Angels and Djinn, Book 3: Zariel's Doom (27 page)

The serpent was large, but old. Its scaled skin hung in thin, soft layers on its slender bones and its coils lay on top of each other like old sagging blankets instead of muscled limbs.

“Shhhh.” Iyasu squatted down and sighed as he watched the slender tip of the serpent’s tail drag itself over the ground away from him. “It’s okay. As long as you stay in here a little while longer, no one’s going to hurt you. Just rest. We’ll be gone soon.”

“Soon?”

Iyasu jerked upright and looked back, but no one was behind him and the voice was definitely not Azrael or Hadara. It sounded like an older woman, tired and faint. “Hello?”

“Hello.” The voice came clearly from the back of the cave. From the serpent.

“I’m… I’m Iyasu.” His eyes darted madly as he tried to discern the creature more clearly, but beyond the end of the tail near the small patch of light on the floor, he could only see vague shadows.

“Iyasu?” The shadows moved, rising in waves of black against the black walls, but a form did emerge, a form with shoulders and arms, and a head.

Iyasu edged closer. “Who are you?”

“Ma… Marana,” she said. “I was called Marana.”

“Marana.” The name meant nothing to him. “We saw a trail by the water and followed it here. There are others outside. Some of them… you should avoid. But I won’t hurt you, I promise. You’re safe here.”

She chuckled, but the girlish sound quickly devolved into a rasping fit of coughing. “Thank you, Iyasu, for keeping me safe.”

“Can I see you? Do you mind? Could you come closer to the light?” he asked.

“Will it terrify you, I wonder?” she muttered. “Will it drive you mad to see me?”

“Please,” he said. “Let me see you.”

“Curious fool…”

He heard the sand shuffling and sliding, and then the shadows loomed closer and a figure in pale gray appeared, the figure of an elderly woman crawling on her belly because below her navel where her legs should have been she had the scaled body and tail of a monstrous snake.

She curled up next to the puddle of light on the ground as though it were a fire, and she pulled her tattered shawl tighter around her shoulders to cover her wrinkled skin. Her tangled gray hair had once been bound up on top of her head, but most of it had fallen loose except for a few locks that hung in stubborn arcs around her face. The woman called Marana looked at him wearily and laid her head on her arm on the ground. “You look very young to my eyes.”

“I’m twenty.”

She blinked slowly. “I’m older than that.”

“Maybe by a year or two.” He smiled. “Are you alone here? Are you all right? Do you need anything?”

“No, I’m quite fine here in my little corner of paradise. A blanket would be nice, but I—”

Iyasu stripped off his outer robe and laid it across her arms. “Sorry about the dust.”

She stared at the cloth touching her skin. “Thank you,” she whispered as she clutched the heavy robe to her chest and pushed a fold of the white linen under her head for a pillow. “Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome,” he said. In the dim light he could see her body quite well, the strange blend of bone and flesh, as well as her very human face, and her… soul. The soft inconstant light that hovered around her head wobbled and pulsed. He had seen many souls, human, djinn, and angel, but this one made him squint and pout in thought. “You know, I’ve never seen anyone like you before. Not exactly, anyway. You’re not… are you an angel?”

She closed her eyes and sneered, shaking her head. “No. I’m… Well, I was like you once. But I was changed. That was another life. Another time.”

“When? Where?”

“Far away. Far across the desert, across the sea, high in the mountains, in a green city…”

“Naj Kuvari?”

Her eyes opened and she bared her teeth in a terrible rictus of surprise and anger. “How do you know that name?”

He shivered as the cool air whispered over his bare arms. “I’ve been there.”

“Been there? Liar! The demons would have licked off your skin, drunk your blood, and cracked your bones to suck your marrow.”

He shook his head. “No. The demons are all gone now. And Raziel is alive again, and teaching his new clerics.”

“Raziel?” Her eyes shone and her lips trembled. “Alive?”

“Very alive.” The smile in his eyes faded. “What happened to you?”

“The Razielim, the clerics, they wanted to cheat death.” Her voice shook. “They did this to me. They said it would make me immortal, but they lied. It was just another of their mad experiments. And after they turned me into a monster, they turned me out of the city and left me to die in the jungle. But I didn’t die. I was strong back then. Very strong.” She paused to look at him, to study him. “I survived. I ran, I hid, I fought. I fed.”

