A Wild Light (33 page)

“Be careful,” he whispered.

“You, too,” I said, and slammed my armored fist against my chest.

Moments later, I stood within the prison veil.

OF all the nightmares, and all the things I had never let myself imagine that I would have to do, entering the prison veil was surely at the top of the list. I had no concept of what to expect: fire, maybe, burning air, brimstone, acid.

Torment.

Instead, I walked onto a solid stone plain that looked like the first jut of primordial land, pushed from the sea: cracked and steaming, and heavy with the scents of blood and sulfur. Zee, Raw, and Aaz tumbled around me, crouched and staring. Dek clung to my throat, but Mal had stayed with Grant.

Clouds shrouded the sky, rolling golden and crimson, and in the distance I saw statues: immense carved beasts with wings and talons, and long, sharp faces that resembled the Mahati. Beneath those statues were small groups of moving figures, and smoke, and walls. Homes hacked from the rock itself.

From there to where I stood, and all around, were the Mahati. More than I had imagined, more than I could have conceived: thousands upon thousands, hundreds of thousands. I stood in the middle of a city—behind me, more structures hacked from stone: low towers, and narrow lanes, archways covered in rippling flags, torn and stained. I heard singing, the clang of metal, voices garbled in melodic conversations. Small naked figures darted through the crowd—children, I realized with shock—silver hair loose and flowing, and their long fingers sharp as knives.

All the fear I had brought with me faded into a coarse sort of wonderment.

Life in the prison veil. Life, going on.

And it was raw, and beautiful.

No one noticed us at first. Where the boys and I stood, they were too busy dividing up clusters of Blood Mama’s parasites, which were filling the air with high-pitched, bloodcurdling screams. Vast nets filled with shadows had been dumped on the stone ground, and the Mahati who waited for them appeared hollow with hunger. The lines were long.

They need more,
murmured the darkness.
So much more.

Not from me,
I told it, though I felt a terrible regret.
Not from earth.

“Jack,” rasped Zee, pointing. I looked, and saw a bright light burning just above the heads of a distant Mahati crowd. The light pulsed in one spot like a beacon, locked in place.

Lord Ha’an stood beside that light, taller than the Mahati around him. He gazed across the heads of his people, into my eyes. Others followed suit. A cry rose up, a deafening trumpet of voices raised at once—falling, at once, into a profound hush. Those nearest stopped moving, maybe breathing.

Dek licked the back of my ear. I exhaled, drew in another deep breath, and walked to Ha’an. The first step was the most difficult, but I looked at Jack’s light—straining now, toward me—and kept moving. The boys spread out, low to the ground, graceful and quick: sleek as bullets, the spikes in their spines longer, sharper, as though the very air was changing them.

Mahati stepped aside for us, kneeling. All of them, thousands of bodies, rippling downward with shoulders and heads bowed. Maybe they knelt for the boys, and not me—but the sight was still terrifying and struck me numb. It was not supposed to be this way. The veil was hell. I had been raised to fear it, fight it. Kill what waited within.

But my gaze swept over those lowered heads, my own head spinning, and the only eyes that stared back belonged to children—little Mahati—who did not know enough to be frightened, or respectful, or whatever the hell made their parents drop to their knees. They stared with solemn, curious eyes—and as alien as they were, I couldn’t think of them as monsters. Not a single one of the thousands of Mahati surrounding me.

A threat, yes. A terrible threat. They would destroy and enslave humanity if I couldn’t stop them.

I didn’t know how to stop them without killing them. And that seemed just as wrong.

It is wrong. Look how they would worship you,
said the darkness, rolling through me with a terrible pleasure: uncoiling high in my throat, stretching every inch of my skin until I felt ripe, ready to crack, split, spill.

Ha’an towered, waiting in silence. When I drew near, he folded his long, tined fingers over his chest, bowing his head at the boys, and me.

Green eyes glittered. “I thought you might come.”

I looked at Jack’s light: translucent, a white fire pitted with turquoise and purple, seemingly locked within the cradle of a stone pillar. I could see a spike, at this distance, driven up through the middle of him—and sensed a low vibration in the air. His light strained and fluttered in my direction—his soul, consciousness, dreams. My grandfather.

“For the Aetar,” I said. “Yes, I came for him.”

“Will you save him, too, as you do the humans?” Ha’an turned and swept his fist outward, a sharp, violent gesture. Mahati scrambled to back away, pushing each other, some carrying children. Leaving us alone in a large semicircle—a grant of privacy.

Raw and Aaz sniffed the sand around the pillar, making a full circle before coming back to me. Zee stayed close. Dek was very quiet. Ha’an watched us all, inscrutable.

“How will this end?” he asked.

I looked at him, all around him, at the Mahati—strange and dangerous, with their sharp fingers and missing limbs, and those chains that chimed in the crimson air like silver bells. I looked into their eyes, those shining black eyes that stared at me with fear and hope, and distrust—and a great heartbreak soared within me, which had nothing to do with the darkness, though the darkness curled around it as though nursing a sore.

“I don’t want to be your enemy,” I told Ha’an. “But I can’t be what you need.”

Not yet,
breathed the darkness inside me.

