by Sabaa Tahir
Fight him, Laia. A voice calls out. So far away. But insistent.
“I should not be here.” I pull my hand from Keenan’s, because if he does love me it is a twisted sort of love.
“No,” he says. “You should not.” Though his voice is soft, something behind it makes me draw away. Deep in his brown eyes, I see the flash of a feral creature, riven by a hunger that never ends. I feel surrounded by that hunger, suddenly, as if it’s a pack of wolves, closing in.
“Get away from me,” I say. “I will tell you nothing—”
His body changes, the way it did when I gave him the armlet. Except he is no shadow creature now, but something explosive and wild, an unchecked fire, malevolence emanating from every flicker of his body.
“You will tell me what lives within you and where it came from—”
“I’ll die first!”
I open my eyes then to a nightmare world. A turbid river of rock and branches and debris tosses me to and fro like a rag doll, and though I try to stay afloat, I am yanked under again and again, until water fills my nose and I cannot breathe.
No, I think. Not like this. Not like this. I scream as I break through the surface of the water.
“Let me inside, girl!” Rehmat appears, reaching for me. “I can save you, but you have to let me in.”
I barely hear it before the water pulls me down once more. I claw and kick and thrash, pain exploding along my hands and legs as the flood’s undertow drags at me. When I surface again, Rehmat is somewhere between furious and frenzied.
“Stop fighting the flood!” it shouts. “Keep your feet up!”
I try to do as it asks, but the river is a starving giant clutching at my ankles, as hungry as the maelstrom I see in my nightmares.
“Let me in, Laia!”
As I break the surface, I imagine a door in my mind and fling it wide. Almost immediately, I go under again. My whole body is on fire. I swallow a lungful of water and this must be death.
Then, like that day weeks ago in Adisa, I am pushed to the back corner of my mind—this time with a shove instead of a nudge. My body shoots through the water, clothes ripping, my pack falling away. The wind bends beneath me, Rehmat manipulating it as easily as clay.
I wonder if this is real or if the flood has killed me.
It’s real. When Rehmat speaks, it is from inside my own mind now. The creature’s magic saturates my limbs and we are one, riding the wind as easily as I tread the ground. It carries me to the top of the canyon, and I collapse on my side, staring down at the flash flood in wonder and horror. Rise, Laia. The Nightbringer is near—
A soft thud beside me, and then there is a hand at my throat, lifting me, squeezing. The Nightbringer, cloaked and shadowed once more, fixes me with his hateful, sun-eyed stare.
“You—cannot kill me—Nightbringer—”
“But I am so much more than the Nightbringer now, Laia.” His voice is that flood below, all-consuming and treacherous.
Once again, I am shoved to one side of my own mind. I stare down the Nightbringer in all of his wrath. But I feel no fear, because Rehmat feels no fear.
“You,” the Nightbringer whispers, “have been hiding for a very long time. What are you? Speak!”
“I am your chains, Meherya. I am your end.” But Rehmat does not sound triumphant. It sounds anguished. It sounds broken.
The Nightbringer releases me. He takes a step back, a slow shock rolling over him. I expect Rehmat to use the moment to spirit us away. But it does not. Nor does it attack the Nightbringer. Instead, we stare together at the king of the jinn, and an unexpected emotion unfurls within Rehmat. One that makes me recoil in disgust.
Longing.
The Nightbringer appears as paralyzed as I am. “I know you,” he says. “I know you, but—”
Rehmat lifts my—our—hand, but we do not touch him. Not yet.
“I am your end,” Rehmat says. “But I was there at the beginning too, my love. When you were king alone, solitary and ever apart from our people. You went wandering near the sea one day, and you found a queen.”
I try to wrap my mind around what I am hearing, but it is too deep a betrayal for me to comprehend. This . . . thing living inside of me was a jinn? And not just any jinn, but their queen?
“Rehmat,” the Nightbringer says, the name a prayer and a curse at once. “You died. In the Duskan Sea battle—”
What the bleeding skies is happening? I scream in my mind at Rehmat.
