A peculiar tussle ensued; it looked as if the old man were wrestling with himself. The waiter flapped nearby, agitated, and Karou scraped her chair back clear of flailing limbs both visible and invisible.
“Stop it. Stop!” Izîl cried, wild-eyed. He braced himself, raised his walking stick, and brought it back hard against his own shoulder and the thing that perched there. Again and again he struck, seeming to smite himself, and then he let out a shriek and fell to his knees. His walking stick clattered away as both hands flew to his neck. Blood was wicking into the collar of his djellaba—the thing must have bitten him again. The misery on his face was more than Karou could bear and, without stopping to consider, she dropped to his side, taking his elbow to help him up.
A mistake.
At once she felt it on her neck: a slithering touch. Revulsion juddered through her. It was a tongue. Razgut had gotten his taste. She heard a loathsome gobbling sound as she lurched away, leaving the graverobber on his knees.
That was enough for her. She gathered up the teeth and her sketchbook.
“Wait, please,” Izîl cried. “Karou. Please.”
His plea was so desperate that she hesitated. Scrabbling, he dug something from his pocket and held it out. A pair of pliers. They looked rusted, but Karou knew it wasn’t rust. These were the tools of his trade, and they were covered in the residue of dead mouths. “Please, my dear,” he said. “There isn’t anyone else.”
She understood at once what he meant and took a step back in shock. “No, Izîl! God. The answer is no.”
“A bruxis would save me! I can’t save myself. I’ve already used mine. It would take another bruxis to undo my fool wish. You could wish him off me. Please. Please!”
A bruxis. That was the one wish more powerful than a gavriel, and its trade value was singular: The only way to purchase one was with one’s own teeth. All of them, self-extracted.
The thought of pulling her own teeth out one by one made Karou feel woozy. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she whispered, appalled that he would even ask it. But then, he was a madman, and right now he certainly looked it.
She retreated.
“I wouldn’t ask, you know I wouldn’t, but it’s the only way!”
Karou walked rapidly away, head down, and she would have kept walking and not looked back but for a cry that erupted behind her. It burst from the chaos of the Jemaa el-Fna and instantly dwarfed all other noise. It was some mad kind of keening, a high, thin river of sound unlike anything she had ever heard.
It was definitely not Izîl.
Unearthly, the wail rose, wavering and violent, to break like a wave and become language—susurrous, without hard consonants. The modulations suggested words, but the language was alien even to Karou, who had more than twenty in her collection. She turned, seeing as she did that the people around her were turning, too, craning their necks, and that their expressions of alarm were turning to horror when they perceived the source of the sound.
Then she saw it, too.
The thing on Izîl’s back was invisible no more.
14
DEADLY BIRD OF THE SOUL
If the language was alien to Karou, it was not so to Akiva.
“Seraph, I see you!” rang the voice. “I know you! Brother, brother, I have served my sentence. I will do anything! I have repented, I have been punished enough—”
Akiva stared in blank incomprehension at the thing that materialized on the old man’s back.
It was all but naked, a bloated torso with reedy arms wrapped tight around the human’s neck. Useless legs dangled behind, and its head was swollen taut and purple, as if it were engorged with blood and ready to pop in a great, wet burst. It was hideous. That it should speak the language of the seraphim was an abomination.
The absolute wrongness of it held Akiva immobile, staring, before the amazement at hearing his own language turned to shock at what was being said in it.
“They tore off my wings, my brother!” The thing was staring at Akiva. It unwound one arm from the old man’s neck and reached toward him, imploring. “Twisted my legs so I would have to crawl, like the insects of the earth! It has been a thousand years since I was cast out, a thousand years of torment, but now you’ve come, you’ve come to take me home!”
Home?
No. It was impossible.
People were shrinking away from the sight of the creature. Others had turned, following the direction of its supplication to fix their eyes on Akiva. He became aware of their notice and swept the crowd with his burning gaze. Some fell back, murmuring prayers. And then his eyes came to rest on the blue-haired girl, some twenty yards distant. She was a calm, shining figure in the moiling crowd.
And she was staring back.
Into kohl-rimmed eyes in a sun-bronzed face. Fire-colored eyes with a charge like sparks that seared a path through the air and kindled it. It gave Karou a jolt—no mere startle but a chain reaction that lashed through her body with a rush of adrenaline. Her limbs came into the lightness and power of sudden awakening, fight or flight, chemical and wild.
Who? she thought, her mind racing to catch up to the fervor in her body.
And: What?
Because clearly he was not human, the man standing amid the tumult in absolute stillness. A pulse beat in the palms of her hands and she curled them into fists, feeling a wild hum in her blood.
Enemy. Enemy. Enemy. The knowledge pounded through her on the rhythm of her heartbeat: the fire-eyed stranger was the enemy. His face—oh, beauty, he was perfect, he was mythic—was absolutely cold. She was caught between the urge to flee and the fear of turning her back on him.
It was Izîl who decided her.
“Malak!” he screamed, pointing at the man. “Malak!”
Angel.
Angel?
“I know you, deadly bird of the soul! I know what you are!” Izîl turned to Karou and said urgently, “Karou, wish-daughter, you must get to Brimstone. Tell him the seraphim are here. They’ve gotten back in. You must warn him! Run, child. Run!”
And run she did.
Across the Jemaa el-Fna, where those attempting to flee were being hampered by those drawn to the commotion. She shouldered her way through them, knocked someone aside, spun off a camel’s flank and leapt over a coiled cobra, which struck out at her, defanged and harmless. Hazarding a glance over her shoulder, she could see no sign of pursuit—no sign of him—but she felt it.