Angels and Djinn, Book 3: Zariel's Doom

by Lewis, Joseph Robert

  “How are you doing?” the cleric asked.

  “Fine.” He sighed and moved Nadira to lie across his lap, her soft arms flung over her head in a dramatic pose as she whistled and drooled and dreamed.

  “I can carry her, if you want.”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  “You do know that she won’t weigh anything if I carry her, right?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, but if we run into trouble, I’d rather you have your hands free.”

  She smirked. “Oh really? You expect me to protect you?”

  He glanced at her. “Are you saying you came all this way just to stand by and watch me get caught?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve already saved you twice. Seems like you owe me.”

  Zerai nodded. “Yeah. I do. Thank you. For all of this.”

  They rested a while, watching the stars drift across the night sky and listening to the voices of the archers standing watch on the wall high above them. Lamia assured him that the guards couldn’t see them as long as they stayed close to the wall, and she seemed to be correct. They drank a little water, and then stood and carried on.

  After another hour of slow hiking over the uneven terrain, they finally sighted the bright sparkling line of the canal in the distance. When they finally reached the place where the wall ended and the canal began, they stopped to rest again. Zerai could see the rocky path around the end of the canal that would lead them away from the city and north toward the coast and safety, but the path was utterly exposed, bathed in moonlight without a single stone or even a shriveled tree to hide someone on it.

  He stared at the path. “Maybe if we wait until the moon sets?”

  “No. We go now.”

  “And when they see us?”

  “We laugh.”

  “What?”

  “Seriously.” She looked at him. “Laugh as loud as you can. They’ll think we’re just a couple sneaking out for a little time alone, and no one will come after us.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s a desert, Zerai. No one laughs as they run into the desert, unless they’re about to have sex.”

  He smiled and shook his head. “All right. I’m trusting you.”

  “You should.” She leaned out to look up at the wall. “I count two archers up there, so make that five, just to be safe. Ready?”

  He took a breath. “Ready.”

  She grabbed his hand and yanked him away from the wall and into the bright star light. They dashed across the sand, their feet growing lighter with every step and the falconer struggled to compensate for his change in weight, which made his legs feel ten times stronger than they really were.

  As soon as they were in the open, Lamia let out a peal of girlish laughter that took Zerai completely by surprise, but a moment later he mustered up a laugh of his own as he twisted around to look back at the wall. He glimpsed at least three dark figures up there, all holding long slender bows, but he didn’t hear anyone shout at him to stop, and he didn’t hear the twang of a string or the shriek of an arrow.

  Nadira jostled along against his chest. He checked to make sure she was still secure and asleep, and his heart fell a bit when he saw her dark eyes staring up at him as if to ask why on earth he was shaking her so much in the middle of the night.

  Shhh, don’t worry, it’s only for a few seconds. Just stay quiet, not a sound now…

  The little girl’s eyes narrowed, her lip pouted, and she shrieked a long, howling, wordless noise, and then began babbling at the top of her lungs, “Da-gaya, mo-mo, de-daya…”

  Zerai stared at the child’s face and her gaping mouth as though he might make her be quiet with the power of his desperate thoughts, but she didn’t stop, and he just kept staring at her as he ran, blindly, up the rocky path.

  “Hey!”

  The archers on the wall shouted, calling them to stop, to come back. Zerai wanted to look back, but he couldn’t stop running and he couldn’t stop looking at Nadira because he knew that if he looked away, something terrible might happen to her.

  “You idiots!”

  He looked up at Lamia out of the corner of his eye, but a moment later he realized that it wasn’t her who had called him an idiot.

  A silver arrow shrieked down into the sand near his feet, transforming the ground into a plate of lumpy ice that shone brightly in the star light. He scrambled across the slick ground as a second arrow whisked over his head, and then something clinked right behind him. Zerai tore his eyes away from Nadira to look back because the sound had come from directly behind him, from the empty space he had passed through a moment ago, except now it wasn’t empty.

