by Sabaa Tahir
As I sharpen my blades, Mamie approaches, a thick robe pulled tightly around her and a fur hood framing her face. Unlike most of the Kehannis, she has not avoided me, despite my endless pestering about the Nightbringer’s story.
“How is he?” she calls out, and I do not ask for clarification.
“He’s trying to clear out as many people as he can,” I say of Elias. “Says Keris will be here by nightfall.”
“I did not ask what he is doing, my love.” Mamie tilts her head, dark eyes seeing too much. “I asked how he is.”
“Physically, he’s recovered.” For most people, those injuries would have taken months to get over. But not Elias. “Mentally, he’s troubled. The magic should have healed him within minutes—hours at the most. The fact that it took a week is eating at him. He’s worried about Mauth.”
“If the magic is loosening its hold on his body, do you think . . .”
“It might let go of his mind?” I consider. “I do not know, Mamie. Elias’s inhumanity is his own choice. Mauth simply makes it easier for him by numbing his emotions. Mauth took away the memories of those Elias killed. Those he hurt. But now he’s being forced to do it again and he hates it. Maybe forgetting would be a blessing. He—he would be gone forever, but at least he would not feel such pain.”
“We’ll bring him back, Laia.” Mamie guides me to a nearby bench and bids me sit. “First, you must survive. And that means—”
“I have to kill the Nightbringer.”
“It means”—Mamie raises an eyebrow at my interruption—“that I owe you a story.”
I go still. She had been so adamant that she would not help me. As if sensing the direction of my thoughts, she shrugs.
“I have learned to love you these past few weeks, Laia.” She says it casually, as if it is not extraordinary to gift someone with love. “I find it hard to deny anything to those I love. Already, I have begun to seek out the tale. Though it is not easy. Many of our revered elderly do not wish to speak of the jinn. Yet I need a source to draw from. A person. A scroll. Even a fireside myth.” She draws herself up. “But I have hunted stories before and speared them. This one will be no different.”
“You say it like it’s a living thing, Mamie.”
“It’s Kehanni magic, child. A Kehanni can sense a story. Feel out its contours, its breath. I do not just speak a story, I sing it, I become it. That is what it means to be a Kehanni. All of us trained to tell stories have a bit of magic in our bones.”
The idea of Kehanni magic sparks a hundred questions in my mind. But Mamie kisses me on the cheek and leaves, clearly preoccupied with her new task.
Free for the first time in hours, I find a quiet spot on the side of the courtyard, close my eyes, and reach out to my brother.
Laia. He sounds startled. Where have you been?
“I’m in Nur,” I say. “About to try to get the scythe. I have much to do, but I need to—I need to ask you something.”
The scythe? Is the Nightbringer there?
“He’s coming,” I say. “Darin, if I fail, promise me you’ll defy him. You’ll find the scythe. You’ll fight him.”
Of course, I promise. In fact, Laia, the Blood Shrike is sending troops.
“Finally! We’ve been waiting. Where are they?”
But I do not hear Darin’s response, for Elias rides into the courtyard with a clatter and my concentration is broken. After, I think to myself. I will speak with him after.
Elias swings down from his horse and makes his way toward me. Though he still wears his black fatigues, something about him speaking Sadhese among the dun buildings of Nur makes me smile and remember the Moon Festival. He dressed as a Tribesman and danced with me, graceful as a cloud.
“Laia,” he says. “You should rest. It will be a long night.”
“Do you remember the Moon Festival?” I blurt out, and for a moment, he looks confused.
“In Serra,” I say. “It was the first time I saw you without your mask. You asked me to dance—”
“Stop.” He takes a wary step back. “I’m not asking on my own behalf. I’m asking because I will only hurt you, Laia. I’ve proven it over and over. I don’t want to hurt anyone anymore.”
“You still think you can decide things for everyone.” My hands curl into fists. “But you cannot. And you cannot make me stop loving you, Elias Veturius. Not when I know that somewhere in there, you feel the same.”
