“Oh, you sad little thing, still clinging to your doctrine, to your angels on the mount?” Kadir smiled. “I’m afraid they can’t save you now. And why would you want them to? The future is racing toward us, a new future, a new world. Djinn, angel, human, magi. All of the lines between us will be swept away in my embrace. The last embrace. The only embrace this world need ever know.”
“Are you still Kadir?” she asked. “Or are you… someone else?”
“Of course I’m still Kadir,” the stranger purred. “But also so much more, now.”
“Don’t you see what’s happened?” Samira shook her head. “Stealing the angel’s soul has twisted you, turned you into a perverted echo of yourself.”
The flame-haired djinn laughed. “Is that what you think?”
The walls and buttresses of red rock that Samira had lifted and sculpted to imprison him groaned softly and shattered into a landslide of boulders, pebbles, and dust that cascaded down the sides of the ravine and pooled at the cleric’s feet. She leapt backward with the uncanny speed of a djinn, never letting the debris touch her.
Zerai swore.
Below him, Kadir stood on the broken remains of his prison with his fiery hair flying in the wind. “I know exactly who I am, little sister,” he said. “And exactly who you’ll be, very soon.”
He dashed toward her and grabbed her wrist in one hand and her neck in the other, and in both places her skin erupted in red fire. Zerai grimaced as he watched Samira struggle in his grasp, her dark hair slowly turning a bright crimson gold just like Kadir’s. The falconer grabbed his sword and scrambled down the rocky slope toward them. But he had only gone a few steps when a pair of strange writhing tendrils of loose sand rose up from the desert floor behind Kadir, and proceeded to lash him viciously across his shoulders.
After a handful of strikes that cracked louder than bullwhips, Kadir staggered and dropped Samira to the ground. She stood and backed away from him, her hair still shining like copper. Her sand lashes snapped around Kadir’s neck and waist, and hurled him away from her, suspending him high in the air.
Kadir roared as a blaze of red fire engulfed his body, transforming the sand whips instantly to glass, and shattering them, sending tiny crystalline fragments flying in every direction. He fell to his knees, one hand pressed to his throat. Then he slowly stood up, scowling at Samira, and said, “It would seem I’m not quite ready for… this. Pity, but no matter. We’ll just have to do this again some other time.”
A column of red flame roared up from the earth at Kadir’s feet, and the djinn rocketed into the night sky like a streak of angry fire slicing across the sea of stars. Zerai watched the tiny red needle lance toward the east until it finally faded from sight, and when he looked down again he found Samira standing beside him.
“You all right?”
She nodded as her hair slowly began to fade back to its natural black sheen.
“So,” he grunted. “Djinn who think they’re angels. That’s new.”
“He really did change. It was more than his hair, more than his voice. I could feel it.” Samira paused to look up at the sky again. “He’s much stronger than me now, only he was… dazed? Off balance? Whatever it was, it will probably pass soon. An effect of the change. And when he’s had time to recover, I don’t know if I’ll be able to kill him.”
“Perfect.” Zerai shook his head. “Just perfect.”
“That must have been what was happening to Danya,” she mused. “Fortunately, we found her in time. But Jevad is still out there. That makes two of them.”
“Two?” Zerai raised an incredulous eyebrow. “They’re from Ramashad, remember? The city of evil djinn? For all we know, there are ten thousand of those monsters getting their red-haired blessings tonight.” He paused to sigh and lower his voice. “This could be the end. Right here, right now. The end of everything. They’ll fly across the world like a storm, crushing everything in their path and burning everything in their wake. I doubt the angels at Shivala will even slow them down.”
She peered at him. “Are you finished feeling sorry for yourself?”
“Go to hell! At least you have a future in their new world order. It sounds like they’ll be recruiting you, or enslaving you, to be like them. Must be nice to have that sense of security during the end times.” Zerai closed his eyes and leaned his head back against a cold, sharp rock as all his plans for a home and a life with Nadira vanished into piles of rubble and ash beneath the fiery wings of a legion of angel-djinn warriors.
