by Sabaa Tahir
“What would a child know of such things?” the Nightbringer says. “You are dew on a blade of grass fresh born. I am the earth itself.”
The maelstrom buffets me, and I move closer to the Nightbringer. I call his name. But he ignores me, enmeshed in his pain. Rehmat’s words come back to me.
His strength is in his name. And his weakness. His past and his present.
Nightbringer was the name humans gave him. Along with the King of No Name. But before that, he had another name.
“Meherya,” I say. “Beloved.”
He howls then, an echoing cry that breaks something inside me. But still, he hides away, for he is not the Beloved anymore either. He has turned his back on his duty and humanity. On Mauth.
But in truth, humanity turned against him first. And Mauth, who should have loved the Meherya best, did nothing when his son and all that he cherished were destroyed. The Nightbringer gave Mauth everything—and Mauth repaid him with a thousand years of torment.
And how did I, the one she loved the best, repay her? How did I thank the human who gave me everything?
Mamie’s words, as she became the Nightbringer and told me his tale. As she told me of the woman Husani. The first—and perhaps only—mother the Nightbringer ever knew.
“Nirbara,” I whisper. “Forsaken.”
He turns.
“Forsaken by humans and by Mauth,” I say, and the maelstrom grows more violent with each word. “Forsaken by the Scholars, who you sought only to help and who stole all that you loved. Forsaken by Rehmat, who left you alone with all of your pain. What a terrible thing love is, when this is the cost. But it does not have to be this way. There are millions who might yet live, who might yet love, if only you returned this suffering to Mauth.”
“It is done,” the Forsaken says. “You do not know pain like mine, child. All is suffering and suffering is all. Let it destroy the world.”
“I know suffering,” I say, and he raises his head, a hiss on his lips. But I hold open my hands. “You think because you were a jinn, you felt more deeply? Because you were the Beloved, your grief is greater than my own? It is not, Nirbara. For I—I was beloved too.”
I struggle to speak, to put all the darkness in my life, all the things I have never understood, into words. “I was beloved to my mother and my father. I was beloved to my sister and my brother and my grandparents. I was beloved to Elias. I was beloved to you.”
I wish I could touch him. I wish he could feel what I feel.
“Perhaps you and I are doomed.” My voice is raw, aching. “Doomed to always hurt. But what we do with that hurt is our choice. I cannot hate. Not forever. Are you not tired of it, Nirbara? Do you not seek rest?”
He looks at me and shudders, so alone. So I reach out and pull together the shreds that remain of him. The scraps solidify into the shape of a child, a young boy with brown eyes, and when I pull him into my arms, he collapses. Together we weep over all we have done and all that has been done to us. Though I do not speak, I pour what love I have into this, the truest manifestation of a broken creature.
How long since anyone offered him comfort? How different would his life be if the greed of man had not led to his madness, and the hurt of millions?
We kneel, locked in that embrace as the suffering of years swirls around us. Until he pulls away, and he is a child no longer, but a man. He is a shadow I recognize, who pulses with the gravity of thousands of years and thousands of souls. I see all that he has done and I choose not to hate him.
The maelstrom around us slows.
“You didn’t deserve this,” I whisper to him. “None of it. But those you hurt, they didn’t deserve it either. End this madness. Release your pain. Stop fighting Mauth.”
Rage sparks in his eyes at the mention of his father. “Mauth would have us forget,” the Forsaken says. “He would take the pain of the world and lock it away—”
“So that we might be free of it,” I say. “But I will not forget.”
Rehmat. I call to her with all the force of my mind. Her light is a beacon through the swirling silver mist, and in a moment, she is beside me.
But she does not speak to me or even look to me. She has eyes only for her Meherya.
“My beloved,” she murmurs. “Come to me now, for I have waited long years for this, our last union. Come now, and give me your pain. I must bind you, that you may never release this agony upon the world again. You must submit to me.”
“Finally, Rehmat,” the Meherya says, “I understand the meaning of your name.” He turns to me. “Do not forget the story, Laia of Serra,” he says. “Vow it.”