I grab his cloak, rise up on my tiptoes, and kiss him. Hard. Angry and bruising. His nose is cold from the wind, but his lips are soft and deliciously warm. Kiss me back, you dolt, I think, and he does, but far too carefully, his desire caged. It drives me mad.
When I break away, he stares at me, dazed.
“Uh—Um—”
I leave him there, stammering. It is a small victory. But even those are hard to come by these days.
* * *
«««
Night falls reluctantly, as if she does not wish to witness the horrors it will bring. When the stars finally rule the sky, the horizon brightens, glowing orange, then white.
The jinn approach.
“We’ll need more than magic to survive that, Laia.” Afya enters the courtyard. Her gaze is trained on the eerie glow of the sky, visible even through the trellises. “Are you ready?”
“Doesn’t matter if I’m ready.” As I dip the last of my arrows in salt, I remember the words I said to my mother long ago, just before I broke Elias out of Blackcliff. “It’s time.”
“Be careful.” Afya glances over her shoulder at Elias, who sends the last of the Tribespeople into the desert. “I don’t trust him to defend you.”
“I do not need defending, Afya.”
Afya nods at the flames drawing nearer. “With that on our tails, we all need defending.” She clasps my hands and leaves, heading to the edge of the courtyard, where Aubarit and Gibran hitch up the last wagon leaving the city. The air flickers around them—wind efrits who will speed them through the desert. The young Tribesman says something to the Fakira that makes her cheeks rosy. They have spent many hours together, those two, and it makes me smile.
“Not much time, Laia.” Elias speaks from beside me, though I did not see him approach. “Shall we?”
“Do not windwalk.” Rehmat’s gentle glow flares between us. “He will sense you.”
I nod, but say nothing else. My anger toward her has cooled, but she has made herself scarce these past few weeks. Whenever she has appeared, there has been a fractured aura about her, as if her focus is fixed elsewhere.
It seems to take ages to wind through the city to the abandoned Martial garrison in its center. By the time we reach the building, the jinn have reached Nur, and the screaming has begun.
I smile at the sound. For if one were to listen carefully to those screams, one might notice that there is something off about them.
“The barbarous keen yokes us to the low beasts, to the unutterable violence of the earth,” Elias mutters, and when I look at him askance, he shrugs. “Something the Warden of Kauf Prison said. For once, that evil old bastard was right.”
Indeed, a human scream is unique because of its rawness. A fey cry, however, is round and clean, without edges. A stone instead of a saw.
It is the fey who scream now, the sand efrits who are immune to fire, and who agreed to provide a distraction to cover the evacuation of the Tribespeople.
We make our way to the rooftop of the garrison. It is a broad space, scattered with patchy armor, sandbags, and a few piles of pale brick—whatever the Martials failed to take when the Tribes drove them out.
“Does this remind you of anything?”
Elias looks around, nonplussed. “Should it?”
“Last year,” I say. “When we were breaking out Scholars from Martial ghost wagons. Only difference is that now I can do this—” I raise my hand to his dark hair
, pushing it back. “And Mauth won’t give you a splitting headache.”
He catches my hand, gripping it for a moment before the Soul Catcher takes hold again and he releases me.
“I wish you luck, Laia,” he says. “But I have my own mission. If you’re in trouble, I can’t help.”
“I am not expecting you to,” I say. “But if something happens to me—”
“Defeat in the mind is defeat on the—”
“You Blackcliff types and all your sayings.” I kick his boot. “Listen, for skies’ sake. If something happens, be a brother to Darin for me. Swear you will.”
“I don’t—” He takes in my scowl and nods. “I promise,” he says.
“Thank you, Soul Catcher.”
“Elias,” he says after a moment, the slightest bit of warmth entering those cold gray eyes. “From you I prefer Elias.”
Now it is my turn to be stunned. If we were not about to confront the Nightbringer, I would kiss him. Instead, all I can do is stare as he disappears over the side of the building.
Mission, Laia. Focus on the mission.
As I scurry across the rooftop, wind howls out of the south, a spine-chilling preface to the approach of the jinn and their human army.
