The sum of all shadows, p.21
The Sum of All Shadows, page 21
“Before we left I spread a protective cocoon around him. He couldn’t move even if he regained consciousness.”
Ayla remembered her wing passing over Bravo before they left. She rose. “I don’t know whether to kiss you or kill you.”
“Neither would be an appropriate response,” Antiphon said. “Neither would it bring us closer to discovering where Bravo has been taken.”
Ayla frowned. “Taken?”
“Exactly.” The eagle stepped toward her. “If it was impossible for him to emerge from the cocoon, if it was impossible for him to move, and he is not here, by process of elimination someone or something must have taken him.”
Ayla thought her head would split open. All these desperate hours she had lived with the prospect of a reunion, reviving Bravo, healing him, saving him. These were the only things that allowed her to keep self-recrimination at bay. And now this. A reality that had never been on her radar.
She staggered, and the eagle spread one of her wings to keep her from falling.
“This is no time for weakness, Ayla,” Antiphon told her. “We need to find Bravo, and quickly before whatever abducted him finds a way through his protective cocoon. Right now, his energies are at their lowest ebb. He will not be able to fight. He is utterly helpless.”
32
The demon of fate, the Lord of Limbo, known more informally as the Regent, stepped out of the last swirl of smoke. He was a male human of dapper mien—at least he was at the moment—dressed in striped trousers, a velvet smoking jacket of a deep and delicious claret color. His feet were clad in formal patent-leather slip-ons, and he wore something like a cravat around his neck. He had eyes as black as his slippers and very pale skin. As a consequence, his eyes seemed to glow. His hands were slender, with unnaturally long fingers. He was of regal bearing, his face composed of noble features: wide-apart eyes, an aquiline nose, lips neither thin nor thick. In all, he cut quite a dashing figure, which, Emma decided, was the idea. And yet something about his face disconcerted her. It was as if he had chosen each feature from an assembly line, placing them on a tabula rasa one by one until this whole was achieved.
“So sister, what have you brought me?” His voice was thin, almost strangled, as if speech was not native to him.
“My name is Emma,” Emma said before Surah could utter a word.
He lifted his arms wide. “And what brings you to our fair land? Not as a tourist, surely. We get so few tourists here.” His voice held a sardonic edge as he shot Surah a glance. “And when we do they never leave.”
“I’ll bet,” Emma said.
“They wished they had never come.” He suddenly looked very dangerous. He rushed her, a blur accomplished so quickly that before Emma could draw another breath he had stretched her to her tiptoes with his hand clamped around her throat. The fingers were so long they ran right around to the nape of her neck to meet his thumb. “I tell them to sue their travel agent.” His face was so close their noses nearly touched. His breath smelled of cedar oil and bitumen. “That makes them laugh, but believe me soon enough they’re weeping like babies and calling for their mother.”
“Don’t hurt her,” Surah said, coming to stand beside them. “We were on our way to find the path to bring her back home.”
“You know that was never going to happen.”
Surah tossed her head. “I know nothing of the sort.”
The Regent snorted. “You always say that about these human trespassers when you know full well how abominable they are.” His lips pulled back from lupine teeth. “Especially this one.” His fingers dug into Emma’s throat, causing her to cough and choke. He had lost all semblance of civility and politesse. “You brought the cold fire. Didn’t you, dear?”
“My … name,” she managed to get out, “is Emma—”
“You told me that already.” The Regent’s glowing eyes transfixed her as if they were dagger blades.
“Emma Shaw.”
The Regent slammed his forehead into hers, bringing stars to her eyes and then tears. He loomed over her, casting a shadow as thick as asphalt. “You fucking Shaws.” He began to shake her as if she were a tree full of ripe apples. “You’re the reason for this war—you know that, don’t you?” He shook her harder. “Don’t you!”
Emma stared at him, unable or unwilling to utter a word.
