The Empire of Gold

by S. A. Chakraborty

  Food wasn’t technically Dara’s problem; only security and military affairs were. Yet it wasn’t easy to divest himself of the day-to-day issues of running the city. It had been two weeks since they’d taken the palace, and Manizheh was still attempting to piece together a government—if by government, one meant a dozen cowed ministers of extremely varying levels of experience ruled by an increasingly exhausted and exasperated Kaveh e-Pramukh. Despite Manizheh’s ultimatum and the havoc Dara had unleashed while delivering said ultimatum, none of the djinn had surrendered. The Agnivanshi had sent over a cautiously worded letter that could have been interpreted a dozen different ways, the Tukharistanis a far blunter missive suggesting the Scourge of Qui-zi go burn in hell, and the Sahrayn an actually burning barrel of dung. From the Ayaanle and Geziris was silence, though Dara supposed silence was what happened when someone was actively conspiring to bring you down.

  And there was nothing he could do about it besides train more warriors. “Keep at it,” he told Noshrad. “I shall see if I can’t rustle up more recruits.”

  Dara took the main avenue back to the palace, steeling himself for the mixed reactions his presence provoked. When he’d first returned to Daevabad, he’d been treated like a hero by the Daevas, the legendary Darayavahoush e-Afshin brought back to life to escort the even more miraculous and mysterious Banu Nahri e-Nahid. It made for a fantastic story, truly—Dara had once seen it performed by some sort of street puppets while walking with Jamshid in more peaceful times. He was also not unaware of the other angle people brought into it: Nahri was a beautiful woman, Dara a handsome warrior, and the Qahtanis made for excellent villains. He’d heard the sighs as he bowed before Nahri in the Grand Temple, not missing the admiring whispers, longing looks, and overly excited children eager to show him the Afshin marks they’d drawn on their cheeks.

  No one wore Afshin marks now.

  Oh, there were plenty of Daevas who’d greeted their conquest with grateful tears and flocked to see Manizheh during her rare public appearances. But like Noshrad said, most of their people just seemed wary. Resigned, traumatized, and as intimidated by Manizheh and Dara as they had been by Ghassan. And Dara couldn’t blame them. They’d been stripped of their magic, and ifrit strolled the streets. Ghassan might have been a tyrant, but Dara suspected the brutal way the Geziris had been slaughtered—the Nahid magic his people revered as sacred twisted to deliver a gruesome death—was simply too much to accept. Dara kept his eyes down as he walked, aware of the conversations that abruptly ended when he drew near, and the whispers that picked up in his wake. There were almost no women and children out, and the markets and cafés were empty, litter and weeds beginning to overtake the cobbled streets.

  It was no easier to enter the palace grounds, for Dara walked straight through the scoured dirt field where the doomed Geziri traveling camp had been. It stood out like a wound against the rest of the lush garden; no one had yet the stomach to do anything about it.

  Nor did Dara. Because every time he looked at this field, it was impossible to deny that what was left of his soul screamed this was wrong.

  It could have been worse, he tried to tell himself. The palace had been just as blood soaked the last time Daevabad was conquered—and that time it had been his people slaughtered. The Daevas cowering in their homes should count themselves lucky to still be cowering. His family never had that chance.

  But the justifications were getting harder to swallow. Dara continued to the massive throne room. This place too still smelled like blood. They’d removed the bodies of the dozen Geziris they’d found here, and Dara had ordered the room cleaned, first by servants and then by his own magic, but the pungent aroma lingered.

  Without it, the throne room would have dazzled. Knowing this would be the place where Manizheh greeted her subjects, Dara had not held back from returning it to its former glory. He’d stripped the age from the enormous columns with a snap of his fingers, restoring the lustrous shine of the sandstone walls and the bright paints of the original Daeva ornaments. A thick conjured carpet ran the entire length of the audience hall, the luminous threads depicting dancers and animals and feasts, the patterns he remembered from his youth. Two large fire altars had been brought in, filling the room with cedar incense. And yet beneath that holy fragrance … still blood.

