The City of Brass

by S. A. Chakraborty

  “At this rate, it will take us a few centuries just to finish this conversation.”

  That brought a wry smile to his face. “You have their wit, I’ll admit to that.” He snapped his fingers, and another goblet appeared in his hand. “Drink with me.”

  Nahri gave the goblet a suspicious sniff. It smelled sweet, but she hesitated. She hadn’t had a drop of wine in her life; such a forbidden luxury was well beyond her means, and she wasn’t sure how she’d react to alcohol. Drunks had always been easy pickings for a thief.

  “Rejecting hospitality is a grave offense among my people,” Dara warned.

  Mostly to appease him, Nahri took a small sip. The wine was cloyingly sweet, more like a syrup than a liquid. “Is it truly?”

  “Not at all. But I’m tired of drinking alone.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, irritated that she’d been so easily tricked, but the wine was already working, rolling down her throat and spreading a warm drowsiness throughout her body. She swayed, grabbing for the rug.

  Dara steadied her, his fingers hot on her wrist. “Careful.”

  Nahri blinked, her vision swimming for another moment. “By the Most High, your people must get nothing done if you drink things like this.”

  He shrugged. “A fair assessment of our race. But you wish to know of the ifrit.”

  “And why you think they want to kill me,” she clarified. “Mostly that.”

  “We’ll get to that bit of bad luck later,” he said lightly. “First, you must understand that the earliest daevas were true creatures of fire, formed and formless all at once. And very, very powerful.”

  “More powerful than you are now?”

  “Far more. We could possess and imitate any creature, any object we desired, and our lives spanned eras. We were greater than peris, maybe even greater than marid.”

  “Marid?”

  “Water elementals,” he replied. “No one’s seen one in millennia—they’d be like gods to your kind. But the daevas were at peace with all creatures. We stayed in our deserts while the peri and marids kept to their realms of sky and water. But then, humans were created.”

  Dara twirled his goblet in his hand. “My kind can be irrational,” he confessed. “Tempestuous. To see such weak creatures marching across our lands, building their filthy cities of dirt and blood over our sacred sands . . . it was maddening. They became a target . . . a plaything.”

  Goose bumps erupted across her skin. “And how exactly did the daevas play?”

  A flash of embarrassment swept his bright eyes. “In all sorts of ways,” he muttered, conjuring up a small pillar of white smoke that thickened as she watched. “Kidnapping newlyweds, stirring up sandstorms to confuse a caravan, encouraging . . .” He cleared his throat. “You know . . . worship.”

  Her mouth fell open. So the darker stories about djinn really did have their roots in truth. “No, I can’t say that I do know. I’ve never murdered merchants for my own amusement!”

  “Ah, yes, my thief. Forgive me for forgetting that you are a paragon of honesty and goodness.”

  Nahri scowled. “So what happened next?”

  “Supposedly the peri ordered us to stop.” Dara’s smoky pillar undulated in the wind at his side. “Khayzur’s people fly to the edge of Paradise; they hear things—at least they think they do. They warned that humans were to be left alone. Each elemental race was to stick to its own affairs. Meddling with each other—especially with a lesser creature—was absolutely forbidden.”

  “And the daevas didn’t listen?”

  “Not in the slightest. And so we were cursed.” He scowled. “Or ‘blessed,’ as the djinn see it now.”

  “How?”

  “A man was called from among the humans to punish us.” A hint of fear crossed Dara’s face. “Suleiman,” he whispered. “May he be merciful.”

  “Suleiman?” Nahri repeated in disbelief. “As in the Prophet Suleiman?” When Dara nodded, she gasped. Her only education might have consisted of running from the law, but even she knew who Suleiman was. “But he died thousands of years ago!”

  “Three thousand,” Dara corrected. “Give or take a few centuries.”

  A horrifying thought took root in her mind. “You . . . you’re not three thousand years—”

  “No,” he cut in, his voice terse. “This was before my time.”

  Nahri exhaled. “Of course.” She could barely wrap her mind around how long three thousand years was. “But Suleiman was human. What could he possibly do to a daeva?”

