The Empire of Gold

by S. A. Chakraborty

  Then one day, one spoke back. The oldest crocodile she’d ever seen, half-starved on the riverbank. One whose eerie gaze had flickered with recognition at the gold in her eyes and the offer of salvation.

  “Bring me blood,” Sobek had begged. “I am so hungry.”

  So Duriya did. Pigeons and fish she stole from coops and nets, determined to keep her scaly pet alive. Both lonely in different ways, she spoke to him and he spoke to her. In exchange for blood, Sobek taught her small tricks, magic and mortal alike. How to conjure fire and urge wheat to blossom. The best plants for making salve and drawing out poison.

  Such skills were useful in her small village. Duriya was clever, and she was discreet. She might have made a happy life for herself there, if she found an adoring husband on the dim side.

  But there were those who hunted humans who did magic, and when the Nile was at its lowest, Sobek too far to hear her cry for help, one of them found her.

  The djinn bounty hunter had been merciless. There was money to be made in returning shafit—the word Duriya learned that would define the rest of her life—to some magical city with a foreign name on the other side of the world. The djinn had offered to spare her father if Duriya went willingly, making clear with his metal-toned eyes on her body what “willingly” meant. Tearfully, she had agreed, and then he had lied, seizing them both, and taking her anyway in the dark on the longest journey of her life.

  Thus had been her introduction to her new world.

  Daevabad. An overcrowded apartment in a crumbling section of the city with other shafit who spoke Arabic, who welcomed Duriya and her father and helped them find jobs in the palace. The palace itself, a thing from a fairy tale filled with equally beautiful and monstrous creatures. A king said to set vicious beasts upon his enemies and a pair of black-eyed siblings who broke bones from across the room. Frightened out of her wits, Duriya was relieved to find herself only responsible for serving the queen—a kind woman whose open love for her little son made Duriya think there was something possibly human about the creatures who’d destroyed her life.

  But then the queen died, and Duriya was given to the Nahids.

  A black-eyed man who veiled his face and prayed to a fire altar she couldn’t understand. Who never spoke to her until he’d caught Duriya in the garden and called the jute plants she was growing to make molokhia for her homesick father a weed. The Baga Nahid had gone to tear them out, and, enraged, Duriya had struck him, lashing out with all her frustration at one of the most dangerous men in Daevabad.

  He’d looked at her with astonished eyes, his veil torn and the gash she’d cut on his lip healing even as she watched.

  But Rustam hadn’t demanded her execution, nor had his even more frightening sister boiled her blood. Instead, he’d listened as Duriya tearfully explained why she wanted the jute, and then he touched the dark earth and made a dozen new stalks sprout.

  She fell in love. It was foolish and dangerous, and back in her village, Duriya would never have been so bold. But she’d been desperate for a bit of happiness, and a sad-eyed fallen prince who was just as trapped as she was made an irresistible mark. Until her belly began to swell and her own cuts began to heal, the child growing inside her rich with magic.

  Telling her father had gone badly. Telling Rustam had been worse. Duriya had not grasped the politics of the city she’d been imprisoned in. They were all djinn to her, and she hadn’t understood Rustam’s panicked pleas when he took her to his sister.

  “Help me, Manu,” he’d begged, and Manizheh had taken one look at Duriya’s belly with her unreadable eyes and agreed. Again, Duriya had been smuggled away, not daring to tell her father lest the palace intrigue she’d gotten caught up in ensnare him as well.

  Her daughter, born on the road and blinking up at Duriya with black eyes. Rustam holding her, a look of fragile wonder in his face as he kissed the top of the baby’s head, touching her soft curls. She’d been a mix of both of them, too djinn to pass in the human world and yet visibly shafit.

  “I want to take her home,” he whispered, tracing a tiny peaked ear. “Back to Daevabad.”

  Duriya had been shocked. “But you said no one could know.”

  “Let people know. I don’t care.” Rustam, always so soft-spoken, was suddenly fierce. “I want to have a family in the city my ancestors built and teach my daughter our ways.”

