The Empire of Gold

by S. A. Chakraborty

Tiamat let out a scornful growl. See how he chooses them? The daeva brat lectures us on courage and then—

  “Alizayd al Qahtani.” The syllables fell from his mouth like someone else was speaking them. Tiamat blinked, the great marid mother actually looking surprised, and so he repeated the words more firmly. “My name is Alizayd al Qahtani.”

  Tiamat regarded him. He couldn’t tell if she looked annoyed or pleased.

  So be it, she declared.

  Ali didn’t even get a chance to conjure a last flame.

  Her words had no sooner blossomed in his head than he was driven to the flooded sand. It felt like a pike had been thrust through his heart, one made of ice and metal barbs. It twisted, filling him with cold poison and sucking every hint of warmth away. Ali nearly bit through his tongue, trying not to scream as the pain spread in slow, agonizing waves.

  He fell forward onto his palms. Molten fire danced from his hands, the warmest, most beautiful golden glow he’d ever seen. Like a caught ribbon, it reluctantly let itself be tugged away, drops clinging to his fingertips before they fell. Ali fought the wild urge to grab them, to gather the precious liquid draining into the sand. More ran down his cheeks, whether the blood Tiamat had claimed or tears, he did not know.

  A deep, clammy coldness rushed through his body, claiming the space the five had occupied as the flavors of the air shifted. A hint of gray stole over his vision, and the black void was suddenly clearer. The scars the marid’s possession had carved into his arms were glowing, the lines of tissue melting into swirling paths of brilliant, iridescent scales.

  Ali shut his eyes—he didn’t want to see this. Racked with pain, he was only barely aware of Tiamat speaking again.

  Show him, Sobek. Show him what we are.

  Sobek laid a hand on his skull. “Let them pass. If you fight, it will drive you mad.”

  Ali was gasping for air, his eyes still closed. “What will drive me—”

  Sobek’s memories poured into his head.

  Ali cried out, water bursting from his skin. He tried to free himself, but the Nile marid was ready, holding him firmly in his arms.

  “Let them pass,” Sobek urged again. “Let yourself hear and taste, see and feel. It is a blessing. Accept it.”

  Let them pass. His mind laid open, raw and scoured, Ali had no choice. It was too late to turn back now.

  Hear. The crashing of waterfalls and herons in flight. The singing of harvest songs in tongues no longer spoken and his name chanted in soft worship.

  Taste. The iron earth of flooding fields and the blood of his prey.

  See. The glimmering cap of a stone pyramid that touched the sky, a structure so striking that he rose from his river and felt the first touch of trepidation at what the humans could do. An empty plain that seemed to sprout into a city overnight.

  Feel. His daeva child, his first, in his arms, strangely warm and wriggling. Then dozens, the affection with which the first greeted him fading to apprehensive reverence. His favored heir, the one who might finally promise deliverance, falling to his knees.

  Forgive me, Grandfather, his heir begged. I could not betray them.

  The sudden blow of Sobek’s banishment, loneliness as he watched his temples fall and mortals forget his name, scratching out his image and taking bricks with his visage for floors. The silence of centuries with no communing, no worship, no pacts until he was so weak he could no longer shift out of his crocodile form, until he’d crawled into the weeds, starving.

  The little human girl who’d found him, utterly fearless as she slipped through the sugarcane surrounding her riverside village and dropped a pigeon in front of his jaws, the first offering he’d been given in a thousand years.

  “My grandma said we should be good to crocodiles,” she’d announced, crouching across from him. Her words took him aback as much as her eyes. Big, bright, and brown, with a hint of the gold that had colored the eyes of his long-dead daeva kin.

  A hint of magic.

  Ali tried to return to himself and seize upon the memory, but instead he noticed that the water had been rising and was now creeping up his neck, lapping over his closed lips. Despite his promise, he wrestled against his ancestor’s grip, filled with the awful premonition that whatever the marid had already done to him, this last part would be the worst and place him at a remove from his people he’d never escape.

  You promised you’d return to her. You swore to always put Daevabad first. Weeping and praying to God that there would be something left of him after, Ali let his lips fall open. Salty water poured down his throat, invading every corner of him.