  A dark expression flickered across Dara’s face. “Anything he liked, apparently. Suleiman was given a seal ring—some say by the Creator himself—that granted him the ability to control us. A thing he went about doing with a vengeance after we . . . well, supposedly there was some sort of human war the daevas might have had a part in instigating—”

  Nahri held up a hand. “Yes, yes, I’m sure it was a most unfair punishment. What did he do?”

  Dara beckoned the smoky pillar forward. “Suleiman stripped us of our abilities with a single word and commanded that all daevas come before him to be judged.” The smoke spread before them; one corner condensed to become a misty throne while the rest dissipated into hundreds of fiery figures the size of her thumb. They drifted past the carpet, their smoky heads bowed before the throne.

  “Most obeyed; they were nothing without their powers. They went to his kingdom and toiled for a hundred years.” The throne vanished, and the fiery creatures swirled into workers heating bricks and stacking enormous stones several times their size. A vast temple began to grow in the sky. “Those who made penance were forgiven, but there was a catch.”

  Nahri watched the temple rise, entranced. “What was it?”

  The temple vanished, and the daevas were bowing again to the distant throne. “Suleiman didn’t trust us,” Dara replied. “He said our very nature as shapeshifters made us manipulative and deceitful. So we were forgiven but changed forever.”

  In an instant, the fire was extinguished from the bowing daevas’ smoky skin. They shrank in size, and some grew hunched, their spines bent in old age.

  “He trapped us in humanlike bodies,” Dara explained. “Bodies with limited abilities that only lasted a few centuries. It meant that those daevas who originally tormented humanity would die and be replaced by their descendants, descendants Suleiman believed would be less destructive.”

  “God forbid,” Nahri cut in. “Only living for a few centuries with magical abilities . . . what an awful fate.”

  He ignored her sarcasm. “It was. Too awful for some. Not all daevas were willing to subject themselves to Suleiman’s judgment in the first place.”

  The familiar hate returned to his face. “The ifrit,” she guessed.

  He nodded. “The very same.”

  “The very same?” she repeated. “You mean they’re still alive?”

  “Unfortunately. Suleiman bound them to their original daeva bodies, but those bodies were meant to survive millennia.” He gave her a dark look. “I’m sure you can imagine what three thousand years of seething resentment does to the mind.”

  “But Suleiman took their powers away, didn’t he? How much of a threat can they be?”

  Dara raised his brows. “Did the thing that possessed your friend and ordered the dead to eat us seem powerless?” He shook his head. “The ifrit have had millennia to test the boundaries of Suleiman’s punishment and have risen to the task spectacularly. Many of my people believe they descended to hell itself, selling their souls to learn new magic.” He twisted his ring again. “And they’re obsessed with revenge. They believe humanity a parasite and consider my kind to be the worst of traitors for submitting to Suleiman.”

  Nahri shivered. “So where do I fit in all this? If I’m just some lowly, mixed-blood shafit, why are they bothering with me?”

  “I suspect it’s whose blood—however little—you have in you that provoked their interest.”

  “These Nahids? The fam
ily of healers you mentioned?”

  He nodded. “Anahid was Suleiman’s vizier and the only daeva he ever trusted. When the daevas’ penance was complete, Suleiman not only gave Anahid healing abilities, he gave her his seal ring, and with it the ability to undo any magic—whether a harmless spell gone wrong or an ifrit curse. Those abilities passed to her descendants, and the Nahids became the sworn enemies of the ifrit. Even Nahid blood was poisonous to an ifrit, more fatal than any blade.”

  Nahri was suddenly very aware of how Dara was speaking of the Nahids. “Was poisonous?”

  “The Nahid family is no more,” Dara said. “The ifrit spent centuries hunting them down and killed the last, a pair of siblings, about twenty years ago.”

  Her heart skipped a beat. “So what you’re saying—” she started, her voice hoarse, “is that you think I’m the last living descendant of a family that a group of crazed, revenge-obsessed former daevas have been trying to exterminate for the last three thousand years?”

  “You wanted to know.”

  She was sorely tempted to push him off the carpet. “I didn’t think . . .” She trailed off as she noticed ash drifting up around her. She looked down.

