Page 100 of The Gilded Ones

“This was one of our salt mines,” he replies. “I used to play here when I was little, with my family.”

I want to nod, but that’s impossible, since my neck isn’t fully attached.

I can’t imagine what Keita feels like being here, at the site of his family’s massacre. I wish I could hold him, wish I could at least squeeze his hand.

He continues on to his destination, the lake in the centre of the cave. “The waters here are supposed to have healing properties,” he says. As he carries me over, I catch a glimpse of my reflection, my body shimmering golden under the thin white cloth he’s wrapped around it.

“My body is still in the gilded sleep?” I ask, amazed.

Keita nods. “Precisely why all this is so startling to me,” he says. “You should still be asleep. All alaki sleep during this period. That’s what your kind does.”

“I don’t think I’m my kind,” I whisper. “I don’t think I’m an alaki.”

Keita looks down at me. “Then what are you?” he asks, no hint of judgement in his gaze. No hint of repulsion.

“I used to think that perhaps I was a creature White Hands made, some deathshriek half-breed she created for the emperor,” I reply. “But after what I experienced on the battlefield, I’m no longer sure…”

When he glances at me, a questioning look in my eyes, I confess: “I brought Britta back. She was on the edge of her final death and I pulled her back.”

Keita nods as he wades into the shallows, and carefully slips my body down into the soothing cold. There’s so much salt, my body floats. Sparks shoot through my muscles as they begin connecting more tightly. To my relief, it’s not painful, as it was when I first woke, merely uncomfortable – an itch that won’t go away.

Once I’m firmly in place, Keita looks down at me, eyes worried. “Whatever you are, you can never return to Hemaira, you do know that, Deka? You can never return.”

I blink up at him, careful not to move anything but my eyes. Even though he’s telling me to keep away from Hemaira – from him – he doesn’t flinch as he watches my body knit back together, doesn’t show any disgust, although it must be gruesome to behold.

When one of my fingers twitches, he takes my hand, holds it in his own. I can dimly feel the warmth of his touch coursing through my body’s tendrils. I look up to find silent tears in his eyes.

This is goodbye.

“You’re too powerful, Deka,” he says sadly. “You always were. That’s why they killed you. That’s why they’ll kill you again if you return. You must never return to Hemaira, you hear me? Not ever.”

Tears burn my eyes, and my lips tremble as I try to find a reply. Never return? Never see him again? Never see my friends, Britta?

I’m so caught in my misery, I don’t notice the shadows entering the cave until a familiar voice sounds. “Oh, she won’t, young lord of Gar Fatu,” it purrs. “Deka will never return to the humans again.”

A light whooshing attracts my eyes to the ceiling, where seven women are flying down on gryphs, gigantic beasts that look like striped desert cats except they’re covered in feathers and have wings sprouting from their shoulders. Each woman wears golden armour and carries an enormous glass lantern. Even from the water, I can feel the vibrations in that armour.

It’s infernal armour, which means these women are alaki, but there’s something different about them. I study them, my eyes narrowing as realization builds inside me. These women are older than all the other alaki I’ve met. Much, much older.

Ancient, in fact, if their appearance means anything. A few of them look more than forty years old, which means they must be several millennia old – it takes us centuries to age one year, after all.

The woman at the front is immediately recognizable in her white armour. White Hands. As she descends, mist curls up to reach her. It’s coming from the deathshrieks spilling into the cave, all of them spiked, all of them armoured. All of them female.

The thought resonates through me, and along with it, the horror of understanding what they are. What they were.

“Keita,” I whisper warningly, but he has already noticed them.

They’re all so tall, I easily spot Katya from the water, her red spikes blazing in the dim lights. Braima and Masaima accompany her, their pale, equine forms distinct among the much larger, darker deathshrieks.

“Deka,” Keita answers back, alarmed. He edges closer to me, hand on his sword.

White Hands smirks as she steps off her gryph and places her lantern on the cave floor. “As you no doubt understand by now, Keita, deathshrieks and alaki are the same creatures. Deka is ours. She has always been ours.”

Keita glances at White Hands. “Ours?” he says, frowning. “You’re an alaki?”

“An alaki?” White Hands laughs dismissively. “I am the Firstborn. Fatu of Izor, mother of the house of Gezo, true empress of Otera. I am your ancestor, boy. You and all your line sprang from my womb.”

Keita’s jaw is slack with shock now – as is mine.

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