Nothing did, not when her city finally came into view.
Daevabad, in all its glory and infamy. The mighty brass walls embellished with the facades of its founders, her ancestors. The crush of ziggurats and minarets, temples and stupas; the dizzying array of clashing architecture and eras—each group, each voice leaving its defiant mark on the city of djinn. The shafit stolen from Persepolis and Timbuktu, the wandering scholars and warrior-poets from every corner of the world. The laborers who, when their work was left unacknowledged in official chronicles, had instead emblazoned their names in graffiti. The women who, after erecting universities and libraries and mosques, were kept silent because of “respectability,” had stamped their presence on the cityscape itself.
Yet everything was a touch off. There were empty spaces where conjured buildings should have stood, ugly pockmarks on the skyline. The brass walls were tarnished, the edifices riddled with missing bricks and blackened mortar. Defying any weather pattern Nahri knew, somehow the eastern half of the island was draped in snow while the sun scorched the western side so fiercely that small fires smoldered in the scrubby hills. A hazy black cloud revealed itself to be a swarm of flies, and the ruined Citadel lay bare to the sky like a scar, its tower half drowned in the lake.
Like the mountains, Daevabad was sick. But there was no magic leaping from her hand now, and Nahri feared that whatever damage had befallen her city was going to need more than a single Nahid flitting through the air to fix it.
She took a deep breath as they approached the walls—she and Mishmish would be visible in seconds. Creator, if you have ever listened to my prayer, help me save my home. Guide me like you guided Anahid.
Make my hand steady when it needs to be.
Then Nahri and her shedu soared over the walls and into the city of Daevabad.
They flew directly into the Grand Bazaar. The crowded marketplace of djinn shoppers and arguing bargain hunters—the place she’d originally wandered through, wide-eyed and dazzled at Dara’s side—was almost unrecognizable. Most of the shops were shuttered, and several had been ransacked. There were no browsing families now, only knots of people sticking to the shadows, blades sheathed at their waists.
Knots of people who very swiftly noticed the enormous flying lion. Alarmed cries rang out, followed by an awful metal racket, like someone had upended an entire rack of kitchen pans.
“The Scourge!” she heard someone wail. “He’s back!”
“He’s not!” Nahri shouted down at a group of men in tattered military uniforms. Oh, how lovely—one was loading a rifle.
But they must have heard her, for the tone of the shouting immediately changed.
“It’s the Banu Nahida!” a woman cried. “Banu Nahri!”
Nahri’s name carried on the wind, and the clanging went wild, people stepping into the street and leaning out of windows to gape upward. And while being cheered was certainly more encouraging than being shot, Nahri didn’t slow down. Signs of decay and disease were everywhere, from buildings sheared in half to public water pumps submerged in fetid ponds. With relief, Nahri noted the hospital still stood, a small blessing. She urged Mishmish to fly over the hospital’s roof and toward the midan.
Utter devastation met her eyes.
Nahri blinked, certain her mind was playing tricks. Because where there had once been blocks upon blocks, lively inhabited neighborhoods that stretched between the hospital and midan, there was now nothing but rubble—as though a great hammer had fallen from the sky to smash everything in its wake. The destruction wasn’t confined to the shafit district either: a vast swath of carnage also stretched across the Ayaanle and Geziri quarters. Their three gates lay in ruins, half buried under the shattered remains of the midan wall.
She kept staring, as though the scene before her eyes would resolve. She wasn’t naive. Nahri knew war, and she knew cruelty; her homeland had been occupied since her birth, and she’d fled through a palace filled with slaughtered djinn. But the enormity of what was before her very eyes … how did one process that? How did one make sense of entire neighborhoods, long-standing places with history and roots and community, simply being erased? Ground up. Homes and schools, tea shops and gardens; the lives and stories they’d contained, the hard work and dreams that kept them standing.
All gone now. Pulverized.
She was shaking. Where are the people? Had they been warned? Or was it a graveyard she was flying over, thousands buried beneath the ruins?
