He opened his eyes—and immediately regretted doing so.
Blood beasts and dead-eyed simurgh soared across a black sky choked with smoke. Bursts of bloody fire rained down like ghastly shooting stars, and as Ali turned his head to glance below at the palace garden, he realized the animal shrieks he’d heard belonged to his father’s menagerie—the karkadann used for state executions included—now loosed and trampling through the grounds.
Banu Manizheh was apparently not going down without a fight.
“Is my sickle-sword still in my belt?” Ali asked weakly.
“Yes.”
“Can you put it in my hand?”
“Why, so you have a better chance of impaling yourself when you pass out again? Because you don’t look ready to do anything else with it.”
Despite Fiza’s words, she helped Ali back to his feet and placed the hilt of Sobek’s gift in his hand. As soon as the sword grazed his palm, Ali felt better—well, the world started spinning more slowly, anyway.
He gripped the ship’s railing in his other hand, studying the deck splintered against the palace’s exterior wall. Ali’s head was pounding, and his heart felt ready to explode, his body still trying to recover from all the marid magic he’d just done. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten, and he hadn’t slept in days.
But all that could come later. Daevabad came first.
“We made a pact, Fiza. You get me to Tiamat, and then we return to Daevabad and do right by your people.” Ali shoved away from the wall and wiped his mouth. “The battle’s just beginning.”
44
NAHRI
Nahri was dreaming, swaying back and forth, her head an aching weight.
She ran through the sugarcane, free as a bird. A weed ripped at her ankle, but she ignored the sting of pain. The blood would be gone by the time her mother caught her.
“Golbahar! Gol, come back here right now!”
“—a lie all along, Aeshma! Decades, and for what? You promised us freedom!”
“I promised we would see Anahid’s legacy destroyed, and we have. We just ripped through her very Temple! They have no magic, and they’re tearing each other apart. The only thing that’s going to be left of Daevabad and that race of weak-blooded traitors when Manizheh is done with them is ash.”
“I never cared about Anahid and her legacy!” Vizaresh shouted. “I knew I should have listened to Sahkr. All you were ever interested in was your vengeance against the Nahids. You let them cast aside Qandisha, our companion for millennia. You let this dirt-blooded child live after murdering my brother. Where is the Aeshma who battled with prophets and sent storms of wrath against Tiamat?”
“We have Suleiman’s seal now!” Aeshma shot back. “We have a Nahid. Her name. There is power in that. You saw what Manizheh did when she murdered her brother!”
The words washed over Nahri, half meaningless. She had never felt so weak, so bound, her mind and body wrapped in barbed wire. She caught an upside-down glimpse of burning gardens and a blood-filled fountain. The Grand Temple. A Daeva elder in priest’s garb lay slaughtered on the path.
The shadows swallowed her again.
Her throat was sore, her voice nearly gone. It had been the screaming, she knew, but she couldn’t say why she had been screaming. Couldn’t say why, after hours in the river, her hair smelled like smoke, her eyes swollen from crying tears she couldn’t remember. Instead she drifted down the Nile, her cheek pressed against scaly hide, her small fingers clutching a ridged back.
“Is that a child?”
“Oh, God—it’s a little girl. Beat the water, get the crocodile away!”
An explosion brought Nahri briefly back to the present, bricks and brass raining down. There was a hole in the city wall where there shouldn’t have been, the island’s wilderness beckoning.
“—because it’s not right! We followed you for years!”
“Will you not cease your nagging?” Aeshma snapped. “You want to have this argument now, when you’re the one who jumped out of your skin when you saw the peri’s blade and whimpered that we should flee to the clouds?”
The fishermen bundled her in a shawl, river mud still staining her face and clinging to her hair.
“It’s okay, little one. It’s okay.” One of the men knelt across from her. “What happened, child? How did you get in the river?”
She stared at him. “I don’t know.”
He tried again. “Then what’s your name?”
“I … I don’t know.” She started to cry. “I want …” But the word for what—who—she wanted wouldn’t come, as though it had been snipped from her mind.
“Oh no, there’s no need for tears.” The fisherman wiped her cheeks. “It’s okay, little river girl. We’ll take you back to Cairo and get it all sorted out, God willing. Ah, there it is. Bint el nahr. A title for a Nile princess.”
