by Sabaa Tahir
Umber swoops into a dive, incinerating the pikes, and Keris’s Martials are through, throwing themselves at Elias’s forces.
My eyes sting as I watch. So many dead. Who they fight for does not matter, because we are all the same to the Nightbringer. He has manipulated us into hating each other. Into seeing the other side as he sees us. Not as humans, but as vermin, worthy only of slaughter.
But where is that creature? Nowhere to be seen, though his jinn wreak havoc.
Enough of this. Every second that passes means more people dead, which is exactly what he wants.
The scythe is heavy on my back. Too heavy. I unsheathe it. Wan light glints upon the black diamond blade before the sun disappears behind a cloud. Rain threatens, and I stare at the approaching storm. If only it would break upon us, for the jinn hate the wet. But the sky does not open.
“Come on then, you monster,” I hiss, hoping the wind will carry my words to him. “Come for me.”
“As it pleases you, Laia of Serra.”
That deep growling voice. The voice of my nightmares. The voice that has taken so much.
I turn and face the Nightbringer.
LIX: The Soul Catcher
The troops from Antium do not wish to fight. I see it in their eyes, feel in it their spirits as they lock shields to face Keris’s cavalry, roaring up the escarpment.
If I have my way, they won’t fight for long. But I must get to Umber. She is the Nightbringer’s second, commanding the other jinn in his absence. If I could get her to listen to me, we could end this madness.
The air grows heavy and strange. As if some unseen hand presses up from the earth, seeking to tear through it. The maelstrom, I fear, is close.
Umber streaks across the front of the escarpment, laughing as she incinerates the stakes we’ve laid to deter Keris’s troops. Our soldiers cry out first in anger, and then in fear as the ground rumbles and shakes beneath them—Faaz using his powers to throw them off balance.
“Rowan!”
The sand efrit and his kin are already streaking toward the jinn, and my army stands fast.
Protected by their armor and wielding spears of their own, our infantry hold the line, supported by volley after volley of arrows from a thousand Scholar bowmen behind them. I shudder at the death—brutal and unending. The screams of the wounded fill the air.
The catapults creak as the Blood Shrike unleashes her unusual missiles: giant blocks of salt. One of the jinn screams as a block gets too close, and plummets. A cheer rises up from our soldiers, but Umber wreaks havoc in revenge. She slips through the dozens of bowmen we have guarding one of the catapults, ignoring the salt-coated arrows that penetrate her flame form, and slices through the ropes to render the war machine inert.
As I windwalk to the front line, an old rage rises up in me, the battle wolf howling, baying for blood. My scims sing as I whip them from their scabbards, and I weave through the fighters as easily as if I am born of smoke. I could kill dozens if I wished. Hundreds.
But it is not the humans I want. And it is not killing that will help. I must reach Umber.
I find her on the far western side of the line, tearing into a tightly packed phalanx, swiping their shields aside. She shrugs off the arrows sticking out of her, and Spiro Teluman appears, sliding under her guard, his scim whipping toward her neck.
But it only glances across her fiery body before she twists her glaive and disarms him. She moves in for the kill, but I meet her this time, and the wood of her glaive glances off my scims.
“Usurper,” she hisses. “You have no place here. No place fighting beside them.”
“And you have no place murdering people who had nothing to do with your imprisonment.” I dart around her, drawing her toward the forest, where there are fewer soldiers. But even with my speed, she smashes her glaive into my arm. It would be a bone-shattering blow if not for Spiro’s armor. Umber roars and strikes out again, but I parry, catching her blade between my scims.
“Your kind are a pestilence.” She tries to yank her glaive away, but I do not let her. “One that must be eradicated.”
“It’s not just us that will be eradicated,” I tell her. “If the Nightbringer brings the Sea of Suffering into this world, everyone—everything—will die. Including you. The world will fall—”
“Then let it fall,” she screams. “We will have peace, finally—”
“The peace of the dead,” I say. Why does she not understand? “Can’t you feel it, Umber? The air isn’t right. Has the Nightbringer told you what he is doing? Has he shared his plan with you?”