And Nahri knew very suddenly why the peris had finally interfered. This was nothing like the sickness infecting the rest of Daevabad, a slow and steady rot. It wasn’t the kind of devastation the ifrit could wreak. Or Manizheh.
This was the wanton destruction of the daevas of legend. The ones who had traveled the winds to bury caravans in the desert and devour human cities. The daevas it had taken a prophet to beat.
Dara had done this. And Nahri would kill him for it.
As if sensing her wrath, Mishmish roared, a bone-shaking sound that split the sky. Nahri almost hoped they heard it in the palace. She hoped they knew she was coming for them. That she was coming for vengeance.
With her own cry, she urged the shedu forward and cut through the sky.
They were flying faster now, but a quick glance at the Daeva Quarter and Temple revealed nothing out of the ordinary—whatever death Manizheh had visited on their tribe must have been done behind closed doors. The palace veered nearer. Archers were scrambling on the wall, but they didn’t shoot, whether out of shock or uncertainty, Nahri didn’t know and didn’t care. Mishmish vaulted up and up, over the garden in which she’d spent countless hours grieving and healing; the massive library in which a prince had taught her to read and that they had then destroyed together; the throne room where Ghassan had attempted to humiliate her and was instead met with defiance from her tribe …
Then they were there at the top of the ziggurat, the palace Anahid had designed and built while wearing the ring now on Nahri’s hand. Mishmish landed with a flourish, spreading his dazzling wings against the sun and roaring at the sky.
Their epic entrance wasn’t a lonely one for long—it was probably the roaring—and it was only a minute or two before a pair of Daeva soldiers burst through the doors, their swords flashing.
The first paled so fast Nahri thought he might faint. “By the Creator,” he choked. He held out his blade, the sword dipping madly. “Is that a—a …”
Nahri raised a fist, the magic of the palace leaping to her hand like an old friend. Her rage echoed in its old stones. It had always been there, simmering in the walls whose shadows had hidden her when she needed and ripped the rug out from under Ghassan’s feet, but it had new life now. Daevabad’s heart and soul had been gutted, and everything in it cried out to be saved. Healed. Flames burst from her palm, the ring gleaming in the firelight, and she inhaled, power rippling through her.
Nahri snapped her fingers, and the soldier’s sword shattered.
He jumped, gasping and dropping the hilt. The second man hadn’t even reached for his weapon; he was touching his ash mark and whispering prayers.
“Go,” she commanded, offering mercy. “I am here for Manizheh, her Afshin, and the ifrit alone.”
The first man stammered a response. “W-we have orders to protect—”
“Warrior, I am a Nahid standing before you, on a shedu, with Suleiman’s seal. Trust me, your orders did not consider this. Go.”
“You should listen to her.” A quiet voice spoke up. “I wish I had.”
Nahri whirled around.
Dara.
THE AFSHIN HAD APPEARED WITHOUT A SOUND BEHIND them, perhaps even more dazzling than Nahri, on a winged horse of shifting smoke and flashing embers. He was dressed in black, scaled brass armor covering his chest and wrists and glittering in the sun. A matching helmet with a crest of vibrant feathers crowned the ebony hair tumbling down his shoulders.
His horse landed lightly on the parapet and then fell apart in a ra
in of cinders. Dara approached, looking every bit the beautiful Scourge of legend. He was carrying one now—the foul weapon dangling from his belt along with a sword and a dagger, his bow lying across his back. The helmet threw his face into shadow, but his emerald eyes still shone fever bright, and when Dara moved closer, it took everything Nahri had to not step back. Forget the emotional entanglements between them—she was mad to think she could take on such a man. Why had she even thought this was possible? Because the peris gave her a fancy knife? Dara looked like death itself.
And how did you kill death?
Mishmish growled, baring his teeth and curving one wing around her. Dara stopped, glancing at the soldiers. “Leave us.”
The two men vanished, tripping over each other in their haste to get out the door.
Dara stared at her, his gaze tracing Suleiman’s ring blazing from her smoldering hand to the shedu curled protectively around her.
“You look glorious,” he murmured. “The Creator has favored you.”
Nahri’s heart was racing. “Probably means you should switch sides.”
