“It is not Manizheh who is upsetting the balance. It is her servant.”
Nahri’s stomach dropped. Her servant. “Dara,” she stammered. “You’re asking me to get rid of … to kill Dara?”
“No,” the pearl peri said. “We are not asking such a thing. We would never make that type of request. We are simply informing you of the cost of magic’s return to your world and suggesting a way in which your burden might be eased.”
“But Manizheh is the one responsible!”
“Manizheh is a full-blooded mortal daeva. Extremely powerful, yes. But still beneath us. Lesser. Were we to be involved in suggesting her demise …” The ruby peri gestured to the flocks swirling overhead. “We have agreed that the risk is too great. Her … creation,” he said distastefully, “is an entirely different matter. He is an abomination, a monster she has cobbled together out of blood magic, murder, and a marid’s debt. His removal has been deemed permissible.”
Every careful word made Nahri more disgusted. It was what they’d wanted, what she and Jamshid had been searching for in their family’s texts. But the idea of the peris, so smug and convinced of their own superiority, debating the assassination of mortals below—debating how to make it permissible—filled her with revulsion.
“So you do it,” Nahri replied. “You’re all high and mighty. Surely you can perform your own assassinations.”
“We cannot,” the sapphire peri objected. Of the three, this elder was gentlest, and their words were delivered in a way that seemed to plead for understanding. “It is against our nature.”
“And he is in Daevabad,” the pearl peri added. “We cannot enter the city. Since the veil has fallen, we can see into it. But we cannot enter.”
Nahri clenched her hands into fists. “You could ask any daeva. Any djinn. Why me?”
The ruby peri swept a hand through the air, looking more fascinated by the snowflakes spinning in the wind than by the murder they were asking Nahri to carry out. “For many reasons. You can enter the city and get close to him. You need an act that will bond the seal to your heart. It is also believed your human blood will add an additional layer of protection that distances us. For a shafit to kill the Scourge, it would be justice.”
“Let’s not pretend you care about justice when it comes to the ‘internecine squabbles of my people,’” Nahri shot back. “And I can’t kill him. All your spying must be pointless if you haven’t figured that out. I’m no warrior.”
“But you are,” the sapphire peri countered. “In the only war that truly counts.”
“And you would be protected.” The pearl peri gestured to the shedu. “We took the shedu from your family when they stepped off the righteous path but would permit them to serve again.”
“There is also this.” The ruby peri snatched at the air, snow and ice condensing in his hands to form a straight blade that gleamed like liquid mercury. “A weapon that strikes through any heart that beats fire.” He tossed it to the ground before her feet. The hilt dazzled even in the snow-dimmed sky.
“You would be glorious,” the sapphire peri whispered. “A daughter of Anahid with Suleiman’s seal and a weapon of heaven, flying into Daevabad on the back of a shedu. Your people would follow you to the ends of the earth. No matter your human blood. No matter what revolutionary things you desired. You could transform your world.”
Nahri tightened her fists, struggling to keep her face blank at the calculated offer. The peris really had been listening. They knew her wishes, her fears.
They knew she was the kind of person who would strike a deal.
So this was what it had come to, then. For all Nahri’s efforts, she was still caught beneath the thumbs of more powerful brokers. A queen who would keep her as a vulnerable guest, a mother who would lock her away. Or a pawn, a well-rewarded weapon.
And it was still a wildly impossible goal. Kill Dara—Dara, a man who would have been worshipped as a war god in an earlier era. Even with a legendary mount and a celestial weapon, it seemed a ludicrous proposition.
But it’s not.
Nahri remembered Dara in the palace corridor where it had all gone wrong, clutching her hands as he begged for understanding. You weren’t supposed to see it. He had wanted so desperately to save her. He loved her.
It was his weakness. And it might be the only thing that made him an easy mark.
Nahri stared at the dagger, but no one moved. “You must take it for yourself,” the ruby peri explained. “We cannot put it in your hands.”
