Angels and Djinn, Book 3: Zariel's Doom

by Lewis, Joseph Robert

  Zerai awoke to screams and shouts, and a titanic cracking sound as if the entire world were breaking in half right beneath him. He blinked and stared in confusion at the dark white world around him until he remembered the ice ship, and everything that had happened. He saw that the others were also just beginning to wake up, although some were already cogent enough to be terrified of the huge black crack in the bottom of the ship and the waves of clear sea water lapping at their feet.

  “Everybody up!” Zerai roared as he stumbled to his feet. The boat went on lurching and rocking from side to side, and his mind was still only half awake, but his body was willing to move whether his thoughts were clear or not. He could only see dim gray shapes in the dark interior of the ice ship, but he could see enough.

  The falconer grabbed Veneka and Talia and pulled them to their feet, and they all clung to each other to keep their balance in the rolling cabin as the rest of the healers stood up with them.

  “Kiya!” Adina was shaking the Juranim, but to no avail. The archer had collapsed, her whole body pale and drenched in sweat. “Kiya! Wake up!”

  The healers descended on Kiya, pressing their hands to her skin and whispering their prayers in the name of Raziel, and while they succeeded in restoring the color to the archer’s hands, they could not wake her.

  “What about Samira?” Talia cried. “Has anyone checked on her?”

  Veneka was closest to the hatch and she instantly turned and bolted up onto the deck. Zerai felt his stomach lurch as she vanished from view as the hideous thought raced through his mind that he might never see her again.

  He was halfway to the hatch himself when he heard her yell down to them, “Land! I see land! We are here!”

  Everyone clambered up onto the icy deck, huddled and shaking against the fury of the blizzard. The world above and below was all black and iron and charcoal and flashing silver, and at first they saw nothing but the shimmering white curtains of the howling storm, but then a gust of wind parted the freezing rain and a new shape of dim white and dirty gray loomed out of the blinding torrent. A jagged wall of ice and rock rose from the dark waves, spearing upward far above their poor ship’s mast and spreading north and south as far as they could see.

  “The cliffs of Imaya!” Adina yelled. “We made it!”

  No sooner had she spoken than the ship screamed in a dozen crackling voices as its broken hull scraped across the vicious edges of some unseen mass of ice just below the surface of the dark waters. The entire ship groaned and snapped, and then shattered out from under them, and they fell silently into the frothing waves of the Sapphire Sea.

  Zerai felt the cold of the water stabbing his skin like ten thousand needles and burning razors and he nearly screamed at the sudden shock, but instead he clawed his way back to the surface where the gathering darkness and the tossing waves made it impossible to see anything in any direction.

  “Ven!” he roared. “Veneka! Talia!”

  Something hit his legs and he lunged down to grab an arm, and the person he pulled to the surface was an unconscious healer, a girl named Danai. Struggling to keep both of their heads above the surface, he began kicking toward the snowy cliffs, screaming with every spare breath for Veneka, and for Talia. But he reached the pebbled shore without finding or hearing another living soul, and he dragged Danai up the beach with his arms and legs numb and shaking.

  Collapsing to his knees, he kept pulling the cleric over the frozen stones until they reached the foot of the cliffs and he shoved her into a narrow crack in the rock wall. Then he rose to his feet on wooden legs and staggered back to the water’s edge to scream into the storm with his shredded voice, “Veneka! Ven! Veneka!”

  Chapter 10

  Zerai spent the night shaking, crying, and hating the world.

  The crack in the cliff face was barely deep enough for two people, and with Danai shoved back as far she could go, he was left to wedge himself in with his back to the sea and hope he would live to see the dawn as the blizzard lashed his shoulders and spine with freezing spray and frozen daggers. After dragging Danai to safety he had stood on the pebbled, icy beach and screamed until his raw throat fell silent, and then he had run as far as he dared in the darkness, searching the pounding surf for survivors.

  For Veneka.

  For Talia.

  For little Nadira.