“I swear I will not forget,” I say. “Nor will my children. Nor theirs. As long as one of my line draws breath, Meherya, the Tale will be told.”
The very air shudders with the force of the vow, and a deep crack echoes beneath me, as if the axis of the earth has shifted. I wonder what I have bequeathed to my own blood.
The Meherya lifts his hand to my face, and I feel his sorrow and his love, extant still, despite all that has happened.
Then he turns to Rehmat, who opens her arms, drawing him to her. Her gold body shudders and splits, exploding into hundreds of burning ropes, inexorable as they wrap around him tighter and tighter. He does not resist. He is lost within the binding as it drains him of his pain, his suffering, his power—and releases it back to Mauth.
The maelstrom slows, dissolving first at the edges as it drains back through the rift the Meherya opened. It thins, disappearing faster and faster, swirling blue, then gray, then white, until finally there is nothing left.
I stand upon the promontory, though it is riven down the middle as if struck by a giant hammer. The rift is only a few feet away from me, closing before my eyes.
Rehmat is nowhere to be seen. I find that I regret her loss. I regret not being able to say goodbye and not thanking her. And I regret that she never told me the meaning of her name.
A voice whispers in my ear. “Mercy,” she says. “My name means mercy.”
Then the Queen of the Jinn is gone, dragging her prisoner with her to some unknown plane where I cannot follow. In that moment, the wind ceases. All falls silent. All goes still.
For the Beloved who woke with the dawning of the world is no more. And for a single, anguished moment, the earth itself mourns him.
LXVIII: The Soul Catcher
The plateau splits down the middle as I emerge from the maelstrom. The earth shudders with the force of it, a tremor rippling through the Waiting Place, eliciting great arboreal groans from the woods.
The shaking drops me to my knees, and I slide back toward the tree line. A figure emerges from the cyclone, and, as suddenly as the storm entered this dimension, it drains away, as if through a crack in the air. All is silent. Even the trees do not move.
Then the figure at the edge of the plateau collapses, and the world breathes again. I scramble to my feet, and at the sound, she turns.
“Are—are you real?” She half lifts her hand, and in five steps, I have reached her and pulled her to me, shaking in relief because she is impossibly, miraculously alive. The rock of the plateau groans, and in moments I have windwalked us away from it, down the tree line to the edge of the jinn grove.
“He’s gone,” Laia whispers when we stop. “Rehmat chained him. At the end he was destroyed, Elias.” She looks down at her hands, and her eyes fill, voice cracking. “He killed my brother. Darin is d-dead.”
What can I say to her that will comfort her? She defeated a creature that defies description—more than a king, more than a jinn, more than a foe. And in the process, she lost the only family she had left in this world.
A wind stirs the trees behind us, and the first of the Tala tree blossoms detach and swirl through the air.
“In flowerfall, the orphan will bow to the scythe,” she says. “In flowerfall, the daug
hter will pay a blood tithe.” Her dark eyes are red and dull. “Skies-forsaken foretellings.”
“The same foretelling said I would die.” I remember the jinn’s prophecy as clearly as if she spoke it yesterday. The son of shadow and heir of death will fight and fail with his final breath.
“But it didn’t say I’d find my way back.” I pull Laia close. “And it didn’t say that you’d win.”
“Have we won?” Laia says as we stare out at the jinn grove. Soldiers on both sides of the escarpment stumble to their feet, still shaken from the maelstrom. Musa has an arm under the Blood Shrike’s shoulders, and together they stagger away from the front line, anguish emanating from both. Spiro and Gibran carry an injured Afya toward the infirmary tents.
Laia and I walk to the edge of the escarpment, and she gasps, for Keris’s army appears to have taken the brunt of the maelstrom’s wrath. A deep gash in the earth and a few pockets of stunned-looking soldiers are all that remain of the Commandant’s one-massive host.