“Of course not. You wouldn’t want to interfere.” But Nahri knelt, picking up the dagger from the soft snow. The hilt was so cold that it stung her hands, and she found herself quietly checking her healing magic. The pain felt deserved.
You won’t pick yourself up from this. Nahri had lost her mentor and her best friend. If she went back to Daevabad to murder her Afshin, the charismatic warrior who’d once stolen her heart—smiling and feigning affection as she plunged a dagger into his chest at the behest of these meddling creatures—it would break Nahri in a way she didn’t think she’d recover from. If she survived, she’d have her brother, her Daevas. She might oversee the rebirth of her city.
But she’d have sold a part of her soul.
And that, apparently, was exactly the sacrifice she was being asked to make.
Nahri straightened up and slid the peri’s dagger into the folds of her belt. She reached for the shedu, trying to take some assurance in the cozy heat of its fur. By the time she spoke again, she made sure her voice were steady.
“You should take me back to Ta Ntry now. There is not much time.”
40
DARA
Fiza did not seem thrilled with Ali’s transformation.
“Aghhh!” The pirate captain scrambled backward on the riverbank, drawing her pistol and pointing it in his face. “Demon! What did you do to him?”
Ali dodged the pistol. “Nothing! Fiza, it’s me, I swear!”
She didn’t lower the weapon, her hand shaking. “What the fuck is wrong with your eyes?” Her gaze darted to his arms, the silver-scaled lines dazzling in the early morning light as they traced wild patterns across his bare skin. “What is wrong with your everything?”
Ali paused. Sobek had taken them from Tiamat’s realm back to the Nile, but it wasn’t the winding desert river he and Nahri had sailed. Instead, they sat at the foot of a lush green plateau, the mighty river plunging over in a wall of waterfalls that stretched into the distance. Between the mist and the churning water, Ali hadn’t gotten a good look at his reflection.
My eyes. His eyes had been an exact mirror of Ghassan’s, the most visible sign of his Geziri heritage.
Gone now, apparently. “I had to make some choices. But forget all that. Are you okay?” he asked worriedly, nodding at her black eye. “It looks like you took a bad blow to the head.”
“Yes, the ocean rising around us and punching me in the face left a mark.” Fiza finally lowered the pistol and then groaned as seawater poured from it. “Damn, I was fond of that! Where are we? And what happened? The last thing I remember is the ship getting gobbled up.”
Ali hesitated again, having no idea how to describe what had happened at the bottom of the sea without alarming Fiza further. Between getting chased by a massive scorpion-man, participating in a forced gladiatorial match with his literal pagan past, or having a thousand memories dumped into his brain as part of a pact with a colossal chaos spirit, he didn’t know where to start.
So he just said, “I met Tiamat. We didn’t really get along.”
Fiza gave him an incredulous look. “You didn’t really get along? That’s not an encouraging statement, prince.” She glanced around. “Where’s the boat? Where’s the ocean? Where’s—” She screamed again, the pistol reappearing. “What is that?”
Sobek had rejoined them.
The Nile marid had emerged from the muddy water in his less frightening form, but he didn’t need to be gnashing crocodile teeth to be unset
tling—the green of his rough hide and dappled yellow-and-black eyes were enough.
Ali quickly stepped between them, lowering Fiza’s hand. “This is Sobek. My … great-grandfather. In a way. He’s not going to hurt you, I promise.” He glanced at Sobek. “Right?”
Sobek’s unearthly stare didn’t waver. “I have already eaten.”
Fiza closed her eyes. “I never again want to hear that shafit are the source of our world’s problems. Never.”
Sobek’s gaze narrowed on Ali. “Are you ready?”
Ali’s heart skipped, but he’d already paid Tiamat’s price. He might as well claim the knowledge that had cost him so dearly. “Will you be okay here for a little while?” he asked Fiza.
“With him? No!”
“He’s coming with me.”
“Where are you going?”
“To deal with some family history.”