Dara gave her a broken smile. Smoke curled from his collar, melting into the dark of his hair and making him as otherworldly as ever. “Were it that easy, my love.”
“You don’t get to call me that,” she snapped, her voice shaking with anger. All thoughts of lulling Dara into a false intimacy, of throwing herself into his arms so she could shove the peri’s dagger through his heart, had fled at the enormity of what he’d done. Not even Nahri could wear a mask after flying over street after street of ruined homes and untold dead.
“Was that your handiwork back there on the other side of the city?” she demanded. “Were a thousand Geziri dead not enough? Was Qui-zi not enough? You had to add another thousand? Five thousand? TALK TO ME!” Nahri screamed, her control shattering when he didn’t respond.
Dara squeezed his eyes shut. He was trembling, his lips contorting as though he were fighting his own response.
But when he finally spoke, his voice was flat. “I am loyal to the blessed Banu Manizheh. Those were her orders.”
“‘Orders,’” Nahri repeated. “A good man would have defied those orders.”
His eyes seemed to sparkle with unshed tears, but then the wetness was gone, vanishing as swiftly as it had come. “I am not a good man. I am a weapon.”
A weapon. Dara had called himself that before, but not in this oddly muted way, his head lowered. This was not the hot-tempered Afshin she’d known, defending himself in the corridor. This was not the Afshin she wanted. Needed. Nahri almost needed Dara to shout back at her, to give some hint that there had been emotion and a heart that roiled within him.
“I went back, you know. To the cemetery where we first met.” Fighting the hitch in her throat, Nahri plunged forward. “Was any of it ever real between us? Because I don’t understand how the man I thought I knew … who I thought I—” She could not say the word as easily as he did. “How could you have done it, Dara? How could you have stood by her side as she did that to the Geziris? How could you have done the things they said you did at Qui-zi? Their women … is that what you really are?”
The name of the city he’d terrorized long ago seemed to break whatever spell of dispassion he’d been under, a hint of despair stealing into Dara’s voice. “I … no. Qui-zi, their women—that part at least was a lie. My men never—”
Nahri recoiled. That was where Dara wanted to draw a line? “Oh, please. You really think no one in your batch of murderers went off mission between slaying shafit children and burying men alive?”
There was pleading desperation in his eyes now, as though he could speak more honestly about the past than his current duty to Manizheh. “You do not understand.”
“Then tell me!”
Dara looked pained. “They … some of the women had lain with shafit. My men would not have touched them.”
Nahri felt the floor move beneath her. “I hate you,” she whispered. “I hate that I ever had feelings for you.”
Still in his celestial finery, Dara dropped to his knees. The sight was incongruous. “I had to do it, Nahri. The people I believed were the Creator’s messengers on earth looked me in the eye and begged me to. I was eighteen. They told me we would otherwise lose the war and our world would be ripped apart.”
“And the people at Qui-zi? The mothers and children you ripped apart? Did they not beg you? Tell me,” Nahri demanded when he dropped his gaze in shame. “Tell me how you could look at people—at anyone—hear those cries and not break? Tell me how you could do it again. You’re not eighteen anymore, Dara. You’ve got centuries on me, and do you know what I did when Manizheh asked me to join her? To view the massacre of innocents as an acceptable price for victory?
“I turned her down.”
But at her mother’s name, Dara had rocked back on his heels, a vacant daze sweeping his features. “You should not have. Banu Manizheh is blessed, rightly guided, and I am loyal only to her.” Again, the stilted, almost rehearsed-sounding words. “I cannot act against her. I cannot speak against her.” He was staring at her, a glimmer of odd beseeching in the otherwise bleak set of his face. “Please understand.”
“But I don’t understand!”
Still on his knees, Dara shivered and then rose to his feet in an awkward fashion entirely unlike him, as if he was fighting his own body. He clenched his fists, embers falling from his lips. “I have orders to capture you.”
“You take another step near me, and my shedu is going to have orders to eat you.” The threat didn’t take, because Dara was still moving toward her. Yet he was going slowly, like he might have been wading through churning water. He stepped into a ray of sunlight, the angle finally illuminating his visage beneath the helmet.