Bint el nahr.
Nahri.
The bonds around Nahri slipped just slightly.
“I don’t understand why you’re complaining. You got your prize, a bunch of new little pets. Go clap your hands as they sow mayhem, Vizaresh. Run away if following me is too frightening.”
“Not without the rest of the vessels,” Vizaresh hissed. “And not without the girl. You promised me she would die for Sahkr, and it is I who earned all this. I was the one who guided Manizheh’s hand when she enslaved the Afshin. I was the one who commanded the ghouls. You would not be here without my magic!”
Nahri was dropped to the ground. She landed in a bed of leaves, rocky earth beneath her. It was dark, the sky churning with smoke, and the air thick with rot. Far off, there were screams and screeches and the bellow of dying unnatural animals.
Open your eyes, little Gol. Banu Golbahar e-Nahid, a proper Daeva name. Nahri fell back into her memories.
“She doesn’t even have a real name, the little witch!” the boys yelled, chasing her down the street. “Nahri, bah. Probably the cast-off from some whore.”
“Your magic? You mean, your handful of cheap tricks?” Aeshma snarled. “I have rewarded them enough, you little pest. You should be grateful I’ve given you any vessels. Honored I even included you in this to begin with. You are nothing, Vizaresh. You never have been. Where were your worshippers? Your feasts? You were never more than a murmured name, a creature of spells and shadowy bridges.”
A warrior with wary green eyes, dragging a knife through the sand in one soot-covered hand.
“There is power in names. It’s not something my people give so freely.”
She scowled but decided to tell him the truth—for now. “My name is Nahri.”
Nahri. My name is Nahri. Again, the chains slipped, and the world came more into focus. They were in the woods, on a path winding through the hills beyond the city walls. The distant screams were louder, blending with the crash of waves and the closer sound of crickets.
Magic was returning to her in pieces. Nahri lay in the grass where Aeshma had dropped her, vines reaching out to wind around her skin.
Nahri. My name is Nahri.
Her vision cleared as though someone had peeled away the last strip of gauze covering her eyes. Nahri saw the arguing ifrit as Aeshma returned for her. Vizaresh was still standing on the path, watching Aeshma’s retreating back.
“I’m not nothing,” he whispered under his breath. His fiery gaze was wild and boiling with spite. With resentment long buried. “I’m not nothing.”
Aeshma snorted in derision. “You can chant that all you like. Not even you have the tricks to sell that spell. Now come—”
Vizaresh swung his ax and buried it in Aeshma’s back.
“I’m not nothing,” Vizaresh screeched, yanking the ax free with a sickening crunch.
Aeshma fell to his knees, spitting fire. His smug, sadistic smile had been wiped clean, replaced by genuine shock.
He scrabbled for his mace. “Traitor,” he said. “You cowardly, traitorous worm …”
“Survivor,” Vizaresh co
rrected. “One who intends to stay that way.”
He swung the ax clean across Aeshma’s throat and decapitated the other ifrit. Molten gold blood splashed across the path, splattering Nahri’s feet.
Vizaresh was breathing fast. For a moment, he looked almost as stunned as Aeshma by what he’d done, but then he recovered and began rooting around the gory remains of the other ifrit’s neck. He pulled free another chain—one made of gold like a bride might wear.
But there was far more than jewels hanging from it.
There were rings. Dozens of them. Anklets, bangles, and a handful of neck cuffs. All with one uniting feature.
Emeralds. The slave vessels from the Grand Temple, all of them. The vessels of the stolen souls who’d been resting quietly in the light of Anahid’s original altar, awaiting a Nahid who could free them. That hadn’t been Nahri, not yet. Before the invasion, she hadn’t considered herself skilled enough to risk the extraordinarily advanced Nahid magic said to be necessary. But she’d visited the enslaved souls regularly, always leaving with the promise that when she was strong enough, she’d learn to wake them in the fires of rebirth, holding their hands as they took their first breath of freedom.
Now another Nahid had betrayed her promise and handed them over to the very creatures who’d enslaved them in the first place. Vizaresh ran his claws over the chain of stolen souls like a perverse twist on prayer beads, his eyes lighting with pleasure.