  But Manizheh had had other ideas.

  The burning plain full of broken bodies. Rustam, dazed and dying, having battled with magic Duriya hadn’t known existed as he struggled to help her onto the last horse.

  “Return to the human world,” he’d begged, choking on his own blood as he took a last anguished look at their daughter. “Flee as fast as you can. But take this.”

  The emerald ring he and Manizheh had warred over. It had bonded to his finger, and blood erupted from his hand when Rustam finally ripped it off, as though the ring itself had been draining his life away.

  “Get rid of it,” he mumbled, ash beading on his brow.

  “Come with us,” Duriya had begged, adjusting the shrieking baby in her arms. “Please!”

  Rustam shook his head. “Manizheh will return. I’ll hold her off as long as I can. Go!”

  A race across the burning grasslands. It would have killed Duriya, should have killed her, her body still recovering from labor.

  But magic poured from the dark-eyed infant pressed to her chest, healing her mother unnaturally fast. When the emerald ring began to shiver, scorching her skin, Duriya had hurled it into a field, hating what the foul gem had cost her.

  Duriya was done with magic. Instead, she used everything else she had to get back home. Her wits and her wiles and her body when she had no other choice. She stole, and she begged, and she conned until she stood once again on Egyptian soil.

  She didn’t go back to her village in the south. Instead, remembering what people said about the djinn not liking human cities, she found a town on the outskirts of mighty Cairo. Still on the Nile. Still close enough that she could kneel in the river’s shallows, cut her arm, and watch the blood and tears billow on the muddy water.

  “Old friend,” she had wept, “I need a favor.”

  The years passed in a blur, Duriya finding work as a midwife and healer of sorts—piecing together what she’d seen in the infirmary and what she’d learned from Sobek. Little Golbahar, for she’d kept the name Rustam had granted their daughter, grew strong, her djinn appearance masked by Sobek. Duriya loved her fiercely, doing everything she could to keep Gol safe and hide what she could of her daughter’s magic. When they curled up together at night, her daughter’s knees pressed against her belly, her little chest rising and falling in sleep, Duriya had prayed to all she knew.

  It hadn’t been enough. Because Rustam had been right, and Manizheh eventually came for them.

  The village hadn’t stood a chance, destroyed in a storm of fire, its people screaming. Duriya had barely had enough time to grab Golbahar, race for the river, and call for its lord.

  Sobek had not been encouraging. “They are Nahids, and our pact has been paid. The blood your request would require …”

  Duriya didn’t hesitate. She had known from the day they’d fled the burning plain that there was nothing she would not do for her child.

  “I will get you your blood.” Then she kissed Golbahar’s head, told her she loved her, and shoved her daughter into the scaled hands of a monster.

  When Manizheh arrived, she’d been furious. Duriya had never been more than a dirt-blooded nuisance, a lesser being barely worth her notice but for the Nahid child she had carried—and the ring Manizheh believed she had stolen. It didn’t take much taunting to shove her over the edge.

  It didn’t take much to ensure Sobek got his blood.

  The water was warm when Duriya finally fell, the Nile cradling her in a last embrace. She would swear clawed hands stroked her hair, but of course that was impossible. Sobek never showed such affection.

  But he d
id whisper his promise as she died, as assuring as any prayer. “I will protect her. I will protect her always.”

  NAHRI WAS WEEPING BEFORE THE TOUCH OF THE RIVER faded. Her own memories were coming back in pieces. Gripping her mother’s dress as Duriya jested with customers. Simple meals of beans and bread, of the sugary feteer her mother’s father had taught her to make.

  Of the words her mother had told her every night, simple ones, but ones no one had told Nahri since, not in language she still used to summon flames.

  I love you, little one. I love you so much.

  Ali was already reaching for her. Sobbing too hard to speak, Nahri threw herself in his arms and there, in the garden where her parents had met, finally mourned them.