  Now there was a wall of stone behind him, perfectly rectangular, like a door without a doorframe, alone in the dark sandy wastes.

  “What the…?”

  “Faster, you clay-foots!”

  It was the strange voice again, though this time it sounded more familiar, but he didn’t have time to place it because a hand grabbed his arm, the same arm that Lamia was already holding onto, and he felt himself being yanked forward, propelled into the deep shadows of the dunes and the rocky outcroppings. The ground and sky became one dark blur and the wind screamed in his face, and Nadira shrieked merrily as she arched her little back, threatening to tumble out of his arms.

  Zerai plunged his head down to hold the child still, trapping her between his one arm and shoulder and chest and chin while his other arm was still being pulled forward by two powerful hands. The world shuddered in streaks of darkness and slivers of light, and the wind howled, and his feet fumbled to hold him up…

  And then it all stopped.

  Zerai blinked and looked around. He was standing on a high rocky point with a cool breeze blowing from his left side. Storm clouds rolled and growled over the soft roaring of the sea. To his right he could see the pale dunes of the desert undulating away to the horizon, far below him. And there, behind him, he saw the tiny sparkling lights of Shivala, nothing more than a vague, dark shape punctuated by stars or fireflies in the distance.

  “Are you all right?”

  The falconer turned and stared at the woman standing next to Lamia. “Samira?”

  The djinn cleric narrowed her eyes. “Is Nadira all right?”

  “She’s fine.” He looked down to make sure that she actually was, and saw the little girl pouting up at him. “She’s fine. Where did you… what just…?”

  “She saved us,” Lamia said. “She pulled us out of range of the archers.”

  “But… you’re dead.” Zerai knew it was a stupid thing to say, but the exhilaration and confusion of their escape was preventing him from saying anything coherent about the fact that this woman had somehow survived the wreck of the ice ship all those days ago and then had miraculously appeared exactly when he needed her. But he did manage to piece together one intelligent observation. “And djinn aren’t strong enough to carry humans when they run.”

  “You’re right.” There was a coldness in Samira’s voice, just as there was a dark void in her eyes. “Luckily your friend here was making you both very light at just the right moment.”

  “Speaking of luck and moments, how did you find us?” Zerai asked.

  “I’ve been following you ever since the moment you set foot outside the wall tonight,” the cleric said softly. “I’ve been waiting there for days.”

  “For me?”

  Samira glared at him with contempt. “For the woman who attacked the city. In case she returned.”

  “Oh.” Zerai glanced at Lamia and saw the discomfort in her eyes and the way she stood, angling away from the djinn woman. “Lamia, this is Samira. She’s a Tevadim from Odashena. She helped me a few years ago in Maqari, and she came with us across the sea a few days ago, only… she didn’t make it.”

  “Okay.” Lamia did not appear any more at ease.

  “We should go.” Samira turned and started walking north, away from the city lights.

  “Go where?” Zerai followed her.

/>   “The nearest town isn’t near at all. It will take some time to carry Nadira to safety,” she said.

  “Is that where Talia is? The town?”

  Samira paused. “Talia’s gone.”

  “Oh.” Zerai looked down at Nadira and was ashamed at the sense of relief in his heart at that moment. “What happened that night?”

  Samira stood with her back to him. “I crawled ashore alone. Barely alive. My people don’t do well in the water. I heard a voice, and I saw Talia still far out in the sea. Drowning. I don’t know if she was strong enough to survive that storm, those waves, the cold. But inside, she was still Bashir, and he was like me. He was afraid of the water.” She took a breath. “I went back out into the sea, swimming as hard as I could, and I grabbed hold of her, but the weight of her pulled me down. I fought back to the surface with her in my arms. I saw her face once. And she spoke to me, and I lost my grip on her, and she sank out of sight. I tried to grab her again, but she was gone. I didn’t have the strength to swim back to shore again, so did my best to stay afloat until the current carried me to the beach and left me there. I must have slept there for at least a day or two. I’m not sure.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Zerai wanted to touch the woman’s shoulder, he wanted to look into her eyes, he wanted to connect with her in some way in that moment, not really for her sake but for Talia, but Samira did not look back at him, and she took a few steps farther away. He asked, “What did Talia say to you?”