It—or she—ignores me. But when she speaks again, it is in the manner that I’ve become accustomed to, as if she has finally remembered why she is here.
“I did not die,” she says. “I saw what was to come and I called on an old magic, blood magic. Lay down your scythe, Meherya. Stop this madness—”
But the Nightbringer flinches. “I was alone,” he whispers. “For a thousand years, I thought I was—” He shakes his head, and it is such a human gesture that I actually feel sorry for him. For in this moment, we have both been betrayed.
Damn you, Rehmat, I shout at her in my head. Get out of my mind.
Laia—
Get out! Her magic fades first, then her presence, and I am alone.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper to the Nightbringer, “I—I didn’t know—” Why am I telling him this? He will only use it against me. He might have loved me, but he hated himself as he did so, because his hatred for my people is the air he breathes.
An aroma of cedar and lemon fills my senses, and I return to a cellar miles to the north, where a red-haired boy I loved made me feel less alone. I have spent so long hating the Nightbringer that I never mourned who he used to be. Keenan, my first love, my friend, a boy who understood my loss so deeply because he had endured his own.
“We are doomed, you and I,” the Nightbringer whispers, and when he touches my face with his hands, their fire cooled, I do not quail. “To offer more love than we will ever be given.”
He is not violence then, or vengeance. All his hate has drained away, replaced by despair, and I put my hands on his face. I am glad Rehmat has fled, for this strange impulse is mine alone.
Salt flows over his fingers as fire trickles down mine. Would that we all knew the cracked terrain of each other’s broken hearts. Perhaps then, we would not be so cruel to those who walk this lonely world with us.
Our moment is over too quickly. As if realizing what he is doing, he wrenches his hands from my skin, and I stumble back, toward the canyon’s edge. He snatches me from peril, but that act of mercy seems to rekindle his fury. A fey wind howls out of the somber sky, and he spins away.
Just like that, we are at war again.
I watch him until he is gone and then look down at my hands. They are unmarked by his fire, appearing whole, as if I’d touched a human and not a creature of flame.
Still, they burn.
XXXIV: The Blood Shrike
As we enter the city, a horn wails. A Karkaun warning call, rousing them from sleep and drink and less savory entertainments. In minutes, the sound echoes across the city.
“Teluman.” At my summons, the smith looms out of the night, a group of twenty men behind him.
“After you secure the drum towers,” I tell him, “get to the southeast barracks, in the Mercator Quarter. A good part of their army is there. Burn it down.”
“Consider it done, Shrike.” Teluman moves off, and I turn to Mettias.
I’m heartened to see that though the thud of Karkaun boots closes in on us, the young Pater is unfazed. He’d have made a good Mask.
“Make sure those weapons get to every Martial and Scholar willing to fight,” I say. “Get the word out to hold the attack until Teluman sounds the drums. Musa, send a wight to Quin. When he gets through, he needs to bring his forces to Cardium Rock.”
“Shrike,” Harper protests, for this is not part of the pl
an. “Grímarr is too well-protected. He’ll have the bulk of his men up there. He’s luring you to him.”
“You are a man of few words, Harper.” I signal to my men, and we move away from the walls. “So don’t waste the ones you do utter on things I already know. He needs to die. And I’m the one who is going to kill him.”
Harper looks taken aback, and then laughs. “Sorry, Shrike.”
Musa, Harper, and my last thirty men are behind me as we weave through streets we know better than any Karkaun. We leave weapons throughout the city, passing through a prearranged system of alleys and courtyards and homes. Everywhere, the Martials and Scholars of Antium thump their fists to their hearts in salute.
Eleventh bell tolls. We approach the Hall of Records, a building as massive as Blackcliff’s amphitheater. The hall’s roof, carved with sculptures of Taius’s victories, is held up by stone columns as wide around as trees in the Waiting Place.
We enter, making our way across a thick layer of ash from the fire that burned here when the hall was hit by a Karkaun projectile. A stone statue of Taius lies on its side, the head broken off and half-buried beneath scattered scrolls and shattered masonry.