  IT WAS EVENING BY THE TIME NAHRI MADE HER way to the palace kitchens. She knew she looked like a wreck, her eyes red and puffy from crying. She knew as well that it would have been wiser to wait until tomorrow, until her grief had settled. Even Ali had tried to gently dissuade her, fearing the devastation that awaited if she was wrong. There had been a war, after all, and so many people had died—especially in the palace.

  Nahri had gone anyway.

  The kitchen staff was threadbare, reduced to a handful of shafit. But Nahri knew the moment she saw his stooped back and oil-splattered galabiyya. The old man from Egypt who’d quietly cooked meals from their shared homeland and slipped her small trinkets.

  He glanced up from the dough he was kneading, and it was the face from her mother’s memories, only more aged.

  Nahri burst into tears. “Grandfather?”

  “I KNEW THE FIRST SECOND I SAW YOU,” HE WHISPERED. “You look so much like her, and when you smiled at me …” Her grandfather wiped his eyes with the edge of his scarf. “You have her smile. She used to smile so much back home.”

  The rest of the kitchen had cleared out, and the tea he had insisted on making for her sat untouched, the mint blackened. Nahri had no appetite for anything but his words.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” she asked. “All this time …”

  “I didn’t dare. They were treating you like royalty; I couldn’t take that away from you.” He shook his head. “I’d spent a generation in this city. I knew all too well how they treated shafit, and it wasn’t a life I would wish on my enemy, let alone my granddaughter.”

  Nahri squeezed his hand. “I wish I had known. I wish I could have done something for you.”

  “I deserved every hardship. Duriya, she came to me about the pregnancy, and I—” Her grandfather briefly shut his eyes, pain crossing his face. “You grew up in our country, you know how things are. I was afraid and upset, but it’s no excuse. I said things I’ll never be able to take back, and then I lost her forever.”

  Nahri didn’t know what to say. Her heart ached with the knowledge of her parents’ fates. They had fought so hard to save her and to build lives for themselves in an impossible world, only to be cut down by Manizheh.

  And yet she’d also seen enough to know they’d be proud of her. Nahri felt a yearning, intimate closeness with her mother, their lives almost mirrored. The lonely little girl set apart in the human world by magic, who’d been crushed in Daevabad. The woman who’d fought tooth and nail to get back to her homeland with an infant still at her breast. Nahri was a survivor, but she didn’t think even she had as much strength as her mother.

  I am as much Duriya as I am Rustam. Nahri had spent so much of her life focused on her Nahid heritage, and yet it was her mother, the smooth-talking shafit fighter who’d outwitted Manizheh in death to protect her child, whom Nahri had more in common with.

  It gave her more peace than she would have imagined possible.

  “We have each other now,” Nahri said finally, still holding her grandfather’s hand. “And we’ll honor her memory.”

  For Nahri was going to bring forth a world in which her mother would have been free.

  EPILOGUE

  Six months after she first had tea with her grandfather, Nahri lounged on the shedu throne.

  She sighed, pressing her back against the hammered gold and trailing her fingers over the priceless gems making up the wings and rising sun. The cushion was wondrously plump, and Nahri reclined, taking full enjoyment of the ludicrously expensive throne.

  She tossed an apricot to Mishmish. The shedu, who seemed content to stay in Daevabad and follow her around instead of returning to the peris, caught it easily, swallowing the fruit in one gulp before returning to the nest he’d made by tearing up the carpet.

  The doors to the throne room opened, revealing a man so bowed down with scrolls his tall frame was bent as he entered.

  Nahri raised a palm. “Bow before me, djinn peasant. Hand over your gold, or I shall take your tongue.”

  Ali offered his scrolls. “Would you accept extensively detailed notes on the condition of the Treasury instead?”

  “No, Ali. No one would. Everything about that sounds miserable.”

  “Alas.” He nodded at the throne as he approached. “Don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts.”

  “If I was having second thoughts, I would have kicked you out of my house last night and gotten a proper amount of sleep instead of letting you yammer on about tax rates.”