THE GLADE SOBEK LED HIM TO WAS BEAUTIFUL, ONE of the loveliest places Ali had ever seen. Despite a waterfall that cascaded down a flower- and vine-covered cliff, the river was remarkably still, and there was a quiet to the air that seemed sacred. The lush scene could have been plucked from Paradise—a dragonfly lazily dipping over a water lily, a heron stalking the shallows, and a slender antelope drinking from the edge. The animals had all briefly frozen when Sobek appeared, the instinctual response of prey, before relaxing and continuing as if they weren’t in the presence of a marid and a djinn who’d recently tried to kill each other.
“This is one of the places your ancestors would come pay their respects to me,” Sobek murmured as they strode through the hip-deep water, lotus stems brushing against Ali’s legs.
“Did they live here?” Ali asked, remembering what his grandfather had said about their family’s early history being a blank slate.
“For a time. But they moved frequently, especially the first generations. Their water magic was impossible to hide then, and your world was chaos for centuries after Suleiman’s punishment. My kin were careful.” Bitterness edged into his voice. “Until they were not.”
Ali tensed, but when Sobek submerged with a wave of his hand, Ali followed. The murky river was no trouble for his senses now; he could see clear as day, his ears picking up new underwater sounds he hadn’t been privy to earlier. He swam faster, easily keeping pace with Sobek as they dove beneath the curtain of waterfalls to emerge in a hidden cave. It had been enlarged, with benches cut into the stone and pictograms carved into the walls.
Ali traced the image of a man with a crocodile’s head. “Is this you?”
“Yes.” Sobek laid a palm against the hand-drawn letters, and if his expression betrayed nothing, Ali could see wistfulness in the gesture. “It is our history. Their names, the deeds I did for them. Our pact.”
Ali stared at the pictograms. “They mean nothing to me,” he confessed, a great loss opening inside his chest. “They don’t look like any Ayaanle script I know—they don’t look like any script I’ve ever seen. Their language may have been forgotten.” He could hear the ache in his voice. It shook him to think how thoroughly severed his family had been from its roots.
“That may have been intentional on the part of the survivors. Ignorance weakens the bond. It is more difficult to hold someone to a pact they had no part in making.”
Ali felt sick all over again. “Why did you kill them?” He had to know. “Tiamat said she ordered them brought before her. So why did you kill them?”
Sobek had crossed to the rocky wall, moving stones from a cairn set against it. “Tiamat and I have long been rivals. We both hail from the original generation of our kind, and I was not always keen to pay her obeisance, especially when she abandoned the lake and turned her back on those of our people forced to toil for the Nahids.” He pulled a bundle free.
“I don’t understand,” Ali said.
The marid returned, leaving a trail like a serpent across the damp sand. “You saw how she is. I was not going to give her my kin. She would have spent a thousand years slowly torturing them to death. It was more merciful—more swift—to handle them myself.”
More merciful. “Could you not have tried to save them? Warned them to run to the desert, spared the children?”
“That is not our way.” There was no malice in Sobek’s voice. It was the simple truth of a creature from a time and place Ali didn’t and would never understand. “They had a pact. They betrayed it.”
They saved us and were destroyed for it. Ali tried to imagine what might have happened if his Ayaanle ancestor had taken Suleiman’s seal away from Daevabad after the Nahid Council had been overthrown, magic vanishing with Zaydi’s victory. People would have thought it God’s revenge for rebelling against the Nahids, for daring to call for equality. The shafit probably would have been wiped out, the resulting civil war lasting centuries.
We do not cross the Ayaanle. Six words the only memory of a sacrifice that had decimated the half of his family Ali had grown up dismissing.
“What was his name?” he asked, his voice thick with emotion. “The name of my ancestor who betrayed you?”
There was a moment of silence before Sobek replied. “Armah.” He pronounced the name with somber respect. “He was talented with my magic. The first in many generations to be able to travel the currents and share memories.” Irritation slipped into his voice. “Apparently talented enough to keep me from realizing that he left a child or two in Daevabad.”