“The Meherya need share nothing with us. He is our king. He freed us. And he will rid us of you and your kind, that we may live quietly in the Sher Jinnaat—”
“He is waking the Sea of Suffering,” I shout at her, because reason doesn’t appear to be working. “He seeks to gather every bit of pain and horror and loneliness we took from the dead and return it to the world. Do you think that when it wakes, it will have mercy on you because you are a jinn?”
“You know nothing of what we have suffered!”
I wrench her glaive from her and cast it to one side. “I will not kill you,” I say. “But your Meherya will. Look at me and know that I do not lie. If you let your king continue to reap souls, what he awakens will destroy us all.”
I step back and lower my blades, even as the battle edges closer. “Please,” I say. “Stop him. He might not realize what he is doing, what he is unleashing.”
“I would not go against my Meherya.” Umber shakes her head, a shudder rippling through her flames. “He understands what you do not, Soul Catcher. We are too broken. We can never go back to what we were before.”
“You are needed,” I say desperately. “Essential to the balance—”
“The balance!” Umber cries. “Who benefits the most from the balance, Soul Catcher? Mauth, who let our children die, but expects us to do his bidding? Your kind, who kill and maim and give us all of your pain to clean up? We held the balance for millennia, and look what it got us. If it is so important to you, then tell Mauth to find more humans to pass the ghosts.”
She streaks away, and the battle closes around me, too swift for me to escape. I cut through a knot of legionnaires. Not far from me, Darin, Spiro, and a group of Saif Tribespeople fight off a platoon of Keris’s soldiers.
I move to help them, but another battle surges in front of me, and I catch a flash of blonde streaking past, a silver mask and pale gray eyes lit with unholy fury.
My mother impales a Tribeswoman and an aux soldier with two slashes of one scim while taking the head off a Scholar with her other, moving so swiftly that one might think she was windwalking. Her skill is otherworldly and yet grounded in savagery that is deeply, uniquely human. Though I have seen her fight hundreds of times, I have never seen her like this.
At first, I’m certain she doesn’t spot me—that she is too deep in the battle.
Then she stops, and though all around us, men and women strive and die, we are trapped in a pocket of quiet. All my memories of her flood my mind at once, sharp words and whippings and her watching—always watching, more than I ever knew.
“Stay far from the Nightbringer, Ilyaas,” she cautions me, and I disappear back into a moment years ago, in a desert far to the west of here. Go back to the caravan, Ilyaas. Dark creatures walk the desert at night.
Before I can make sense of her warning—of her—she is gone, her scim crashing into that of a man a foot and a half taller than her and decades older. Her father. My grandfather.
“Go, boy,” Grandfather says. “She’s been waiting to fight me for years. I’ll not disappoint her. Not in this.”
Grandfather evades Keris’s first attack easily, though she moves twice as fast, and seems to anticipate her every stroke. His mouth is a grim slash, his body taut, but the shrewd self-assurance I’m us
ed to seeing in his gaze is gone. Instead, he looks like a man haunted, a man wishing to be anywhere but where he is. Strength and the wiles of more than seventy years as a fighter might be enough to keep him alive against Keris.
Or they might not.
A scream turns my head, and I barely avoid a spear aimed at my heart. Shan knocks the attacker unconscious, and then he is swallowed up in the battle, and though I try to make my way toward him, the sheer mass of bodies is impossible to get through, even windwalking.
“Soul Catcher!”
Darin appears, panting and blood-streaked, Spiro at his back. “Where is Laia?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “She was on her way to the plateau—”
Darin glances over his shoulder toward the rocky promontory, but we cannot see anything from here.
“I know she doesn’t want us there.” He is frantic. “I promised I wouldn’t interfere. But everything feels wrong. There’s something coming—and she’s the only family I have left, Soul Catcher. I can’t just leave her alone.”
