Malachai's Arc

Chapter 4 of 11

They sat together on the altar step while the temple cooled around them. Blood had stopped spreading. It only darkened now, drying between the flagstones in slow black rings. Torches guttered in their iron cages. The red light moved across the bodies and made them look like sleepers. Malachai kept his arm around his brother's shoulders. Shae did not shake. He only looked. "It's beautiful," Malachai said. Shae turned his head. His blue eyes were wet but steady. He had washed one hand on his robe without knowing it. "They came to pray," he said. "They did pray." Malachai tipped his chin at the nearest body, a woman folded across a bench. "Look at her hands. She kept hold of the man beside her the whole way down. That's a prayer. That's the truest one this hall has ever heard." Shae said nothing. The black stone walls rose above them into shadow. Crimson glass in the high windows threw long red shapes onto the floor. It was the kind of quiet Shae led his own rites in. Malachai felt him settle into it, the way a priest settles. "You feel it," Malachai said. "Don't lie to me. You feel how clean it is." "I feel it," Shae said. "That's him in you." Malachai squeezed his shoulder. "That's the master's hand. He put it there when you were small. He never took it back." Shae let out a breath that was almost a laugh. He leaned into his brother's side. "I thought you were going to name me," he said. "Down there. I stood and waited." "I know." "Why didn't you?" "Because it wasn't theirs to do," Malachai said. "It was mine." Shae's face began to change. Malachai did not let him finish it. He slid the knife from inside the bone coat and drove it under Shae's ribs before the word reached his mouth. Shae's body jerked. Malachai held him tight against his chest and stabbed him again, and again, quick and close, the way a butcher works. He counted the first ten. He lost count after. The blade went in and came out and went in. Shae's hand closed on his sleeve and then opened. His weight sank into Malachai's lap. "Duty," Malachai said into his hair. "He asked for you by name. Only me. Only my hand. That's the favor, Shae. That's the whole of it." He held him until the small movements stopped. Then he laid his brother down on the altar step and wiped the knife on the black robe. The pressure inside his skull did not lift. It bloomed. A warmth spread behind his eyes that was not his own, pleased, patient, hungry for the next. Malachai stood. The count had moved. One brother closer to a thousand. Diablo wanted more, and soon.