Angels and Djinn, Book 3: Zariel's Doom (41 page)

Samira. I think her name was Samira…

She leaned down and brushed her lips over those of her love. “I have to go now. I love you. I’ll always love you. And if I ever can, I will find you again, wherever you are.”

Slowly, painfully slowly, she stood up, her eyes still on his face, and then she looked up at the tiny blue sky overhead. Her wings unfurled from her shoulders, black as midnight, and she felt her skin grow warm as she let her divine light pour outwards, transforming her sight so that the world appeared to her all in shades of molten gold.

She looked over at Hadara, still crouched beside her Rahm. “Is he alive?”

“He had a burn, but now… now it’s gone, I don’t understand how,” the princess said. “I think he’s going to be fine.”

“Raziel healed him. He’ll come and find you again when it’s safe to go up into the city. Stay here for now.”

“No, take me with you!” Hadara stood up. “I can help, I can fight.”

“No,” the angel whispered. “You can’t help me now. Stay with him. Stay with your love. Stay alive.”

Azrael rose up from the ground, streaking into the air in a storm of black and amber flames. Her world expanded suddenly from the dark and narrow confines of Ramashad to the wide open spaces of Shivala, but it was a Shivala that hardly looked like a city at all. Walls and towers lay in broken piles of stone and dust, huge craters dotted the ground, jagged spires of ice gleamed with reflected flames, and great black scorch marks covered everything in streaks of soot, ash, and cinders.

And everywhere she saw bodies, bodies running and grappling, bodies writhing in agony, and bodies lying still. Red and brown and black and gray, men and women, humans and djinn, everywhere.

As she hung in the sky surveying the chaos and carnage below, yet another familiar face flashed by her mind’s eye.

Zerai?

The falconer had died in horrible paralyzing agony, his heart overflowing with regrets and unrealized dreams, a vessel full to bursting with frustration and confusion and sadness, all but for one tiny thread, one small feeling in his heart. That feeling was joy and comfort and hope, and its name was
Nadira
.

And then he was gone.

Azrael looked down. The walking mountain that was Sophir stood in a field of shattered stones, surrounded by djinn in white robes that moved faster than the angel could catch them.

The frozen flames of Juran stood side by side with the watery form of Tevad, who was shaping and reshaping the land around them, distorting the ancient walls and towers of Shivala into shields and rams against the whirlwind of flame-haired djinn hurling waves of fire faster and faster. And in the distance, the blinding column of Arrah glared against the southern wall, no doubt also beset with fleet-footed attackers.

And everywhere in between she saw the bodies of the clerics, burned and crushed and discarded in the madness. That’s where she found Zariel, strolling calmly through the violence with his long red wings trailing on the ground to either side, and wherever they touched a cleric who was not quite dead, the man or woman would gasp and sit up as their hair blazed like bloody gold and they eyes shone with new power and new purpose, and one by one the transformed magi rose to their feet and began to follow their new master through the blasted streets of Shivala.

Azrael streaked across the sky and crashed down directly in her mad brother’s path, sending waves of dust and flame blasting outward from her feet. She stood tall in the shattered boulevard, her black wings raised, her eyes blazing with golden fire.

Zariel paused and looked at her with disdain and disappointment. “Another time, maybe. After I’ve claimed the city of the magi, after I’ve turned our other brothers and sisters, then, maybe, I’ll take the time to deal with you. When your mind is less… fractured.”

“No. This ends now.” Her voice boomed across the thoroughfare, and the flame-haired clerics winced at the power of it.

“Azrael, poor little sister.” Zariel paced toward her. “You may be Death, death for all things with souls, perhaps even death for angels. I can’t say. But you can’t kill. And the only way you can stop this is to kill me. So you can step aside, or I can cast you aside.”

“No.” She thought of Iyasu cold and gray on the ground. “I can’t kill you.” And she held out her empty hand to him.

He looked at her hand, thoughtful and skeptical. Then he looked up at the rampaging angels and djinn battling with fire and earth and steel all around them. “I was going to start with Tevad,” he said. “But maybe it would be more illuminating to see what will happen to poor little you first.”