Laia feared he would do what older siblings do and put himself in danger to help her. I grab his shoulder, sensing his anguish—and his intent. “If you go after her, it might distract her. It’s the last thing she needs or wants, Darin. Please—”
My words are drowned out by the shriek of rock—Faaz hurling a giant boulder down upon the farthest reaches of our army. Keris’s forces roar in triumph as it digs a grave-deep runnel into the earth, taking out dozens of our soldiers with it.
The Martials and Scholars around Darin howl at the abrupt death of so many comrades, and attack Keris’s men with newfound strength, driving them back toward the edge of the escarpment. My battle rage rises, screaming at me to fight, to kill. War is your past. War is your present. War is your future. So Talis, the jinn, told me. And so it is. I give in to my wrath, my scims whipping through the men around me.
“Darin!” I call out, but he does not respond. Spiro Teluman is next to me, scanning the faces around him for his apprentice. But Darin has disappeared. Distantly, the Blood Shrike bellows orders, and Keris shouts in horrific triumph. The earth groans, a jinn-spawned temblor, and huge fissures open and swallow dozens of my troops. One of the catapults explodes as Faaz slings a boulder into it. Two more erupt in a roar of flame.
The air, already weighted with the cacophony of war, thickens, as if a thunderstorm is about to break.
Banu al-Mauth.
Mauth’s voice is so quiet, but it rings in my head like a bell.
Forgive me, Banu al-Mauth, he says. I have not the strength to stop him.
Oh bleeding, burning hells. A vision flashes in my head—Mauth’s foresight. A terrifying, hungry maw, spearing through Mauth’s barrier, erupting into the world.
“Mauth,” I whisper. “No.”
LX: The Blood Shrike
When I see Elias streaking for the woods where Laia disappeared, I know something is wrong.
I cannot go to him. I cannot even call out to him. Keris’s forces have killed half our bowmen, and Umber lights up our catapults with that damnable glaive of hers. All our attempts to stop the jinn have been met by their fey superiority. The Soul Catcher said the creatures have their limitations. He said they would grow weak as they poured their life forces into destroying us.
But if there is weakness, I do not see it. I only see our forces being annihilated, with no sign of Laia, no indication that she even still lives. The efrits fight valiantly—and fail, for they are no match for the jinn, fading sparks against screaming suns.
Wraiths pour from the Commandant’s ranks, and while her men shy back, ours do not. Scholars stand shoulder to shoulder with Martials and Tribespeople. A wave of wraiths is upon us, their infernal cold sending man after man to his knees. But I scream and swing my scims, lopping off their heads as if they are stalks of corn.
“Imperator Invictus!” My troops rally around me. “Imperator Invictus!”
But it’s not enough. There are too many wraiths, too many jinn, too many soldiers fighting for Keris.
Panic envelops me, the same terror I felt in Antium. The hopelessness of defeat, and the knowledge that nothing can be done to stop it.
You are all that holds back the darkness. Today, I will not be defeated. Today, I take vengeance for Antium. For Livia.
“Shrike!” Harper appears beside me, gasping, bleeding from too many wounds to count. I feel the urge to heal him. It is so powerful that his song is already on my lips. But I transform it into a demand.
“Where is she, Harper? This cannot end until she is destroyed.”
“Her standard is there—” Ahead of me, well past the catapults and near the escarpment, Keris’s banner snaps in the jinn-spawned wind. Near it, a man stands inches above those around him, white hair flying as he fights his daughter.
“She’s battling Quin,” I say. This is my best chance. I turn to Harper, catching his gaze. “You stay away,” I say. “She’ll use you against me. Do you understand? Stay away.”
I do not let him protest, instead shoving forward, breaking a path. As I close in on Keris’s standard, Quin drops out of view. Has she killed him? Her own father, bleeding hells.