  But after an hour of screaming and running, he was too blind, too mute, and too exhausted to move, and the one thing he knew, the only thing he knew for certain, was that the girl Danai might live if he helped her, and might die if he didn’t. So he went back.

  Crushed against the jagged rock walls with the wind and hail whipping his back, Zerai made certain that Danai was still breathing, and tried to rub some warmth into her hands.

  He tried to feel busy, to feel useful. Rubbing her hands, breathing on her frozen fingers, wiping frigid water and crystals of ice off her face and hair. But he knew that every moment he was safely tucked into his tiny cave, on dry land, breathing, Veneka and all the others were being dragged out to sea by the rip tide, crushed by icebergs, numbed by the cold, and one by one they were slipping under the cold salty waves to die in the dark, silent depths.

  He could picture her in his head. He could see his beautiful Veneka down in the darkness, her arms and legs spread out, weightless in the water, her beautiful hair swirling slowly around her head, her sightless eyes gazing into the blackness as she slowly sank deeper, and deeper, until tiny creatures emerged from the shadows to take their first gentle bites of her cold, dead skin.

  Zerai wept. Gasping and shaking, he wept.

  And he hated. He hated the world for being a terrible place, and he hated the djinn for being terrible people, and he hated the magi for courting war and disaster, and he hated himself for ever suggesting that they leave their shelter and build a ship of ice, of all things, and he hated himself for leaving the beach and huddling in the cave instead of searching for the others.

  They’re gone. Just like all the others. No reason. Just gone. And I’m still here. Again. Have to keep going, alone. Just like when I lost Nahom, at night, at sea, this same damn sea. One moment alive and rambling, the next… gone.

  A moment came when he almost left the cave. He almost crawled out, intending to walk down into the storm, wade out into the sea, and let the storm swallow him up, reuniting him with all the others in death. But he didn’t leave. He stayed, and he tried to keep Danai alive.

  I have to keep going.

  Going where?

  Why?

  It doesn’t matter. I’m no magi. No one needs me. I’m just the falconer, the sword-arm. I could just go.

  And maybe I should.

  Maybe I should just go, leave this place and all its nightmares behind me, and just go.

  Go anywhere.

  Go someplace where they’ve never heard of magi, or djinn, or angels. And just live.

  Somewhere green.

  With my birds.

  For a timeless while, he listened to the girl’s breathing, and then her eyes opened and he whispered to her to stay still. He told her where they were, and what happened. She didn’t react at first, but after a moment she closed her eyes and hummed softly to herself. Zerai watched the frostbitten blackness on her fingers melt away and the dark bruises all around her face vanished. Then, without opening her eyes, she reached out to take his hand, and he felt her holy gift healing his frozen, battered body as well.

  Warmth and strength washed over him and through him. “Thank you,” he whispered.

  “Where are the others?”

  He could only shake his head.

  She stared at him as the meaning of his silence sank in. “So… what do we do now?”

  “I don’t know. I guess… we can try to find them.”

  They crawled out onto the rocky beach to find the tide was much lower now and huge black rocks stood exposed to the pale starlight filtering down through the storm clouds. The wind was blowing to the south, and the icebe
rgs were sailing to the south, so Zerai began walking south and together they scanned the beach for signs of survivors.

  We won’t find them. They’re all dead. It’s just us now. How long do we search before I tell her? How long before we give up, and make our way to Shivala alone?

  More than an hour passed before they found anything, and then they found too much. Three bodies, caught in the rocks, in a tangle of arms and robes and hair. Zerai stared at them.

  Maybe they clung to each other to stay afloat.

  Or maybe they panicked, pushing each other down to get one last gulp of air, tangling their clothes around each other, dragging each other under…

  Danai recognized them all as her friends from Naj Kuvari, and she fell to her knees beside them, sobbing. Zerai felt sick as he looked down at the frozen, bloated corpses. Abasi, Damisi, and Hafsa. Two young men and one young woman, all alive that morning, all dead now.

  Because of me.

