Dreams of Gods & Monsters(65)
Author: Laini Taylor

As for Akiva, he would fly due west to Cape Armasin, which was the Empire’s largest garrison in the former free holdings. His role—and it could make all the difference—was to seed mutiny in the Second Legion, and attempt to turn at least a portion of the Empire’s might against Jael. While the Dominion forces were elite, aristocratic, and would fight to protect the privilege they were born to, the soldiers of the Second Legion were largely conscripts, and there was reason to believe that their hearts weren’t in another war—especially a war against the Stelians, who weren’t beasts but kin, however distant. Elyon thought that Akiva’s reputation as Beast’s Bane would count for something in the ranks, on top of which, he’d proven himself persuasive with his brothers and sisters.

Karou had need of persuasion, too, to urge Jael to leave, but it was a particular breed of “persuasion” that Liraz could manage as well as Akiva, and so it was arranged.

“I’m going to go find out what the scouts have to say,” she told Mik and Zuzana, dropping her gear with a thud and rolling her shoulders and neck. She was passingly bothered by the fact that there had been only three scouts waiting for them: Lilivett, Helget, and Vazra. Ziri had dispatched four pairs of scouts, and each pair was to have sent one soldier to rendezvous here and make report on any seraph troop activity around the bay.

So there should have been four.

Probably just late, Karou told herself, but then she heard the Wolf tell Liraz, “We have to assume the worst.”

And so she did.

And… so it was.

41

UNKNOWNS

There were just so many unknowns. From their perch in the Adelphas, the rebels were blind. Up here it was all ice crystals and air elementals, but a world lay beyond the peaks, full of hostile troops and slaves in chains, shallow graves, and the blowing ash of burned cities, and it was all as a play behind a closed curtain to them.

They didn’t know if Jael had sent troops to hunt them down.

He had.

They didn’t know if he had found and secured the Atlas portal since they passed through it.

He hadn’t, yet, but even now his search patrols were crisscrossing the Bay of Beasts, searching.

They didn’t even know if he’d returned to Eretz, victorious or otherwise, and they had no way of knowing that Bast and Sarsagon, the unrepresented pair of scouts, had been captured within hours of their dispatch from the crater a day and a half earlier.

Captured and tortured.

And the rebels didn’t know and couldn’t have begun to imagine that, on the far side of the world, the sky had been twilight-dark for more than a day—a strange and ruthless dark that had nothing to do with the absence of the sun. The sun still shone, but it peered out of the inky indigo like a burning eye from the shadow of a cloak. Its light still fell on the sea and the speckling of green isles. Colors were still tropics-bright—all but the sky itself. It had sickened and blackened, and the stormhunters still wheeled in it, their screams gone hoarse and horrible, and the prisoners in their unprisonlike room watched it out their window and shuddered in nameless horror, but they couldn’t ask any questions of their captors, because their captors didn’t come to them. Not Eidolon of the dancing eyes, not anyone. No food was brought, or drink. Only the basket of bloodfruit remained, and none had grown hungry enough yet to contemplate it. Melliel, Second Bearer of that Name, and her band of Misbegotten brothers and sisters were seemingly forgotten, and, looking out their barred window, they could only imagine that it meant the end of the very world.

Scarab and her four magi were aware of the state of their home sky. Sendings had come to them, even here, and they felt the disaster as a slackness of their own anima, as though their souls shrank from the shadow of annihilation.

But if they sensed the annihilation that was nearer at hand—much nearer—they did nothing to warn the host in whose midst they invisibly mingled. Perhaps it was apathy bred of centuries of reclusion. They’d been taught that these folk were fools, and that they deserved their wars. To take it a step further, there was a certain sense in the Far Isles that the wars served a grim good: That by occupying itself killing and dying here, the Empire couldn’t muster itself to bother the Stelians with its stupid hostilities.

And if there was a grandiosity in the Stelian belief that, above all, they must not be bothered, it was a well-deserved grandiosity.

They must not be bothered.

At all costs, the Stelians must be left in peace. Scarab knew, from halfway around the world, what Melliel and the others abandoned in their cell beneath that unnatural dark did not: that Eidolon of the dancing eyes was one of many who strove against the sickened sky, holding the seams of their world intact. That she didn’t have time for prisoners now, or for anything else.

And of course it’s possible that the five fire-eyed interlopers didn’t feel the ambush gathering just out of sight—though it seems unlikely that the collective breath passing in and out of thousands of enemy lungs could go unremarked by magi of such exquisite sensitivity. In any case, they didn’t warn the rebels.

They watched.

Scarab’s sending to the others was plainthought, without sensory threads or any effort at feeling. It is nothing to do with us, she sent.

It had always been true before. She could have no way of knowing how deeply untrue it was today, or what it was this peculiar ragged hybrid army stood against, or what would be the fallout if they failed.

There were just so many unknowns.

ARRIVAL + 48 HOURS

42

THE WORST

The first awareness is a sensation in the spine. Karou feels it and looks to Akiva, across the crowd of soldiers. At the same moment, he looks to her. A crease knits his brows.

Something—

And then, just like that, the sky betrays them. It’s low and bright—a lucent, backlit mist, just as it was when they came from the portal. But this time it isn’t stormhunters that drop from above.

It’s an army.

Many.

The angels are fire, and they are legion, wing to wing, and so the sky has become fire. Bright and alive. But the daylight is brighter and they’re blotting it out—so many—and so a tangled darkness falls on the host below.

Shadows, chased by fire.

Very fast. All very, very fast.

It begins.

The crater is a ragged bowl, and the Dominion are as a lid of fire, and they are many and many, wing to wing and swords drawn, and when they plummet in a single breath’s span, there is no getting out, and no getting around them.