Then he noticed her.
“Well, look who’s awake.” His mouth curled in a smile, half giddy, half frantic—as if he still couldn’t believe what he’d done to his companion, vacillating between regret and thrill. He was trembling madly, bouncing on his feet—a frame of mind that Nahri suspected did not bode well for her, his brother’s murderer.
Sakhr was clearly on Vizaresh’s mind as well. “I know who he is,” the ifrit growled. “Your brother, Jamshid. A long time Manizheh held that secret, but we eventually pried it loose.” He hefted his ax again. “I had hoped one day to kill him before you. What is it the humans say, an eye for an eye? I wanted your brother to suffer, to make his death as painful as a blood-poisoning.”
There was genuine grief in his voice. Nahri remembered Qandisha’s anger back at the Nile and Vizaresh’s own keening howl when he’d discovered Sakhr’s body. She knew now that in some way Sahkr had acted in good faith back at the Gozan—he truly had been working with her mother.
And Nahri had killed him.
My name is Nahri. She breathed, and her voice returned to her. “I don’t imagine you’ll believe me, but part of me is truly sorry.”
Vizaresh scoffed. “You’re right, I don’t believe you. You come from a line of liars. Liars and dirt-bloods, and even if your apology was sincere, I would not want it.” He lifted the chain of vessels around his neck, caressing the rings again. “I think after I kill you, I’ll drop a few of these in your human land and see what chaos they may bring. For now, shut your mouth, Golbahar, and do try to lie still.”
But Nahri was done with lying still. As Vizaresh raised the ax again, she called to Daevabad’s magic, to the seal, and to her own strength.
To the little girl who’d chosen her own name.
Her shackles and chains burst apart.
Vizaresh froze in midstep. “But your name …”
“I have another.”
He recovered, swinging the ax anyway. Nahri ducked and then rolled to her feet. She raised her hands, calling again to her magic and preparing for his next attack. She was going to rip that foul chain off his neck.
This time, though, Nahri hadn’t read her mark. Because Vizaresh took one look at her, roiling with unknown magic, another look at the seething city—blood falling from the sky and marid waves beating the walls—and then vanished in a bolt of bright lightning.
“No!” Nahri threw herself on the spot where the ifrit who’d declared himself a survivor had just been, but he was gone. Along with the dozens of souls he’d stolen.
And Nahri couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Not when nearer catastrophes loomed. Jamshid being hunted by Dara. Howls from the lake she couldn’t even comprehend. And, behind it all, her mother, who would pay any price, including enslaving her people and handing her daughter over to demons, to stay in power.
Nahri closed her fists. The seal ring held tight.
And then she turned back to Daevabad. It was time to end this.
NAHRI WAS NO STRANGER TO VIOLENCE. SHE’D watched the Navasatem parade turn to carnage and had survived her mentor dying badly in her arms. She’d fled through a palace filled with murdered djinn, and watched, helpless, as innocent scholars were swallowed by blood beasts. She’d flown over entire neighborhoods that had once been lively, bustling places and were now reduced to crushed tombs, untold dead beneath the rubble.
None of it had prepared her for Manizheh’s last stand.
Fiery blood fell from the sky in clumps, its smoke illuminating twisting, terrible beasts both conjured and resurrected. Half-dead simurgh, rotting elephants and lions, and vacant-eyed karkadann ran wild through the palace, trampling fleeing servants and screaming soldiers. Ghouls stalked the corridors—the Daeva nobles Manizheh had massacred. Still dressed in bloodstained finery, their relics gone, they fell upon the living with no discrimination between Daevas and djinn. Nahri wasn’t sure if her mother had intended such chaos or if the blood magic was out of her control. She suspected Manizheh didn’t care. A victory would be a victory, no matter the cost.
But it wasn’t all lost, not yet. A fierce rain poured down, water extinguishing some of the smoldering patches of blood, and Nahri raced through the outer gardens to see lake creatures—marid—climbing over the walls, crab-men and water snakes, attacking the ghouls and conjured beasts. With a great crash, the wooden doors smashed in, and a mixed troop of soldiers rushed through—a Daeva acolyte on horseback shouting to a group of similarly garbed youths and a Geziri warrior woman brandishing a zulfiqar.