  The room has always demanded a cost. Dara could still remember the first time he’d set foot in here. Suleiman’s eye, he’d been young. Eighteen, nineteen? Still in training, since he’d been taken directly from the sparring yard by an impatient steward in royal colors who said Dara had been summoned by the Nahid Council.

  Summoned by the Nahid Council.

  The five words that changed the entire course of his life.

  AT FIRST DARA THOUGHT IT WAS A MISTAKE. WHEN IT became clear it wasn’t, he was both thrilled and panicked. Afshin minors did not get summoned by the Nahid Council. Dara knew he was favored—though he came from a talented generation of Afshins, he was head and shoulders above his cousins when it came to military skills. Considered a prodigy with the bow, he’d been taken for specialized training two years earlier, a decision that had quietly irked his father. Zaydi al Qahtani takes votes with his generals and sends their sons to rebuild villages we have destroyed, he recalled his father complain to his mother in a whispered conversation, while we make assassins out of warriors we should be training to lead.

  Indeed, his father, Artash, was there when Dara arrived, kneeling before the shedu throne, his helmet at his side. Yet everything about the set of his features was wrong. Everyone bowed before the Nahids, but there was a simmering despair under his father’s carefully neutral expression Dara had never seen before. His own heart was pounding so hard he could hear it in his ears, more embarrassing because he knew the healers could detect it as well.

  Almost too nervous to proceed, Dara prostrated himself before he even neared the throne, dropping to the ground to press his face into the carpet.

  A chuckle broke the tense silence. “Come forward, young warrior,” a Baga Nahid teased. “We can hardly converse when you’re all the way back there.”

  His gaze lowered and his face burning, Dara approached, taking the cushion beside his father, aching to ask him what was going on. Artash was a hard but loving man, both Dara’s commander and his father. Dara never disobeyed him, had always looked to his father first, and seeing him suddenly bowed in grim silence was a disorienting experience.

  “Look up, boy. Let us see you.”

  Dara glanced up. The throne catching in the sunlight was blinding and he blinked, the Blessed Nahids coming to him as indistinct shapes in their blue-and-white regalia, their faces veiled. Five sat there, one on the throne and the others on jeweled stools. He’d heard they took turns sitting on the throne and possessing Suleiman’s seal. None but members of their family knew who ruled and when.

  He’d also heard that the Council had once been thirteen—before that even more. People whispered the Nahids were turning on themselves, relatives who quietly dissented being exiled, and those who openly criticized being found dead. But those were rumors, blasphemous gossip that good Daevas—Daevas like Dara—didn’t listen to.

  There was a smile in the Nahid’s voice. “A handsome young man,” he remarked. “You must be so proud, Artash, to have raised such a diligent warrior, one praised by his instructors for his skill. For his obedience.”

  His father’s voice was halting. “He is my life.”

  Worried, Dara snuck a glance at his father, surprised to find him unarmed, the iron knife he wore at his waist missing. A trickle of fear stole through him. What could have reduced his towering father to such a state?

  “Good.” The Baga Nahid’s clipped voice brought Dara back to attention. “For we are sorely in need of such a man for a very important mission. A difficult one, but perhaps the most crucial we’ve faced in a long time.” He stared at Dara over his veil. “We believe you are he.”

  Startled by the pronouncement, Dara nearly br
oke protocol, his mouth falling open to protest. Surely this was a mistake. He was skilled, but he was a minor, still years away from his first quarter century. The Afshins held themselves to notoriously strict standards, particularly when it came to training the next generation. Their warriors did not go near a battlefield until their majority; leading a mission was unheard of.

  But there was no questioning a Nahid—a good Afshin obeyed—so Dara said the only thing he could. “I am here to serve.”

  He remembered the Baga Nahid’s eyes crinkling, his smile hidden beneath his veil. “See how easy that is, Artash?” he remarked before returning his attention to Dara. “There is a city called Qui-zi …”

  The rest was a blur. Dire warnings that shafit had infiltrated and corrupted a Tukharistani merchant city. That the fanatic Zaydi al Qahtani, desperate and losing, schemed to so brazenly flout Suleiman’s law that he’d trigger another cataclysm. That to save their people, this all needed to be stopped.

