What made Temur think he should have this power over life and death? And why did the flow of strength out of his hands seem to confirm that something, indeed, was happening?
Whatever he was accomplishing, it wasn’t enough, though he tried until the dark room spun.
Not until her struggles ceased and the first lank, slimed demonling undulated from her mouth in a well of blood and mucus did he turn away. Then, he could not turn fast enough. To his shame, he recoiled from the spatter across his face as the demonling fanned membranous wings and shook its head clean. Temur’s head snapped to the side, Samarkar’s blood unnaturally bitter upon his lips. He sobbed, but even clenching his eyes like fists did not remove the image of the skeletal, clawed thing drying its dark wings in the warm morning air. Temur thought the frail, bony limbs, the beaked and barbed head, the half-shuttered eyes would be with him until he died.
He groped for his knife, left beside the bed. When he raised his opened eyes again, Samarkar stood over him, gold-flecked hazel eyes too pale in a changed face. She seemed stretched, misaligned—as if the bones lay wrong beneath her skin. She reached out to him with a hand that was wrong, taloned, the fingers crooked and too long. She clucked, as if to a mare.
… not to Temur. To the demonling; it flew up with still-moist wingbeats, lofting itself to perch on her fingertips like a tame songbird with its long tail trailing behind. Behind it, a second hatchling began to drag itself from between Samarkar’s fleshless jaws, and the thing standing over her—wearing her skin stitched tight with black cordage over alien bones—smiled in maternal delight.
Outside the window, Temur realized, a million more of the tiny monsters roosted, and the light had been dappled not by the turning of leaves but the movement of their gently fanning wings.
* * *
Temur woke in warm darkness, a woman’s breasts against his back, her arm around his waist, a press of lips to his nape that told him she lay awake. He was frozen at first, dream-locked, the horror of what he had seen still creeping up his spine and in his veins. For a moment, it was all he could do to breathe, in and then out again, and to curl his fingers around Samarkar’s supporting arm.
“Sky and stars,” he muttered when he could say anything at all, and he felt her pull him closer.
“Dreaming true?” she murmured.
He closed his eyes to better feel her breath against his ear. “I hope not. It was the Sorcerer-Prince again. Breeding an army of demons in the bodies of my friends.”
“Ugh.” She waited for him to continue, a gentle strength.
He leaned against her. “It wore a different skin this time.”
She kissed his neck again, still breathing. “Yes?”
She must have known already, from the weight of his pause. But she waited nonetheless for him to get it out.
“Yours.”
* * *
The scent haunted Edene. At stray moments, when her mind wandered, she would catch a hint of the smell of hot desert, of ammonia, of frankincense and bitter myrrh. It made her stomach clench as the babe had not, and made her wonder, each time, at her sanity. She could almost feel al-Sepehr at her shoulder—his cloying paternalism, his grotesque parodies of human emotion. Just the smell—remembered or imagined—was enough to bring paroxysms of loathing up in her.
She had been touring the storerooms with the tireless Besha Ghul—so many bolts of cloth, so many salvaged weapons of ancient Erem, so many barrels of meat too rancid and vile for anyone who was not a ghul to eat, all laid in readiness for war—when the sense of presence moved over her again. Sniffing, she turned—this was a storeroom, and it already smelled of putrid meat and resin; surely that was all—but she found that the scent followed her into the hall. She stood, sniffing, and the ghul was right behind her.
“I’m not crazy.”
Besha Ghul gave her exactly the look anyone would give a crazy person, if anyone were a dog-snouted, velvet-gray monster. “You smell something unclean, my Queen?”
Besides the rotten meat? “I smell…” she hesitated. But she would not allow herself to be afraid to say his name. “I smell al-Sepehr. I mean, the man who—”
“We know of the al-Sepehrs,” the ghul said, its normal air of obsequiousness lost with the force of the interruption. Its ears went flat against the wrinkled head, lips curling in a slight snarl. “We knew of their master.”
Edene paused in surprise. “You don’t approve?”
“He cared not for Erem,” the ghul said. “Only for using its power against the other worlds.” A flicking gesture of distaste and dismissal with a clawed hand. “You will be a better Queen.”