  “Blame your grandfather’s tea,” he replied, setting down his scrolls and holding out his hand to help her down. Workers had been spending the past week starting to carefully crate up the throne so it could be taken to the Grand Temple and put on display. “It’s like drinking lightning. I can’t sleep for hours.”

  “I would never blame anything on him. He’s a sweet old man who fills my house and the hospital with pastries at all hours of the day. There is a place reserved for him in Paradise.”

  “Undoubtedly.” Ali smiled. “Are you coming down?”

  Nahri stroked the jeweled arms a final time. “Yes. I just had to sit here at least once.” She took his hand, clambering over the crate.

  “Couldn’t you sit on it at the Temple?”

  “It’s going to be mobbed by children day and night. Seems undignified to fight them for a seat.”

  She swung down, letting Ali catch her. Nahri didn’t really need the help, but he looked rather dashing in a billowing silver-dark robe, and she allowed herself to enjoy the flutter in her stomach at the brief press of his hands before locking it down. She was getting better at doing so: allowing herself to savor pockets of happiness instead of worrying they’d be ripped away. Tea with her grandfather as he told stories about her mother’s childhood. Venting over difficult patients with Subha and Jamshid and cracking horribly grim and inappropriate jokes. Playing the addictive human card game Fiza had introduced her and Razu to—with which the former pirate was steadily enriching herself at their expense.

  Ali set her down and picked his scrolls back up. “Nervous?”

  “A bit,” Nahri admitted as they walked. “I’m the more ‘conning everyone into compliance’ than ‘actually making genuine alliances and compromises’ type.”

  “Bah, it’s just like bargaining in the bazaar. But with actual life-and-death consequences. As long as we’re diplomatic and patient, it will be fine, God willing. After all, what is it they say in Divasti?” he asked, reciting a very mangled and rather filthy verse in her language.

  Nahri stopped, scandalized. “What did you say?”

  “‘A pleasant voice brings a snake out of its hole,’” Ali repeated, this time in Djinnistani. “Jamshid taught it to me.” Nahri covered her mouth, failing to suppress a laugh. “Wait, why?”

  She tried to be merciful. “That’s not the exact way we say that phrase. The word he told you was ‘snake.’ There’s another, more common meaning. For a man’s, well …”

  “Oh no.” Ali looked horrified. “Nahri, I’ve been saying that to the Daeva delegates. I said it to the priests.”

  “Consider it a creative way to break the ice?” Ali groaned, and Nahri took his arm. “Next time, make sure you clear with me in advance any Divasti phra
ses Jamshid teaches you. Though I’m sure he and Muntadhir got quite the kick out of it.”

  “I am going to command all the liquid in the pipes running under their house to back up.”

  “Let me find a plumber who will give us a cut of the repair costs, and I’ll help you.”

  Ali grinned. “Partners?”

  They were at the doors to the old Royal Library. “Until the end,” Nahri replied.

  They entered the library, but it wasn’t only books that greeted them. There was a crowd of people, already bickering. Djinn and shafit and Daeva. Representatives from all the tribes, from dozens of towns and all the provinces. From the Grand Temple and ulema, the craft guilds and the army.

  To say they were a varied lot was an understatement. Not wanting to interfere, Nahri and Ali had given leeway to groups in choosing their delegates, and it seemed to have already backfired. For starters, no one was sitting. Instead, people were shouting in a dozen different languages over cushions surrounding an enormous table.

  Ali gave the crowd an uncertain glance, looking a little overwhelmed. “An auspicious start to a new government.”

  But Nahri laughed. “Bargaining, you said?” She surveyed the crowd with the practiced air of a professional, smiling graciously as various arguing delegates glanced their way.

  Nahri always smiled at her marks.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  THE ROYAL FAMILY

  Daevabad is ruled by the Qahtani family, descendants of Zaydi al Qahtani, the Geziri warrior who led a rebellion to overthrow the Nahid Council and establish equality for the shafit centuries ago.

  GHASSAN AL QAHTANI, king of the magical realm, defender of the faith

  MUNTADHIR, Ghassan’s eldest son from his Geziri first wife, the king’s designated successor