“It was Conrad Shaw, gulled by Leviathan, who caused the breach between realms. It was his grandmother, Chynna, who had the misfortune to mate with that insatiable satyr. Again Leviathan! Out popped Gideon, Conrad’s father. A Nephilim. Filled with Leviathan’s evil ichor.”
He raised his arm until Emma’s feet dangled off the ground, until, with the noose of his hand around her neck, she was in the process of being hung.
“Now all of you Shaws are tainted with that same foul ichor. You are abominations. You sicken me to the point of violence.”
“Brother, please!” Surah clawed at his arm, trying to bring it back down, and Emma with it.
The Regent shook her off. “What is it with you and humans, Surah? What exactly is the attraction?”
“They are complicated creatures, brother. More complicated than we are.”
“Which is why they are continually enmeshed in trouble.”
“Their complications—”
“Enough!”
Still Surah persisted. She felt something for the human woman, it was true. “She is not responsible for the sins of her great-grandmother and her grandfather.”
“Irrelevant. She is spawn of Nephilim.”
“Brother, we are Medius,” Surah said, trying one more time. “We are pledged to neutrality. This action violates the Compact of the Medius.”
“You violate the Compact every time you interact with humans.”
“I don’t kill them or even harm them,” Surah said, thoroughly indignant. “I would never even contemplate such a thing!”
“I am Regent!” he roared. “I bend the knee to no one. Not them!” With his free hand he pointed over his head. “And certainly not him!” He pointed at the ground beneath them.
“But you are still Medius, brother. We are wed to reason.”
He glared at her. “Reason—”
“Put her down, brother, while we talk. I implore you.” She placed a hand on his cheek, said softly, “Leviathan would surely treat her violently. But not you. Not you.”
At last she had moved him, if only a fraction, but it was enough, and he lowered Emma until her feet were once more on the ground.
Surah kept her eyes on him. “And…”
Immediately as he loosened his grip Emma began to gag, sucking air through her bruised windpipe, into her oxygen-starved lungs. Her legs were like rubber, and Surah snaked an arm around her waist to keep her from collapsing against her brother’s hand.
“Reason you say.” The Regent took out a great gold pocket watch, snapped its lid open. Daring to look down, Emma could see nothing on its face; it was blank as a stone wall.
The Regent looked up. “When Conrad Shaw’s love for his mother caused him to lose all reason, to step into the trap Leviathan had laid for him, the breach opened, all reason was drowned. A blood-dimmed tide arose and slowly, slowly it began to slither out of the dark prison of God’s imagining.”
He snapped the watch closed, returned it to an inside pocket. “Hear me, Surah. As if I don’t have enough on my platter with this war almost upon us, I have this”—he tilted his head toward Emma—“to contend with.”
“She isn’t what you—”
“Silence, sister! Allow me to elucidate the truth of Emma Shaw and her cursed line. Witness the cataclysmic moment when myth and history entwine, and because of that moment history becomes stranger and more disastrous than ever the myth was.”
“Wh-what myth?” Emma’s voice was as slurred as her mind was muzzy. Yet still she had sense enough to understand the final mystery of her bloodline was likely about to be revealed to her.
“What myth, she asks?” The Regent sneered. “A myth you should know by heart, a myth you should have taken in with your mother’s milk, but I see by your expression that isn’t the case. And don’t you for a moment confuse ignorance with innocence. You are anything but innocent, Emma Shaw, despite what my softhearted sister falsely claims.”
His face settled in to the look of a professor about to distribute a final exam. “When Zeus looked upon the human Leda he lost all reason. Assuming the shape of a swan he dropped from the sky, fell upon her, and raped her. The issue from that rape was the impossibly beautiful Helen—Helen of Troy. Do you see? Do you understand? That single moment of lost reason—that act of rape—caused the Trojan War. A decade of death and destruction on the plains of Asia Minor.”
He looked from his sister to Emma. “Have the scales fallen from your eyes? Leviathan’s illicit congress with the human Chynna caused the issue of Gideon. From this one act came all the rest: the breach, the eternal enmity between Leviathan and the Shaws, and, worst of all, the war on Heaven, engineered by Leviathan on orders from his Lord and Master, abetted by the Shaws.”
