Daughter of Smoke and Bone

here. This chance, she suspected, would never come again. So when Brimstone and Twiga turned into a stairwell, she followed.

They were tower stairs, a tight corkscrew down. The spiraling descent made Karou dizzy: down, around, down, around, hypnotic, until it seemed as if she were caught in a purgatory of stairs and would go down like this forever. There were small slot windows for a while, and then they disappeared. The air grew cool and still, and Karou had the impression of being belowground. She heard Brimstone and Twiga in snatches, and could make no sense of their conversation.

“We will need more incense soon.” Twiga.

“We will need more of everything. There has not been an onslaught like this in decades.” Brimstone.

“Do you think they have their eye on the city?”

“When have they not?”

“How long?” Twiga asked with a quaver. “How long can we hold them off?”

Brimstone. “I don’t know.”

And just when Karou thought she couldn’t bear any more turning, they reached the bottom. It was here that things got interesting.

Really interesting.

The stairs spilled out into a vast, echoing hall. Karou had to hold herself back to make sure Brimstone and Twiga had gone on, but when she heard their voices moving away, rendered small by the immensity of the space that swallowed them, she crept out after them.

It seemed she was in a cathedral — if, that is, the earth itself were to dream a cathedral into being over thousands of years of water weeping through stone. It was a massive natural cavern that soared overhead to a near-perfect Gothic arch. Stalagmites as old as the world were carved into pillars in the shapes of beasts, and candelabras hung so high they were like clusters of stars. A scent was heavy in the air, herbs and sulfur, and smoke wreathed among the pillars, teased into wisps by breezes emanating from unseen openings in the carven walls.

And below it all, where Brimstone and Twiga walked down the cathedral’s long nave, there weren’t pews for worship, but tables — stone tables huge as menhirs, so huge they must have required elephants to haul them there. Indeed, they were large enough to accommodate an elephant reclining, though only one of them actually did.

An elephant, laid out on a table.

Or… no. It was not an elephant. With clawed feet and a head that was some nightmare of a massive, tusked grizzly bear, it was elsething. Chimaera.

And it was dead.

On each of the tables lay a dead chimaera, and there were dozens of them. Dozens. Karou’s gaze fluttered, erratic, from table to table. No two of the dead were alike. Most had some human quality to them, head or torso, but not all. There, an ape with the mane of a lion; an iguana-thing so huge it could only be called a dragon; a jaguar’s head on the nude body of a woman.

Brimstone and Twiga moved among them, touching them, examining. They paused the longest over a man.

He was naked, too. He was what Karou and Zuzana would have called, with the smug smiles of connoisseurs, a “physical specimen.” Heavy shoulders tapering to neat hips, abdomen corrugated, all the muscles Karou could identify from life drawing study ruggedly pronounced. On his powerful chest was a down of pure white hair, and the hair of his head was white, too, long and silken on the stone table.

A fug of incense hung thick around him. It was coming from a kind of ornate silver lantern suspended from a hook above his head, exhaling a steady fume. A thurible, Karou thought, like those twirled about in Catholic Mass. Brimstone laid a hand to the dead man’s chest, let it linger there a moment in a gesture Karou couldn’t decipher. Fondness? Sadness? When he and Twiga moved on and vanished into the rearing wall of shadow at the far end of the nave, she crept out of hiding and went to the table.

Up close, she saw that the man’s white hair was an incongruity. He was young, his face unlined. He was very handsome, though blank and waxen in death, and seeming not quite real.

He was also not quite human, though nearer to it than most of the chimaera here. The flesh and musculature of his legs transitioned at mid-thigh to become the white-furred haunches of a wolf, with long backward-bending canine feet and black claws. And his hands, she saw, were hybrid: broad and furred across the backs like paws, with human fingers tapering to claws. They were lying palm up, as if they had been arranged that way, and that was how Karou saw what was etched on his skin.

In the center of each palm was a tattooed eye identical to her own.

She took a startled step back.

This was something. Something critical, something key, but what did it mean? She turned to the next table, the lion-maned creature. Its hands were simian, the flesh black, but she could still make out the hamsas on them.

She went to the next table, and the next. Even the elephant-creature: The soles of its mammoth forefeet were marked. Each of these dead creatures wore the hamsas, just like she did. Her thoughts hammered in her head the way her heart thumped in her chest. What was going on? Here were dozens of chimaera, and they were dead and naked — without, she noted, any visible wounds — and laid out cold on slabs in some kind of underground cathedral. Her own hamsas connected her to them in some way, but she couldn’t imagine how.

She circled back around to the first table, the white-haired man, and leaned against it. She was conscious of the scented smoke from the thurible and had a moment of anxiety when she realized her hair would be infused with the smell and give her away to Yasri and Issa when she snuck back into the shop. The shop. The thought of climbing back up that interminable corkscrew made her want to sink down into fetal position. Her wounds throbbed. They were seeping through the bandages, and Yasri’s balm was wearing off. She hurt.

But… this place. These dead. With her muddled head, Karou felt unequal to the mystery. The white-haired man’s hand lay right before her, its hamsa taunting her. She laid her own beside it to compare the marks, but his lay in the shadow of his body, so she reached out to lift it into the light.

The marks were identical. She saw that as her mind worked at something else, a too-slow warning from her sluggish senses.

His hand, his dead hand… it was warm.

It was not dead.

He was not dead.

A whip-crack movement and he came upright, spinning on his knees. His hand, which had lain inert in hers, caught her throat and lifted her off her feet, slamming her down onto the stone table. Her head. Against stone. Her vision blurred. When it cleared again he was above her, eyes ice-pale, lips drawn back over fangs. She couldn’t breathe. His hand still clutched her throat. She clawed at it, struggled to throw him off, managed to get her knees between them and kick out.

His grip loosened and she gasped a breath, tried to scream, but he was over her again, heavy and naked and bestial, and she fought him with everything in her, fought him with a wildness that plunged them over the edge of the table to the floor. It was chaos and thrashing, and bare limbs so strong Karou couldn’t break free. He was on her, straddling her legs, staring, and some kind of crazed madness seemed to clear from his eyes. His lips eased from their snarl and he looked human again, almost, and beautiful, but still terrifying and… confused.

He gripped her by the wrists, forced open her hands to see her hamsas, then looked sharply at her face. His gaze roved over all of her so that she felt as if she were the naked one, and then he gave a thick growl that sent shudders through her. “Who are you?”

She couldn’t answer. Her heart was pounding. Her wounds were on fire. And, as ever, she had no answer.

“Who are you?” He dragged her upright by her wrists and flung her back onto the stone table and was over her again. His movements were fluid and animal, his teeth sharp enough to rip out her throat, and all at once Karou saw how her trespass through the other door was going to end: in a pool of blood. She found her breath.

And screamed.