Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [39]
Akiva was stone-faced, unreasonably disturbed by the thought of this abomination tasting the girl. He waited until Razgut gibbered into silence before he said, his voice low in his throat, “I didn’t ask what she tastes like. I asked who she is.”
Izîl shrugged, fluttering his hands in an effort at nonchalance. “She’s just a girl. She draws pictures. She’s nice to me. What more can I tell you?”
His voice was glib, and Akiva saw that he thought he could protect her. It was noble, and laughable. Having no time to waste playing games, he decided on a more drastic approach. He seized Izîl by his shirtfront and Razgut by one of his jagged bone spurs and leapt airborne with the pair of them, hauling their combined weight as if it were nothing.
It was only a matter of wingbeats before all of Marrakesh glimmered below them. Izîl was screaming, his eyes squeezed shut, but Razgut was silent, his face displaying such unutterable longing it shot pity into Akiva’s heart like a splinter—more painful, indeed, than the shard of wood Karou had stabbed him with. It surprised him. Over the years he had learned to deaden himself, and he had lived so long with the deadness that he believed pity and mercy were extinguished in him, but tonight he had experienced dull stabs of both.
Slowly spiraling downward like a bird of prey, he brought the two to rest on the domed peak of the city’s tallest minaret. They scrabbled to hold on and failed, sliding down its slick surface, paddling frenziedly for handholds and footholds before coming to rest against a low, decorative parapet that was all that kept them from plummeting over the edge, several hundred feet to the rooftops of the mosque below.
Izîl’s face was gray, his breathing thin. When Razgut shifted himself on the old man’s back, they teetered perilously close to the edge. Izîl let out a stream of panicked commands to stay low, not shift, hang on to something.
Akiva stood over them. Behind him, the serrated ridge of the Atlas Mountains shone in the moonlight. Breezes teased the flame-feathers that made up his wings, setting them dancing, and his eyes were the muted glow of embers. “Now. If you wish to live, tell me what I want to know. Who is the girl?”
Izîl, with a horror-struck glance over the edge of the roof, answered in a rush. “She’s nothing to you, she’s innocent—”
“Innocent? She bears the hamsas, traffics teeth for the devil sorcerer. She doesn’t seem innocent to me.”
“You don’t know. She is innocent. She just runs errands for him. That’s all.”
Was that all she was, some kind of servant? It didn’t explain the hamsas. “Why her?”
“She’s the Wishmonger’s foster daughter. He raised her from a baby.”
Akiva processed this. “Where did she come from?” He knelt to bring his face closer to Izîl’s. It felt very important that he know.
“I don’t know. I don’t! One day she was just there, cradled in his arm, and after that she was always there, no explanations. Do you think Brimstone told me things? If he had, maybe I would still be a man instead of a mule!” He gestured to Razgut and fell into lunatic laughter. “ ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ Brimstone said, but I didn’t listen, and look at me now!” Tears sprang to the wrinkled corners of his eyes as he laughed and laughed.
Akiva was rigid. Trouble was, he believed what the hunchback said. Why would Brimstone tell his human minions anything, especially mad fools like this? But if Izîl didn’t know, what hope did Akiva have of finding out? The old man was his only lead, and he had lingered too long already.
“Then tell me where to find her,” he said. “She was friendly with you. Surely you know where she lives.”
Woe flickered in the old man’s eyes. “I can’t tell you that. But… but… but I can tell you other things. Secret things! About your own kind. Thanks to Razgut, I know far more of seraphim than I do of chimaera.”
He was bargaining, still hoping to protect Karou. Akiva said,