  “She said…” Samira swallowed. “She said, ‘I lost Nadira.’”

  The falconer felt his mouth twist down as his stomach churned and his eyes burned.

  Her last thought was of her baby, sinking into that water, dying, lost. Just like I felt that night on the beach. And it killed her. The thought of it killed her.

  He hugged Nadira tighter to his chest.

  And it wasn’t even true.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  Samira shook her head. “Did the others survive?”

  “Veneka. Adina. Kiya. A few others. But we lost the rest.”

  The djinn woman nodded.

  “And you’ve been waiting outside the city, at the edge of the desert, all this time?” Lamia asked. “Why didn’t you come to find the others?”

  “I didn’t think a djinn would be very welcome right now,” Samira said softly. “And I wanted to be alone.”

  Zerai reached out toward her, but his hand fell back to his side. “Well, thank you, for tonight.”

  “We should go.” Samira started walking again.

  They followed her. For a moment, Zerai almost suggested that Lamia make them lighter again so that Samira could whisk them north to the distant town, but since neither of the clerics were suggesting the idea, he didn’t feel it was his place to ask. So they walked on, and it didn’t take long before he saw the limp in Samira’s stride and understood why they were going so slowly.

  An hour passed in silence, with only the groaning of the western sea and the soft breath of the eastern desert to remind them that the world was still alive, and still quite deadly. But then Samira stopped on a jagged, broken plate of cold stone and said, “We’ll rest here until dawn.”

  No one objected.

  Then Samira raised her hand and three smooth walls of stone rose up from the ground at gentle angles to each other and met at a peak to form a protective shell, a small three-sided pyramid with its back to the sea and its narrow entrance facing the desert. They slipped inside and lay down on the smooth floor, out of the wind, without saying a word.

  Zerai put his arm around Nadira, who was sound asleep, and he closed his eyes and hoped he would fall into oblivion without thinking or dreaming.

  He had barely closed his eyes when the ground shuddered, and his skull shook against the hard stone. Scooping up Nadira, he sat up and braced himself against the wall, but Lamia and Samira both bolted to their feet and out of the shelter as the ground continued to thunder and shake, so he crawled out after them and knelt on the cold stone outside.

  Lamia took his arm and made him walk a few paces away from the shelter, and she held on to him for a few moments as the earthquake exhausted itself, and the ground fell still, and the world fell silent once again.

  “What the hell was that?” Zerai asked.

  “Earthquake,” Lamia muttered.

  “I know that. I mean… is that all it was?”

  “No.” Samira limped out in front of them to the edge of a low cliff overlooking the desert. “It’s her.”

  “Her?” Zerai felt a chill run through his bones as he peered out into the night. The sand glowed softly with the pale light of the stars, and out there among the smooth curves and shadows he saw a sharp black figure on the crest of a dune.

  “Her.” A blast of wind heavy with sea salt whipped through the cleric’s silken robes. “I’ve felt her out there since the moment I reached Shivala, but she never showed herself.”

  “Why now?” Lamia asked.

  Zerai grimaced. “Because we’re out in the open.”

  Samira nodded. “Stay here. I’ll deal with her.”

  “But you’re hurt,” Lamia said. “Stay here and we can deal with her together.”

  “No.” Samira stepped forward off the ledge to drop down to the next outcropping.

  A hot shriek of desert wind struck Zerai in the face. The flying sand clawed at his skin and Nadira jerked in his arms. He wrapped his jacket around her to shield her, but the sandstorm ended a moment later.

  “Get back!” Lamia shoved him, hard.

