Kushiel's Avatar

would sit or kneel, watching the zenana . It drew comments, which I ignored. I could not afford to lurk within my walls and remain ignorant. I watched Imriel return time and again to the garden passageway, worrying at the boards. Like his mother, he despised his cage, and yearned for a glimpse of sky. When Nariman the Chief Eunuch was watching, the Akkadian attendants would pull him away. And he fought them, tooth and claw; it was one of the Akkadians he had stabbed with a fork. For all that, I saw, they accorded him a certain forbearance. It may have been due to the Mahrkagir’s plans for him, though I suspected they harbored an appreciation for Imriel’s defiant spirit.
    Once, one brought him to my carpet, slung over his broad shoulder, spitting and kicking. It was the attendant from the first night-Uru-Azag, his name was-who had guided the Menekhetan boy.
    “Khannat, Uru-Azag,” I said to him, bowing from my seated position. “Thank you.”
    Something glimmered in the Akkadian’s dark eyes. “Yamodan,” he replied briefly, shaking his forearm where Imriel had bitten him; you are welcome.
    Imriel crouched, one hand touching the floor, regarding me warily. “Uru-Azag is not your enemy,” I said to him in D’Angeline. “You do wrong to fight him.”
    “Death’s Whore!” He bared his teeth in a snarl, black hair falling in a tangle over his brow. “Mother of Lies! I know who my enemies are!”
    “Do you?” I asked. “So do I. Fadil Chouma was your enemy, was he not? He is dead, now; did you know it? You stabbed him, in Iskandria-stabbed him in the thigh with a carving knife. The wound took septic, and he died. I know your enemies better than you do, Imriel.”
    Alarm widened his twilight-blue eyes and his mouth worked soundlessly. Deprived of adequate words, he spat once more onto the tiles between us, and fled, overturning an Ephesian water-pipe in his flight. Muzzy curses followed him, which he ignored, taking refuge at the couch-island of some Hellenes, who were glad enough of a boy-child to stroke and pet, having none of their own. His eyes, his mother’s eyes, continued to watch me, gauging my reaction.
    Those were the good times in the zenana .
    During the bad times ... during the bad times, I was conscious of the desire. I remembered it, the blood-dark throbbing, Kushiel’s brazen wings buffeting my ears and the light, the glittering light, the cold iron nubs rending my flesh. I wanted it again; Elua, but I did! When I was weak, when I let myself remember, horrified, the face of the poor Magus, seized in a rictus of death, I knew the chains of blood-guilt lay heavy on my soul. I had undergone the thetalos . I knew. And I saw Joscelin and his deadly smile, playing cat-and-mouse with the Tatar. My fault; my doing. And it seemed, at those times, that nothing would redeem me, that the only absolution I might find lay within the Mahrkagir’s bedchamber, the dank air and his icy fingers digging into my flanks, oiled leather straps creaking as I welcomed the reaving iron into my flesh.
    My title, my name, my very will ... all laid upon the altar of destruction.
    Only then would it stop .
    In time, I asked him for it. No; that is wrong. In time, I begged. I do not pretend to be more than I am. There were times, in that place, when the tides of my soul ebbed, and I saw only darkness, only despair. You must make of the self a vessel where the self is not, Eleazar ben Enokh had told me, and this I sought; not in perfect love, but perfect self-loathing. Of a surety, he prompted me, the Mahrkagir, whispering in my ear as he used his rusted implements of pain, as he took me in some other orifice-do you not want this ? He knew. There is a cunning in madness. As he whispered in my ear, Angra Mainyu whispered in his, and the dark wind blew through us both.
    I begged.
    And the Mahrkagir gave.
    I was wrong, though; wrong about one thing. It did not make an end to it. For a time, it did; a time bounded by the endurance of my flesh-and his. Mad or no, the Mahrkagir was mortal. When it was over, it was over, and I was still alive, still Phèdre. Those are the times when I would lie shaking, curled on my side, throbbing with the aftermath of pain and fulfillment, and he would stroke my sweat-dampened hair as tendrils grew clammy on my brow, whispering endearments in Old Persian; ishtâ, he called me, beloved, smiling to see me tremble, srîra, beautiful one.
    He was mortal, only a man, spent.
    The Mahrkagir