Ha’an tilted his head, anger burning the backs of his eyes, and something else, too: deeper, more thoughtful. “You are gambling with our lives. Not just our bellies, but our lives. We, who are locked in the veil, are not one people. We are different breeds, and there were wars once between us, for those differences. When we joined together to survive, when we filled the army with our lives, it was only the strength of the Reaper Kings that kept us from each other’s throats.”

I glanced down at Zee and the boys, who stared at Ha’an with such regret, such sorrow: memories so strong I could taste them, feel them, on the tip of my mind, like a dream.

Their memories, our memories, your memories,
said the darkness.
So desperate, to open our door—to summon us for our power—and we came to the Reapers with a will and a hunger. Helping them gather the clans, forcing them to bond before the war spread, and all those lives were lost to the shadow.

And the price?
I asked, wondering what war, what enemy, could be so terrible to frighten my boys, the boys I knew now. Not the Avatars, surely.
What did you want?

It did not answer. I shivered, and listened to Ha’an say, “The veil is weakening, everywhere, all the walls that divide the Mahati from the Shurik, and the Yor’ana from the Osul. I told you before . . . my people are too weak to stand against them. They will enslave us.”

He crouched before Zee, dragging his long fingers against the stone. “You understand. Perhaps you are not the Vessel any longer, but you and your brothers are still Kings. Our Kings.”

“Different life,” Zee rasped. “Different dream.”

I crouched, too, dragging my own fingers against the stone, my silver, armored fingers, which glimmered in the red light as though soaked in metallic blood.

“There are other lives at stake,” I told him. “Lives I’m responsible for.”

I ignored the voice. Ha’an stared at me. “Humans are worthless except as slaves and food.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Wrong or not, we are starving. Look at them. All but the very young are missing limbs, and flesh. We have been forced to desecrate the dead.”

“Like you said,” I told him, “it’s not just flesh you want, but pain. You want the
hunt
, not the meal. And until that changes,
I can’t help you
.”

Ha’an’s jaw tightened, and he looked down at Zee. “You agree with this?”

I held my breath when Zee hesitated, but the little demon finally said, “Yes.”

“We have reached an impasse, then,” he said, with disappointment and weariness. “I cannot kill you. And while you could kill me, kill us all, I suspect you would have done that by now if that were your true desire.”

I had been raised on violence, witnessed violence—all my life—but I had no stomach for it. I glanced at Jack—his burning light—and felt another light inside me, shining beneath the coils of the darkness.

But more than that, I felt
me
, my own self, running even deeper than the darkness and the light. I felt my own roots inside my soul, roots I had been born with, roots my mother had grown—and when I thought about killing all of the Mahati, when I thought about letting them kill, every fiber of my being said,
NO.

So lead them,
breathed the darkness.
That is the only way. No one else can be trusted. You could do such good.

My vision wavered. I reached for Zee, needing his shoulder to stay upright. I felt as though I were being pulled into the void, but it was just my mind, my sight swept sideways with dizzy speed. Images shimmered in front of me, inside me, spreading over the coiled scales of the darkness like some movie screen.

I smelled smoke. Fires flickered. I found myself in a different place, even though part of me was firmly aware that my body still crouched on stone, inside the prison veil.

But in my mind, I peered through the leaning trunks of palm trees and wild undergrowth. I heard human women screaming. Human men laughing, swaggering into sight, armed with rifles and machetes—dragging those women over the ground, most of them already naked. I couldn’t move to help them. Not with all my will.

This is now,
said the voice.

The scene faded, replaced by other, more terrible, visions. Glimpses of terror, suffering, every profound humiliation—and the voice said,
This is now, somewhere now
, and on it went, with me unable to look away, even for a moment, until it felt as though I were being ripped apart from the roots of my soul to my skin. I wanted to scream. I wanted to tear myself apart for all those men, women, and children who right now
at this moment
were being raped and murdered and forgotten. Everywhere, around me, below me, outside the veil.

“No,” I whispered, breaking on the inside—breaking. A scream boiled in my chest—rising higher and higher—burning through me, killing me. What I wanted I couldn’t have. Not both. Not both, without sacrificing something terrible. All that power, gone wrong. Power always went wrong. That was the price of having it.

A woman screamed inside my mind, but the voice was familiar. I was in moonlight again, watching my ancestor sob over her dead mother. Lost in those sobs.

So lost. I felt the boys pull on me, grabbing my arms, but their touch only made the sensation worse, like I was going to rip out of my skin. I was going to. I could feel it. I wanted it. Just to stop. Everything. To stop.

No,
said a little voice inside my head. Not the darkness. Something even deeper.

No,
it said again.

No,
it whispered.
No, baby. There’s always a way.

The scream building inside me broke into a sob, and an immense hand wrapped around the back of my neck—a spider’s touch, each finger long as my forearm. My eyes flew open, just as Ha’an kissed me hard on the mouth. I was too shocked to move—and it was that shock that brought me crashing down. I could think again. I remembered myself.

Ha’an tasted like blood, and his mouth was huge. Darkness rose up through my throat and touched his lips. The Mahati Lord shuddered, and broke away.

I wiped my mouth, trembling. “Why did you do that?”

He gave me a haunted look. “To understand something. Now I do.”

Zee stabbed his claws into the stone. “You see the other side, Ha’an. In her mind. Humans, us, together. Hearts, bleeding, together.”