As for Keris herself, her standard flaps in the wind near the edge of the escarpment. Beside it, she lies faceup, blonde hair streaked with mud, her throat bloody, gray eyes fixed on the sky.
Dead.
Laia releases me, her hand on her mouth. I kneel beside the body of my mother, whose heart and mind will now forever be a cipher. Despite her violence, her implacable hatred, I grieve her loss. Her skin is cold and soft beneath my hands as I close her eyes. My eyes.
Stay far from the Nightbringer, Ilyaas. Such a strange and unexpected warning. Why did she caution me, when she spent so many years trying to kill me?
Perhaps she was never trying to kill me. Perhaps she was trying to kill some part of herself. But I will never know. Not truly.
Just a few feet away, Avitas Harper lies dead too. Now I understand the Blood Shrike’s devastation. We had one meaningful conversation, Avitas and I. It was not enough.
Even as my heart aches for my brother and my mother, Mauth’s magic swells, a wave of forgetting that he will unleash to wash away the mess in my mind.
“No,” I whisper, knowing that he can hear me. “My duty is not yet done. I must restore the balance.”
You will speak to the jinn. Mauth has returned to full power, and his voice thunders in my bones. But you must be clear of mind and heart, Soul Catcher. Not distracted by love and regret and hope.
“That is exactly what I must be distracted by,” I tell him. “Love and regret and hope are all I can offer.”
A long silence as he mulls it over. Laia watches me knowingly—the one person on this earth who understands the bone-deep intrusion of having a supernatural voice in your head that is not your own.
Do not fail me, Banu al-Mauth.
Behind me, the air hisses as hundreds of scims leave their scabbards.
“Look at that, bleeding hells—”
“Must be scores of them living in that city—”
Down in the Sher Jinnaat, across the gash in the earth, figures emerge. Most are in human form, though some wear their shadows, and others swirl in full flame.
“Soul Catcher.” The Blood Shrike limps toward me. Behind her, our ranks of Tribesmen, Scholars, and Martials are already forming up again into neat lines. Her gaze is fixed on the jinn watching us from the Sher Jinnaat.
“The catapults. There are two still working.” She raises her voice. “Load the salt—”
But I turn on her, Mauth’s power filling me, and my voice booms out across the jinn grove.
“You will not touch them.”
The Blood Shrike looks at me in surprise. As the rest of our men realize what I am saying, an angry mutter rises.
“We cannot let what they’ve done stand, Soul Catcher,” the Blood Shrike says. “Their leader is dead. Their human minions are dead or scattered. This is our chance.”
“They are not the Nightbringer,” I say. “The Augurs imprisoned them for a thousand years for doing nothing more than defending their borders. Unless you wish to punish yourself for defending Antium against invaders?”
“You saw what they can do at full strength. Such a threat—”
“We can treat with them,” I say. “This is what the Augurs worked toward, Blood Shrike. The foretellings, the raising of Blackcliff, the Trials. All their machinations were to bring us to this moment. They knew there was going to be a war years ago. Ever since they stole the jinn’s magic, they’ve been trying to make up for the evil they did. But they are not here to see it through.” I look at Laia and the Shrike in turn. “That falls to us.”
As I regard them, I wonder at the strange twists of fate that have led us here. The impossibility of this outcome, of the three of us alive, together, and standing before a host of the creatures desperately needed to restore balance to our world.
“Right.” Laia takes my hand in her left, and the Blood Shrike’s in her right. “Let’s get on with this.”
Hand in hand, we make our way down the escarpment and to the waiting jinn. We stop at a far enough distance that they don’t feel threatened.
“Where is he?” Umber steps forward, recognizable only by her wrathful voice and the glaive in her hand. Even her eyes have dimmed, her fire a bare flicker of what it was in the battle.
“He is gone.” Laia steps forward. “Bound by Rehmat, who gave her life so yours might be spared. For he would have destroyed this world, and there is yet much good in it.”
“No.” Umber crumples, weeping, not in rage as I expected, but in desolation. “No—he loved us—”
But the other jinn are silent, for they bore witness. They saw what he became.
