Vara knew what she must do. The feel of Akil’s resura body throbbed in hers.
We can’t win this war by fighting like humans.
Had she said it aloud, or merely understood it, deep in her soul?
How Akil hated to be touched! His past haunted him still. “Closer, Akil! Don’t let go.” He obeyed her, twitching in her arms. She felt the churning presence of all the myriad particles of which his magical body was made. “Do you remember when you held me on the road home from Linqua? Our bodies tried to meld into one. So odd and disturbing, but I was tempted to let myself melt into you, as candle wax melts. Or as wine and water mingle in a pitcher… Oh, I can’t explain it!”
He answered, his voice muffled against her neck. The soft, tight curls of her hair cushioned his cheek. “I remember very well. You were human then, but your da resu nature glowed in you like a flame. We could have melded… and my body would have eaten yours alive. Devoured every speck of your substance without mercy. That is why, my sweet Vara, I so rarely touch you. But now…”
“But now. Yes! We are both resura. Nothing can stop us. Not gods, not soldiers, not hate or fear…”
“Not love.”
Love. She knew he felt it too. Not just the bond of the dangers they’d braved, the chances taken, the battles still ahead of them. He loved her. She could feel it. And she loved him. Poor, crippled, clever Akil the slave-boy.
She pushed her fingers into his tangled brown hair. Felt the shape of his skull. The skull beneath the skin. He sighed and trembled. The strange internal roiling grew, insistent and irresistible.
It was too much. And it was not enough.
She pushed him away. “We need my mother.”
“Ah,” he said, understanding. “She won’t be far from Jameel.”
*
She wasn’t. The lioness paced around her mate, who held Chaim’s head cradled in his arms. Chaim, Akil could instantly see, was dead. Jameel mourned him as was proper, but this was not the time for such earthly rituals; they needed to fight.
Akil had the sudden premonition that what Vara had in mind might go terribly wrong. He also knew there was no way to stop her. Nor should he.
Vara, as Freewoman, dropped to her knees beside her father. “We will mourn Chaim later. Father, please forgive me for what I am about to do.” She dropped a fast kiss on his head. Before Jameel could respond, she jumped up and dug her long dark fingers into Lioness’s fur, pulling the great tawny head around.
Lioness snarled and struck, her claws barely missing Freewoman’s belly.
“You can’t kill me, Mother. Don’t waste time. Akil! Come to us now.”
Akil, ignoring his urge to stop and think, stepped into Vara’s arms and dug his own fingers into Ragna Svobodová’s hide. The creature panted and twisted under their hands. Ragna, mad with thwarted blood-lust, was unable to shift to another form. Vara pulled them both close. “Trust me,” she said.
Akil hung on tight. He at least had an idea of what Vara might do; Ragna did not.
He could feel it starting already.
He closed his eyes. In his travels with Carolina Marsh, he had seen what a vortex could do. There was a stretch along the vast brown river in the Terra Torridia where no boatman would be foolish enough to venture. He’d never seen the legendary Charybdis, in the Strait of Messina, but knew it could suck a trireme down in heartbeats without a trace.
He was in such a vortex now.
*
Vara knew she didn’t need to breathe. Her bodies only did it out of a stubborn refusal to admit they weren’t alive any more. Yet I do live. I love. I fear. I am confused and timid when I must be clearheaded and brave.
Oh Sisters—what am I doing? Help me now!
She could feel Akil and her mother breathing as she did, hear the deep thunder of their dust-born hearts. They knew it too: we are not among the living. Yet their spirits refused to surrender that last and final bridge to what once was. And would never be again.
With the sensation of growing, or swelling, she felt the melding start. Once started it must not stop. She could not let the others grow fearful and break away. The fur and flesh under her hands writhed and tossed like grain fields in a tempest.
They knew what must be done. They trusted her.
Vara let herself go. Let her self go.
And felt the other resura flow into her, into each other as water from three vessels pours into one greater vessel. One too small to hold it all. The vessel burst.
The strange substance that was the melded resura threatened to shoot away like the fireworks her Pada Josef had loved so much, to spend its force uselessly against the sky. She could not let that happen. The last vestiges of her magical body had vanished; she had only her mind to gather the force the three had become.
She saw Akil’s love for her, saw his damaged soul, saw in her mother the cold realization that her husband would die soon.
No. Accept their sadness and pain later. Now we fight.