“All unwittingly,” Emma managed to choke out.
The look of contempt on the Regent’s face fell on her like hard rain. “Please. Conrad’s mother warned him. She begged him not to try to save her—but, as I told you, all reason had been trampled under Leviathan’s hooves. All that was left Conrad in his frenzy was that most despicable of human traits: hubris. Continually baited by Leviathan, he still thought he could save her, still considered himself smarter than the First Sphere Seraph. He had his mind locked on an unreachable goal he should have known better than to try for. And what happened? His mother died and Conrad accomplished what neither Leviathan nor the Sum of All Shadows could ever have done: he caused the breach between the realms of humans and the Fallen.
“Now all sorts of vermin who live in the crevasses between Spheres are creeping and crawling out to where they—like you, Shaw—do not belong, wreaking all manner of mischief and havoc, upending the delicate balance of the Spheres.
“Now there is nothing for it but, like Agamemnon and his army, to go to war.”
The uncanny silence of the place, where not a single sound common to Emma’s home could be heard, closed around them. She was abruptly aware that, should the Regent get his way, she might never hear them again. The thought that she might never again see Bravo or Lilith was intolerable to her. She refused to accept the possibility that her life ended here in what appeared to be Limbo.
Gathering her wits about her, she said, “I can dispute little of what you’ve said, Regent. I have never before considered the confluence of the myth of Zeus and Leda with the reality of Leviathan and Chynna. Although one was a rape and the other probably was not—”
The Regent’s eyebrows lifted. “No? You think not? Was Chynna’s charismatic seduction any different than a physical rape? I think not.”
Something snapped inside Emma. The artifice of this conversation, that it was anything but a brutal browbeating leading to either her death or her torture at the Regent’s hands, had become unacceptable to her.
“I am not interested in ancient history, you pompous prick!” Her cheeks were as flaming as her throat, but for a different reason. “I am interested in the here and now. I’m not responsible for the actions of Chynna or of Conrad. They made their own decisions, for better or worse. Now is my time! Mine! Emma Shaw’s moment!”
Momentarily taken aback, the Regent said, “I don’t know what you think—”
“A Shaw, sister to Bravo, granddaughter to Conrad—whatever else you may brand me doesn’t count for a dropped penny. I am Aqqibari. I am one of the Protectors against the Darkness to Come.” She shoved both hands against his chest. “Now get off me!”
“I will not—”
“Djat had’ar!” Emma cried. And then, in almost the same breath: “Et ignis ibi est!”
At once, the blue flames ignited from the center of her palms, sending the Regent reeling back. His smoking jacket was on fire—cool, smokeless flames that nevertheless ate away at the jacket’s front so that in moments it slid off him, fell onto his patent-leather slip-ons, curling as it crisped, as if it were made of paper.
With irritating fastidiousness, the Regent brushed the ashes off his shirt. “Is this really the way you want to play this, Emma Shaw?”
“It’s the only way I know how to play,” she shot back.
“Consider yourself warned.” With that proclamation the Regent unwound the ascot from around his neck.
Surah rushed at him. “This isn’t right, and you know it!”
“I know no such thing.” Her brother’s neck was bare now, and they both could see the red line that went straight around it, as if he had been beheaded and his head placed back on the bleeding stump of his neck. He wound the ends of the ascot around his fingers and stretched it between his hands. As he did so, the ascot commenced to alter its form and shape. But before Emma could see what it was becoming, Surah stepped between them, blocking her line of sight.
“I won’t let you.”
“Step aside, sister.”
“I will not allow you to harm her.”
He shook his head. “I will ask as kindly as possible: How d’you propose to stop me?”
“You know full well how.” Her hands did something at her breast that Emma couldn’t see.
The Regent’s eyes opened wide. “Wait, what?” He shook his head. “No, you can’t!”
