Empires of Moth (The Moth Saga, Book 2) (8 page)

He came walking around the bed
toward her.

Biting her lip so hard she
tasted blood, Linee crept under the bed into the dusty darkness.

She could see Ferius's boots
circling the bed. Somewhere outside, she heard men sing a song and
laugh, and it seemed so strange to her that folk could find joy while
her husband lay dead.

"Where are you, friend?"
Ferius said. "Speak to me and you will not be harmed." His
boots moved several paces away. She heard hinges creak. "Are you
in the closet? No . . . Are you behind the table?"

Linee gritted her teeth and
crawled.

Stay
alive. Just stay silent and stay alive.

The voice rose behind her. "Are
you . . . under the bed?"

His robes rustled.

Linee scurried out the other
side of the bed, leaped toward the open door, and bolted outside.

"Friend!" rose his
voice behind.

Linee ran. She leaped onto a
stairway. She raced downstairs, heart thudding.

I
have to find Sir Ogworth! I have to find his soldiers. I—

Across a hallway, she found
herself entering the main hall of the Night Castle, the place where
only moments ago, she had seen Ceranor meet his nobles.

Those nobles, all the dozens of
them, lay dead in the hall, piled up upon the granite table. Their
necks were split from ear to ear. Above their bodies hunched a host
of Sailith monks, their yellow robes stained red. All raised their
heads together to regard her, a flock of vultures turning from a
carcass.

Tears filled Linee's eyes.

She turned away from the hall.

Through a labyrinth of stone and
fire, Queen Linee of Arden ran, her heart pounding and blood staining
the hem of her gown.

 
 
CHAPTER FIVE:
DANCE OF DEATH AND LIFE

Koyee entered the Hall of Dying
dressed like a vulture of metal, leather, and glass.

Her outfit creaked and clanked
as she walked, hiding every part of her. Leather robes draped across
her, stiff as armor, brushing the floor. A belt heavy with buckles
and purses jangled around her waist, holding vials and spoons and
scalpels. A wide-brimmed hat topped her head, and gloves encased her
hands, ending with steel fingertips like thimbles. Worst of all was
her mask; it wrapped around her head, laced up at the back. Its beak
flared out, full of spices to stifle the miasma of disease. Even her
eyes hid behind glass lenses that turned the world into a smoky,
wavering dreamscape.

When she passed by a candlelit
window, she gazed upon her reflection. She didn't see a girl; she
didn't even look human. A gangly, creaking bird stared back, a
creature of both nightmare and mercy.

"For I am a Sister of
Harmony," she whispered, her voice muffled inside her beak. "I
am here to guide souls into death."

And
what of my own soul?
she wondered. Hiding here from the monks of Sailith, would she scar
whatever purity and hope remained inside her?

As if to answer her thoughts,
the anguished screams of the dying echoed down the hall. Koyee tore
herself away from the window and shuffled onward, her boots thumping
and her outfit creaking and clanking. She made her way toward the
doors, stepped into the Hall of Dying, and beheld a nightmare she
knew would forever haunt her.

The hall was as large as a
temple. Hundreds of beds stood in rows, and upon them lay the
devastation of the Sunlit Curse. Elorian men, women, and children lay
writhing and moaning, their faces gray with fever, their bodies
covered in oozing boils. Their teeth had fallen from bleeding gums,
and their fingers had shriveled into black twigs. The plague had come
upon the Timandrian ships, hidden inside rats, cats, and scurrying
cockroaches; it had devastated Timandra ten years ago, the soldiers
said, killing all those susceptible to its whispers. Now it tore
through Pahmey, striking everywhere—from the towers of the wealthy
to the huts of the poor.

"Sister," whispered
the dying, hands reaching out toward her. "Mercy, sister.
Prayer."

Koyee stood for a few breaths at
the doorway, frozen. Several patients were no longer moving. The
others were only moments from death, so frail they seemed like
skeletons draped with skin. As strange as her costume appeared to
her, the Sunlit Curse twisted these people into shapes far stranger,
living death of pus and blood.

Koyee sucked in air, inhaling
the scents of spices inside her beak, a thick and tangy breath that
would protect her from the curse.