He took her hand and a thunderclap shook the earth as a blast of red flame erupted from his hand and washed over her body. But Azrael let the flames pass over her, ignoring the flashes of crimson and gold in her hair as it whipped in her eyes. She pushed through the firestorm with a wave of her own darkness, her own divine essence, roaring down her arms like a flood of cold steel, a single terrible razor more subtle than any other in creation.

That was who she was. No, it was
what
she was. The blade that severed the soul from the flesh. Her most basic truth. Her original and eternal purpose. To be that blade. That perfect tool to cleave the immortal from the mortal.

Zariel gasped and shook, his flames guttering and growling as his body shuddered against the sensation of that blade, sharper than anything that could be described in terms of flesh or steel.

But he straightened himself, stood taller, spread his wings wider, and poured his red flames upon her with even greater fury. And she felt him burning her, tearing her body apart, just as any fire transforms wood or cloth into ash and cinders, he was changing her immortal flesh from what it was to something else, something new and different. Something
not her
.

And she couldn’t stop him. Her dark blade could not cut his bright fires, could not sever his soul from his body. Azrael closed her eyes, groping through the darkness of her mind for answers, for guidance, but all she saw were the faces of the dead marching on and on through her.

The air hissed all around her, and Azrael opened her eyes to see what new torment was about to strike her. She saw her skin turning sickly white, and she saw her long black hair shining like bronze at sunset, but she could not see what was making the air hiss and whine like ten thousand angry hornets. Zariel frowned, and even as he continued to burn her, he turned his head and looked to the east.

She followed his gaze and gasped. There in the wide gap of the city wall stood a mighty beast, a massive creature with golden skin and a lone rider perched upon its back. The boy wore bright blue and gold robes covered in armor plates all too large and too loose for his thin frame, but his eyes peered out across the battlefield with more cold determination than men five times his age.

“Kamil!” Azrael cried out.

The boy squinted in her direction and said nothing. He merely reached down and touched the head of the gigantic karkadann and a score of lightning bolts flashed from the beast’s huge horn, covering the length of the city faster than even Azrael’s eyes could follow, and the blinding charge struck Zariel squarely in the face.

The thunderclap rocked the entire city, shaking loose every stone and brick, sending thousands of people slipping and stumbling.

Zariel fell to one knee and pressed one hand to his eyes.

Azrael looked down at him, her mind still whirling as she felt the red firestorm grow slack for a moment.

My razor of death cannot turn aside his fires of change.

What can?

Can anything?

She blinked.

He didn’t want to turn me. He said I was broken.

Fractured.

Something inside me… scared him.

And then she knew what to do. She reached inside herself for that thread, that endless thread of faces and voices, the thread of Death that slipped relentlessly through the core of her own, ancient soul, and she pressed that thread outward, letting it ripple down her arms in waves of black flame until Zariel gasped and trembled in her grasp.

The red angel shook and tried to let go of her, but Azrael held tight to him, crushing his hand in hers.

“You think I’m broken,” she said. “You think I’m damaged.”

Zariel clawed at her arm with his free hand as the black flames rolled and roared toward his shoulders, and his own bloody wings began to flicker and fade.

“You think the parade of Death through my mind has done something awful to me, to my soul.” She pulled him a little closer and raised her black wings a little higher.

Zariel groaned as the black flames licked at his face, and suddenly his own red wings flared to life all the brighter, not with his rage or hate but with mad, blind panic.

“But Death is the ultimate change, brother,” she whispered. “And if you so desperately want to change the world, if you want it enough to murder the innocent and destroy the beautiful, if you want it enough to take away my love, then I will give you the greatest change imaginable.”

She pulled him closer so that they stood face to face, even as he fought to free himself, and she placed her other arm behind his shoulders to embrace him tightly, and whispered in his ear, “I give you Death.”

The black flames engulfed them both and in that moment, she could see nothing but dark fire, no sky or sun, no earth or walls, not even the faces of the dying, and for one brief moment, one terrible, wonderful moment, she felt a vast silence engulf her heart, her mind, her soul.