He nodded.

“But I… I wasn’t myself anymore. I wasn’t human anymore. And I couldn’t stand to let them see me, the people, or to hear their voices, or any of it. So I left. I crept and crawled, year after year, across the sea, across the desert, until I found an old ruin, a crumbling stone house, where I lived for a few years. But then someone came. A madwoman, raving and thrashing about. I hid from her, but she didn’t leave, so I left and followed the water until I found this place. No more people. No more demons. Just the river and the sun. And I’ve been here ever since.”

“I’m sorry.” He reached out and took her frail hand in his. “I’m so sorry.”

“You’re sorry?” She scowled at him. “Well, that makes it all better then.”

He looked away. “I know there’s nothing that can ever give you back what you lost, all those years…”

“My husband, my home,” she hissed sharply.

“Yes.” He nodded, looking back at her again. “But you don’t have to live like this anymore. We can take you back to Naj Kuvari. Raziel can give you back your body, and maybe even your youth. You can live a new life.”

“I trusted a man once,” she said, her eyes drifting toward the darkness. “He found me in my little stone house and thought I was a creature from heaven, a queen of snakes, a prophetess. He gave me gifts and said he loved me.”

Iyasu said nothing, waiting for the inevitable tragedy at the end of the story.

“He betrayed me. Tried to kill me. Tried to eat me,” she whispered. “And would you believe I almost let him? I almost gave myself to him, because he said those things. Because he said he loved me.”

“I won’t betray you,” the seer said. “As a cleric of Arrah and a servant of heaven, I swear it to you.”

“Heaven!” Marana glared at him as she slithered back into the shadows, clutching the robe to her chest. “There is no such thing. Angels are just demons with wings, and clerics are demons in human masks. Get out!”

“No, please!” He held out his empty hands, ready to argue with her, to implore her, to beg her to come outside and meet his beloved Azrael to see that she was wrong and that he could help her. But the words all died in his mouth. He could see the countless years of anguish and loneliness in her eyes, the weight of the stories she had told herself to make sense of her bizarre and terrible life, the cold hatred she had nursed for centuries as she clung to life alone in the wilderness, knowing only betrayal and sorrow. He had no words that could outweigh all those lifetimes of pain.

 “I am sorry you lost your stone house,” he said after a moment. It was the most honest and reasonable thing he could think to say. “Even if it was a ruin, it must have been better than this cave.”

Marana peered at him. “It was. I miss the sound of the rain on the roof. And I miss watching the peris playing.”

“Peris?” He looked sharply at her face, searching her eyes. “Peris? At the ruin?”

“Oh yes. Pretty little things. And funny.” She smiled to herself with a faraway look in her eyes. “They could be so curious, and so clumsy. I loved watching them try to lift a piece of driftwood, or roast a nut over my fire. They were always dropping things and squabbling, like children.”

“But then someone came. A madwoman?”

“Yes, horrible thing. White hair, shaking like a leaf, shrieking and babbling nonsense, always hurting herself.” Marana glared and pressed her face down into the folds of his old robe for a moment. When she lifted her head, she said, “One night I tried to speak to her, to help her, but she attacked me. Threw stones at me. She moved very fast.”

“I’m sure she did,” he muttered.

“What’s this?” The old woman pointed at a fold in the robe just in front of her face.

“What’s what?” He leaned forward to look.

She drew her hand out of the robe and displayed on the tip of her finger a tiny golden beetle with a glowing white orb in its tiny pincers. “What is this?”

Chapter 22

“It’s a beetle from the Gaokerena,” Iyasu said softly. “I didn’t realize I had any on my clothes.”

“What’s it holding?” she asked.

“I’m not sure, really.” He squinted at the white speck clutched in the beetle’s horns. “Food for the tree, maybe. Or a seed. I really can’t say.”

“Mm.” The ancient snake-woman nodded as she studied the golden bug on her knuckle, and then she plunged her finger into her mouth and drew it out again, and began to chew.

Iyasu cringed. “Why?”

“Hunger,” she muttered between the soft crunches in her mouth. The morsel vanished a moment later and she flicked at her dark, stained teeth with the tip of her tongue. “Disappointing.”

“Sorry.”

She shrugged and pulled the robe on over her rotting shawl.

“Listen, I would truly like to help you, I would, but I won’t force you to go back to Naj Kuvari,” he said. “That’s your choice.”