  The carpet was dissolving.

  Dara followed her gaze and let out a surprised cry. He backed away to a more solid patch in the blink of an eye and snapped his fingers. Its edges smoking, the rug sped up as it descended toward the glistening Euphrates.

  Nahri tried to appraise the water as they skimmed through the air above it. The current was rough but not as turbulent as it had been in other spots; she could probably make it to shore.

  She glanced up at Dara. His green eyes were so bright with alarm that it was difficult to look at his face. “Can you swim?”

  “Can I swim?” he snapped, as if the very idea offended him. “Can you burn?”

  But their luck held. They were already at the shallows when the carpet finally burst into burning crimson embers. Nahri tumbled into a knee-high patch of river while Dara leaped for the rocky shore. He sniffed disdainfully as she staggered toward the riverbank covered in muck.

  Nahri adjusted the makeshift strap of her bag. And then she stopped. She didn’t have Dara’s ring, but she had her supplies. She was in the river, safely separated from the daeva by a band of water she knew he wouldn’t cross.

  Dara must have noticed her hesitation. “Still tempted to try your luck alone with the ifrit?”

  “There’s a lot you haven’t told me,” she pointed out. “About the djinn, about what happens when we get to Daevabad.”

  “I will. I promise.” He gestured at the river, his ring sparkling in the light of the setting sun. “But I’ve no desire to spend the coming days being looked at like some villainous abductor. If you want to return to the human world, if you wish to risk the ifrit to return to bartering your talents for stolen coins, stay in the water.”

  Nahri glanced back at the Euphrates. Somewhere across the river, across deserts vaster than seas, was Cairo, the only home she’d ever known. A hard place but familiar and predictable—completely unlike the future Dara offered.

  “Or follow me,” he continued, his voice smooth. Too smooth. “Find out what you really are, what really exists in this world. Come to Daevabad where even a drop of Nahid blood will bring you honor and wealth beyond your imagining. Your own infirmary, the knowledge of a thousand previous healers at your fingertips. Respect.”

  Dara offered his hand.

  Nahri knew she should be suspicious, but, God, his words struck her heart. For how many years had she dreamed of Istanbul? Of studying proper medicine with respected scholars? Learning to read books instead of pretending to read palms? How often had she counted her savings in disappointment and put aside her hopes for a greater future?

  She took his hand.

  He pulled her free of the mud, his fingers scalding her own. “I’ll cut your throat in your sleep if you’re lying,” she warned, and Dara grinned, looking delighted at the threat. “Besides, how are we supposed to get to Daevabad? We’ve lost the rug.”

  The daeva nodded eastward. Set against the dark river and distant cliffs, Nahri could make out the bare brick lines of a large village.

  “You’re the thief,” he challenged. “You’re going to steal us some horses.”

  6

  Ali

  Wajed came for him at dawn.

  “Prince Alizayd?”

  Ali startled and looked up from his notes. The sight of the city’s Qaid—the commander of the Royal Guard—would have made most djinn startle, even if they weren’t expecting to be arrested for treason at any minute. He was a massively built warrior covered in two centuries’ worth of scars and welts.

  But Wajed only smiled as he entered the Citadel’s library, the closest thing Ali had to his own quarters. “Already hard at work, I see,” he said, motioning to the books and scrolls scattered on the rug.

  Ali nodded. “I have a lesson to prepare.”

  Wajed snorted. “You and your lessons. Were you not so dangerous with that zulfiqar, one would think I’d raised an economist instead of a warrior.” His smile faded. “But I fear your students—however few they are—will have to wait. Your father’s had it with Bhatt. They can’t get any more information out of him, and the Daevas are clamoring for his blood.”

  Though Ali had been expecting this moment since he’d first heard Anas had been captured alive, his stomach twisted, and he struggled to keep his voice even. “Was he—?”

  “Not yet. The grand wazir wants a spectacle, says it’s the only thing that will satisfy his tribe.” Wajed rolled his eyes; he and Kaveh had never gotten along. “So we’ll both need to be there.”

