He let out a pained breath through his teeth. “I told you. We have ways of keeping him contained.”
“Malachiasz?” Serefin ignored the boy.
Malachiasz’s onyx eyes flickered before the black leaked away to a pale, almost colorless blue. He frowned, straining against the chains, before sitting back on his heels, looking perplexed.
“Do you remember what happens when you’re like that?” Serefin asked curiously. He had always wanted to ask.
“Sometimes,” Malachiasz said, his voice sounded scratchy and wrong. He cleared his throat, which devolved into a fit of coughing. He spat out a mouthful of blood. “Do remember this one.”
“Oh, so how you nearly killed me.”
Malachiasz tried to shrug but the chains were weighing his arms down enough that he barely managed it. He tilted his head back at the boy.
“I suspect you have questions,” the boy said brightly.
Kacper took that moment to finally stir awake. Serefin tried his hardest not to make a fuss but played his hand by pulling Kacper to him and kissing him like he was drowning.
“My head feels terrible,” Kacper said when Serefin broke away and the boy started chaining him up as well.
“You and all the rest of us,” Malachiasz muttered.
Kacper glared, as if he had forgotten Malachiasz was around and was being suddenly and unpleasantly reminded.
The boy moved on to chaining Kacper, almost apologetically. “Until I know you can be trusted, this is the way things have to be,” he said.
Serefin and Kacper exchanged a glance. Malachiasz was gazing up at the ceiling.
“This is a cult,” he murmured.
The boy finished with Kacper’s chains and took a step back. Without another word, he returned to the stairs and left them in the dark once more.
Serefin tossed out a few stars.
“What a parlor trick,” Malachiasz said, a touch more derisively than necessary.
Serefin thought of what the stars had done to the Vulture that had attacked him in that inn but kept it to himself. Let the Black Vulture underestimate him.
“What was that?” Serefin asked flatly.
Malachiasz rolled his eyes. “What do you want me to say?”
“‘Sorry for nearly murdering you, Serefin,’ would be a real good start.”
“It’d be a lie.”
“And you’re so above that.”
That got a smile out of Malachiasz, which was unnerving.
“How did that boy survive being stabbed?” Serefin asked.
“Now that is a good question.”
Serefin had forgotten how profoundly condescending Malachiasz was.
“If the internal bleeding hadn’t gotten him, the poison absolutely should’ve,” he continued.
“You poison your claws?” Serefin said. It was supposed to be a question, but the idea was so ridiculous yet completely unsurprising that he didn’t know what he was expecting the answer to be.
“You don’t want to know the particulars of why the Vultures are the way we are,” Malachiasz replied.
Serefin didn’t, in fact, want that. “Never mind.”
“Truly, I hate him,” said Kacper.
Malachiasz grinned brightly before an odd expression flickered across his face and he pitched over, coughing. It was mildly pathetic. After a few moments he straightened with some effort.
“Where are we?” Serefin asked.
“How would I know? You ask so many questions.” He couldn’t wipe off the blood that had smeared across his chin and every time he spoke there was a glimmer of teeth sharper than was natural.
“You know something.”
Malachiasz inclined his head. “Whoever they are, they follow the god that has me.”
“Oh,” Serefin breathed.
Kacper shot him a questioning glance. Of course. Of course that was how Malachiasz was alive. This wouldn’t be like with Velyos. Because Velyos was, ultimately, a being of mischief but nothing so destructive.
“That boy is too much trouble,” Velyos noted.
Who is it? Serefin asked.
“You know. You dealt with him and walked away alive, which is more than most—more than anyone—can say. That’s how he knew it was possible, you see. The blood is the same. If the elder brother could look upon one as old and twisted and wrong as he, then the younger, who is so much worse, so much madder, could as well, and the younger was the one he truly wanted.”
Chyrnog. Serefin’s stomach churned. “He’s why I lost my eye,” he said softly.
“This is your fault?” Malachiasz asked incredulously. Like he couldn’t believe that Serefin was capable of anything, let alone something that had touched him.
Serefin opened his mouth and closed it. Yes. Yes and no and yes. He shrugged helplessly. “I—I didn’t mean—”
Serefin was interrupted by the door slamming open. Malachiasz tensed, curling inward, like he was poising to strike, though Serefin didn’t think he could do much while chained.
Serefin had set an old god free. And the god had taken the most powerful person alive who didn’t have a shred of a conscience. If the world was to fall, it was very much Serefin’s fault.
15
MALACHIASZ CZECHOWICZ
They cut off Svoyatovi Dimitry Teterev’s ears, burned out his eyes, cut out his tongue, but still that did not stop him, nothing could stop him, and he brought down the city of Kowat alone.
—Vasiliev’s Book of Saints
The boy returned with an extremely tall woman whom Malachiasz thought was potentially the cult’s leader, until she hauled him to his feet to stand before the boy.
“If you are expecting me to be scared and incoherent, I am sorry to disappoint,” Malachiasz said.
A smile pulled at the boy’s mouth. He had feathery black hair and golden skin, the high features of someone from the Kalyazi north. One of his pupils was the wrong shape—a horizontal slit of black within brown. He lifted a hand to tuck a lock of hair behind his ear, two of his fingers as well as a chunk of his ear missing.
“My expectations are low, I assure you.”
“Even better!”
He was hoping to get a better read on this boy who had survived his claws, but he got no reaction and a shiver of anxiety itched at his hands; he picked at a hangnail on his middle finger behind his back.
“Are you sure this is the one?” the woman asked. “The other has a godstouched eye.”
Serefin jolted, as if trying to cover his eye but forgetting his arms were tied. Malachiasz knew what the woman was not saying. He stifled a sigh.
“You want a show,” he said flatly.
It was a constant effort, holding the roiling chaos at bay, and thus a release to let his body succumb instead. He closed his eyes—though he saw through every other damn eye that opened on his skin, a veritable assault on his fragile senses. No limbs this time, odd since that had happened during his episode on the floor earlier. He supposed there was no predicting chaos. After what felt sufficient, he carefully pulled everything back, smothering it down, knowing that every time his shields fell it was a little bit harder to put them back up.
He opened his eyes, watching as the boy’s pupils dilated, a hitch of breath at his throat. The boy’s pulse quickened in a beat so fast that Malachiasz could almost see it against his skin.