The Dew of Flesh

  Chapter 29

  The sound of shouts, and over them, a piercing scream, made Ilahe jump. She pressed up against a wall, the strips of paint from a peeling mural breaking like dried flower petals as she brushed them. Darkness had fallen over the city, and although street-lanterns ran along the major thoroughfares, the smaller side-streets, and the alleys, such as the one where Ilahe hid, were so dark that Ilahe walked with a sword held out in front of her, more to keep from running into anything than out of fear. Not for the first time since leaving the Iris did Ilahe wish for its gentle, nightly, rainbow kaleidoscope, bathing Cenarbasi in shifting light. The outside world was too extreme—brilliant sunlight and total darkness.

  Another scream, and Ilahe’s own pounding heart pulled her back to reality. The shouts were growing. Anger and nausea warred in Ilahe’s stomach; it sounded like a street harvest. The rage she had felt after reading that Istbyan book—rage directed at men and god alike, for meddling, for ruining women’s lives—washed back over her again. And now, nearby, a woman was going to be sacrificed to a god by a group of bloodthirsty men. Men and gods—things the world would be better without. Ilahe fingered the cam-ad. With the flower, she could kill them all, kill any eses that came to stop her, any sarkomancers. But when its energy expired, she would have only two cam-adeh left, and she would not be any closer to fulfilling her job. If she did not finish the job, she would not be any closer to the money she needed. Wealth enough to start her own noble house. Wealth to begin her revenge.

  Drawing her other sword, Ilahe crept toward the mouth of the alley, toward the shouts and cries. The noise swelled, until it echoed off the wooden buildings and any discrete words were lost in the frenzy of pure voice. It hammered Ilahe from every side, pressed her forward on a wave of sound. Her heart pounded so that she thought she would be sick. This was nothing like Cenarbasi. When the priests had taken her, the cold precision of it had terrified her, the utter impersonality of the torture, the ritual. This, though—Ilahe realized, with sudden embarrassment, that she wanted to kill, wanted to taste blood, the sweet life staining her teeth, and that, underneath that bloodlust, she wanted a man. Embarrassment burned her cheeks.

  Ilahe tightened her grip on the swords and tried to resist the feelings washing over her. A part of her wanted nothing more than to drop the swords and scream, to join the crowd she could not even see yet, to be part of a seething mass of bodies, to feel flesh on flesh from every side, and to lose herself. To become nothing more than body, without the fears, the self-loathing, the regrets of the past.

  Hatred, hot and bright as the foreign sun, awoke inside her. This was the work of a god. Ilahe realized she was being manipulated, and anger and hatred washed away the feelings. She drew in a deep, sobbing breath, the stench of rotting garbage and human excrement from the alley pungent and new, as though she had just awakened.

  The strange feelings lurked at the edge of consciousness, waiting to slip back in, but Ilahe fanned the flames of her anger. Everything settled back into place around her. The agonized screams still rang, the frenzied shouts still surrounded her, but they were just sounds. Ilahe crept forward. She needed to see this, needed the fuel for her anger.

  The street ahead was empty except for a knot of people. Ilahe walked out of the alley, past the buildings, trying to get a better view. Knot was not the correct word. Mob. A mob of people, fifty, perhaps a hundred, clustered together, all facing in. They shouted, and a roar ran through the crowd as one last, drawn-out scream cut the air. It was not a woman’s scream, Ilahe realized with a start. Too deep.

  The scream broke off. A ripple ran through the crowd—men and women rising to their toes, or their knees buckling, some shouting, others moaning. A pair of men near the edge fell to fighting, hands at each others’ throats as they rolled in the dirt.

  And then, as quickly as the ripple had run through the crowd, it was over. The men fighting rolled to a stop, both shaking their heads, and the crowd began to break up. A nervous buzz of conversation started, and more than one man or woman scurried away, head held low. Ilahe spat on the ground as she watched them. Like mechta leaf chewers after waking from their dreams.

  As the crowd parted, she saw a stout, middle-aged woman still standing in the street, shaking so that she seemed about to fall. Blood covered her from face to groin, and she held the mutilated body of a man by the head. The body shook in time with her tremors, as though the pair performed some gruesome dance. Light from a lantern slid along the red blade in the woman’s hand.

  Ilahe stared, uncomprehending. Had the woman somehow escaped her torturer? Is that why the strange emotions had ceased? She had turned the knife on him, somehow?

  It did not make any sense. No one seemed upset, or frustrated. That last scream had been met with rapture. Ilahe’s swords sagged as facts, but not yet full comprehension, set in.

  The woman had been the one torturing. It was obvious, but Ilahe could not accept it. She just stared, mouth slightly open, at the blood-soaked, ecstatic figure who stood down the street. Impossible. What woman would act that way?

  A shout stirred Ilahe from her daze. A man stood not ten feet away, pointing at her, one hand grabbing a woman’s elbow. She added her shouts to his. In her confusion, Ilahe could not focus on their words, could not make sense of them. It all seemed so distant. A woman. Butchering, torturing. Taking another’s life. That was what men were—butchers, monsters. Not women. Women learned the skills.

  Her thoughts cut off as she realized that men were running toward her. Shouts, some filled with terror, others angry, rang around her. Through it all, she understood a single word.

  “Cenarbasin!”

  Ilahe turned and ran.