Free Crow Jane by D. J. Butler Page B

must be a Swordbearer. She should be hurrying to get out of the city, she knew, but instead she ran toward its center.
    She wanted to warn Azazel; she owed him that much.
    The crow flew on ahead, just beyond her reach.
    Other Ainokites heeded the more sane imperative, though, and she struggled to push through them. Women and men of her own kind—not quite her own kind, but her kin, at least—rushed in a thick and burbling stream toward the gates of the city, and she had to push fiercely to force them to part and let her upstream.
    The Fallen were fewer, easier to see and avoid, but much more dangerous. They towered above their mortal subjects, and though Qayna had become accustomed to their appearance, the beast heads and limbs were still terrifying when they rushed at her at full speed. A towering Fallen with the lower body of a horse, Ezeq’el, trampled people who might have been her servants, or even her lovers; a giant with the face of an octopus or a squid dragged shrieking bodies with him as he plunged into one of Ainok’s great canals, finding it a more expedient route to the exits; a corpulent man with long yellow tusks jutting from his face and spikes growing from his back and shoulders lowered his head and charged through the crowd, leaving behind him a trail of mangled corpses and blood.
    These were Qayna’s people now, and they were destroying themselves in their flight.
    The towers of Eden, Mother had told her, were observatories. She and Father had climbed within them to the platforms at their heights to watch the Messengers in flight above them, when they had been Eden’s lord and lady. The spires of Ainok, for the most part, were merely spikes, but they were enormous, fingers jabbed in accusation at the sky or daggers pointed at the throat of heaven. Their heights were not platforms—other than on the one, central tower—they were the sharp points of spears.
    Whether it had something to do with the spires or not, the Bearers of the Sword burned in their inexorable paths toward points outside the city.
    At Ainok’s center were the Grand Plaza, 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