There’ll be no way to run, nowhere to hide, and no hope of defense. Just slavery, torture, and death, if the attack on Shivala is any sign of things to come. With an emphasis on death, I’m guessing.
He opened his eyes to see Samira still standing over him, staring at the sky. “Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll get used to the red hair,” he muttered.
“Have you always been such a coward?” she asked the stars.
“I’m no coward!” he roared. He pushed himself up to his feet as his words echoed down the ravine and across the dunes. “When soldiers killed my family, I survived. When demons ate my friends, I fought back. And when there was no hope for Tigara, I brought the clerics to save Raziel. I’m not afraid of anything!”
He was shouting into her face, letting flecks of spittle fly at her cheek. But he kept his hands still at his sides, and then he stepped back sharply, not so much out of fear of her response as from a sudden disgust with himself.
Zerai blinked and swallowed. “But this isn’t like that. This isn’t men, or demons, or even war. This is the raw power of heaven, perverted and stolen by genocidal monsters. I can’t stop them. All I have is an old sword, a bird, and these two hands. That’s all!” He paused. “And it’s not enough. Not nearly.”
“No, it isn’t,” she said.
“Really? You think? Well, thank you, thank you for that, O wise magi warrior.” He threw up his hands and stalked away, scratching at his scalp as he scowled at the frost-covered ground.
“But we do have the angels at Shivala. They need to know about this, that the djinn are becoming more like Zariel. Maybe they’ll understand it better. Maybe they’ll know what to do. Are you coming?” She started walking back toward the shelter.
“Coming? Where, back to Shivala? Again? Are you insane?” He strode after her, fists at his sides. “That’s the first place the djinn will go, the first place this war is going to erupt. By the end of the first day, I doubt there’ll be anything left of the city at all. And you want me to take Nadira back there? Again?”
“Do what you want.” She flashed across the remaining distance in a haze of dark dust and frost, and paused only briefly at the entrance of the shelter before disappearing inside.
Zerai carried on at the same pace, glaring at the shelter.
She knows there’s no way to stop them. She knows she’s going to die. And she doesn’t care. Why would she? Duty and service, right to the end. And then she’ll get whisked away to her eternal reward, job well done, her nice little life as a cleric all wrapped up nice and tidy, and who gives a damn about the people left behind…
He shook his head.
Just as he reached the shelter, Samira emerged and spared him only a brief, dismissive glance before vanishing again in a blur of shadows and silk, racing away south toward the city.
Zerai ducked into the shelter and saw Lamia sitting with Nadira in her lap. The cleric stared at the floor, her eyes unfocused, her hand absently petting the little girl’s soft black curls.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“She told me about the… thing.” She blinked. “Djinn changing into angels.”
“Yeah. It looks pretty bad.” He sighed. “Listen, if you want to go back, you can go. I can manage on my own.”
She blinked again and looked up at him. “Maybe.”
He sat down and Nadira scrambled gleefully over into his lap, where she promptly flopped over on her side with her thumb in her mouth. Wrapping hi
s arms around her, he said, “I know we don’t have much of a chance, but if I can run far enough, fast enough, then maybe we can have a little time to ourselves. Someplace remote, like a cave or an island.”
“Island.” She frowned and her eyes focused on his face. “You could sail to the southern islands.”
“Sure. Maybe.”
“No, I mean right now.” Lamia rose to her knees and began packing her bag. “The djinn who was keeping the sea frozen is gone now, right? Samira said he stopped the blizzard and then flew away. So if you go back to Shivala, you can get a ship and head for the southern islands. They’re small. Remote.”
Zerai shrugged. “I suppose that’s a better plan than trying to cross the northern desert by myself. I know more about boats than deserts, at any rate.” He paused. “And I can get some more of the people out of the city with me, can’t I?”