Take the claws and fangs of the lioness, the stubborn strength and weapons of the knife woman. Pull in the talons and rending beaks of the eagle and the hawk. Gather the fighting knowledge of the Moorish woman, the wiles of the street boy. Take it all. Grow huge and fierce.
And gather the teeth the Nightingale had lost.
*
Akil felt himself torn to shreds, and less than shreds. The particles—atoms—that Josef Svobodá thought were the minuscule building blocks of everything. He became a mass of swirling atoms, substance without form. Matter without pattern. And then Akil saw the God. Felt it form around him. A new God, one whose mind reached into his and commanded him to obey.
And obey he did. Akil and Ragna clung to one another as Vara expanded, encompassing them in her new-found power. It was like riding the hottest updraft Eagle could imagine. He let it take him, and rejoiced.
The other Gods noticed the new-born one. Reared back like startled horses, and watched from their sky palaces as she grew and strengthened.
The new God was angry and vengeful, and she would not be reined in by those who merely sought sport and disruption. She knew what she wanted.
*
The Nightingale, small and insignificant no more, rose up, and up, and up, and spread her wings. And the wings were mighty and wide, and drew power from her fellow resura and from the dust and air and smoke and blood all around her. In an instant she was the size of a battle elephant, her wings like two great glistening sails buffeting the air. And her beak—
Her beak was like the prow of a ship, and was lined with a thousand teeth. Her wings drove gusts of wind before her as she sought her prey. Among the screaming, grovelling men it was hard to see the one she wanted… The men’s souls, like soot-blackened curtains, drifted around their flailing bodies as the other Gods looked down.
They wanted to see what she could do, before daring to meddle.
She saw the soldiers’ battle fever vanish as they beheld her. Some abased themselves, begging for mercy. Others dropped their weapons and ran. Those that held their ground she bit in half and spat away. At last only one remained. A man on horseback, barely controlling his screaming animal, his eyes dripping blood.
As the eyes of one she had loved dripped red, in an arena not too long ago.
Petru Dominus, the Scorpion of Askain. At her mercy.
She had no mercy.
He turned his blind eyes up to her, leaning back in the saddle to see the height of her. He bared his teeth and lifted his sword, a puny effort, but she acknowledged his spirit. It was only God-given, though; was he to be pitied? She lowered her sleek head, its gleaming feathers reflecting the lurid firelight from Arles, her great black eyes glittering. She looked into his face, saw the pain, smelled the rot, heard the gasps of his labouring lungs. The man should be long dead, yet the Gods still drove him.
“I will set you free,” she said to him. “I will show you mercy.”
He slashed at her, his horse bucking in panic under him.
She lowered her head. Opened her beak. And with one snap of her jaws she crushed him, felt the hot blood spurt and let Eagle savour it. Let Lioness drink it. Delicately she bit his arms off and let Ragna Svobodová, whose soul rode within her, rejoice that the hands that once gripped her neck were no more.
As life fled from Petru Dominus, the Scorpion of Askain, his Gods fled too. Or did they simply jump off as a rider abandons a dying horse? No longer of use.
The air reverberated like a beaten drum, battering Nightingale’s ears and buffeting her wings. She blinked, revelling in the wind that blew the stink away.
The sudden wind died, and its absence, and the departure of the Gods, left the air empty. It was as if a violent summer storm had blown through in an instant and washed the sky clean. The remaining soldiers, and their horses, collapsed to the ground, exhausted or dead.
The Nightingale launched her huge body into the air, flew high and beheld the scene of bloody carnage. Unaware of the change in their fortunes, men still fought and died, and cities and farms still burned. But the fever had broken.
One by one, as if touched by expanding ripples in a pond, soldiers all over Askain felt the air change, looked about themselves in horror, dropped their weapons and fell to the ground to sleep where they lay.
Even the birds and insects settled to rest. Nightingale soared, and those few souls who remained awake dropped to their knees, pointed to the sky as she circled overhead, and marvelled at the thunder of her passage.
Within her breast and brain rode the souls of Akil and of Ragna Svobodová. Ragna could think only of Jameel, half dead in the mine. Akil felt the relentless pull of his alanbir.
Nightingale, ignoring their pain, flew wide and far, observing what lay below. The mine pit looked tiny. Such a small arena for such a decisive battle. Her great body cast a shadow that, when it touched a man, caused his heart to expand in awe and fear.
She drank their worship, as Eagle and Lioness had drunk Petru’s blood. It tasted good.