The Hall of Records takes up one entire side of Cartus Square. Palace outbuildings line another side, and shops and businesses the third. The last side is taken up by a jumble of rock that leads to a vast bone pit. A scarred granite cliff stretches above the pit and at its top—Cardium Rock, where a dozen massive bonfires light up the sky.
As I send men out into the square to kill off any guards, Musa comes to squat beside me.
“Spiro ran into trouble. He’s battling a Karkaun force at one of the drum towers.” Musa pauses. “Three hundred men.”
Bleeding, burning hells. At that moment, Harper, who slipped ahead to scout, returns.
“The palace entrance to the Rock is blocked by thousands of Karkauns,” he says. “They’re bringing prisoners out from the dungeons and—” Disgust ripples across Harper’s silver face. I move forward to get a better view of the Rock, only to see prisoners being shoved off the top and into the bone pit a hundred feet below.
“How fast can you get our men changed into the stinking furs the barbarians wear?” I ask Harper.
“Before you get up that cliff, Shrike.”
“Get to the top of the Rock, hide among the Karkauns, and wait for my signal. When the time is right, raise the hells. And—”
He meets my eyes, his own burning with battle rage. I want to tell him to be careful. To take no foolish risks. To survive. But such sentiment has no place in war.
“Don’t fail me,” I tell him, and turn away.
It is the work of a few moments to flit across the square. Once I reach the pit, I mutter a curse. I thought I could swing a grappling hook up from the furthermost edge of it, but it is too broad.
Which means I must cross it. I must make my way over the skulls and bones and bodies of the dead.
You are all that holds back the darkness. My father spoke so to me, more than a year ago now. I do not think any longer. I simply move, dropping down into the pit.
Bones crunch as I land, and soft flesh bursts. I retch from the stench, and the darkness is something out of a nightmare.
It lasts so long. The pit is a hundred yards wide, but it might as well be a continent. For as I make my way over the dead, I hear things.
Moans.
Ghosts! my mind screams. But it is not ghosts. It is something far worse. It is those men who survived the fall. I want to find them. To grant them mercy in this hellish place. But there are too many and I have no time. Teluman has not yet sounded the drums. For all I know, he and his men could be dead, our attack over before it even started.
Defeat in your mind is defeat on the battlefield!
A lifetime passes as I walk across the pit, over the rotting flesh of the dead. I know I will never speak of these moments to anyone. For they have changed something inside irrevocably. If I do not kill Grímarr at the end of this, this will be where I die too, and I will deserve it, because I did not avenge the injustice done to all those whom I tread upon now.
Finally, I reach the cliff. It is rugged and will be difficult to traverse. My eyes adjust to the darkness as much as they can, and I can just make out crags and pits in the rock face that I can use to pull myself up.
I unsheathe my knives, dig them into the rock, and climb. The world below falls away. I still bear the scar of Grímarr’s bite. A half-moon-shaped reminder that he sunk his jaws into my city, my people, and sucked them dry. I quench the idea of death and think of how it will feel to hold that bastard’s neck in my hands. Of how it will feel to break it.
Foot by agonizing foot, I climb. By the time I approach the top, I am covered in sweat and panting, every muscle screaming. I drag myself the final few inches, taking in deep draughts of air as I peer over the edge.
Cardium Rock is shaped like a wedge with a flat tip. The narrowest point, where I am, is thirty feet wide, and the broadest is a hundred. At its far edge are three terraced levels for viewers to watch the executions that usually take place here.
Right now, the terraces are filled with Karkauns. Grímarr, meanwhile, is just steps away.
He is naked but for a loincloth, his pale body drenched in blood. He gibbers maniacally—Ik tachk mort fid iniqant fi!—as the air around him quivers. The skin where I severed his left arm is pink and scarred, as if he’s had months to heal instead of a fortnight.
Which means that even if he hasn’t been able to raise ghosts, he has other magic at his disposal.
