Ah, yes. When Karou was too small to shove out into the world’s streets on her own, Issa had kept her here. Hours they had sometimes crouched in this tiny space, Issa trying to keep her entertained by singing songs or drawing—in fact, it was Issa who had started her drawing—or crowning her with venomous snakes, while inside Brimstone confronted whatever lurked on the other side of that door.
“You can come back in,” Issa continued, “after.”
“That’s okay,” Karou said with a sigh. “I’ll just go.”
Issa squeezed her arm and said, “Sweet dreams, sweet girl,” and Karou hunched her shoulders and stepped back out into the cold. As she walked, clock towers across Prague started arguing midnight, and the long, fraught Monday came at last to a close.
9
THE DEVIL’S DOORWAYS
Akiva stood at the edge of a rooftop terrace in Riyadh, peering down at a doorway in the lane below. It was as nondescript as the others, but he knew it for what it was. He could feel its bitter aura of magic as an ache behind his eyes.
It was one of the devil’s portals into the human world.
Spreading vast wings that were visible only in his shadow, he glided down to it, landing in a rain of sparks. A street sweeper saw him and dropped to his knees, but Akiva ignored him and faced the door, his hands curling into fists. He wanted nothing so much as to draw his swords and storm inside, end things quick right there in Brimstone’s shop, end them bloody, but the magic of the portals was cunning and he knew better than to attempt it, so he did what he had come here to do.
He reached out and laid his hand flat against the door. There was a soft glow and a smell of scorching, and when he took away his hand its print was scored into the wood.
That was all, for now.
He turned and walked away, and folk cringed close to walls to let him pass.
Certainly, they couldn’t see him as he truly was. His fiery wings were glamoured invisible, and he should have been able to pass as human, but he wasn’t quite pulling it off. What people saw was a tall young man, beautiful—truly, breath-stealingly beautiful, in a way one rarely beholds in real life—who moved among them with predatory grace, seeming no more mindful of them than if they were statuary in a garden of gods. On his back a pair of crossed swords were sheathed, and his sleeves were pushed up over forearms tanned and corded with muscle. His hands were a curiosity, etched both white with scars and black with the ink of tattoos—simple repeating black lines hatched across the tops of his fingers.
His dark hair was cropped close to his skull, with a hairline that dipped into a widow’s peak. His golden skin was bronzed darker across the planes of his face—high ridges of cheekbones, brow, bridge of the nose—as if he lived his life in drenching rich honey light.
Beautiful as he was, he was forbidding. It was difficult to imagine him breaking into a smile—which indeed Akiva hadn’t done in many years, and couldn’t imagine doing ever again.
But all of this was just fleeting impression. What people fixed on, stopping to watch him pass, were his eyes.
They were amber like a tiger’s, and like a tiger’s they were rimmed in black—the black both of heavy lashes and of kohl, which focused the gold of his irises like beams of light. They were pure and luminous, mesmerizing and achingly beautiful, but something was wrong, was missing. Humanity, perhaps, that quality of benevolence that humans have, without irony, named after themselves. When, coming around a corner, an old woman found herself in his path, the full force of his gaze fell on her and she gasped.
There was live fire in his eyes. She was sure he would set her alight.
She gasped and stumbled, and he reached out a hand to steady her. She felt heat, and when he continued past, his unseen wings brushed against her. Sparks shivered from them and she was left gaping in breathless, paralyzed panic at his receding form. Plainly she saw his shadow wings fan open and then, with a gust of heat that blew her headscarf off, he was gone.
In moments Akiva was up in the ether, scarcely feeling the sting of ice crystals in the thin air. He let his glamour fall away, and his wings were like sheets of fire sweeping the black of the heavens. He moved at speed, onward toward another human city to find another doorway bitter with the devil’s magic, and after that another, until all bore the black handprint.
In far reaches of the world, Hazael and Liraz were doing the same. Once all the doors were marked, the end would begin.
And it would begin with fire.
10
HITHER-AND-THITHER GIRL
In general, Karou managed to keep her two lives in balance. On the one hand, she was a seventeen-year-old art student in Prague; on the other, errand girl to an inhuman creature who was the closest thing she had to family. For the most part, she’d found that there was time enough in a week for both lives. If not every week, at least most.
This did not turn out to be one of those weeks.
Tuesday she was still in class when Kishmish alighted on the window ledge and rapped at the glass with his beak. His note was even more succinct than yesterday’s and read only Come. Karou did, though if she’d known where Brimstone was sending her, she might not have.
The animal market in Saigon was one of her least favorite places in the world. The caged kittens and German shepherds, the bats and sun bears and langur monkeys, were not sold as pets, but food. An old crone of a butcher’s mother saved teeth in a funerary urn, and it was Karou who had to collect them every few months and seal the deal with a sour swig of rice wine that left her stomach churning.
Wednesday: Northern Canada. Two Athabascan hunters, a sickening haul of wolf teeth.
Thursday: San Francisco, a young blonde herpetologist with a cache of rattlesnake fangs left over from her unfortunate research subjects.
“You know, you could come into the shop yourself,” Karou told her, irritated because she had a self-portrait due the next day and could have used the extra hours to perfect it.
There were various reasons why traders might not come into the shop. Some had lost the privilege through misbehavior; others weren’t yet vetted; many were simply afraid to submit to the serpent collars, which shouldn’t have been a problem in this case, since this particular scientist spent her days with snakes by choice.
The herpetologist shuddered. “I came once. I thought the snake-woman was going to kill me.”
Karou smothered a smile. “Ah.” She understood. Issa was no friend to reptile killers, and had been known to coax her snakes into semi-strangulation as the mood arose. “Well, okay.” She counted out twenties into a decent stack. “But you know, if you do come in, Brimstone will pay you wishes worth much more than this.” He did not, to Karou’s bitterness, entrust her to dispense wishes on his behalf.