She paused in her packing to look at him. “Hopefully. But it’s a long walk back. There’s a chance the fighting could start before we get there, if the djinn are in a hurry.”
Zerai nodded. She was right, and there was no way around the long hours of walking back to the city. He was about to speak when he heard a familiar sound outside, a high clear cry that cut through the fading white noise of the wind and waves.
Hello, Nyasha.
The falconer smiled. “Then we won’t walk back. We’ll fly.”
Chapter 26
In the morning, after promising Marana that they would return one day with a healer, and after hearing the rose-covered Marana decline the offer to have her legs restored, Iyasu and Azrael set out across the red rock hills with the rising sun on their left shoulders and a trio of whistling peris safely swaddled in a fold of the angel’s dress. They climbed up and out of the ancient, crumbling canyons, leaving the icy rivers far behind, and soon came to a dry and dusty land where the sparse vegetations simply ceased, and all sounds and traces of life vanished, and only the vast rolling dunes of the White Desert could be seen.
Azrael took the seer up into her arms, spread her magnificent black wings, and flew.
They raced across the desert floor, skimming the surface of the sandy earth with only a hand span to spare and causing great waves of sand to fly into the sky in their wake. At the eastern edge of the world Iyasu could see the black smudges where the mists of the Vourukasha hid the mountains and the most ancient tree in the world. On the western horizon Iyasu saw four familiar mountain peaks, though they appeared in miniature and reversed in order, but still he knew them.
But now they whisked straight south between the distant mountains, plunging toward nothing but sand and more sand, harsh and hissing as it blew off the dunes in terrific white plumes and cascaded down the dry slopes like water.
Countless leagues later, they stopped and stood at the edge of a rocky trough gouged into the face of the earth as though a great finger had descended from on high to carve a groove through the desert from east to west. A thin scattering of sand lay in the bottom of the trough, but otherwise the rock stood exposed to the sun.
“A riverbed?” Iyasu squinted at the strange formation. “A dry riverbed that somehow never fills with sand? Is this the golden scar?”
“Apparently. I suppose this is what the peri meant by the footsteps of Tevad.”
Iyasu nodded. The Angel of Water. Makes sense. Sort of.
“So is this the edge of the manticore’s domain?” he asked.
“Maybe.” She studied the dunes around them, but there were no tracks or other signs of life to be seen. “Manticore… Is that just another poetic word, or do you suppose Galina meant that there’s a real manticore roaming the desert?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, but it’s hard to imagine a giant creature surviving out here. No water, no plants, nothing to eat. Maybe the manticore is something like the riverbed, some sort of natural formation. Maybe it’s a sandstorm that moves between here and… the tower of the moon, whatever that is. Why? Have you ever seen a real manticore before?”
“Not with my own eyes,” she said. “But I’ve seen the faces of men and women at the moment of death, their eyes wide in horror, with the word manticore on their dying breath. Not recently. Long ago. But the horror was real. And the word was clear.”
“Oh. Then we’ll be careful.”
They flew on across the stone ravine and into the southern desert with the midday sun beating on their backs, but the angel’s wings seemed to outpace the heat of the daystar and only the sharp flying sand bothered the travelers whisking above the dunes.
“Do you hear that?” Iyasu called over the cry of the wind.
Azrael set him down on the crest of a dune and her wings melted into the baking air. “I don’t hear anything.”
He paused. “There it is again.” He pointed to the southwest. “A voice, I think.”
“Well, we’ll know in a moment.” She picked him up and carried him across the dunes, casting a vast avian shadow that swept up and down the sandy slopes beneath them.
Within moments they could both hear the distorted echo of… something. And that something quickly resolved into the blurred sounds of words, shouts, cries of pain and anger, both male and female, and on the bright horizon of the white sands Iyasu saw dark figures running madly up the soft, sliding face of a tall dune, and chasing those figures ran a great hissing mass of sand that bounded on legs of amber dust and sparkling claws of silicon.
