it. Mother. She was his mother. What she meant to him . . . there was no more precious thing. She was to be the central piece of what he needed to be, of what that niggling presence needed him to be.
Its intangible hand brushed his nape with flaming claws banded in blackness as the presence rooted around his skull. Wren struggled for sense, but it clenched tightly on his will. Indistinct images floated in a pool of hazy thoughts. An image clear as midday floated to the forefront. A tome soaked in blood, and spidery strokes as antimony kohl hands turned a page.
An intrinsic understanding swaddled him.
He didn’t want this. But the presence ate away the many vulnerabilities that made him. What a ripe vessel, it must’ve thought, perfect for consumption, corruption—possession. Clarity crumbled to ash in his head as he grasped and grasped but could not seem to pull himself from beneath the presence pressing down on all sides.
Fool, the dregs that were his tried to scream. He was screaming into the void, watching himself move. Watching as the thing moved him.
Wren sliced the meat of his palm. Skin parted, crimson flowed over the woman’s arms, scarring the sand at her sides. The blood warped and roiled before his eyes. The blood was breathing, and the sand was breathing, and he was breathing. And life hung suspended for a moment, captured within the web of khetry like a lone insect.