Yet
they are no monsters,
she
thought.
They
are my brothers and sisters, and they need me. The true monsters are
those tall, fair Timandrians with their shining armor and endless
cruelty.

She stepped into the hall and
walked among the beds. The hands of the dying reached out. Their
fingernails, blackened with disease, scraped against her robes. Their
bleeding mouths opened and closed, begging for prayer, and their
boils oozed. At every bed, Koyee paused and held out a bottle of
silverdream, a milky medicine of mushrooms in deep caves. It would
not cure these people, for there was no cure for the Sunlit Curse,
but it could ease their pain. She dripped two drops into every mouth
and whispered a prayer.

"The stars of the night
will bless you, child of Eloria. The moonlight will glow upon you. We
are the night."

Her words and medicine sent them
into shivering, feverish sleep, their eyes moving behind their lids,
their gums smacking, their curling fingers reaching out to those
stars, awaiting their journey to the world beyond.

More creaks and clanks rose in
the hall. Other Sisters of Harmony, humanoid birds with their beaks
and hats, moved between the beds. The sisters prayed, soothed, and
poured their medicine. They moved like clattering marionettes,
wheeling out the beds of those succumbed to the illness, angels of
death escorting famished, rotted bodies into the darkness.

As Koyee stood above a young
girl, praying as the child's breath faded into stillness, tears
splashed her lenses. She missed The Green Geode. She even missed
living in the alleyways, scrounging through trash to survive. But
inside her beak, she tightened her lips and raised her chin.

In
The Green Geode, I played music for those who brought this curse upon
us,
she thought.
Here
I heal their victims. Here I suffer. Here I am noble.

The Sunlit Curse killed Madori
the yezyana; a Sister of Harmony rose from the ashes, a phoenix of
leather and glass.

After passing by every bed,
Koyee left the hall and walked down dark corridors, nodding her beak
at those sisters she passed. She had been serving in the Sisterhood
for twenty turns now—not yet a moon—though it seemed like a year.
In all this time, she had not even seen the faces of her sisters, for
they dared not remove their beaks unless alone in their chambers.

She reached bronze doors where
two sisters stood, their robes and beaks black, and they held not
medicine but halberds of cruel, twisting iron. As Koyee approached,
they nodded, opened the doors, and watched her through their glass
lenses as she passed. Twice since Koyee had joined the Sisterhood,
patients had tried to leave the hospice's eastern wing. Twice had
these guards, sisters trained not to heal but to kill, slain the
dying.

"Bless you, my sisters,"
Koyee said.

"Bless you, Sister of
Harmony," they replied in unison, voices muffled inside their
beaks. "Seek solace in shadow, for the sun rises."

She repeated the chant—the
words of the Sisterhood—and stepped into a second hall. The doors
closed behind her, sealing the screams, the pain, and the miasma of
death.

In this new chamber, bronze
baths stood full of steaming water. Soaps and brushes hung from pegs.
Slowly, buckle by buckle, Koyee removed her outfit. She placed her
brimmed hat upon a peg. She unlaced the mask that enveloped her head,
emptied the beak's spices into a bowl, and hung the device upon a
rack. Finally she removed her thick robes and boots, remaining nude
in the chamber of steam.

She stepped into a tub and
scrubbed her skin raw, removing any hint of the disease that might
have invaded her suit. She did not know what caused the illness,
whether it was evil spirits, an invisible cloud of black magic, or a
stench that invaded through the nostrils. Whatever the case, she
would scrub every trace off, even as her skin turned raw and red. In
wisps of steam and ripples in water, she thought she glimpsed Eelani
bathing too, her invisible friend—no larger than her hand—scrubbing
off the illness.

After toweling herself dry,
Koyee dressed herself in the simple, white robes the sisters wore in
their chambers. The silk caressed her skin, soothing the sting of the
brushes.

She left the bathing chamber,
walked upstairs, and entered her small chamber. It was no larger than
her room in The Green Geode—a humble cube containing a bed, a table,
and a chair, all forged of the same unadorned iron. A painting of
Shenlai, the blue dragon of her empire, hung on a wall. Koyee sat on
the bed, pressed her knees together, and trembled.

"Please, Shenlai the
dragon," she prayed to that painting, "look after the ill
in your kingdom. Please protect us from the sunlight."