  A spectacle. Ali’s mouth went dry, but he rose to his feet. Anas had sacrificed himself so that Ali might escape; he deserved to have one friendly face at his execution. “Let me dress.”

  Wajed ducked out, and Ali quickly changed into his uniform, a tunic the color of obsidian, a white waist-wrap, and a gray tasseled turban. He secured his zulfiqar to his waist and tucked his khanjar—the hooked dagger worn by all Geziri men—into his belt. At least he’d look the part of a loyal soldier.

  He joined Wajed at the stairs, and they descended the tower into the Citadel’s heart. A large complex of sand-colored stone, the Citadel was home to the Royal Guard, housing the barracks, offices, and training ground of the djinn army. His ancestors had built it shortly after conquering Daevabad, its crenellated courtyard and stark stone tower an homage to Am Gezira, their distant homeland.

  Even at this early hour, the Citadel was a hive of activity. Cadets drilled with zulfiqars in the courtyard and spearmen practiced on an elevated platform. A half-dozen young men crowded around a free-standing door, attempting to break past its locking enchantment. As Ali watched, one flew back from the door, the wood sizzling as his fellows burst into laughter. In the opposite corner, a Tukharistani warrior-scholar dressed in a long felt coat, fur hat, and heavy gloves presented an iron shield to a group of students gathered around him. He shouted an incantation, and a sheath of ice enveloped the shield. The scholar tapped it with the butt of a dagger, and the entire thing shattered.

  “When’s the last time you saw your family?” Wajed asked as they reached the waiting horses at the end of the courtyard.

  “A few months ago . . . well, more than a few, I suppose. Not since Eid,” Ali admitted. He swung into his saddle.

  Wajed tsked as they passed through the gate. “You should make a greater effort, Ali. You’re blessed to have them so close.”

  Ali made a face. “I’d visit more often if it didn’t involve going to that Nahid-haunted palace they call home.”

  The palace came into view just then, as they rounded a bend in the road. Its golden domes gleamed bright against the rising sun, its white marble facade and walls shining pink in the rosy dawn light. The main building, an enormous ziggurat, sat heavy on the stark cliffs overlooking Daevabad’s lake. Surrounded by gardens still in shadow, it loo
ked as if the massive step pyramid was being swallowed by the spiky tops of blackened trees.

  “It’s not haunted,” Wajed countered. “It simply . . . misses its founding family.”

  “The stairs vanished under me the last time I was there, uncle,” Ali pointed out. “The water in the fountains turns to blood so often that people don’t drink it.”

  “So it misses them a lot.”

  Ali shook his head but stayed quiet as they crossed the waking city. They ascended the hilly road leading to the palace and then entered the royal arena through the back. It was a place best suited for sunny days of competition, for boastful men juggling incendiaries and women racing scaled simurgh firebirds. For entertainment.

  That’s exactly what this is for these people. Ali gazed at the crowd with scorn. Though it was early, many of the stone seats were already taken, filled with an assortment of nobles vying for his father’s attention, curious pureblood commoners, angry Daevas, and what looked to be the entire ulema—Ali suspected the clerics had been ordered to witness what happened when they failed to control the faithful.

  He climbed up to the royal viewing platform, a tall stone terrace shaded by potted palm trees and striped linen curtains. Ali didn’t see his father but spotted Muntadhir near the front. His older half brother didn’t look any happier than Ali to be there. His curly black hair was mussed, and he seemed to be wearing the same clothes he’d probably gone out in last night, an embroidered Agnivanshi jacket heavy with pearls and a lapis-colored silk waist-wrap, both wrinkled.

  Ali could smell the wine on Muntadhir’s breath from three paces away and suspected his brother had probably just been dragged from a bed not his own. “Peace be upon you, Emir.”

  Muntadhir jumped. “By the Most High, akhi,” he said, his hand over his heart. “Do you have to creep up on me like some sort of assassin?”

  “You should work on your reflexes. Where’s Abba?”

  Muntadhir nodded rudely toward a thin man in Daeva clothing at the terrace edge. “That one insisted on a public reading of all the charges.” He yawned. “Abba wasn’t wasting his time on that—not when he has me to do it for him. He’ll be here soon enough.”