The Empire of Gold

by S. A. Chakraborty

  Nahri stared at him, some of the friendliness going out of her eyes. “Ah.”

  And just like that, he felt the old divide between them, between their families and their peoples, rise up.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I—”

  “Stop.” Nahri didn’t sound angry, merely tired. “Just stop. If you and I have to apologize for everything our families did to each other, we’ll never get off this boat. And you might have forgotten, but believe me when I say that I know how the old Nahid Council felt about shafit. How many Daevas still feel.”

  Another topic they’d been avoiding. “Is it true what your mother said, then?” Ali ventured. “About you being shafit?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Yes. But we’re not talking about my secrets today. So the marid helped Zaydi overthrow the Nahid Council. Did your father say anything else?”

  “Not much. He said until that night he thought it was just a legend to explain the warning Qahtani kings passed to their emirs.”

  “What warning?”

  “Don’t cross the Ayaanle.”

  “That’s the warning? I thought your tribes were allies!”

  “We are … sometimes,” Ali said, thinking back to the various coups, religious revolutions, and tax delays his relatives in Ta Ntry had instigated. “But it wasn’t meant as a threat. Zaydi’s Ayaanle ally apparently paid a terrible price for his connection to the marid. We were never to betray their people.”

  “What price?”

  “I don’t know. My mother caught me out about the marid when I first returned to Daevabad and convinced Ustadh Issa to help us try and learn more. But neither of them seemed to know anything about the marid being involved in the war, and I wasn’t inclined to tell them. Instead, Issa was looking into an old family connection my mother believed we had with the marid.”

  Nahri nodded slowly. “That’s right, people say the Ayaanle worshipped the marid centuries ago, don’t they?”

  “A lie,” Ali replied, trying to keep the defensiveness from his voice. “Issa told me that the marid used to trick people into making ghastly pacts, convincing them to kill innocents for riches and give up their life’s blood. I wouldn’t call that worship.”

  “Sounds like just the kind of creatures you should take as military allies.” Nahri leaned back on her cushion again. “But what I don’t understand is why. Why are a bunch of overpowered water demons so determined to come after us? To trick people in Ta Ntry and overthrow the Nahid Council? To kill Dara?”

  “If I had to guess, I don’t think they were as eager to hand over their sacred lake and serve Anahid as Daeva legend would suggest.”

  “And revenge was handing their sacred lake over to a different group of fire-bloods?” Nahri groaned, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Creator, every time I think I’ve found the bottom in all of this, I get some new story of murder and vengeance.” She sighed, pushing back the midnight locks that had fallen in her face. “Any more gruesome family secrets?”

  She’d asked it mockingly—as if Nahri didn’t think Ali had anything else equally ghastly—and he’d been so busy trying to not follow the movement of her fingers through her hair that the question threw him. “No. I mean, yes. There’s … well, there’s a crypt beneath the palace.”

  “A crypt?”

  “Yes.”

  Nahri stared at him. “Who’s in the crypt, Ali?”

  “Your relatives,” he confessed softly. “All the Nahids who’ve died since the war.”

  Genuine shock swept her face. “That’s not possible. We keep their ashes in our shrines.”

  “I don’t know whose ashes are in your shrines, but I’ve seen the bodies myself.”

  “Why? Why has your family been hoarding the bodies of my ancestors in some crypt beneath the palace?”

  “I don’t know. I got the impression no one does anymore. The crypt looks ancient, and there are all sorts of wild stories about the earliest Nahids. Legends claiming they could resurrect the dead, trade bodies. Maybe …” Heat crept up his neck in shame. “Maybe it made my relatives rest easier.”

  Nahri glared at him. “Oh, how reassuring for them.”

  Ali dropped his gaze. This conversation was about to get so much worse. “Nahri, that’s not all that’s in the crypt. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but Darayavahoush’s relic is also down there.”

  She sat up so fast that she rocked the boat. “Excuse me?”