She didn't know if Shenlai could
hear. Perhaps dragons were simply myths, creatures for statues and
paintings and unanswered prayers. And yet she prayed, for she was
lost and afraid. She had lived on the streets of Pahmey, an urchin
and thief. She had a chamber now and food and a sisterhood, but life
in Pahmey was harder than ever, for the heel of Timandra was grinding
them, and the skeletons of the curse forever danced in her mind.

She closed her eyes, and she saw
them there: the dead and dying, skin draped over bones, cadaverous
creatures dancing in a circle, holding hands, chanting to the sky,
the dance macabre of the night.

How
long before I dance with them?

A tap sounded on her window.

Koyee started and opened her
eyes. For a heartbeat, she was sure those skeletons had arrived at
her chamber, that they were knocking on her window, beckoning for her
to join the dance. But then the tap sounded again—a pebble tossed
against the glass.

The fear left Koyee like drawn
curtains. A smile tingled her lips.

"Torin," she
whispered, relief and love warming her like mulled wine.

He had been visiting her every
hourglass turn, sneaking away from his barracks at the Night Castle.
These visits were her shadow in the light, her dreams of joy in a
world of death. Her smile spreading, she opened her window and leaned
outside.

He stood below in the garden,
disguised in the robes of an Elorian philosopher. When he pulled back
his hood, he smiled at her. Lavender mushrooms grew around him, as
tall as his shoulders, glowing with inner light.

There was some hope in the sea
of pain. There was her friend. There was Torin.

She grabbed the rope she'd woven
from her sheets and tossed it out the window. He looked around the
garden, perhaps fearing Sailith monks in the shadows, then grabbed
the rope and climbed. He entered her chamber, smelling of the city,
an aroma of spice, oil, and wine.

"Have you been practicing
the new words?" she asked him, speaking Qaelish. "Will you
be a better student this turn? If you're a bad student, I'll slap
you."

He snorted, but the sound was
more affectionate than offended. "I good student," he said
in clumsy Qaelish. "You good student of Ardish?"

It was her turn to snort. She
switched to his tongue. "I speak Ardish very well. Sit on bed!
Sit. Open book. Let me hear you read."

They perhaps had to meet in
secret now, but she would not let him abandon his lessons. She had
started teaching him her tongue, and by the moonlight, she would make
him fluent. And in truth . . . though it made her cheeks tingle, she
had to admit she enjoyed these lessons. She liked his company—the
way his hand sometimes accidentally touched hers, the way he tried
not to laugh at her jokes, and the way she laughed at his.

He opened his book of stories,
and he read slowly, stumbling over some words but plowing on. This
time he read a story about the three dragons of Eloria, all born from
the same brood, who flew to the three Dark Empires to watch over
them. When he finished reading, he looked at her with his mismatched
eyes.

"Better this time?" he
asked.

She nodded. "Better."

Before she could resist, she did
something that surprised her, that made her cheeks tingle. She leaned
forward and kissed his cheek.

At once she pulled back and
looked down, blinking and blushing.

He nudged her with his elbow. "I
like your kisses more than when you slap me for making a mistake."

She spoke softly, staring at her
lap. "You'll get more if you're a good student."

He nodded. "Good. Reward
for success. I prefer that to punishment for failure."

She dared to look up at him. She
found his face close to hers, and she looked down again at her lap,
though a smile tingled her lips.

His fingers caressed her hair,
making her tremble. "And you speak my language very well now,
and you deserve a kiss too." He kissed her ear.

She turned toward him, surprised
at his audacity, and his face was so close that her lips brushed
against his. It was only an accident—it had to be—but somehow she
was kissing him, not just a peck on the lips, but a real kiss, their
mouths open, their tongues touching, and his fingers caressed her
hair, and he held her close to him.

"You must have been a very
good student," she whispered, pulling back from him only an
inch.

"My Qaelish feel stronger
alrea—"

She did not let him finish his
sentence. She could not bear for her lips to be away from his. She
kissed him again, and this time their kiss was deeper, a desperate
kiss, a kiss for some goodness in this pain, for some hope and love
in war. His arms wrapped around her, and she sat on his lap, her legs
around him, her hair curtaining their faces in a white cocoon.