She sighed and curled up into a ball on the sandy floor, and shivered.

“Maybe someday soon I can come back here with one of the healers and they can help you right here,” he continued. “If you want, I can do that.”

Marana shuddered and pulled the robe tighter around her shoulders.

When she said nothing, he said, “So I guess I’ll be going. We’ll all go, and you’ll be safe again in a few minutes. But it would help if you could tell us where we can find your old house. I’d like to see the peris, and maybe see if that woman is still there. She might need some help too.”

The elderly woman opened her eyes and stared at him, and for a moment he thought she might have died as her glassy eyes reflected the pale light of the sun on the floor. But then she coughed and shook, and lifted her head closer to the light and the warm rays of the sun fell on her cheek.

Her smooth brown cheek.

Iyasu squinted.

What is…? That’s not possible.

But it was happening. Marana’s face grew softer and fuller by the second, smoothing away the lines around her eyes and filling her lips with life and color, even as the gray vanished from her hair, leaving it a lustrous cascade of pure black in the darkness.

She cleared her throat and the weak rattle and cough were gone, replaced by the sound of a younger, stronger voice preparing to speak. “What is this?” she said in a honeyed tenor. “I feel strange. I feel… better.”

“You look… younger,” he said slowly. In truth, she looked as young as he did, as entire decades and centuries of unnatural decay vanished within a few brief heartbeats.

She stared at her hands as the flesh grew fuller, the skin smoother and darker, the movements fluid and powerful. “It’s a miracle.”

He nodded. “It looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“Iyasu!” Azrael called from the mouth of the cave. “Is everything all right?”

“I’ll let you know in a minute!” he called back.

Marana sat up for the first time, balancing strangely upon the coiled mass of her tail, and letting the dusty wrinkles of the cleric’s robe lay flat upon her breasts, revealing the young skin of her belly and arms. “What have you done?” she asked wonderingly.

He shook his head. “I really have no idea.”

“It’s wonderful,” she whispered. “The pain is gone. All the pains, the little ones, the aches, the creaks, the shaking in my chest, all gone.”

“Mm hm. Anything else changing?” Iyasu rose to his knees and glanced back toward the exit. When he looked at her again, he saw how sharply the tip of her tail was flicking and lashing across the floor, tossing small mushrooms of dust into the air.

“I don’t know, I…” she paused, gazing up at the jagged roof of the cave. “I…” She gasped.

“What is it? What’s happening?” He searched her face and hands for some sign, some expression or gesture that would reveal whether her heart was weakening, or her lungs collapsing, or her mind unraveling. But instead he only saw confusion, and the glimmers of pain.

Marana gasped again and grabbed her left wrist, only to yelp and yank her hand away again, her fingers bloody. Iyasu shuffled closer and saw that tiny bone-white spurs were thrusting up through her skin, and the longer they grew, the greener they appeared.

“What are they?” she asked, her arm shaking.

“They look like… thorns.”

She cried out again, this time reaching for her neck, but instead of sharp thorns, she found small round bulbs forcing their way out through her pores, dozens of them, and all growing larger and rounder with each passing moment, until they all unfurled in a single radiant splash of green leaves and red petals.

“Roses,” Iyasu whispered, his brows furrowed in a deep frown. “They’re roses. The seed you ate, the one the beetle carried, it was a rose seed, but not a seed, not like we know them. It was something deeper, something more elemental than just a seed. More like… the essence of the rose. Whatever it is, it’s taken root inside you.”

“Get it out! Help me!” She grabbed at the profusion of beautiful blossoms around her neck and chest, only to yell in pain when she tried to pull them out.

More thorns erupted on both of her arms, piercing the white folds of the robe’s sleeves and lancing forward from her hands, until her fingers were all but hidden within the deadly clusters of long, sharp points.

Iyasu stumbled back from her as she began to thrash about in her agony, grasping at the blossoms that she couldn’t stand to tear free, and stabbing herself over and over with the cruel tips of the thorns on her hands. More roses erupted around her face and in her hair, as well as on her naked belly, bursting into life in haphazard clusters all across her warm skin, small and large alike. And in the shadows where the woman’s serpentine tail coiled and writhed, more and more thorns sliced upward through her scaled flesh, transforming her lower limb into a vicious morning star flailing out of control.