The fighters coming toward me fall beneath the edge of my blade. I scream, snarl, and pitch fighters twice as wide as me out of the way, wrath consuming my mind, until Keris’s spike-crown standard is nigh and she is before me.
This demon. This tiny slip of muscled, deadly madness. This murderess, eviscerating one of my legionnaires, then turning to face me with a sneer.
My men surge around me, fighting hers back, leaving the Bitch of Blackcliff and the Blood Shrike to each other.
Don’t give Keris an inch, Blood Shrike. She’ll have something up her sleeve. She always does.
And who is to say I don’t, Soul Catcher?
I force away the memory, for with it comes the words Karinna spoke, what she showed me deep in the Waiting Place. The Nightbringer or his minions could pick such thoughts from my mind. They are a weakness, and today, I can have no weakness. Today, I must be a thousand times smarter and faster and better than I have ever been.
Keris unleashes her fury like she’s been saving it just for me. I will pay you back for every escape, every defiance. She screams the words with the violence of her body, the ferocity of her scims. I will punish you for all of them.
Her savagery is so startling that I stumble, on the defensive. She is not a normal foe, nor a fair one. This is the woman who taught me everything I know about war, survival, combat. The woman who honed killing machines—none more effective than herself.
Though she knows my skill, she does not know my heart. Keris did not witness her parents and sister’s throats slit in front of her. Keris did not watch her last living sibling stare into her child’s eyes as she died, all her hopes dead in the flash of a blade.
Keris is fueled by anger. But mine burns hotter because of grief. And I unleash it.
The Commandant’s weapons of choice are dual scims. She is smaller, so she has to risk getting in close. I keep her at a distance, dodging her thrusts, matching her parry for parry, until I get a hit on her shoulder, and another on the side of her neck.
But she moves too quickly for me to slice at her legs or throat—her weakest spots.
A sting across my face—and the warm rush of blood pouring down my cheek. I jerk my head back as Keris’s blade comes within inches of my throat. At the same time, she whips her other scim across my left side so viciously that even Spiro’s armor cannot stop the blow. If I was wearing my ceremonials, I’d be dead.
The battle still swirls around us, and I catch sight of Harper shoving his scim into the throat of an attacker—barely avoiding the swing of a club at his legs. My men are beating the Commandant’s forces back, outnumbered as they are, and the sight gives me heart.
I move as if blood does n
ot pour down my side, feinting with the scim in my right hand before pivoting around her. My blade is inches from her hamstrings, and I whip it across.
But instead of the satisfying give of metal cutting through flesh, I feel a deep burn in my left wrist. She tricked me. Left her back open so I’d go behind her and leave my left side, my weak side, exposed. Shrike, you fool.
My scim falls uselessly from my hand, and her blade rips through my armor into my hip. I stagger back before she tears me in half, my vision doubling. Get up, Shrike! Get up!
I lift my remaining scim in time to parry a blow that would have taken my head from my body. The force with which our scims meet knocks mine loose, but she slips on a stray bit of mud, giving me a chance to fall back.
Though it does little good. I am weaponless, my scims too far away to reach.
“Shrike!” Harper, ever watchful, breaks free from the battle on Keris’s left side and throws a dagger to me. No. No. Stay away. Stay away, you fool! Keris catches the dagger, but Harper has already thrown another.
Even as he hurls the second blade at me, as I pluck it from the air, I see his chest plate is askew, knocked loose in battle.
“Harper!” I scream, but Keris has turned, the blade she caught hurtling through the air at him. Death with wings.
It sinks into his chest.
A flesh wound, I think. I crawl through the mud toward him. I can fix it. I can sing him back. But another flash of steel cuts through the air. This blade lodges in his heart. He falls.
“No!” I reach him, my knees sinking into the mud. His green eyes glaze as the life leaves him, as blood oozes from his chest.
“Harper, no—” I whisper. “No—please—”
“Helene—” He says my name, but I cannot hear it. The battle is too fierce, my heart thunders too loudly. No—no. I do not want victory if this is the cost.