  Veneka is dead because of me. And so are Talia and Nadira. And now I… what? I keep going? Finish the mission to Shivala alone? I’ll be dead before the week is out.

  Even if I survive, what then? Go back to Naj Kuvari and serve Raziel?

  Or not. There’s no reason to go back now. And why would I want to see that place, that house, that bed…

  No, I could go anywhere, anywhere in the world. I could go somewhere new, I could be someone new…

  Danai touched each of the bodies, perhaps hoping that some last gasp of life might remain in them so she could restore them. But she stood up a moment later and backed away without saying a word.

  Zerai started walking.

  “We need to bury them,” she called out.

  He turned and squinted at her. In the darkness her form threatened to vanish against the surging shadows of the sea behind her and the roiling clouds above. “How?”

  “I don’t…”

  “We need to find the others. We need to find someone we can help.” He walked on, trying to make himself believe that such a thing was possible.

  “But what about Abasi? And Damisi? And Hafsa? They deserve better, they deserve… something, don’t they?”

  “Yes, they do. But they won’t get it.” And he trudged away.

  Kaleb deserved better. So did Yusuf, and all the others. Idiots who died for me. Died for nothing. We all die for nothing. We live for… what? To serve the angels and the magi?

  Living in service, always risking my life but never having one of my own. A life, a home, a family. A family of my own…

  He kept walking, but often forgot to look down into the surf for signs of the dead, or up to the beach for signs of the living. His eyes kept to the rocks and the sand at his feet, tracing a path from nowhere to nowhere.

  “Is… is that a light?”

  Zerai blinked and glanced back at Danai, and then followed her pointing finger up toward the base of the cliffs where a dull red glow painted the rock wall in angry hues.

  Kiya?

  He jogged up the beach with Danai just behind him and found the light coming from a deep crevice in the cliff wall. Ducking his head, he crab-walked into the small cave and followed the red gleam up a crooked slope until the space widened out to reveal a room-sized chamber where several bodies were huddled and sleeping around a handful of stones radiating an intense heat.

  His eye landed first on Adina who stood apart in her blue robes, and he saw that she lay wrapped around the snoring little bundle of the baby, Nadira.

  Talia…?

  He scanned the others, but did not see the child’s mother. Instead he saw Kiya next to Adina, and then four more of the healers from Naj Kuvari in their green tunics and robes. And one of them had a thick pillow of black hair all around her head.

  Veneka!

  He hesitated, and then moved slowly and silently over to the woman to look more closely, to be sure. And it was her, it was Veneka, alive and breathing, asleep in the sultry cave surrounded by her friends. He knelt beside her and touched her arm gently, but instead of waking her he merely lay down next to her and closed his eyes. The stone floor was warm and the air hung hot and thick with sweat and salt, and he slipped away before he thought to say anything else to Danai.

  He awoke from a poor sleep with an aching head and sore back. The heat and glow of the cave walls had faded away and a cool breeze was blowing in from the sea, where he could hear the waves crashing on the beach. A pale white light gleamed on the rocks down near the entrance of the cave.

  Morning.

  No one else was awake yet, so he sat up and stared at a crack in the wall, but his back hurt too much and he needed to move, so he stood and quietly made his way down through the cave and out to the beach where he could stand up properly and stretch and survey the effects of the storm.

  Huge jagged boulders of ice stood on the beach, both high above the waves and out in the shallows, glistening in the morning sunlight that was just barely peeking out over the tops of the cliffs behind him.

  He looked around for something to do. But there was no firewood to gather, no clean water to fetch, no food to find.

  So Talia is gone… Samira is gone… and five, no six of Veneka’s clerics, all lost. Frozen. Drowned. Maybe the cold numbed the pain. Maybe it wasn’t too bad, at the end.

  He looked toward the sharp rocks where he and Danai had found the three bodies last night. They were gone now.

  Why are we doing this? What good can we do here? If an army of all-powerful magi couldn’t save Shivala, what are we supposed to do?

  What am I supposed to do?