A bonfire burns behind him, ringed with guards. As I calculate whether there are enough to be a real threat, the drums thunder out with such force that I nearly lose my grip on the knives holding me in place.
North tower for the rightful emperor. Attack.
East tower for the rightful emperor. Attack.
West tower for the rightful emperor. Attack.
A cry rises up, one voice joined by a dozen, then a hundred, then thousands. It is not a cry of sadness or defeat, but of fury and vengeance. Across Antium, the women and children and wounded and elderly who have been at the mercy of the Karkauns take up arms. It is a blood-stirring sound. The sound of impending victory.
I close my eyes and remember Antium falling. Remember my men, possessed by ghosts, killing their own people. I think of Madam Heera, and the weeping from the brothels.
Loyal to the end.
I vault upward and tear off my hood.
“Grímarr!” I bellow his name, flinging three throwing knives at him. But he moves with unnatural swiftness to evade them. Without turning to face me, he laughs, an uncanny cackle.
“Blood Shrike,” he says. “At last.”
His men approach, but I spit at his feet, cut my hand, and let the blood drip to the stones of Cardium Rock.
“I challenge thee, Grímarr.” My voice carries over the bonfires and up the terraces. “To battle with no steel and no stone, no blades and no bows. Until one of us lies dead.”
I cast my scim to the ground, along with the knife belt at my waist.
“To the death.” Grímarr turns, grinning, his eyes the pure white of a man possessed. Ten hells. Somehow, the Karkaun warlock has managed to harness a ghost.
“Come then, girl.” His voice sounds like one overlaid against another, an eerie echo. “Come to your doom, for with your soul I shall open a door into the hells.”
The Karkauns holler in excitement. Grímarr’s guards keep their hands on their weapons but step back. The challenge has been accepted.
I ignore the warlock’s blathering and focus on how I’m going to beat him. Ghosts lend humans impossible strength. If Grímarr gets his hands on me, I’m dead.
He drops into a sort of half crouch, preparing to leap. He is taller than me—wider and heavier too. But the ghost possessing h
im makes him preternaturally quick. I dart forward, landing two hard jabs on his chest and a kick to his windpipe.
A normal man would stagger. He shrugs off the blows and snatches at my leg when it’s still flying through the air. I whip it out of the way with only inches to spare.
I dart around the bonfire, and he dives for me, hitting me in the stomach so hard that I nearly retch. I elbow him in the eyeball, grimacing as it squelches. When he howls in pain, I escape his grasp yet again. This time, I edge toward the cliff, watching it carefully, allowing myself to get closer to it. Grímarr narrows his eyes and backs away, understanding my intent.
It appears as if he is retreating from me. Beyond the bonfire, his men jeer at him. An angry snarl forms on his milk-white face. He speeds forward, impossibly fast. I have only a moment to crouch and barrel into his legs as fast as I can in the hopes that he’ll roll over me and into the pit.
He simply leaps over me. In seconds, he will tackle me and break my neck or spine or both. I spin out of my crouch and swipe up my knife belt, still lying near the bonfire. When I turn, he is there, foam flecking his mouth, eyes that uncanny white.
He is too strong. I will never beat him in hand-to-hand combat. And as a Martial, I don’t bleeding care. War has rules—this monster followed none of them. Saving the people of Antium means I must choose between honor and victory. Without hesitation, I choose victory.
He sees the blade too late. I plunge it into his heart, rip it out, and plunge it in again, and again and again.
He should not be able to speak. But the ghost in him rages. “Karkaun—challenge—” he rasps. “No—steel—”
“I’m not a Karkaun.” I kick up my scim from where it rests near my feet and swing it at his neck. He blocks the attack, the ghost in him lending him strength when he should be bleeding out, and I dance away from him.
“You think—you will win,” he whispers, and now he weaves, having lost too much blood.
“This is my city. And as long as I have breath left in my body, I will fight for it.”
“Cities.” He drops to his knees. “Cities are nothing. I am nothing. You are nothing. Ik tachk mort fid iniqant fi.”