“Aqisa?” Nahri shouted over the mob, recognizing Ali’s companion.
Aqisa fought her way over, slicing the head off a ghoul, and Nahri raised her hands, calling for the palace magic to bring down a wall on the karkadann about to stampede through the djinn and Daeva warriors.
“Nahid.” Aqisa clasped Nahri’s wrist. “We thought you might need some reinforcements.”
“You thought right. Have you seen Ali?” Nahri asked.
“No, though I’m guessing the giant crab creatures are courtesy of the man who used to summon springs in the desert?”
“I’m working on that assumption, yes.”
A bloodcurdling scream came from inside the palace.
Aqisa gripped Nahri’s shoulder, the humor vanishing from her face. “Manizheh has hundreds of people locked up in the dungeons who are going to be slaughtered if these ghouls get any farther.”
“Then save them.” Nahri nodded at the many knives Aqisa was wearing. “Can I take one of those?”
The other woman handed over a blade. “Where are you going?”
“To kill my mother.”
The bleak, knowing look Aqisa gave her was torn between respect and doom. “I’ll give you some men.”
Nahri stuck the knife in her belt. “Thanks, but I’ll have better luck sneaking up on them if I’m alone. If you find Ali, please keep him alive, okay?”
“I’ll do my best. Go with God.” Aqisa turned back to her warriors. “Draw up!”
Nahri had already let the palace shadows shroud her. Gripping the knife to steady herself, she closed her eyes, listening to her family’s home speak to her like a sick patient, one infected by the foul perversion of magic staining its halls with fresh death.
It was easy enough to trace the source.
“Ah,” she said softly. “Appropriate.”
Then Nahri headed for the pavilion overlooking the lake where Ghassan al Qahtani had been killed.
THE LIBRARY NAHRI AND ALI HAD DRAGGED A WATERFALL through had yet to be repaired, the damag
ed section curtained off and its books removed. It was empty, the only light coming from a fire raging in another part of the palace and the scorching gushes of smoldering, diseased blood that continued to fall from the sky. Even so, Nahri crept carefully along the shadowed outskirts, slipping through the door that led to the winding staircase.
She could hear shouting from the roof before she got to the top.
“Then let me see her!” Jamshid. “Please! If Nahri and Muntadhir are safe, let me see them!”
Nahri opened the door a sliver, just enough to press her eye to the light now spilling in. She could see Mishmish, trapped under a net, and Jamshid in irons, pleading with their mother. Ice glimmered at Manizheh’s waist—the peri’s dagger, still in her belt.
“Banu Nahida, please!” It was Dara, unseen from Nahri’s vantage point. “You need to control your magic. I cannot protect our people and fight at the same time!”
With a screech, a vicious, bloated locust—as large as a dog—landed on the parapet near Jamshid and Manizheh. Nahri saw Dara and another Daeva soldier lunge to protect them, Dara cutting the locust in half as his warrior drew its attention. A gash had torn through Dara’s armor, exposing his chest and revealing more of the cracking lines of light. Screams in Divasti came from the garden the next moment, and Dara spun around, firing a blur of silver arrows downward before jumping back to the parapet to kick a marid in the shape of a giant purple lobster off the wall.
No matter what curse Manizheh had used to enslave her weapon, Dara looked ready to break. He was gasping for air, liquid fire seeping from the jagged lines crossing his body. Even so, he was still fast enough to leap from the parapet and knock his soldier out of the way of a globule of smoldering blood. Dragging the young man away, he yelled for Manizheh again. “Banu Nahida, stop this!”
Manizheh didn’t seem to hear him, her attention on her distraught son alone. “The ifrit are keeping Nahri and Muntadhir secure in the dungeon,” she insisted. “The way isn’t safe right now, but I promise after the battle …”
“I don’t believe you!”
A wise decision, brother. Nahri watched as Dara rushed across the pavilion to slay another marid and then, shouting orders to his warrior, thrust up his hands to keep a storm of bloody rain from lashing them.
The Empire of Gold Page 61