  Along with the lives and memories of hundreds of marid.

  Rain spirits who danced in the clouds to shatter themselves upon the ground, seeping deep into the earth to join aquifers. Shy stream guardians, darting through quiet ponds and underground springs with webbed hands and turtlelike beaks. Merpeople with shimmering skin and seaweed hair, caught in the nets of humans, hunted and speared. For every lethal marid—ones like Sobek and others who commanded sharks, who lived on the blood of the drowned and warred with the daevas—there seemed twenty gentle ones, protectors not hunters, content with seeing to the tiny aquatic creatures who called their realms home and urging their life-giving waters to sate the surrounding lands and make them flourish.

  Ali suddenly knew what Sobek meant when he said the marid were connected. They were more than a family—they swam among one another’s minds and memories, intensely bonded with their kin and their waters, one foot in the physical world and another in the collective where the currents churned. Not all currents were the same. There were certain nodes, great waters where the marid met and shared memories, cavorted and birthed. A cold northern sea ringed with ice, and the warm, salty darkness at the bottom of the earth where Ali was now. A humid tropical waterfall surrounded by jungle and a riverine cave lit by glowing quartz.

  A mist-shrouded lake. Deep and serene, perhaps the most sacred place they had. Ali saw it stolen, felt the air burn with choking, foreign smoke and fill with the cries of those of his people who were now trapped, who labored to build a city of dry stone and were crushed underfoot. He saw generations of cruelty before the daevas began to weaken and forget, and the marid fled, one by one.

  He saw a daeva warrior on a chilly beach smash in the head of a screaming human acolyte. Watched the body burn, the lake burn, as the fiery-eyed man promised devastation and death. Ali felt sheer existential terror on a level he never had as his people tried to avoid a fate that seemed inevitable.

  They will burn our waters. They will make us slaves.

  Ali witnessed, through the eyes of an elder who’d been trapped in the molten crust of the lake since the days of Anahid, a young daeva man thrown to the waters. He was already dying, arrows through his throat and chest. A warrior, a gray-eyed youth whose blood didn’t have quite the same acrid taste as the rest of the daevas, but the marid elder didn’t think to worry about that. Here was a chance to rid themselves of the doom that seemed inescapable, to rid themselves of the Nahid’s champion who the peris whispered would destroy them all.

  They seized it.

  Sobek relaxed his grip, the torrent of memories fading as Ali drifted in the water.

  “Do you understand now?” the Nile lord asked.

  Yes, Ali replied. I understand.

  38

  DARA

  “Wake up.”

  Dara’s eyes shot open.

  For a second, he didn’t understand where he was, or why the blackness he’d been dragged from was so encompassing, as though his very existence had briefly ceased. There was movement, the floor beneath him rumbling as though being wheeled over an uneven road. Above was a narrow silk-draped ceiling, patterned like those found in the palace carriages. A throbbing ache spiked from the relic clamped around his wrist …

  The relic. The ring. Dara jerked up, reaching for his knife. “Lie down.”

  He collapsed, the back of his skull slamming into the carriage flo
or.

  There was an impressed whistle—Aeshma’s, he recognized—and then three people were leaning over his prone form, Manizheh and her two ifrit. Dara writhed against her control, twisting and clenching his hands, but he couldn’t remove himself from the ground.

  “You did it.” Awe glittered in Aeshma’s fiery eyes when he turned his attention to Dara. “Have a nice sleep, Afshin?”

  Dara had never felt such a violent need to murder someone. He dug his fingers into the wood. “I will kill you. I will rip out your fucking throat—”

  “Enough.” At Manizheh’s command, the words died in his mouth. Dara hissed, wriggling once more against the invisible bonds holding him.

  Vizaresh examined Dara’s cuff, tapping the relic and pressing a finger against the pulse in his wrist. Dara wanted to scream. He wanted to weep. To burn down the world and himself along with it. He thought he’d given everything to serve the Nahids, only to learn that there were still things they could take from him. The little freedom that remained. His agency. His very dignity as these vile creatures poked and prodded his body.