  “His relic,” Ali repeated, feeling sick. “What we think is his relic. And if it’s truly his, it’s probably the one he was wearing when he was killed during the war.”

  “When he was enslaved by the ifrit, you mean,” she corrected coldly. “Does that mean it was the Qahtanis who gave him up?”

  Ali looked at her beseechingly. “I don’t know. This was centuries before you and I were born. My father didn’t know. My grandfather likely didn’t know. I’m not excusing it, I’m not justifying it, but I can’t offer explanations I don’t have.”

  Nahri dropped back down, still looking enraged. “Do you know how long he was a slave? Do you know how Manizheh is going to react if she learns her brother and parents are rotting beneath the palace?”

  Ali tried to offer some hope. “The crypt is well hidden. Maybe they won’t find it?”

  “‘Well hidden.’” She let out an exasperated sound. “Ali, what if this is beyond us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Dara and Zaydi al Qahtani were seasoned military commanders. Manizheh is considered the most powerful Nahid healer in centuries. My ancestors, your father, they ruled tens of thousands and ran governments. And they still failed to fix all of this. Everything they did only caused more violence. If they couldn’t make peace, how in God’s name are you and I going to?”

  Ali wished he had an answer for her. “I don’t know, Nahri. I don’t think there’s going to be a simple fix. It might be a lifetime of work. It might be a peace we don’t live long enough to see.”

  “That’s your inspirational rallying speech?” Her expression grew darker when he had no response. “Then do me a favor.”

  “What?”

  “Learn how to lie by the time we get to Ta Ntry.”

  13

  DARA

  Dara’s promise to Manizheh about Irtemiz did not last a day.

  He examined the weapons in his chest, selecting knives and a sword and securing them to his waist. His bow and quiver went next. Dara could always conjure arms, but considering he was jumping directly into a trap designed to kill him, he figured he might as well take the extra precaution.

  Yes, you would not want Manizheh to be denied the chance to murder you herself when she learns you disobeyed her direct order.

  But he wasn’t leaving Irtemiz with his enemies. Not Irtemiz, the spirited country girl he’d shaped into a talented archer, the one who reminded him of the little sister he hadn’t been able to save. And Dara had a trick up his sleeve not even Manizheh, let alone some wretched sand flies and dirt-bloods, knew.

  The old daeva wind magic.

  Dara hadn’t used it since the night before Navasatem, when he’d become formless to fly over the icy mountains and cold lakes of northern Daevastana. For one, he hadn’t had a spare moment since they took the palace—revolution, it turned out, was time-consuming. But more than that, Dara didn’t trust himself with the temptation. The wind magic had been intoxicating, offering a thrilling escape from all this madness, one that tugged nearly as hard on his heart as did his duty to his people.

  Now, however, he would use it to achieve both.

  It took a few moments to recall how to summon the magic, and then he was gone, his body vanishing from the balcony of his small room in a swirl of dead leaves. In another moment, the city was below him, around him, part of him.

  And had he lungs, Dara would have choked on the miasma of rot that clung to the island. Everything was dulled, as if he’d submerged in a murky pool. It was nothing like his previous experience in whic
h he could taste a buzz on the air, molten energy in the warm earth, and life in the inviting, mysterious waters.

  He floated farther, Daevabad dark and unmoving below him. Though Dara remembered its nights being livelier, he supposed cities embroiled in civil strife shut down the moment the shadows grew deeper, if people dared creep about at all. Beyond, he spotted the gleaming desert past the threshold, bright with starlight and life.

  Daevabad is sick, he realized, dread sinking deeper into his soul. The island and its lake stood out like a festering wound on the world, as though a vital piece had been stolen away. The loss of Suleiman’s seal—it had to be.

  By the Creator, Nahri, please be alive. Please bring it back. Dara couldn’t imagine any way Nahri and the current holder of Suleiman’s seal could return to Daevabad that didn’t end with one of them dead, but the true toll of all this was suddenly so clear. They’d broken their world, and now their home—the home of tens of thousands—was dying.