“Watch me.” Surah’s voice was calm and steady and, above all, determined.
This her brother heard. Fear came into his eyes. “Sister—Surah—surely she’s not worth—”
“An Aqqibari? Of course she is, brother. And even if she were not, even if she were simply a human female…” Her words drifted off, replaced by her brother’s exclamation.
Emma had moved enough so that she had an angle of view that allowed her to see that Surah had reached into her own chest and was now holding her heart in her cupped palms.
“What are you…?” The Regent’s face was pale as ice.
“Do it,” Surah commanded. “Do it, brother.”
“But—”
“There is no other way,” Surah said.
“If you are found wanting…”
Her head tilted. “Yes?”
“You will … you will die.”
Surah smiled. “This is what I choose to do for her, for Emma Shaw. Brother, I know that you cannot comprehend the bond between us. Nonetheless, here is my heart. You must comply.”
The Regent looked at her as if he had never truly seen her before. “I fear I have misjudged you, Surah.” And, swirling the ascot-thing back around his neck, he drew from his back trouser pocket a scale, which grew in size and weight. The Regent set it on the ground before him.
“Emma,” Surah said softly. “My brother has many titles, but only one name.”
“Osiris,” the Regent said, his gaze fixed on the scale.
“God of the Dead.” Surah smiled to ease Emma’s distress, for it was a gentle smile, filled with love. “Another of his titles.”
“One not much used in this day and age,” the Regent grumbled. He looked at his sister. “I want it known and duly inscribed that I perform this ritual under duress.”
“Noted.” Surah looked at Emma, held out the bundle cradled in her hands. “Now you must place my heart on the scales.”
“What? No! I can’t.”
“But you must,” Surah said, “for I cannot.”
“The ancient Egyptians believed that the heart was the font of both intellect and emotion.”
“They were not wrong.” Surah took a step toward Emma.
“This ritual,” Emma said. “You will be judged.”
“Against the feather plucked from Antiphon, the eagle-goddess of truth.”
Surah tilted her head, and Emma saw that the Regent was holding a very long, very beautiful feather in both his hands, cradling it in precisely the same manner as his sister held her heart.
“Now, Emma, take my heart and place it on the scales.”
Frightened nearly out of her mind, Emma did as Surah bade. The organ seemed light as air, almost as if it did not exist. There was no blood, either around the heart or in the hole in Surah’s chest, just darkness there, as if the cavity defied logic, as if it could be as deep as the cavern at the top of the Baatara Gorge waterfall in Tannourine.
Emma turned to face Osiris and the scales, but now a new fear struck her. “Into which pan should I place it?” she asked. “The left or the right?”
“That is entirely up to you,” Surah replied. “That is why I cannot do it myself.”
“So it matters which side I decide on,” Emma said.
“It does,” Surah confirmed.
The Regent looked up, straight into Emma’s eyes. “Choose!” he commanded.
Emma closed her eyes for a moment, then stepped to the scales, bent down, and without another thought, placed Surah’s heart onto the left-hand pan. The scales moved; of course they did, the left side now lower than the empty pan on her right.
“So be it,” the Regent said, and placed the feather onto the right-hand pan. The scales shuddered, wobbled, then down went the pan holding the feather.
Surah came and plucked up her heart, returning it to her chest. That done, she held Emma at arm’s length. “Now he can never harm you.”
“But,” said Osiris’s voice from behind her.
Surah’s expression grew grave indeed. “But now you must do the same.”
“What?” Emma was stricken. Her heart turned over in her chest and her throat closed up.
“Your heart must be weighed,” Osiris said.
“No, what? I can’t,” Emma said, panic-stricken. “I won’t.”
Surah’s eyes were filled with an emotion Emma could not decode. “I’m afraid you must, Emma. This is your one path back. Otherwise—”
“Otherwise,” Osiris said, “you will remain here forever, cut off from everyone and everything you know and love.”
Then, before Emma could make a move or even think clearly, Surah placed her hands on Emma’s chest.