Nahri went cold.
Jagged lines of smoldering fire cracked across the left side of Dara’s face like a lightning bolt, creeping down his neck to vanish under his collar. He was pale, too pale, a gray cast to his skin and deep shadows beneath his swollen, glassy eyes. He looked … sick, in a way that instantly reminded her of the cursed simurgh back on the beach.
But there was no vacant stillness in Dara’s eyes. There was complete and total despair, hopelessness beyond anything she’d seen from him before.
Her throat caught. “What’s wrong with you?”
Dara stared at her, pleading in his gaze. “I have orders to capture you,” he repeated, seeming to choke on the words as if an unseen hand were strangling him. “You have betrayed your people and your family. But Banu Manizheh is ever compassionate.” The overly formal words didn’t match his devastated expression. “Surrender now and be granted mercy.”
Nahri’s mind spun. This is not him.
But what if it was? She’d read Dara wrong before and been nearly destroyed in return. What if he was playing on her weakness, on her affection?
What if Nahri was the mark?
He lurched forward, and Mishmish growled again. “Nahri, please,” Dara implored. “Surrender. I cannot fight her. You cannot fight her. She—” His mouth snapped shut.
Then he shuddered, reaching for his scourge. It transformed in his hand, the iron barbs turning into shackles and chains. A leash.
“I am very sorry,” he whispered. “But I have orders to bring you to her.”
Nahri stared in horrified revulsion at the transformed scourge. But it was also the reminder she needed, jerking her loose from whatever this conversation was. She couldn’t stay up here, not where the lake and sky were so visible.
That wasn’t the plan.
She leveled her gaze on Dara, feeling the chill of the peri’s dagger through her clothes. “I’m shafit, you know.” The truth felt good, filling her with pride. “It’s human blood flowing through here,” she added, tapping her wrist. “Probably not dark enough to have passed your foul test at Qui-zi. But let me tell you, Afshin, I will bury you beneath the lake before that scourge touches me.”
She would swear sorrow bri
efly lit his eyes. But then the flat mask of obedience again slipped over Dara’s features, like a man pulled underwater, and he lunged.
Nahri was ready. With barely a thought, the palace magic surged through her. She threw up her hands, and the stone floor rushed up like a wave, groaning and fracturing, to snare around Dara’s legs.
She didn’t expect it to hold. Nahri jumped on Mishmish as Dara twisted and roared, the stone already starting to crack. “The garden, go!”
They flew, dashing over the overgrown palace heart. An object whizzed past Nahri’s ear with a metallic whistle, a glimmer of silver vanishing into the undergrowth. A second one tore by, and then a third whizzed past her calf with a lash of pain.
Arrows. He was shooting at her.
Mishmish yelped, swerving as he was hit in the wing. Another arrow dashed by, narrowly missing his throat and Nahri’s arm. She whirled back, spotting Dara on the edge of the parapet. He drew back his bow again.
Nahri brought the roof down.
Dara disappeared in the explosion of wood and stone, swallowed by falling bricks. Nahri didn’t bother watching. It wasn’t going to kill him. Deep in her bones, she knew he was going to keep coming for her until she put her dagger through his heart.
But with Mishmish hurt, this gave her time. “Land,” she urged, waving toward the trees.
They crashed through the canopy, her shedu roaring in pain. Nahri rolled off his back, trying to get a look at his wing.
“It’s okay,” she said as Mishmish thrashed. Nahri grabbed his mane, trying to calm him down. “Let me help you!”
The shedu stilled, allowing her to take his wing, and Nahri sent a burst of magic to ease his pain. But the arrow was metal, the shaft unbreakable, and each bit of fletching still razor-sharp.
“I’m sorry, Mishmish,” she whispered, trying to numb him as much as possible. Then she shoved the arrow through, yanking it out and dropping it on the ground. The shedu let out a birdlike shriek even as Nahri soothed him, pressing her hand against the wound and urging it to heal.
The Empire of Gold Page 57