“What on earth is that?” Iyasu whispered. The desert squall chased the two people over the crest of the dune and out of sight, twisting and whirling like a storm of infinitesimal razors dancing inside the shape of some terrible beast with four legs and a long, waving tail.
“A sandstorm?” Azrael swooped around the side of the dune where they discovered the predator and its prey locked in a bizarre sort of combat, as bright steel flashed against claws of flying sand. “A giant lion?”
“Or a manticore.” Iyasu dropped from her grasp and started running across the soft desert floor toward the battle. “It looks like we were both right about it.”
“A sandstorm lion?” She ran easily at his side. “Hardly something we should be pleased to find.”
“But just look at it!” He grinned as he ran, though his side was already beginning to hurt from the sudden effort after hours of resting in the arms of the Angel of Death. “It’s so… strange, so beautiful.”
“And it’s going to kill those two.”
Iyasu nodded. “You know who it’s going to be, don’t you?”
“I know.” Azrael darted forward on feet as light as light itself, raising a thin wall of sand behind her as she tore through the trough of the dunes.
Iyasu watched with a boyish grin as his beloved crashed straight through the body of the sandstorm beast, sending its particulate flesh flying in a sudden hail storm against the distant dune as its dismembered legs and tail collapsed to the ground in a cloud of shining white dust. With the chaos of battle abruptly replaced by a quiet calm, Iyasu could now clearly see Rahm and Hadara standing side by side, their chests heaving as they wiped the sweat from their faces and sat down on the searing sands to rest.
The seer waved to them. Rahm waved back.
Iyasu slowed to a walk as he caught up to them, still smiling but with one hand pressed to his aching side. “Is everyone all right?”
Azrael turned to him, and the desert swallowed her up. The sand erupted in two walls, one behind her and one in front, and those walls crashed together as they resolved into the forms of jaws and fangs, as a great leonine head rose from the desert floor, followed by an enormous mane and shoulders, and a four-legged body composed of flying sand, shrieking sand, flashing white and gold in the sunlight.
“Rael!” Iyasu froze, staring up with his one eye at the monster looming over him.
As the manticore stepped up out of the desert depths and stood upon the surface of the world once more, its long lashing tail flicked up from behind it to hover over the length of its body like a cobra, raised a
nd poised to strike.
“Run!” Hadara yelled.
Rahm grabbed Iyasu and propelled him back the way he had come just as a burst of sand fired from the beast’s tail strafed the dune behind them. The manticore roared and stalked forward as Hadara raised her daggers.
“Hadara, no!” Rahm cried.
The princess charged the monster, running straight into its jaws and then leaping to the side at the last moment, twisting through the air, and slashing her silver blades through the creature’s leg as she fell. The heavy paw of loose sand burst apart and rained on the ground around her, and the manticore stumbled forward, unable to compensate for the sudden loss of its foot, and it crashed headlong into the dune.
Hadara rolled to her feet and dashed away as the beast shuffled and clawed at the ground, trying to pull itself back together and stand. Its deadly tail thrashed from side to side, and Rahm ran in with his curved sword to hack the serpentine appendage off, letting the dismembered sand crash down on him and his wife.
The manticore roared and thrashed once more, and fell still. All its whirling grains of sand dropped to the earth in a heap, and all signs that a living creature had been there vanished utterly.
Rahm and Hadara backed away from the sand pile slowly, their blades still at the ready, loose sand pouring liberally from their hair and shoulders.
Iyasu came forward, one hesitant step at a time. “Rael? Rael?”
The pile of white sand burst upward, and the two warriors readied themselves again, but the sand did not come alive in the flying form of the giant lion. Instead, from within the sand emerged the dark hair and bright copper jewelry of Azrael, lifting herself up through the remains of the dead beast, and in her hand was a slender old man.
Angels and Djinn, Book 3: Zariel's Doom Page 26
