Lyric feels his own pulse throbbing as if his skull has moved outside his flesh like the strange face of the skull siren.
He’s learned a quad of ways to kill a person on a battlefield: barehanded, with force-blade, with baton and staff. Those motions are part of his muscles and instincts after years of training.
His hand doesn’t move.
Lyric stands, the bird cradled against his chest. His indecision only prolongs the suffering of the creature.Decide!he commands himself.Act! You must. Help it.
He doesn’t kill it.
When he can delay no longer, he hurries inside and offers it to Garnet, who grew up among griffons and has never killed anything by word or deed. Garnet crushes the bird swiftly.
Lyric méra Esmail His Glory doesn’t manage to kill anything with his own hand for six more years.
Silence exists in every shadow of his thoughts, holds between his heartbeats. It is there when he has strange dreams, when he struggles to choose how to align his empire with his faith. When his sister manipulates behind his back, when she gloats, when he faces a numen chained behind his throne and doesn’t set it free. He hasAharté as he writes letters to a wife he’s never met, hoping to seduce her with his conviction. Silence throbs with his inner design during drawn-out meetings and mirané conflicts, long nights, pestilence in the south and blight in the west, armies from the Bow reemerging, rebellion in the streets of his capital city, and the revelatory cries of human architects invested in a new prodigy who flaunts her apostasy.
When the balance of Holy Design frays at the edges of his mind, or the knots pull taut in his guts, he walks the labyrinth until he recalls it in the repetitive motion of his feet and the longing rise and pinging ecstatic charge under his skin, feels it reverberating in the globe of his skull like the sea he’s never heard caught in the slick pink curve of a shell.
When Lyric is twenty-seven, he meets a young woman in a garden who tells him he’s wrong about everything. Maybe that’s why he falls in love with her.
He’s the same age when she dies.
Empty sky
Helpless, Lyric presses against the blood spilling from Iriset’s ribs. The dart jerks with her agonized gasping and Lyric tries to push it all back in, take it back, he never would have commanded this, but that doesn’t matter, it happened anyway, and Iriset mé Isidor is going to die again. In his lap.
He puts his other hand to her forehead, brushing sweaty hair away, and holds her against the crook of his knee. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I know it hurts.”
Iriset’s lashes flutter and her hand flings up to grasp at his shoulder, digging in hard.
Lyric remembers a skull siren, fluttering, too, and grasping, and he knows he can’t kill Iriset any more than he could help that dying remnant of apostasy. But he’s stronger now. He can make it faster.
Rubbing his thumb at the crease of her brow, as if that could possibly offer comfort, he wraps his bloody hand around the dart and, without hesitation, pulls hard.
It slips, and he grits his teeth as she whimpers. He tries again: The dart jerks free, and Iriset’s mouth gapes open on a hoarse, choking cry.
“Pressure,” says a voice in Lyric’s ear, and he instinctively obeys, flattening his palm to the wound. Hot blood seeps through his fingers, filling the nail beds and finding every wrinkle in his knuckles. No, wait, this isn’t what he was doing, he was trying to help her die faster, easier.Who said that?
Lyric whips his head up: He’s in a small crater in mirané-brown rock, and scrambling down the wall toward him is a monster.
He presses harder in shock and Iriset groans. The monster is vaguely human-shaped, covered in rough green scales, from the clawed feet digging into the rocks as it skids down the crater wall to the sharp spines lining its elongated skull instead of hair. Tattered pink cloth covers its hips and ties around its neck like a little cape, beneath which are powerful shoulders over two pairs of arms with four-fingered hands tipped in claws with a wicked hook where a thumb should be. The lower arms are smaller, attached to the ribs with extra elbows of some kind, and Lyric cannot stop gaping.
Its eyes are huge, round, and bright as verdigris with no white at all. The pupils are tight slits in the bright sunlight, hooded by thick brows of sharp scales, like an alliraptor. Its cheeks are scaled, too, in ridges as along its jaw. It has a lipless mouth but a scaly human nose. All its exposed skin is yellowish-green, like an old bruise.
That lipless mouth is moving, speaking to him, and the longer arms reach toward Iriset but Lyric leans away, pulling Iriset, too. He is staring at a human-alliraptor hybrid creature and he can only think of the alliraptor that appeared with Aharté and the Holy Syr in those stories from the end of the Apostate Age—the alliraptor She Who Loves Silence also loved, and Lyric says, “Aharté.”
“Aharté,” the monster answers, and then says more, and its head turns to look at another person carefully sliding down the edge of the crater. This one is human, a young woman with Osahar-peach skin stretched too tight around colorless lips as if she were recently ill.She arrives and does not shy away from the monster, but touches its shoulder to nudge it aside, speaking to Lyric with horrible, penetrating looks. Lyric wants to cover his eyes, wants to demand they both cover their eyes, put on a mask, anything to stop staring at him, but he can’t. The woman’s eyes are luminous gray and large over sharp cheeks, and her red-brown hair is cut bluntly across her forehead and equally straight at chin-level.
“Aharté,” she says, and her voice is quiet. She kneels and Lyric flashes his gazefinallydown at Iriset in his lap. Blood coats the corner of her mouth, a smear of it spread down her jaw and staining her collar. Then the woman tears at the remains of Iriset’s shift. The rip echoes through the ringing in Lyric’s ears and as he watches, the woman flexes her hand, her fingernails gleaming like quartz, like the tips of design styli, and she uses small crystal claws to draw a force-net right there in the air, over Iriset’s ribs, a little cage she twists in both hands and pinches into the edges of Iriset’s bloody gash. With a bright click of something, teeth maybe, the cool air surrounding Lyric coalesces in an ecstatic charge, raising hair all over his body.
Ecstatic snaps together in a visible flash and burn and Iriset arches, head lolling against his knee. Then the design net is gone, and the ozone flavor fades from the air.
The tears in Iriset’s robe are wet with blood, but he pulls them away to find no gaping puncture, no bleeding. The edges are welded together, bright red like burns. His hand trembles as he touches the hot skin. Her ribs expand with breath. Lyric bends over her as pure joy shivers through him, bringing a wave of exhaustion behind.
The woman is speaking again. Lyric raises his head. Her voice remains soft, urgent and earnest. He can almost understand.
“Is she all right?” Lyric says. “Will she be…?”
The monster murmurs something and he glances fearfully at it,willing himself to be calm, to swallow his discomfort. No—to be honest it’s disgust and horror, and the monster who is maybe also a human turns away as the young woman speaks again, but slowly.
