Crow Jane - D. J. Butler Page 0,25

the Palace and the Tower. The Plaza was a wide space where the Fallen gathered to debate and, when the Council could not reach peaceable decisions, to shed each other’s blood. The Palace sprawled along its western edge, all white stairs and green rooftop garden and blue water; the central source of Ainok’s canals were the mighty springs beneath Azazel’s home, and they burst forth from the mouths of statues of mutilated Messengers, irrigating the many acres of his private garden-like Palace before radiating out in all directions into the city. The Tower, higher, Azazel boasted, than any of the towers he had left behind, was solid inside and had an enormous staircase winding up around the outside of it to the broad circular platform at its apex.

The Plaza, the Palace, and the Tower were all made of the same gleaming white stone, not native to the hills surrounding the city. Azazel had told her once that he summoned the stone with his sorcery, from a quarry thousands of miles away. Somewhere, there was a gaping hole in a mountainside that sparkled white. The center of the city, even more than the rest of Ainok, was liberally speckled with mirrors. These were the gates of Mab’s people, who were not residents but who came and went freely, and trafficked with Ainok’s citizens. Azazel hadn’t built the city center with wizardry, though, or with the help of the fey folk; Azazel’s slaves had done the work. For himself and his own subjects, Azazel insisted on freedom. The followers of Heaven and its Messengers, he insisted, had already chosen slavery and deserved no better. Now the white stone ran red with blood, shed by slaves and citizens alike, trampled under the feet of their Fallen overlords.

Women streamed from the Palace as if its bowels also concealed a spring of concubines. Qayna drew her knife, a weapon almost long enough to call a sword, and fended the rushing women aside. Some of the women—fey or sorceresses, and in that moment Qayna envied them both—leaped into mirrors and disappeared. Those who couldn’t rushed down the avenues toward the fires.

Qayna saw Azazel standing atop his Tower. The leader of the Fallen was majestic, even though the animal parts he had grafted onto himself with his own hand, and something else, some streak of wrongness, prevented him and all his kind from being truly beautiful. His goat-like legs were crooked, but he held his back erect, and the crimson- and black-streaked fur of his lower half was clean and shone in the sun. His wings, only two of them, were now the wings of an enormous bat, but they still cloaked him with something like majesty. He stood tall and looked about him at the horizon as the Swordbearers touched down.

So he knew. But he wasn’t running.

Qayna cupped her free hand around her mouth and yelled up at him. “Azazel!”

The former Messenger looked her way instantly, and laughed a laugh like rolling thunder. He spread his wings like flexing arms, snapped them once, and sailed into the air and in her direction. He was graceful in flight despite his enormity, and when he touched down, Qayna saw that he held a child in his arms. His son, Jacob.

Azazel set the boy down between him and Qayna, and Jacob looked up at her with bright blue eyes. This boy, tousle-headed, pale and small, but with sturdy shoulders and determination in his eyes, was his heir. His father was majestic, powerful and graceful, but Jacob looked like a mere beautiful boy. He looked as human as Qayna.

And how human was that? She thought.

For all his many women, Azazel had only managed to get one living son, and that had been done with the aid of great sorceries. The seed of the Fallen, apparently, did not grow well in the furrows of Eve.

“You must take Jacob and flee,” Azazel told her.

“The Swordbearers are here!” Qayna said, waving her weapon in a big circle to indicate that they were surrounded.

Azazel smiled gently, but there was a flash of irritation in his eyes. “Must I repeat myself?” he asked. “I took you in when you had no place else to go, Qayna. Will you not repay the favor?”

Qayna nodded heavily and grabbed Jacob by his hand.

With a heavy CRACK! another of the Fallen crashed to the stones behind Azazel and all three of them turned to look.

It was Semyaz. His own beast-assumed attributes included a boar’s head and a long tail