  “He’s still alive,” Vizaresh said. “I thought we agreed you would kill him. The curse would have bonded better.” He sounded more fascinated than disappointed, though, and Dara chided himself for not paying more attention to Vizaresh’s obsession with new forms of magic. To the slave rings the ifrit wore around his neck. Of course he and Manizheh would have experimented together.

  “He’s still my Afshin. I’m not going to kill him.” Manizheh looked on Dara with affection. “Indeed, I’m hoping at the end of all this, when our enemies are dead, and we finally have peace …” She smiled gently. “When you understand why I did this, I will grant you your freedom.”

  Dara was too desperate not to beg. “Banu Nahida, please.”

  “Be quiet and listen.”

  His mouth snapped shut.

  The furrowed line in her brow relaxed. “Better. Now, you have put me in a difficult position by meeting with Ghassan’s daughter. Not only did we miss an opportunity to arrest her, but the Creator only knows what stories she’s been spreading of your disloyalty. I cannot have that, Afshin. I cannot have the djinn whispering that my own general takes meetings behind my back. I need all of Daevabad to know your loyalty is mine alone. I need them to know what happens when they defy me.”

  Dara struggled to peel himself off the floor, to scream. But all he could do was make a strangled sound of protest in the back of his throat.

  A knife. A knife. If he could just get a knife, he could cut his throat. Puncture his lungs, his heart, slice off the relic. Anything to stop Manizheh from using him like this.

  She had one—Dara’s straight dagger now sheathed at her waist. With all the strength he could muster, he tried to reach for it, but his hand felt like it had been pinned by a boulder. He finally lifted his fingertips …

  Vizaresh noticed. “He’s fighting your control. You need to be more specific, Banu Nahida. Use the words.”

  Dara grunted, roaring in his head as Manizheh pursed her lips. No, he wanted to shout. Please!

  “All right,” she started slowly. “Afshin, I wish for you to publicly demonstrate your loyalty. You will neither speak against me, nor do anything to draw suspicion to your state.”

  The fight went out of him. Forcibly. Dara’s hands unclenched against his will, his boots ceasing their knocking.

  Manizheh continued. “I wish for you to destroy the Geziri, Ayaanle, and shafit districts block by block until Zaynab al Qahtani surrenders. I wish for you not to show mercy. You will not disobey me or allow yourself to come to harm. You will sow as much fear and discord as you did during your rebellion.

  “You will be the Scourge.”

  Creator, kill me. I beg you. I BEG YOU. But Dara was already sitting up, magic washing over him in waves. His dirty robe transformed, giving way to the black-and-gray uniform he’d worn when they’d attacked the city. Scaled brass armor crawled over his chest and down his arms, climbing up his neck to sweep back in what he knew would be a perfect imitation of the helm he’d once worn. The weight of a sword and a mace at his waist, a bow and sheath on his back.

  Then the polished wooden handle of a scourge landed in his hand, barbed lashes sprouting from it like a vile weed.

  There was nothing Dara could do. If he had begun to chafe under his Afshin duty to obey, this—this theft of his body and tongue—was the cruelest response imaginable. He turned toward the carriage door and kicked it open like someone was pushing the levers of his legs.

  They were in the Daeva Quarter, just behind the gate that led to the midan. The bars keeping it shut were open, revealing the stone wings of the shedu statues that framed it. Dara could still remember how they’d leapt to his aid the day he’d returned Nahri to Daevabad.

  Nahri. Oh, little thief, would that I had listened to you that night. Would that Dara had bowed his head to her instead and never set this horror in motion.

  His warriors were lined up, as armed as he was, and already on horseback. Uncertain black gazes darted to him, confusion in their faces. After all, had Dara not been cautioning patience? Making quietly clear to his inner circle that the djinn outnumbered them and that to go in would be a bloodbath?

  He wanted to tell them to run. Instead, power building in his blood, Dara raised his scourge to the air.

  “Today we end this!” he announced. “The djinn have returned our gesture of peace with deception and murder. They need to be taught a lesson. You will show no mercy and take no prisoners. We do not stop until they submit, lay down their arms, and hand over Zaynab al Qahtani.”

  As the words poured from him, Dara prayed to see disquiet among their faces. Hesitation.

  There was none. He had trained them too well. They roared their approval.