  Zerai staggered away and saw Samira dangling at the lip of the rock, held in place by a smaller woman, short and slender, dressed in silvery gold that shimmered in the moonlight. The stranger had one thin hand wrapped around Samira’s throat, and with the other hand she carefully adjusted the silk wrap covering her hair and tucked a few loose strands behind her ears. To the falconer, she looked young, younger than twenty, but he knew that appearances meant nothing with the djinn. Samira didn’t look any older than himself, but she was nearly a hundred years old. And that was still young for a djinn.

  “Good evening,” the stranger said. “So nice to finally meet you.”

  “Put her down,” Lamia ordered.

  “Or what? You’ll throw a mountain at me?” The stranger smiled a wide, dangerous smile. There was no laughter in her lips or eyes, but there was hunger. Her eyes flashed with an uncanny crimson light, and the locks of hair that fluttered free of her scarf were black streaked with fiery copper.

  “The biggest one I can find,” the Sophirim said.

  The stranger shoved Samira toward Lamia, and the cleric staggered as she rubbed her throat and coughed quietly.

  “What’s your name?” Zerai tried to keep his voice level and calm, but his heart was hammering as though the earthquake had never ended. In a fight, he had no chance of winning, or even escaping. On his best day he could catch a djinn off guard, but this stranger was not only inhumanly fast but a cleric as well, of some sort.

  The stranger paused, still smiling a little too wide, as though trying to decide whether she would answer. “Danya Kaviim.”

  “From Ramashad?”

  “Yes.”

  “And a cleric?”

  “Ah… no.” The djinn named Danya shook her head and paced over to their shelter, which she inspected and stroked lightly with one finger. “Not exactly.” The rock wall that she touched crackled, and cracked again, and then it shattered into gravel and sand, collapsing to the ground in soft mounds that quickly scattered on the breeze.

  “Do you know Jevad Tafir?”

  She looked at the falconer sharply. “Do you?”

  Zerai blinked. “Yes.”

  Danya shook her head again. “No. I think not. You only know the name itself. The sound of it. The hard and soft letters. But you don’t know what it means.”

  Zerai glared at her. “It means a two-faced djinn slaughtering innocent people in Maqari two years ago. That’s what it
means.”

  Danya laughed and covered her mouth. “Then maybe you do know. Not that it matters.”

  A score of stone spears lanced up out of the ground without a sound or a tremor, and they flew straight at Danya Kaviim’s head and throat and chest. Two dozen stone blades flashed in the star light, and they struck the djinn woman in a single moment, pinning her upright, lifting her off her feet.

  Zerai looked over at Samira, who had not moved at all in launching her attack, and he looked back at the djinn. “You killed her. That was… You…”

  The stone spears shattered just as the rock wall had, reduced to dust in a single instant, and Danya dropped back to her feet and proceeded to brush the grime and debris from her thin, shimmering clothes. “That was sad.” Danya pouted at Samira, but her pout sliced apart into a toothy smile. “So sad. Is that all Tevad could teach you? I expect better from you, but no, that’s all you can do, isn’t it? That’s all you know. Make the stone move. Make it move back. So small. So sad.”

  “What are you?” Samira demanded. “We know that Jevad had the power of an angel, the soul of an angel. I assume you do as well. What angel? How?”

  “Oh, please, stop, you’re embarrassing yourself.” Danya shook her head. “I didn’t come here to answer your questions, or help you save your city, or your clerics, or whatever it is you think you’re doing here. I came here to play with you, and kill you. Why would I tell a dead person anything?”

  “You told me your name,” Zerai pointed out, and instantly regretted opening his mouth and drawing her attention back to him.

  “Well, yes, of course. Manners, and all that. I don’t want you to think me rude, before I kill you all.” She smiled again, radiating confidence and desire and… something else. Something dark, something twisted.

  Chapter 18

  “You’re not killing anyone,” Samira said quietly. She raised her hand and from the rock at her feet, an enormous sword of solid stone emerged from the ground, growing taller and taller until it loomed high over all of them, balanced precariously on its pommel.