“You are needed in this world,” Laia goes on. “You should not be driven into hiding or to war by the greed of a human king from a thousand years ago. The jinn were wronged. The Nightbringer avenged that wrong. Let it end now.”
“What do you wish us to do?” The jinn called Faaz steps forward, brown-haired and dark-eyed in his human form. “Serve your kind again? You will only return to thieve our powers.”
“We will not.” The Blood Shrike steps forward. “I am Blood Shrike of the Martial Empire and Regent to Emperor Zacharias. In his name, I vow that no Martial shall cross the border of the Waiting Place unless you will it, and no Martial shall raise arms against you, unless in defense. We will make no treaty with any nation that does not agree to do the same.”
I look at the Shrike in surprise, but then consider what she said to me only days ago. Another war. Will it ever end, Soul Catcher? Or will this be the legacy I leave my nephew?
“We cannot go back.” The crowd parts to let a jinn through. He is thin and stoop-shouldered, heavily cloaked, but I recognize him instantly. Maro—the jinn who siphoned the ghosts for the Meherya, who did nothing as thousands upon thousands of humans died. “Not after all we have done,” he says. “Not after all that has been done to us.”
“You can.” I think of my father. “I have saved lives and taken them. I have been whipped and beaten and broken down. I have failed the world, failed in my duty. My mistakes will haunt me until I die. But I can still do good. I can pass the ghosts. I can vow to never make the same mistakes again.”
In that moment, something shifts in the air, as if a door has opened on a long-shut room. Spirits flow from Mauth’s realm into the Waiting Place. Hundreds—no, thousands. All those who died here, those who fed the Sea of Suffering this day.
The force of their presence nearly brings me to my knees. They will stay away from the jinn grove, for they dislike it as much as the jinn themselves. But soon enough, their cries will require the humans to find some sort of refuge.
As one, the jinn look to the trees. Maro steps toward them, perhaps feeling the same compulsion that is upon me. Then he shakes himself and turns, walking back into the Sher Jinnaat. Most of the jinn follow him.
But not all.
The jinn Ta
lis stands alone, his human body slowly slipping into a deep carmine flame with a cerulean heart. He raises his hand to the trees, beckoning.
A group of spirits emerge and flow to him. The red of his flame deepens, and he walks with them into the Sher Jinnaat, head tilted as they speak their pain. When he reaches the first buildings, he stops and turns.
“Leave the bodies, Banu al-Mauth,” he says. “They will not be tampered with. I will see them buried.” Then he is gone, the knot of ghosts trailing after.
As he leaves, jinn voices rise on the air, a chorus with layer upon layer of melody, hair-raising and beautiful. The air quivers with the force of their song, and Mauth speaks.
A lament for the Meherya, he says. An elegy for their fallen king.
“Only one returned out of hundreds, Mauth.” I glance toward the city, where Talis has disappeared. “I failed you.”
Without you, all would have been lost, Banu al-Mauth. One is a beginning. And for now, that is enough.
* * *
«««
Hundreds are injured and thousands are dead. The ghosts call to me, begging to be seen, heard, sent to the other side. But I must speak with Mamie and Shan, with Afya and Spiro, with Gibran and Aubarit. I must spend time with the Fakirs and Fakiras and give them guidance on how to move forward with so many of their elders lost. Quin, bleeding from a dozen wounds in the infirmary, demands my presence, and it takes hours to persuade the Paters to leave the bodies of the dead.
But by dawn the morning after the battle, the army is ready to march, and I have spoken with everyone I need to.
Well. Almost everyone.
Laia finds me near the road that will lead the army out of the Waiting Place. The Blood Shrike, Musa, and I are discussing how the troops should handle any rogue ghosts. When Laia appears, Musa kicks the Shrike in the ankle.
“What the hells, Musa—oh—”
The Shrike gives me a dark look—Don’t you hurt her, Elias—and disappears with the Scholar man.