  “For the Nahids!” Noshrad cried, brandishing his sword.

  “For Banu Manizheh!” Dara snapped his fingers, and magic surged to his hand, a hundred times faster and more powerful than it ever had before, as if he’d jumped into a rushing river and been swept away. One of his conjured winged horses appeared before him, dazzling with a spray of smoldering embers in its ebony mane, the four wings billowing like smoke. He launched himself onto its back.

  Dara had no sooner appeared in the midan than gunshots rang out, followed by a barrage of arrows. It didn’t matter. Manizheh had wished for him not to be harmed, and so the curse simply didn’t allow it—the projectiles bursting into flames and falling as ash before him.

  “Djinn!” he roared, rising in the air on his winged horse. “I come with a simple message. Submit. Lay down your weapons and hand over Zaynab al Qahtani, or we will destroy you. The longer you take, the more of you will die.”

  He didn’t wait for a response. He couldn’t. Manizheh’s wish was tearing through him, energy wrapping around his limbs and crackling down his fingers. His relic seared his skin.

  Dara closed his hands into fists, and half the midan came down.

  The three great gates, gates that had stood for centuries even when he was a boy—the stark Geziri archway, the studded pyramids with the proud Ayaanle standards, and the tiled columns leading to the warren of shops and shafit homes—crumbled into dust, the copper wall that connected them shattering. The wall came down with such violence that the buildings nestled against it were ripped apart, furniture and bricks and beams crashing down. It didn’t take much effort—the city had been slowly dying, rotting from the inside since its magical heart was torn out. But to see something once so mighty, so old, obliterated in seconds …

  We were supposed to be the saviors of Daevabad.

  Instead, Dara gazed upon ruins. There were already screams rising from them. Children crying for their parents, the wails of the dying.

  But Manizheh had ordered him to bring down the streets until Zaynab was caught. And so Dara raised his hands again, crying out in his mind as people ran to the buildings that had already collapsed, scrabbling at the heap in hopes of rescuing
those trapped inside.

  He rained down the next block directly on top of them.

  That brought silence. For a moment. Dust rose from the rubble, hazy in the air. Dara motioned to his warriors and pressed forward.

  He didn’t have to speak. He’d given his orders and his soldiers, having spent the past weeks penned up in the Daeva Quarter as conspiracies and paranoia swirled, having just tended the funeral pyres of their comrades murdered in the failed coup, didn’t need a reminder.

  They threw themselves on the survivors, hacking at the djinn and shafit trying to dig through the rubble and firing arrows into the backs of those who fled. On horseback, they were faster, running down their victims.

  Go away from this in your head. It was an old instinct, as though a past version of himself—a forgotten version, the Dara who’d survived centuries of ifrit enslavement—had quietly risen to hold his hand and see him through this latest horror so it wouldn’t obliterate what was left of his soul.

  But it was too late for that. Dara’s horse landed on the road, and he lashed a man across the chest, getting what he knew would only be the first of many coats of blood on his scourge. He roared for his men to charge forward and then brought down another block of buildings. Bricks exploded outward, the roof of a long alley of shops crashing down on the crowd that had rushed to shelter there. Dara scourged another man. A woman. A boy. Blood was thick on his skin, the bodies piling up around him.

  It wasn’t enough. Zaynab al Qahtani was nowhere to be seen, and Manizheh’s wish drove him to further destruction, further death. Dara returned to the sky to bring down a vast complex he recognized as a famed school in the Ayaanle Quarter and a public garden in the Geziri one. Then he headed for the old border between the Geziri and shafit neighborhoods.

  The next block was Nahri’s hospital.

  No. Dara fought harder against the curse binding him, frantic for a way out. A way to delay. He couldn’t harm himself; he couldn’t not carry out the order.

  So he sent his horse hurtling to the ground.

  The cobblestones cracked under the heat and energy pouring off his body. It was as if he’d plummeted into the hell he deserved, nightmarish scenes of panicked mothers running with sobbing children and his soldiers locked in bloody, uneven combat with shafit civilians. There were blasts of gunfire and the punch of arrows. Homes were ablaze, the thick smoke a backdrop against the rise and fall of blades, the spray of blood.