Armah. Ali committed the name to memory. He would pray for his murdered and martyred ancestors later, and if he survived all this, he’d make sure the rest of his family and their next generations did so as well.
But first he would fight. “What is that?” he asked, nodding at the bundle Sobek held.
“His vestments. I made them myself. You are mortal still, and they will protect you when you travel the currents.”
Ali took the vestments. A cross between clothing and armor, they looked like they were spun from crocodile hide and burnished to a pale green-gold. One was a flat, hooded helmet that trailed down the back and the other a sleeveless tunic, knee length and split down the middle.
He ran his fingers over the helmet and then noticed Sobek held something else—something more to Ali’s taste. “Is that his blade?”
“Yes,” Sobek grunted, handing it over.
Ali took it and admired the weapon: a long sickle-sword unlike anything he’d fought with before. The blade was iron and wickedly sharp, the hilt covered with polished bronze.
“You’ve preserved this,” Ali realized. This sword had not been abandoned in a rocky cairn, untouched for centuries. “You say he betrayed you and deserved death, yet you’ve kept safe his vestments and weapon.” He hesitated, then asked another question, one that had been spinning in his mind since their match. “Back in Tiamat’s realm, you stopped fighting me. Why?”
Sobek gave him an even stare. “I am sure you are mistaken.”
Ali held his ancestor’s gaze. In the pale light of the cave, Sobek looked as frightening and mystical as ever, the falling water throwing undulating shadows across his stern face. He looked untouchable.
But he wasn’t. Ali had seen Sobek’s memories and felt those long, lonely centuries—a toll of time and miserable solitude Ali could barely wrap his head around. Perhaps keeping himself apart was how the Nile marid survived it.
They weren’t the same. Ali would never forgive or forget what Sobek had done to his family. But he would let Sobek keep the boundaries of his affection private.
“Perhaps I am.” Ali slipped into the armor. It fit like a second skin, cool against his body. “You’ll teach me marid magic now? How to travel the currents?”
“That was the agreement. Where do you wish to go first?”
Ali ran his hands down the helmet. An utterly mad plan had been taking shape in his head, given new life by the marid memories Tiamat had poured into his brain.
“Is there a place where I can find shipwrecks?”
A HALF DOZEN ATTEMPTS AT TRA
VELING THE CURRENTS later, the sea that stretched before them was shallow—at least compared to Tiamat’s fathomless abode. Pale sand studded with vibrant waves of razor-sharp coral and dancing fronds dazzled Ali’s eyes, jewel-bright fish flitting all about. Beyond was the surface, glimmering like liquid glass with sunlight.
Ali eyed the coral. Dangerous for ships. Beneath the water, he communicated to Sobek in the marid way, words swimming in his mind.
For centuries, Sobek agreed, spreading his hands to encompass the wrecks that surrounded them. The marid of this sea is fat with the blood and memories of mortal sailors. She rules in a ruin far to the north with a court of sharks.
Ali’s skin pricked. She will not mind our intrusion?
She owes me a favor, a pact gone unclaimed. And she will not cross Tiamat.
Ali again studied the ships. Most had been reduced to broken beams and rotting, seaweed-covered hulls. There were the bones of small smugglers’ canoes and elegant dhows, antique triremes and new galleons barely broken down. Lost cargo from across time and space was strewn across the sand: enormous stone amphorae and shattered porcelain vases, coins gone green with age and raw blocks of unpolished rock quartz.
You are certain this is possible? he asked Sobek again. Ali had told the marid his plan as Sobek coached him through handling the currents.
The magic is possible, yes. But you understand none of this will protect you from the Nahid’s champion. No marid can stand against him.
I will not be alone, Ali replied. This is only our first stop.
You intend to go someplace other than Daevabad?
Ali smiled in the water. I intend to go everywhere.
He had promised Nahri he would return, and Ali would.
But first, he was going to get her an army.
The Empire of Gold Page 55
