Rat was standing over Liliana, holding the tree branch she had used to render the necromancer unconscious. The girl looked fairly proud of herself, but Kaya wasn’t in the mood to offer praise. “You should have used your daggers, Rat. You should have killed her.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“No? Look around you. She was using the undead to kill your friends.”
“But I stopped that. You know, by clonking her.”
With Liliana unconscious, the three zombies were inert on the ground, which hardly made them less terrifying; each seemed capable of rising again at any moment.
Teyo, meanwhile, was still struggling to pry open the grip of the skeletal hand around his ankle.
An exasperated Kaya turned on him, barking out, “And you didn’t follow orders.”
“I’m sorry, but—”
“That doesn’t cut it, Teyo. You didn’t drop the sphere when I told you, when I was ready. Then you dropped it later, when I wasn’t. That could have gotten both of us killed.”
“I dropped the hemisphere when Rat was ready,” he said, finally freeing his leg. “With that log.”
“A good thing, too,” Rat said to Kaya, “because when you were ready, she was ready. And that could’ve gotten all three of you killed—and I would have been stranded here…forever. Besides, you don’t really want to kill her now, do you?”
“Oh, don’t I?” Kaya said, striding toward the unconscious woman with her blades out. Kneeling before Liliana, Kaya held one of her long knives to the woman’s throat, just above the golden collar.
“Wait, mistress!” Rat called out.
“I’m not going to have a better opportunity,” Kaya stated, though she remained still—neither putting the blade away, nor slicing it into skin.
“Maybe not, but I know—I know—you’re not thrilled about the idea of killing a defenseless woman.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“Just listen, at least. Listen to what I found out.”
So Rat told her story, of the party and the “servants” and their mistress and her book and the Cabal and the zombie-illusions that became zombie-solids after the sapphire in the amulet had emitted the blue smoke.
Throughout the telling, Kaya kept her dagger poised at Liliana’s throat, while Teyo approached slowly, sniffing the air, as Rat finished her tale: “…So then I grabbed for…I mean…well, see, basically, after the zombies solidified—and Mistress Book Cover and the others figured out someone was there—I figured I better get out and come back to report to you two.”
“You did the right thing,” Kaya said, feeling slightly calmer and very tired.
Rat’s head bobbed up and down. “Yep. Yep. That’s what I did. The right thing.”
Teyo walked right up to Rat and sniffed at her. She gave him a look, but he stepped back and slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Of course! It’s a djinn! This fake ‘Liliana Vess’ has a djinn in her power. That’s what I’ve been sensing and smelling: djinn-smoke. It’s in the air, all around us, present but diffuse. But you were close enough that I can smell it on your clothes and hair.”
“I’m infected with djinn-smoke?” She sniffed at herself and made a face. “Mistress Kaya, can we go back to Orzhova so I can take another shower?”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Kaya said. “What’s a djinn?”
Teyo and Rat stared at her. Then Rat turned to Teyo and said, “There’s something you know that she doesn’t? You barely know anything.”
Kaya said, “Stop it.”
Teyo nodded, saying, “No, no, it’s true. I barely know anything.”
Rat said, “He’d never seen a viashino or a vedalken before two days ago.”
Teyo was still nodding. “Or a leonin. Or a gorgon. Or an elf. Oh, or an angel!”
“Or a pegasus. Or a griffin. Or a goblin.”
“Well, at least I’d heard of goblins. We have goblins on Gobakhan. I’d just never met any. But—”
“All right, I get the point,” Kaya said crossly, poking the air with the dagger that wasn’t still flush against Liliana’s throat. “Teyo’s ignorant, and yet I’m the one who doesn’t know what a…what a…”
“What a djinn is,” Rat said. “Although to be fair, I’ve never seen a djinn.”
“Really?” Teyo said, stunned. “There’s something I’ve seen that the Rat hasn’t?”
“I’d never seen a diamondstorm before yesterday, either. Or was that today? I’ve completely lost track of time.”
“Me, too.”
“Enough!” Kaya shouted. “What’s a djinn?”
Teyo crouched down before Kaya to explain. “Well, see, there are djinn on Gobakhan. Small spirits of fire or air that emerge sometimes from the Western Cloud or the Eastern Cloud, respectively. If you catch one, like inside your geometry, it has to grant you a wish to be released.”
“Did you ever catch one?” Rat asked, excited.
“No, I was never fast enough, and my three-dimensional geometry was pretty awful—really, until I came to Ravnica. But Arturo caught one once. He wished for a hot meat pie, and the abbot later said Arturo was lucky he didn’t wind up baked inside the meat pie. Anyway, djinn don’t have a lot of magic. You can’t, say, wish for the Eastern Cloud to vanish or anything like that. I mean you can, but it’s not gonna happen. And the djinn are tricksters, too. So you have to phrase your wish very carefully.”
“And what makes you think there’s one here?” Kaya demanded.
“Well, all djinn—fire-djinn and air-djinn—smell vaguely of smoke. Sweet smoke, like incense. But none of the djinn of Gobakhan are quite this potent. That’s why I didn’t put it together at first. I saw Arturo’s fire-djinn up close. But I didn’t smell anything from just outside the sphere the djinn was trapped in. I only smelled her smoke after she conjured up the meat pie for Arturo and he let her go. And within a minute of the djinn disappearing, the smell had dissipated, too. But here, it’s, well…everywhere—and it’s strong. Whatever djinn this ‘Liliana’ is using is big and very powerful. My guess is she has him or her trapped in that sapphire amulet.”
Kaya took all this in and was silent for a long time. Finally, she said, “None of this is any of our business.” She turned her attention back to the knife at Liliana’s throat. Liliana lay there, still unconscious and unmoving. Kaya began to apply pressure, and a single drop of blood dripped down between her skin and the servant’s collar around her neck.
Teyo and Rat both shouted, “Wait!”
Kaya hesitated, though she wasn’t quite sure why.
Rat said, “We need to help all these people first—the servants. I promised them.”
Kaya shook her head. “We came here to kill Liliana Vess, not free the prisoners of Caligo.” But still she hesitated.
Rat pounced. “But you took an oath to protect people. ‘Never again.’ Remember?”
Of course I remember. But…
“There’s no reason why we can’t free them after we’ve killed Vess. The real Vess.”
Teyo pointed at Liliana’s face. “Maybe she has a reason.”
Kaya looked down again. Liliana’s eyes were open and staring daggers at the ghost-assassin. And still Kaya hesitated.
Vess didn’t move. She took no action, defensive or otherwise. She simply stated, “No reason. Just a request. One last request before you kill me.”