I look up to find the entire southern horizon obscured by a towering wall of sand. The storm is ten times larger than the one the Nightbringer conjured up in this very same desert the first time Elias and I came through. And it moves fast—too fast.
When I am only halfway across the roof, it hits, propelling me backward with its force. Though I bend my head against it, the sand is so thick and the wind so strong that I can barely see. I am forced back—finding shelter between a pile of sandbags and the wall—which is no shelter at all. I crouch, coughing the sand out of my lungs, frantically pulling a kerchief over my eyes so I do not go sand blind.
My plan was to hide in a weapons shed on the other side of the wall. But I cannot possibly make it now. Not before the Nightbringer arrives.
“I can help.” Rehmat’s glow flickers as thick clouds of sand float through her. “If you let me in.”
“Will he not sense you?”
She hesitates. “Yes. But I am ready for him. And this storm, it is hurting you.” Her form shifts, as if she’s fidgeting, and her voice is so soft I almost can’t hear it. “I would not see you harmed, Laia. Whether you believe it or not, I am bonded to you, the way a fine blade is bonded to its maker.”
Like with Mamie, I feel a sudden flush of warmth at her words. But it is tempered with wariness. Rehmat is so fey. So unknowable. How can I trust her again?
“I’m not ready for you to join with me,” I say, and she recoils in frustration. I do not wish to hurt her. But I will not be betrayed again. She has not met the Nightbringer since the flood. This is an opportunity to see if she truly is my ally instead of his. “Let’s stick to the plan.”
Something thuds atop the tower. A voice speaks, and I clench the hilt of my dagger, fighting back the urge to disappear, and trying desperately not to give myself away by coughing.
“Whip up the winds to spread the fire.” The Nightbringer’s thunderstorm voice rolls across the roof. “And take the storm north. Slow the rats who flee until the Martials can slaughter them.”
“Yes, Meherya,” a voice responds. From what Elias told us, it must be Azul, the jinn who can control the weather.
Azul leaves, and the sandstorm howls past, the thick grit billowing toward where the Tribes evacuate the city. Behind me, the screaming intensifies as the Nightbringer’s kin set houses alight. The sand efrits, it turns out, are excellent actors.
I tense, hoping to the skies that the Nightbringer does not pay close attention to those screams. But he hardly seems to notice them.
Instead, he stares out at Nur. In Aish, Sadh, and most of the villages in Marinn, he always found the tallest building in the city from which to witness the carnage. As despicable as it is, at least it’s predictable. He bows his head, and something flickers behind him.
Maro, Rehmat told me when Elias and I first conjured up this plan. The jinn who steals the souls for him. The two of them will be distracted by the exertion required to perpetrate such a vile theft. And confused when the souls do not appear. When they are deep in their work, I will tell you.
That is all she is supposed to do. Elias will neutralize Maro. And I will take the scythe.
The screams from the city rise in pitch, but the Nightbringer remains immobile. I try not to fidget, waiting for Rehmat to appear. But she does not. Soon, he will realize that we have tricked him. That the screams are not human. What in the skies is taking her so long?
Suddenly, his back goes stiff. He turns toward the sandbags. Toward me.
Oh skies.
“Laia!” Rehmat whispers in my ear. “Let me in—”
I ignore her and stand, dagger high. The last time I saw him, he was not exactly reasonable, but not murderous either. “Hail, Meherya,” I say. “You have something I want.”
Distantly, a building crumbles, and the jinn fire roars closer. Smoke curls through the air, stinging my eyes, my throat.
“Come to watch a city burn, Laia?” he says. “I did not think you had such a taste for blood. Or punishment.”
Though his presence has always twisted the air around him, the Nightbringer’s shadow seems to drag with some new weight. The hatred in his flame eyes is bottomless. He unsheathes the scythe with a flick of his smoky hand and holds it to my throat.
Rehmat manifests beside him.
“Meherya,” she says. “Stop this. This is not who you are—”
“You.” He turns his wrath upon her, but the malice drains out of him, and there is only pain. “Traitor to your own—”
“No—never—”
“Do you remember nothing?” he cries. “Who we were, what we lost, what we suffered—”
Laia. She speaks in my mind. Let me in. Please. He is lost. He will kill you.