Azrael exhaled, tasting the sweetness of that silence. No one cried out, no one was terrified, no one was angry, no one was confused, no one was lost. It was only her, alone within herself.

And then the moment ended and she pulled back the thread of Death. The faces and the agony reappeared in her mind’s eye, the humans and djinn dying all over the world, and she let her holy fires recede into her luminous flesh.

The sun blazed down from a cloudless sky, and Zariel crumpled to his knees before her, clutching his head and weeping. His flame-haired acolytes stood back, their faces awash with confusion, saying nothing.

She heard a word, or two, and she knelt down beside her brother to listen.

“…sorry, so sorry, I didn’t know, I didn’t know, I swear I didn’t know, I’m so sorry, so sorry, so sorry…”

He wept and muttered, on and on as he rocked on his knees, clawing at his hair and eyes, gasping for breath.

“Now you know,” she said. “Now you know what I carry, what made me different, what made me run away all those lifetimes ago. It’s terrible. The most terrible thing imaginable. It’s the burden I carry every day as I walk through this world, protecting the weak, raising the broken, defying the corrupt, and even making love to a fragile little boy who couldn’t stop believing in hope and life and kindness and love… A burden so great that a mere glimpse of it weighs so heavily on you now that you can’t even stand up. Remember that, dear brother, when you wonder which of us is broken, and which of us is strong.”

Azrael stood up and left him there, crouched and crying. She looked at the clerics, the humans and the djinn, all their souls invaded and infected with the pride and arrogance and power of a fallen angel. With a golden flare of her eyes, she called out, “Raziel!”

And her gleaming blue brother appeared beside her, his face a calm glass mask even amidst the fires of war. “Yes?”

“Can you heal them?”

Raziel turned a curious eye on the throng before him. “Yes, I believe I can.” He spread his six wings of flowing crystal and glided forward among the warriors, and everywhere his wings touched them, the people’s hair faded back to black and brown and gray, and the fire left their eyes, and they staggered back against the broken walls of their city, casting shocked and miserable stares at the ruins of their homes.

Azrael stood and watched her brother go, and bit by bit she felt the heat and the rage around her fading away as the shreds of Zariel’s soul were cleansed away from the innocents. The sounds of battle ended abruptly with the last few staccato crackles of stoneworks falling in the distance and the last roars of fire overhead.

She looked around herself, seeing only broken things and broken people. There was nothing left of Shivala but rubble and despairing faces, and the sight of them only compounded the grief inside her. The world felt thin and unreal as she began to walk through it, past the wreckage of Zariel still sobbing on his knees, and past the gaping pit where her Iyasu lay. She sank down through the cool air to collect his body, and with great effort she lifted him again, one last time, and carried him up to the city where he was born.

I should take him… somewhere. That’s what people do, they take the body, and they prepare it, and they bury it, or burn… no, not burn…

With her wings folded, Azrael walked through the shattered streets of Shivala. A shadow fell across her, accompanied by the heavy rhythm of bronze hooves marching down the road beside her.

“You know, Simurgh said you would be good and useful one day. I wonder if she knew how right she would be. Or how soon,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

“I wish I could have done more,” Kamil said. He gazed down at the body in her arms. “Iyasu… Everything he told me, about this place, about the djinn, and the war, it kept racing around my head. I wanted to do something. I wanted to help. And when we found Dalyamuun and the karkadann, I saw a way to help. It wasn’t difficult, escaping from the city. Stealing the karkadann was… well, it doesn’t matter now. I’m just sorry I wasn’t faster. I’m sorry I couldn’t save him.”

She nodded and swallowed. “You saved me. You saved us all.”

“No, you did that.” The boy squinted at her. “I only helped for a moment.”

“That moment meant everything.”

They passed the tear-stained faces of the clerics and blank stares of the djinn, and kept walking toward the only thing that seemed to have survived. The palace. All of the outer buildings lay in heaps of dusty stone, and the gardens had burned, and the windows had shattered, but through some miracle the small white mountain of the inner palace still stood tall above the desert plain.