Days of Blood & Starlight

Zuzana was oblivious. “Ugh! Don’t get me started on that e-mail. I want to kill her a little bit. Was it a riddle? Monty Python references? Sandcastles? What the hell? And she didn’t even mention Akiva. What does that mean?”

“It’s not promising,” Mik acknowledged.

“I know. I mean, are they together? She would mention him, right?”

“Well, yeah. Like you write her all about me, telling her all the funny things I say, and how every day I get more handsome and clever. And you use smileys—”

Zuzana snorted. “Of course. And I sign everything Mrs. Mikolas Vavra, with a heart dotting the i.”

Mik said, “Huh. I like the sound of that.”

She punched his shoulder. “Please. If you ever did ask me to marry you, don’t even think I would identify myself as some addendum of you, like an old lady signing her rent check with perfect penmanship as Mrs. Husband Name—”

“But you’d say yes, is that what you’re saying?” Mik’s blue eyes twinkled.

“What?”

“That sounded like the only quibble is what you’d call yourself, not whether or not you’d say yes.”

Zuzana blushed. “I didn’t say that.”

“So you wouldn’t marry me?”

“Ridiculous question. I’m eighteen!”

“Oh, it’s an age thing?” He frowned. “You don’t mean wild oats, do you? We’re not going to have to take some stupid break so you can experience other—”

Zuzana put a hand over his mouth. “Gross. Don’t even say it.”

Mollified, Mik kissed her palm. “Good.”

She spun on her heel and walked on. Mik gave the huge puppet a tug to get it rolling again, and followed. “So,” he called to her back, “just out of curiosity, you know, purely conversation and all, at what age will you be entertaining offers of marriage?”

“You think it’ll be so easy?” she called back over her shoulder. “No way. There will be tasks. Like in a fairy tale.”

“That sounds dangerous.”

“Very. So think twice.”

“No need,” he said. “You’re worth it.” And Zuzana’s face warmed with pleasure.

They managed to find a wedge of unclaimed space on the Old Town end of the bridge, where they parked the marionette. It towered there in its black trench coat like some sinister bridge guardian, a dark counterpoint to the clutch of white-robed figures beyond. Angel-cult rabble. They were loitering, lighting their vigil candles and chanting—at least until the next police sweep, which would temporarily scatter them. How unflagging they were in their belief that the angels would return here to the scene of their most dramatic sighting.

You know nothing, Zuzana thought with scorn, but her superiority was wearing thin. So she had met one of the angels. So what? She was just as ignorant now as everyone else.

Karou, Karou. What could it mean that she had been here and not even said hello? And that e-mail! Yes, it was absurd, mysterious to the point of clubbing her on the head, but… there was just something so off about it.

It struck Zuzana then: a lightning flash of memory.

I feel happy…. I feel happy….

Karou did not feel happy. Zuzana was suddenly sick. She pulled out her phone to make sure she was right. The clip was easy to find online; it was a classic. “Don’t want to go on the cart!” That was the clue. Monty Python and the Holy Grail: She and Karou had gone through a phase when they were fifteen, they must have watched it twenty times. And there it was, at the end of the “Bring out your dead” scene.

“I feel happy…. I feel happy….”

Desperate singsong. It was what the old man said to convince them he was all right just before they clubbed him on the head and threw his body on the plague cart. Jesus. Leave it to Karou to communicate in Holy Grail. Was she trying to say that she was in danger? But what could Zuzana possibly do about it? Her heart was beating fast now.

“Mik,” she called. He was tuning his violin. “Mik!”

Priestess of a sandcastle? In a land of dust and starlight?

Was that a clue, too?

Did Karou want to be found? 

23 Priestess Of A Sandcastle

The kasbah was a castle built of earth, one of the hundreds that studded these southern reaches of Morocco, where they had baked in the sun for centuries. Once, they had been home to warrior clans and all their retinue. They were primeval fortresses, proud and red and tall, with crenellations like the hooked teeth of vipers, and arcane Berber patterns etched on the high, smooth walls.

In many of the kasbahs, small clutches of warriors’ descendants still eked out lives while time worked its ruin around them. But this place, when Karou found it, had been left to the storks and scorpions.

A few weeks ago, when she came back into this world to collect teeth, she had been, well, reluctant to return to Eretz. Not that she doubted for a second that she would; it was just that returning to that place was so hard. To that world in general with its waft of death, and the mine tunnel in particular. The echoes and the eerie, fluting cries of cherub bats, the dirt, the darkness, the pale tuber roots that pulsed like veins, no privacy, gruff “comrades,” always eyes on her, and… no doors. That was the worst part, not being able to close a door and feel safe, ever, especially while she was working—because in magic she went to a place inside of herself and was entirely vulnerable. And forget about sleep. She’d had to find an alternative.

It was no small matter secreting a growing army of chimaera in the human world. They needed a place that was big, isolated, and within range of the Atlas portal Razgut had shown her, so that they could come and go between worlds. Electricity and running water would have been nice, too, but she hadn’t expected to find a place that fit even the critical needs.

The kasbah did, perfectly.

It looked for all the world as Karou had described it in her one brief e-mail to Zuzana: like a sandcastle, a very big sandcastle. It was monumental: an entire town, really—lanes and plazas, neighborhoods, a caravansary, granary, and palace—all of it echoing empty. Its creators had dreamed on a legendary scale, and to stand in its flagstone court, mud walls and peaked roofs jutting overhead, was to feel shrunk to the size of a songbird.

It was gorgeous: embellished with scrollwork iron window grilles and carved wood, jewel mosaics and soaring Moorish arches, jade-green roof tiles, and the white plaster lacework of long-dead craftsmen.

And it was collapsing into ruin. In some quarters the roofs had fallen in entirely, and several towers were reduced to a single standing corner with the rest melted clean away. Staircases led nowhere; doors opened onto four-story plunges; towering arches loomed precarious, riven with cracks.

Above and behind it, slopes scraped north, where the teeth of the Atlas Mountains bit off the sky. Before and below, the earth rolled down a slope of scree and scrub toward the distant Sahara. It was a bleak vista, so still that it seemed the twitch of a scorpion’s tail for miles around should draw the eye.

All this Karou could see from her room at the highest point in the palace. A wide, walled court lay below. Several chimaera stood in the arcaded gallery that faced the main gate, and they fell silent when she drifted down before them. She had gone out her window—the lanes were in terrible repair and walking was treacherous, on top of which: Why walk when you can fly?—and her silent flight, no stirring of wings, always unsettled them. They stared at her now with the colored eyes of raptors and oxen and lizards, and made no greeting as she passed.