Labyrinth of Stars(62)

What is beneath the mask? continued the darkness, softly. Who is the Hunter and who is the Kiss? Who is the Queen and the mother, and the woman who bleeds?

“Enough,” I said out loud, to the darkness or myself, I wasn’t certain.

Movement, in the corner of my eye. I flinched, but it was only the woman—and her name, our history, flooded back into my mind.

When she saw me looking at her, impatience slid across her face—mixing with anger, exhaustion—and she turned in silence, showing me her bound wrists. Chains dangled; silver manacles flashed in the sun. Her robes had been torn off one shoulder, with blood and dirt rubbed into her short hair and pale skin; and the scratches, bruises, were deep. She had been beaten for a long time.

“Messenger,” I said in a hoarse voice. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner.”

“You could not know,” she replied, giving me a cold, repressive glare over her shoulder. “Free me.”

I slid my left hand over the manacles, which were connected by a thin strip of metal, and started at that weakest point—digging in my blackened fingernails with a hard, sawing motion. My strength just wasn’t there, though—and neither were the boys. I was distracted by their slow, pained movement over my arm, and their slight shift in color; from obsidian to a dark charcoal gray. My nails were weak, too—weaker, anyway—and I felt pressure in them bordering on pain.

I kept working, though, chipping and tearing away at the metal binding the manacles—until finally the Messenger jerked her arms apart with a grunt and separated her wrists. I flexed my hands, fatigue running deep into my muscles. My fingers throbbed. So did my head. I was suddenly so thirsty, I couldn’t separate my tongue from the roof of my mouth.

I managed, though. “Are you okay?”

The Messenger flashed me a hard, uneasy look; her gaze swept down my body, no doubt reading my aura just as Grant always did: like a book that could spell out in one glance all the secrets of my soul.

“You are not the same,” she said.

“No shit,” I replied. “What just happened here?”

The Messenger walked toward the Mahati warrior sprawled face-first in the dirt. Chains dragged, from her feet and wrists. “You know what happened. I never returned to my masters—and now, after all this time, my old gods have decided to learn what happened to me. And why, as I am still alive, I failed to follow their commands.”

Years ago, she’d come to us as the enemy, sent to investigate the deaths of two Aetar on earth. We’d fought, again and again, until my husband had snapped the conditioning that made her unquestioningly obedient to her gods. Sometimes, I suspected he’d done a little more than that. I couldn’t really imagine anyone’s switching sides so easily, not after a lifetime of brainwashing.

“They sent a small army after you.”

“It takes a small army to capture my kind. Not that it is often required.” The Messenger crouched beside the Mahati, and for the first time her expression fractured, and deep sadness flickered in her eyes. There, and gone, all in a moment. The hardness returned, the glint and cold.

“They killed him,” I said, not seeing any movement, not even the faintest rise and fall of breath.

“He lives still,” she replied, surprising me. “But they hurt him when they severed our bond.” And then she fixed that narrow gaze on me, searching, focusing, seeing the invisible. “Did they do the same to you and the Lightbringer?”

A dull ache hit my chest. I reached for my bond with Grant, but the hole was still there, as gaping and horrible as ever. “No. Something else did that.”

“And he has not reasserted the connection?” A frown touched her mouth. “Is he dead?”

“Not yet. But that’s why I came to find you. He’s been poisoned with a disease. All of us have, including the demons.”

She did not look surprised. “Illness is a weapon that has been used before, on worlds that found disfavor with the Divine Lords. It is simple and efficient. A population dies until it is small enough to be controlled or exterminated entirely, then time erases the rest.”

“You’ve seen this with your own eyes.”

She looked down at the Mahati. “I have killed the survivors.”

Of course she had. And I’d just turned men and women into ash by touching them. No fucking stones were going to be cast by me. “Do they ever change their minds? Give these people a cure?”

“It has happened,” she said, running a slow hand through the air over the Mahati’s back. The chain dangling from her manacle rolled against his side, and I saw his gray skin twitch. “Not often.”