  Their orders. So specific that Dara, who had spoken out of turn not once, drew in a sharp, shocked breath and glanced again at his father, an act that prompted the Nahids to start fretting about what might happen should another Suleiman return. How they’d all be stripped of their magic, their names, their family, their very identity—pressed into human service for untold centuries. How his mother and little sister might suffer in such a disaster.

  So Dara again said the only thing he could. “I am here to serve.”

  And once again the Baga Nahid seemed pleased. “Then take your father’s helmet. He will not need it. He has another task.”

  Dara did so numbly, too overwhelmed by the warning and his orders—by the shock of being in such a holy presence—to understand the despair in his father’s eyes, to realize his father’s “task” was to be sent to the front lines as fodder.

  He couldn’t know that, though, so Dara obeyed. Or, at least, he tried to. He left the next day and served the Nahids, clinging to their assurance that the shafit who screamed and begged for mercy at Qui-zi were not real people: they were invaders, soulless deceptions plotting the destruction of his people. His family. It became easier to believe as the bodies piled up. For it had to be the truth.

  If it wasn’t the truth, Dara was a monster, a murderer.

  And Dara wasn’t a monster. Monsters were the ifrit, the treacherous Zaydi al Qahtani who’d murdered his garrison commander and loosed shafit hordes on Daeva civilians. Dara was a good man, a good son who would return to parents who loved him. Who’d tease his young sister as they sat for dinner. The kind of upstanding youth anyone would be proud of.

  He was only following orders.

  But on one order Dara failed. He’d been told to leave no survivors. The Nahids had spoken in the language of healers, and one did not leave an infection to spread. But in telling him how to so brutally isolate those who had human blood—with the scourge he’d be tied to for the rest of his life—they had ensured that Dara knew just how many women and children were not shafit. The weeping survivors who screamed for husbands, for sons, for fathers. They were not soulless deceptions, and when his men barred the gates of Qui-zi and left it to burn, Dara could not bear to shut them inside. Instead he’d brought them back to Daevabad.

  And they rightfully, justifiably, told the world he was a monster.

  The Nahid Council was furious, the story it had wanted to tell torn from its members’ tongues. Dara was home only a week—his mother unable to look him in the eye—when they decided to banish him. The Scourging of Qui-zi had been meant to end the war, and instead it had done the opposite, pushing the surviving Tukharistani clans into the welcoming embrace of Zaydi al Qahtani, who already counted the Ayaanle and Sahrayn as allies. The Agnivanshi retreated, their traders and scholars quietly disappearing one by one, and then the Daevas were left isolated, alone in their slowly starving city with the thousands of shafit they’d forced to live in squalor.

  And five years after Dara burned their city and killed their kin, the Tukharistanis—no doubt led by some of the survivors he’d spared—entered the city at Zaydi al Qahtani’s side. They sacked the Daeva Quarter. They hunted through the streets until they found his family’s home.

  They got the revenge that would haunt him through all his resurrections …

  RAISED VOICES FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CHAMBER caught Dara’s ear, pulling him from his memories.

  “—if the djinn want their kin returned, they can come to me and surrender,” Manizheh said, her voice lifting in anger. “The Grand Temple had no business interfering!”

  “They are afraid of you,” he heard a familiar voice plead. “Banu Manizheh, they are terrified. The rumors they came to me with … they think your Afshin is drinking blood and eating the hearts of his enemies. They think you’re giving over anyone who opposes you to the ifrit to be enslaved!”

  Dara flinched at the words from Kartir, the Daeva high priest—he could see the back of Kartir’s peaked azure cap and crimson robe. Dara moved closer but stayed out of sight. Before the conquest, he would have never contemplated so blatantly spying on his Banu Nahida. But Manizheh had proved at least one of the secrets she held—the poison that had killed the Geziris—was deadly, and while Dara believed she was still working for the good of their people, it seemed wise not to allow himself to be kept completely in the dark.

  “And if they came to me directly, they’d learn such things were ridiculous.” Manizheh was seated on the throne, dressed in a gown of indigo and gold, her chador hanging lightly from a braided crown. Kaveh was at her side, as usual, watching the exchange with concern.