  Awful as that thought was, Dara could do nothing to save Daevabad tonight. But he could save the life of someone who’d trusted him.

  Fixing the hospital in his mind, Dara found himself there in the next moment, spinning down and landing on the roof, light as a bird. It was a disorienting experience; there was the ghost of stone beneath what might have been his feet—except glancing down, he didn’t see his feet. Trying to pull himself back into the material world, he cloaked himself in shadows and crept to the roof’s edge.

  Nostalgia swept him. The hospital looked different, but the bones of the old institution were still there. In his youth, Dara had spent plenty of time in the hospital—most warriors-intraining did—and his memories returned to him, of Nahid healers in facemasks and aprons forcing foul potions down his throat and resetting snapped bones.

  It was quiet now, the breeze rustling the trees in the courtyard the only sound. An arcaded corridor surrounded the garden, and in the eastern corner, he noticed the flicker of firelight beyond the pale bricks.

  This is a trap. It had been there in every goading, mocking line of that Geziri woman’s speech. The djinn wanted him dead. A smart man wouldn’t take this risk—one didn’t risk catastrophe for a single life, and until recently, Dara himself would have made the same cruel calculus.

  But there was another part of the equation worth examining:

  They have never beaten me.

  Dara had been cut down only twice—by the ifrit when he was enslaved and then by Alizayd and his marid masters, fiends who couldn’t touch him now. And that was before he’d awoken with the incredible abilities of an original daeva. There was no one below but ordinary djinn soldiers and shafit servants. Trap or not, they were no match for him.

  Dara vanished again, letting himself become immaterial, but it was a struggle to hold, an ill-timed reminder that his magic and strength were finite, no matter what he wanted to believe. He slipped from the roof and then into the hospital’s murky heart. He was not entirely silent—he might be invisible, but the curtains shivered when he passed, and the torches blossomed, their fire growing wild in his presence. As he went deeper, it became clear the place wasn’t completely asleep. A yawning shafit servant, her arms filled with linens, passed in the corridor, and there were murmured whispers behind doors. Farther away, someone moaned in pain, and a child whimpered.

  He drifted around the next corner and then stilled. Two Geziri men stood at attention beside a closed door, light playing below the doorjamb. The men weren’t in uniform, and one looked barely older than a boy, but the elder wore a zulfiqar and the other a straight sword, their posture indicating training.

  Dara considered his options. With corridors snaking in three different directions, he knew a single cry would carry, alerting the rest of the hospital. But he wasn’t sure he could pass by like this. The djinn might not know the extent of his abilities, but wild gossip would have carried of his fiery form and the lake that had risen like a beast. They were probably on guard for the slightest hint of magic, and he didn’t need the wall torches next to the guards’ heads flaring and giving him away.

  He studied the door, letting himself reach out. The wooden particles were old and dry, insubstantial, really. Beyond, he could sense a vacuum of air, a single hot presence and beating heart. Acting on instinct, Dara willed himself inside.

  He stumbled, falling to his knees as he abruptly rematerialized—thankfully inside the dark room. He was out of breath and exhausted, his magic nearly spent, but he had just enough to pull his mortal form over his body, masking his fiery skin. By the Creator, maybe he should have taken to interrogating the ifrit more often about their ancient abilities. From the stories they’d shared, it seemed they’d been able to stay formless for years on end—and not end up an exhausted mess once they returned to the earth.

  A problem for another time.

  Staying as still as possible, Dara checked to make sure his weapons had come through and then straightened up.

  He breathed a sigh of relief. Irtemiz.

  The young archer was asleep on a straw mat, her breath rising and falling in the beams of moonlight that streamed in from a barred window near the ceiling. A skin of water rested at her side, and if she was disheveled—her black hair knotted and wild, her clothes threadbare—she’d at least been treated for her injuries. Her left arm and leg rested in splints, her body mottled with old bruises. Her right ankle was shackled, an iron chain leading to a pipe that ran vertically through the room.

