Page 114 of The Simurgh

Silas hunched his shoulders, his breath shallow. The ravens cawed inside his head, their cackles staggering. Their numbers untold. Filling him back up where he had emptied himself of sorrow.

‘Silas,’ Pitch said softly.

He raised his head, and the murder fell silent. The prince knelt with him. It was like looking into the sun after a long winter. ‘Are you all right?’ Silas sounded no finer than the Nephilim.

The daemon touched his fingers beneath Silas’s chin. ‘I am. Can you stand?’

‘I’m not certain.’ He could not keep it from becoming a sob. Silas grabbed at Pitch’s arm, desperate to anchor himself. Christ, that sound, that anguish. He’d heard it once before. At the cave where the teratism were laid out for sacrifice.

The prince brushed at Silas’s tears. ‘Is this the secret you have kept from me?’

‘Secret?’ Silas’s head hurt, his heart too.

‘He called you “brother.”’ Pitch urged his chin up once more. ‘I know I seem a shallow creature, but did you truly think I’d shun you for being Nephilim? And long ago, at that.’

Hearing it said here, so plainly, Silas could not find the same strength of fear at being found out as he once had.

He leaned on Pitch, and together they got him to his feet. Despite the slenderness of the prince, the delicacy of his form, Silas had never felt in surer, safer hands.

‘I did not wish to take the risk that you might. The Nephilim are…they are…monstrous creatures.’

Pitch tilted his head to look Silas in the eye. ‘And could the same not be said of me?’ He winked. ‘But you seem to enjoy me just the same.’

The fog lifted, parted as though Pitch’s flame had burned them clear. ‘I do. Very much. But they are your enemy. I thought–’

Pitch sighed. ‘They are Arcadia’s enemy, they are Elyssiam’s servant, but all else, who knows. Like the sorcerers, I’m thinking we are all just pawns in this grand game. Spilling blood for those who stay on their thrones. Come, this way.’ He adjusted his hold around Silas’s waist and led him down the dune. There were traces of his footprints, but also rounder marks which Silas suspected belonged to the Herlequin’s shire. ‘What I know for certain is that you are Silas Mercer. And he is a man who I…well, who pleases me very much. And whose presence I crave when he is absent. But don’t get all dewy-eyed now that I’ve said that.’

‘Absolutely not.’ Silas was solemn, but within there were swarms of butterflies batting their tiny wings of happiness. Distracting him from the echo of grief-stricken cries, if only for a moment.

‘Come here.’ Pitch ushered him in and kissed him. But he soon pulled away. ‘Something’s wrong. What is it? What are you feeling?’ Pitch ran his fingers over the ring that had returned to rest upon Silas’s finger.

‘Great sorrow...terrible sorrow.’ He exhaled. ‘I think I heard the Sluagh that Macha spoke of.’ He grimaced, recalling how he’d dismissed the talk as madness. ‘I think she spoke truthfully. When I brought down the Herlequin I heard them. I can sense them…their loss, regret…their horror.’ He shivered and Pitch’s embrace tightened. ‘It is the same I heard when I had that vision of the cave, with the sacrifice of the teratisms.’

Hundreds of souls sacrificed. The kitsune Weatherby had been terrified it would be his fate, too.

‘What is the point of the Sluagh?’

Silas stared at the beheaded Nephilim, regretting allowing him to slip into death so quickly. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps he did.’

‘Well, it’s a little too late for conversation so far as he is concerned. But it sounds like we cannot leave this place without finding out, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you’re in no fit state to do anything of the sort right now. Don’t even think of arguing with me on that.’

Silas intended to do exactly that, but that was precisely when Pitch shifted his feet, and the sand beneath them gave way.

With a unified cry, they both toppled onto their arses, and the landslide carried them down the rest of the slope, like two ungainly living sleds. The move was swift but not so much so that Silas could not make out the large, dark shape that waited for them at the base of the dune.

‘Look out.’

He tried to manoeuvre himself in front of Pitch, which was a bloody awful idea. They collided in a tangle of limbs, and it was a sandy, chaotic journey to the bottom of the slope.

‘What the fuck, Silas? If you wish to win a sand race, then just say so.’ The pink cloak had ended up flipping over Pitch’s head in the melee, and his frustration only saw him growing more tightly wrapped. ‘Bloody, fuck…sand…everywhere.’

Silas lifted the hem of Old Bess’s cloak absently, unwilling to take his eyes from the huge shire horse that stood over them, watching the cursing daemon with a steady black eye.

‘Pitch, get to your feet slowly.’