  “They’re not going to come to you. Not after what happened to the Geziris. That poison was a cruel act, my lady. People are saying it’s the reason magic is gone, that you twisted your Nahid abilities, and the Creator punished you.”

  Manizheh drew up. “And is that what the high priests believe as well? Have you been wringing your hands in the temple my ancestors built, taking meetings with djinn and undermining me with our people? You might remember it is my family that our creed elevates—it’s we who are to lead you, not the other way around.”

  “You are to be stewards,” Kartir corrected, and Dara couldn’t help but respect the man’s courage, even as his words stirred an unease that had been growing in Dara’s soul. “The Nahids were tasked with caring for this city and its people, all of them. It’s a responsibility, Banu Nahida. Not a right. I beg you, turn back from this violence. Let the djinn being held hostage in the palace go home.”

  Kaveh spoke up, perhaps seeing the fury burning in Manizheh’s eyes. “That’s not possible, Kartir, and respectfully, you are out of your element. This is a political matter. Everyone holds hostages, and right now, they’re one of the most powerful cards we have.”

  “That was how Ghassan ruled,” Kartir rebuked him. He’d crossed the room to service one of the fire altars, swapping the low-burning incense for fresh cedar. His voice was soft, but Dara did not miss his next words, for they went to his heart like a lance. “How the last Nahid Council ruled as well … and then lost the support of its people.”

  “Blasphemy,” Kaveh spat, true anger in his face. There was no quicker way to shed Kaveh’s political pragmatism than to criticize the woman he loved. It was worrying Dara more and more—Manizheh needed advisors who didn’t always tell her what she wanted to hear. “The last Nahid Council didn’t lose the support of its people, it was slaughtered by a bunch of dirt-blood obsessed sand flies.”

  No, Dara wanted to say, his heart aching with the memory of Qui-zi. The Nahids had started to go astray, we just didn’t know until it was too late.

  “Dirt-blood,” Kartir repeated. He was staring at the fire altar. “This is not ours, did you know that?”

  Manizheh was still glowering. “What are you talking about?”

  “Our fire altars. We were not the ones who invented them. Humans did. If you travel to southern Daevastana, you will find the remains of them in buildings that look like
ours but were built long before this city was erected. The humans used them in their rites. Our fire temples, our buildings, our food, the very cut of our clothes …” Kartir turned around, his gaze falling on Kaveh. “Your title, Grand Wazir. Our government. Do you think our ancestors before Suleiman built grand palaces of mudbrick and discussed financial policy when they lived on the winds and took sustenance from wildfires? We owe our survival to humans. We built our entire civilization off theirs, and now we act as if the greatest contamination in our world is a drop of their blood.”

  Manizheh shook her head. “What you’re talking about happened thousands of years ago. It isn’t relevant anymore.”

  “Isn’t it? For much of my life, I thought the same. I taught the same. And yet I wonder if we’ve been blind to the lessons of Anahid’s own life. Did she not build a city, a palace, a temple with human architecture and fill it with human innovations? Was her closest companion not a human prophet?” Kartir drew nearer to the throne. “Anahid embraced all that humanity could teach her; she designed a capital not just for the Daevas, but with room for all. And I fear that’s an inheritance and debt our tribe has forgotten, sealing itself off from the world that gave us so much.”

  Kaveh eyed the other man with skepticism. “You have been listening too closely to Banu Nahri.”

  The priest flushed. “I did not agree with her ideas originally, but I have been to her hospital and seen Daevas and djinn and shafit caring for one another.”

  “And was this before or after shafit attacked the Navasatem procession?” Kaveh provoked him. “Before the dirt-bloods she was helping returned her kindness by trying to assassinate her and my son? Did you give this lecture to the hundred murdered Daevas during their last rites? To Nisreen?”

  “Kaveh.” Manizheh laid a hand on his wrist. She returned her gaze to the priest, looking more exasperated than angry now. “Kartir, I am given to understand my daughter can be very convincing, but I wouldn’t let her sway your opinion on the shafit. She has been under the influence of Geziris and humans for far too long and does not know of what she speaks.”