  He took out the lure that he kept tucked in his falconer’s glove and whirled it over his head, and it sang out its warbling cry over the sound of the crashing waves. But there was no sign of Nyasha, or any other bird, that he could see.

  “Zerai?”

  He turned and Veneka rushed out of the cave and wrapped her strong arms around him. He slowly embraced her and rested his chin on her shoulder, and closed his eyes. She wept quietly, shaking gently, squeezing him tighter.

  He tried to cry too, but there were no tears left in him. He’d spent them all the night before, mourning her, willing himself to let go of her, willing himself to go on living without her, trying to imagine a life and a world without her.

  He’d huddled in the dark in a world without Veneka.

  He’d walked a corpse-ridden beach in a world without Veneka.

  And it hadn’t broken him.

  But here she was, still alive. Everything he’d thought, everything he’d felt, it belonged in some other world where Veneka was dead. Because in this world, Veneka was alive, and last night wasn’t a cataclysmic change in his universe at all, because today would be the same as all the days before. They were still together. They were still going forward, together.

  And all the long, dark night before meant nothing now.

  He tried to forget it, as he tried to cry, and he failed to do either.

  “What happened to you?” she asked as she pulled away from him.

  “I found Danai in the water and pulled her to shore,” he said. “We spent the night in a crack in the cliff wall. What happened to you?”

  “I found as many people as I could and we held each other up, and healed each other as best we could,” she said. “The current carried us along for a time, and then we washed up on shore together.”

  He nodded. “Abasi, Damisi, and Hafsa are dead. We saw their bodies on the rocks, but they’re gone now.”

  Veneka hesitated. “That leaves Kesi, Marjani, and Panya missing.”

  “What about Talia? And Samira?”

  She closed her eyes for a moment. “I never saw Talia. I don’t know if she knew how to swim. And Samira, I saw her once. She said she would look for Talia, and she dove under the waves, and never came up.”

  Zerai nodded. He couldn’t bring himself to care much that the djinn cleric was gone, but he knew the loss her holy gifts was grievous, both to their survival now and their purpose in Shivala.
Still, it was Talia he dwelt on. The strangest, most remarkable person in world. A djinn man’s soul housed in the resurrected body of his own dead human wife, mother to his own child…

  And I killed her.

  I orphaned Nadira.

  I don’t know what the hell I’m doing anymore.

  “What now?” he asked quietly.

  “We should search the beach to see if any of the others survived and came ashore,” Veneka said. “But only for an hour or two. All our food is gone, and the storm is already gathering again.” She pointed to the angry clouds tumbling slowly across the northern sky.

  He stood alone outside and watched the dark sea toss and churn with white foaming waves while Veneka woke the others and they emerged to begin the search. Zerai paused only to look at little Nadira sitting happily in Adina’s arms, sucking her thumb and staring out at the world with her huge brown eyes.

  “Adina?” Zerai took her aside. “Why was Talia coming with us? And why did she bring the girl? We’re going into a war zone.”

  “You didn’t hear?” Adina looked confused. “She told us back in Odashena. They wanted a seer to look at Nadira. Because she’s, you know, different. Special. They wanted to know if a seer could tell them anything about her.”

  “Now? In the middle of all this?”

  “They argued about it, a little. But Samira was afraid there might be another attack, and the seers might all die before they had a chance to see Nadira.”

  Zerai sighed. “Oh.”

  “She’s so quiet,” Adina said, smiling at the girl. “But so heavy.”

  “Oh? Here, I’ll carry her for a while.” He took the child into the crook of his arm, surprised slightly by how much she weighed. It took a moment to get her settled against his side, straightening out her legs and dress, but when that was done he found himself face to face with a tiny person with huge brown eyes, soft fat cheeks, and soft curling black hair. Her eyes fixed on his, and she smiled, and blew a small bubble of spittle on her lip. Then she leaned her head on his shoulder and began picking at the hem of his tunic with her tiny, clumsy hand. Zerai touched her cheek for a moment, surprised by how very smooth and soft it was, and then he turned his attention to the long march ahead.