Lips Touch: Three Times(35)
Author: Laini Taylor

"Ow," she said, as he pulled her forward into the dark reek of the spire. "Wait," she cried, resisting. "I don’t want to go in there –"

"The beasts will come," Mihai said, pulling her inside and closing and locking the door behind them. Esme thought she would suffocate in the dense, putrid air, and she dropped to her knees to retch. When she was through and looked round, Mihai had gone deeper into the rough rock chamber. It was dark, but not fully dark. A few small apertures in the rock admitted shafts of light, enough to illuminate a milky mirror framed in jewels. Esme’s memory sang to her at the sight of it. She knew the mirror. She knew this place.

It was like a chapel, the rock ceiling high and vaulted. The walls recessed into niches and were carved with the clustered shapes of winged men and stags and wolves and moons, crows and serpents and crocodile beasts with the heads of hawks. And amid the carvings Esme saw eyelids, dozens and dozens — perhaps hundreds — of tarnished silver eyelids, just as she had dreamed about on her fitful night in France before the wolves found her. In her dream they had opened to reveal real eyes, but these were all closed. Viscous yellow streaks had dribbled from some of the hinged corners and Esme realized this was the source of the smell: dead eyes, hundreds of them.

Mihai watched her. Esme thought he seemed to expect something of her.

"What is this place … ?" she murmured. "Don’t you remember?" he asked softly.

Remember? She wanted to shake her head, to deny any such memories. How could she remember a chapel of silver eyelids? How could she recognize that iron cage hanging outside? And how could she know that Mihai’s lips had tasted like river? What was happening to her? In her memory things were moving. Deep, as if her mind had a crypt that had been unsealed and in it things were uncoiling — stealthy things, clammy as reptile flesh, things she didn’t want to see by the light of day.

She caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye and turned, freezing in place when she saw what it was. One of the eyelids had opened. They weren’t all dead. The sickly orb of an eye stared out at her; its iris was brown, like her own eyes. Her real eyes. It seemed human. She felt pinned in place by its scrutiny and held very still, not even daring to breathe.

"It doesn’t see you. That’s not the way it works," Mihai said, noticing her rigid posture. He gestured to the mirror and said, "Watch."

Esme looked at the glass. Something stirred in its cloudy surface and an image began to take shape. When it cleared, she saw a line of camels swaying their way over a dune with a red sky behind them, a sinking sun, and long shadows splayed out ahead of them. For an instant she felt as if she were there, trudging with them in the sand. "Where … where is that?" she asked Mihai.

"You would know better than I."

She felt a flash of frustration. How would she know? She turned from the mirror to retort, but before she could speak, something clambered up from that seething crypt of memory and assaulted her. It was a face. A man. A man with one eye. The socket of the other was hollow and raw and Esme’s gorge rose in her throat. She shook her head and the face receded. She whispered, "I don’t know."

He shrugged. "Nor do I. Africa maybe. She had spies everywhere. This is — was — the Tabernacle of Spies. The Druj Queen has always collected eyes. From village rats, eagles circling in the skies, crows, even songbirds in the thickets. She would take one eye and bring it here and leave the creature where it was, and she could see what her spies saw as they moved through the world. All of them. And not just animals. Humans too, like this one." He gestured to the staring brown eye. "She liked to watch the world."

"She … she plucked out their eyeballs?" Esme asked. "That’s … terrible!’ Then she paused, struck suddenly by the memory of her mother and the one-eyed seagull on the beach years ago. Mab’s behavior didn’t seem so irrational now.

Mihai was looking at all the silver eyelids and all the trails of old rot that had oozed from them, and he said, "I suppose most of the spies have died. She used to maintain her collection so carefully, replacing old eyes with new. She won’t be happy to see it like this. To see all of Tajbel fallen to this," he said, and Esme thought she detected not only sadness in him, but as he watched her face closely, also a hint of fear.

"Was this your city?" she asked.

"Not mine. I came from another tribe."

"You have tribes? What… what are you?"

He looked at her keenly again, and again she had the sense he was expecting something of her. "We are Druj," he said simply.

"I know, but what are you?"

"Ah, Esme. I haven’t learned how to tell that story yet." "Is it true you don’t have souls?"

"We never die. What need have we for souls?"

"Is that all souls are for? For when we die?" asked Esme.

Something happened in Mihai’s face then. The cool, almost cruel, animal flatness of his expression vanished and in spite of his sharp teeth and his pale, pale eyes, he looked suddenly human. Vulnerable. "No," he said, his voice like a growl in his throat. "They’re for living too."

Esme felt a surge of pity for him and was surprised by a sudden impulse to reach out and touch his hair. Her hand moved toward him before she even realized it and she made a fist and drew it back against her side. She was overcome by a powerful feeling of vertigo, as if she were standing at the edge of that crypt and it was deep, so deep, filled with rising mists of memory, with sulfur and scurrying things, and with terrible, terrible secrets. She had to steady herself against the wall, feeling silver and stone beneath her fingertips, and the old crust of liquified eyes.

Mihai watched her, and there was a look of longing on his face that sent a chill down her spine. She knew she’d seen it before, that same look, those eyes. And she remembered, again, the shock of his lips on hers.

But how? No man’s lips, mortal or immortal, had come anywhere near her in her young life.

There came a thud against the door, harsh enough to vibrate through the entire chamber. Esme gasped. Beasts were at the door. Since there was no bridge, they must have scaled the stalk of the spire itself. Their pounding jarred the silver eyelid and it slipped closed on its tiny hinges with a barely audible tink. The vision of the desert faded. A horrible moaning and wailing joined the pounding outside, and Esme’s heart began to race. Urgently she said to Mihai, "Why did you bring me here? Take me home. Please!"

"Soon, Esme," he said.

"Soon? But they’ll get in!"