  Dara’s heart sank. The shackle he could deal with. How to silently escape a guarded room with a badly injured woman was another story.

  He carefully crept forward, lowering himself to her ear. “Irtemiz,” he whispered.

  Her eyes shot open, but she was too well trained to shout. Her gaze darted to his.

  There was no relief. “You shouldn’t be here, Afshin,” she said, her voice barely audible. “They’re expecting you. They mean to kill you.”

  “A lot of people have already failed at that,” he said, trying for a reassuring smile. He nodded at her leg. “Can you walk?”

  Despair grew in her face. “No. I can’t even put weight on it. A wave smashed me into the remains of the Citadel. Their doctor says it’s shattered.” Her voice trembled. “My arm too. I’ll probably never hold a bow again. I’m useless, but you’re not. You need to get out of here.”

  “You’re not useless,” Dara said fiercely. “And I don’t intend to leave you, so you might as well help me.” He gestured to the room. “Are there any other ways out of here?”

  “I don’t know. They blindfold me whenever I’m moved and only speak in human languages. They had a Daeva man, a patient, here to translate, but I haven’t seen him in days.”

  Dara took all that in, considering his options. He’d planned on flying out, but there were two of them now, and his magic was still recovering. Could he really burst through these doors, navigate back through the maze of corridors, and take to the air without getting them killed?

  He glanced again at the window. It was small … but perhaps not too small. Quietly pulling over a wooden stool, he climbed up to examine it. The bars were metal and new, their welding still gleaming. The construction looked flimsy—maybe the bars would keep Irtemiz in, but not Dara. Beyond the window, the midnight sky beckoned. It would be a tight fit, but it was better than going through the door.

  Dara climbed back down. “I’m going to need to change to my other form,” he warned. “I’ll help you through the window, but it might hurt.”

  She still looked uncertain but gave a shaky nod.

  He released his mortal guise, fire sweeping over his limbs. The relief was immediate. Not all his magic returned right away, but Dara could already breathe more easily. With a flick of his hand, Irtemiz’s mat floated up from the ground.

  “Wait one moment.” He climbed back up on the stool and then grabbed the bars with his scorching hands. He popped the entire metal frame out of the window with little effort and then looked for a spot t
o set it down.

  Weak-blooded fools. Had their builders proper magic, they would have had stone mages shape the window bars out of the bricks itself and had blacksmiths temper them with fiery hands. Kaveh had called the hospital a vanity project with shafit labor; small wonder they had resorted to inferior human techniques.

  Movement drew Dara’s eye. A skinny length of cord that must have been held in place by the frame jerked swiftly out of sight. Odd.

  He’d only just stepped back when there was an explosion outside the window.

  Dara stumbled, shielding his eyes against the sudden flare of light, the stool tilting and falling with his movement, depositing him ungracefully on the ground. There was the acrid aroma of gunpowder.

  Ah. The trap.

  Another blast and a metal ball the size of his fist shot through the window he’d been hoping to fly through, smashing into the opposite wall and raining dust over his head. Irtemiz yelped, ducking beneath her uninjured arm.

  The door to the room burst open. The two Geziri guards stood there, outlined in the blazing light of the corridor’s torches.

  Dara felt a moment of sorrow looking into their doomed faces. He’d been a soldier and knew the feeling of being thrust into a battle you had no choice in fighting.

  They’d taken his warrior, though, and made a snare of her. So his sorrow was short-lived.

  He lunged forward, drawing his knives before the men could take a breath. They were dead in the next moment, falling to the ground while clutching the throats he’d opened. It didn’t matter—shouts and the sound of pounding feet were already drawing nearer.

  A second shot came through the window, ending any hopes of escaping that way. Dara spun back on Irtemiz, tossing her a knife.

  “Run,” she begged him. “Leave me, please.”

  “Not happening, little one. Hold tight.” With a knife in one hand and his ax in the other, he charged out the door, beckoning for her mat to float after him.