But he does not kill me. Instead he lowers the scythe, and I back away, astonished. Waiting for some new cruelty. But he ignores me completely.
“Come back to me,” he says to Rehmat, sheathing the weapon. “Help me remake this world for our kin. You were a warrior, Rehmat. You fought and burned and died for our people. For our—our children—”
“You dare invoke our children?” Rehmat’s voice is raw and terrible. As she speaks, I shift toward the scythe, readying my dagger. “When you murder other children at will? I will never join you, Meherya. I am not who I was. As you are not who you were.”
“Do you not understand why?” he pleads with her. “I do this because I love. Because I—”
I lunge for his back, slicing through the straps of the scythe. As he turns, as his fiery hands rise up to snatch it back, I call out, but not to Rehmat.
“Elias!”
Almost instantly, a voice screams out from behind the Nightbringer.
It is Maro, a Serric steel blade coated in salt at his neck. Behind him, hood pulled low, stands Elias.
The Soul Catcher’s gaze shifts to me briefly. I can’t help, he’d said. And yet when I called, he was there. As if he catches my thought, he shrugs and jerks his head toward the stairwell. Get out of here.
Scythe in hand, I go.
XLIII: The Soul Catcher
Maro does not put up much of a fight. His skill is limited to soul stealing. The Nightbringer would not keep him so close, otherwise. The touch of my salted dagger elicits a cringe.
To my relief, Laia is gone. When she screamed my name, I had not a whisper of hesitation. It doesn’t matter that I said I wouldn’t help. It doesn’t matter that I need to interrogate Maro to figure out what the hells he’s doing with the ghosts. When she called out, all that mattered was her.
But now she’s gone, and the Nightbringer turns toward me. I drag Maro back a few ste
ps. The soul-stealing jinn wears his shadow form, and he is narrow-shouldered and slender, almost emaciated. When he opens his mouth, I dig in my blade, and he gasps, huffing in pain.
“You’ve been stealing ghosts, Maro.” I fix my gaze on the Nightbringer. “Tell me how to get them back.”
“You cannot get them back,” the Nightbringer says. “They are gone.”
“What have you done with them?”
“They feed the maelstrom.” Maro’s fear makes him talk. “It must be fed if we are to breach the wall between worlds.”
“Silence, Maro!” the Nightbringer hisses, but all his wrath is for me. “Release him, human.” His magic lashes out like a whip, and it burns the skin of my arms so badly that I nearly release Maro. But Blackcliff has trained me well. I hold on to the jinn and reach for Mauth’s magic. I need a shield—something to protect me so that I can spirit Maro away and question him without the Nightbringer’s interference.
But the magic is too far away, just like when Umber chased me. The power fills me slowly, like droplets in an empty bucket.
“Give me back my ghosts,” I tell the king of the jinn, “and I’ll let him go.”
The Nightbringer’s flame eyes narrow, his attention drifting to the city, to the screams of the efrits, louder than before as the fire draws closer. Understanding lights his gaze, and it is terrible to behold.
“Ah, I see now, little Soul Catcher, the game you have played,” he says. “So clever to empty out the city. To use the efrits. But it changes nothing. Your kind is a plague on this world. There are always more humans, and so there will always be more to reap. If not here, then another city.”
“Not if you don’t have your soul thief.” I dig my blade into Maro again, and this time, fire leaks out.
“Stop.” The Nightbringer’s fists clench. “Or I will find her, I swear to the skies. And I will tear her soul from her tortured body myself.”
“Spending time with my mother, I see.” The Nightbringer is usually completely in control. But now his anger is reassuring. He is vulnerable.
And I can take advantage of it. I need to understand him. If he were a human, I would reach out with the tendrils of my magic, a touch too light to be felt. But the Nightbringer will sense any scrutiny—and he will not welcome it. If I want into his head, I will have to force my way in. So I scrape up every last drop of Mauth’s magic and launch my consciousness at him.