6.

 

Zaifyr had stood outside the Spine’s Keep with Ayae and, when he realized that she was not speaking to him, he said, “I’m sorry. My mind is all over the place.” He did not have to explain why: he did not have to repeat Fo’s words, or recreate the horror of his worship again.

“It’s okay.” She was distant, both physically and emotionally. “I can find you tomorrow, if you would like?”

“Yes,” he replied. “Please.”

As he walked away, he chided himself internally. It had never occurred to him that Fo could have been born in Asila. It could be no other city for the Keeper was not, as Zaifyr understood, that old. It was said that he was twelve hundred at most, which meant it had been during the time that Zaifyr had become reclusive. He spent centuries lurking in the towers of his castle, attended by a handful of servants and a host of haunts. He traveled down the steep incline of his home only when the Ritual of Child had taken place and he did so with trepidation. He could still remember the final century of walks, the spiraling staircases and the dark nights, the roads lined by torches and the temples that were now nocturnal.

And the children.

He remembered the children most of all.

It was difficult for Zaifyr to reconcile the actions that had been done in his name with the person he was, but it was not impossible. For all that he had changed, he could still see the man he had been, the man who had become lost in the demands of the dead. The ritual was all that had brought him down to his people in the last centuries. He could not remember the living, the men and women who worked in his name, the families that had sought to gain his favor. He remembered only the dead and he had reached out and pushed his hands through the haunts that had been created—and in so doing, blessed the ritual.

“Jae’le.”

The door to his hotel room closed gently behind him.

“Brother,” the raven said from the window seal. “How did your meeting with Fo go?”

“You saw?”

“Not inside.”

“He was born in Asila, if that’s an answer,” he said. “Did our sister tell you that?”

“No. We speak very little and even then, it is only if I visit her Enclave.”

“I have not spoken to her…” He hesitated. “In a long time.”

“She knew you were to come here.”

“You told her?”

“I thought it best to not further upset her.”

“I knew we had our difficulties,” said Zaifyr as he sat. “Out of respect, I did not enter Yeflam, but now…”

“Aelyn did not take the loss of her godhood well. She knew it was not true, as we all did. But to stand outside Asila and tell the thousands who gathered that she was just mortal was damaging to her pride.” The raven’s feathers ruffled sourly. “She never thought the tower sufficient punishment.”

Her remembered her hard, blunt hands and how she reached for his neck, intent on using her strength in that final moment. Shaking his head, he said, “That is why her law is a farce.”

“It was born in the final moments of Asila, brother. The actual decree came a decade later, but I assure you, it was born then, in her rage.”

“Was Yeflam born then, as well?”

“The Enclave was a long time in birth,” the Animal Lord said. “She disagreed with a lot of what we thought, what we proposed, and others joined her. They all thought it a mistake telling our followers we were not gods. Aelyn argued that since we would be, eventually, there was no need. When her opinion was not shared, the split was inevitable. You had no real influence on that other than to hasten it. But the presence of Fo? I cannot assume it is a coincidence. He may believe that it is—and I have heard her warn him against you, but she cannot have sent him innocently.”

“Which means she still wants to—”

He meant to say, kill me. But instead he lashed out with his arm, slamming Jae’le off the windowsill a moment before an arrow punched into it.

Squawking and turning in mid-air, the raven rose high. As Zaifyr spotted a glint of light through a window off a street, so did the Animal Lord. Stepping out of the window frame for safety and thinking to follow the bird, he did not at first hear the heavy steps to his door. But he heard and saw the kick that splintered the lock.

It revealed a man and a woman, dressed in loose clothes. They had wrapped scarves around their heads, but neither hid the paleness of their skin; nor did the loose dark-blue cloth they wore hide the hard-boiled leather beneath.

“No scream?” said the man. “At very least pleading? I like a man who begs, not a man who fights.”

“Are there even words worth saying?”

“None that I’ve heard.”

In the room where Zaifyr lived, there were two haunts. He had chosen it because they were old. Their deaths had happened so long ago that he could not know the details without pushing deep into the hungry and cold subconscious of each and that suited him fine. He knew only that they were both men and that they had been middle-aged and anything else was quickly lost as Zaifyr flushed his power through them. His attacker screamed as a cold, spectral hand curled through his chest.

A moment later he heard the woman’s knife drop and a low moan escape her.

Zaifyr turned back to the window. He did not need to watch the haunts tear the pair apart, rip into the bodies for warmth and food, take their first comfort with the substance he had given them. He did not need to watch and think about how easy it was for them, and how easy it had been for him to do it. An old life—like putting on an old mask. Or taking an old one off.

Their physical presence in the room was temporary, he would see to that. When they became insubstantial again, there would be four in the room, not two.

Staring at the empty sky, he waited for the raven to return. When he did, his beak was bloody and his claws had scraps of skin.

“Brother,” Jae’le said quietly.

“You can’t stop them,” he replied. “Look elsewhere.”

“How can I?”

“You turn your head.”

“Zaifyr! You cannot be doing this!”

He met the bird’s dark gaze. He imagined the concern in Jae’le’s real eyes, the fear that he knew was there; the fear that was born from the experience of Asila, of the quiet horror he had felt as he walked along the cold roads, knowing that the dead were around him, but unable to see them. “I am not doing anything,” he said. “I acted to protect myself, nothing more. Did you kill your man?”

“No.” The raven’s claw scratched at the shaft of the arrow, as if it were the cause of a wound that none could see. “An eye I might have blinded, but she was prepared—there was no animal around her, nothing I could use to follow her. I lost her a block later in a series of houses.”

“Someone knew you were here.”

“There is something else.”

“Ayae?”

“I do not know, but there have been other attacks,” Jae’le said quietly. “I can hear the noises, the alarms. There is smoke from the keep, soldiers are running to the hospital, and on the roof that Captain Heast has set himself upon, a man has died.”