by Sabaa Tahir
My father and I leave the dimly lit halls of Blackcliff and step out into the belltower courtyard. I suppress a shudder. My blood irrigated these stones. Mine, and so many others.
“Mauth demanded I give up my emotions before he let me use his magic,” I say. “After I did, he helped me suppress them. Washed them away. And I wanted that. Because it let me forget all of the terrible things I’ve done.”
“You cannot forget,” my father says. “You must not forget. Mauth erred when he took love from you. When he took anger and joy and regret and sadness and passion.”
“He did it because Cain’s greed and the Meherya’s love led to ruin,” I tell my father. “But now Mauth wants the balance restored. He wants the jinn returned. And they will not listen to me.”
“Why would they? You cannot convince them unless you first open yourself to all of the joy—” My father touches my shoulder. I see Mamie sing a story, feel Laia’s lips on mine, hear the Blood Shrike’s joyful laugh.
“And all the suffering,” my father adds, and now I see Cain wrench me from Tribe Saif. I scream at the pain of my first whipping, weep as I stab a young man—my first kill.
I want the death to end. It does not. Demetrius and Leander die by my hand. Laia and I escape Serra and I execute soldier after soldier. Kauf burns, and prisoners die in the ensuing havoc. The ghosts escape the Waiting Place and kill thousands.
Murderer! The cave efrit in the Serran catacombs points and screams. Killer! Death himself! Reaper walking!
I feel sick. For though I know my sins, I have not faced them. Every time they came to the forefront of my mind, Mauth eased them away.
“How do I go on?” I ask my father. “When I’ve wrought such devastation? When all I have to give is death?”
I wish for Mauth then, for that quiet rush of calm and distance that his presence gives me. But it is not there. Nothing exists between me and the memories of what I’ve done but naked horror.
“Steady now, my son,” my father says. “What did your grandfather tell you just after the Second Trial?”
“He—he said I’d be trailing ghosts.”
“You trail suffering now too,” my father says. “Like the Nightbringer. Like your mother.”
“Suffering is the cup from which they both drink.” I quote Talis as I meet my father’s gaze. “It is the language they both speak. And it is the weapon they both wield.”
“Yes,” he says. “But you do not have to be like them. You have suffered. You have created suffering. You have killed. But you have also paid. With your life, twice over now, and with your heart, with your mind. You have guided thousands of lost souls. You have saved thousands of lives. You have done good in this world. Which will define you? The good? Or the suffering?”
He places a hand on my chest, and I witness what it would have been like to have had him as a father. It is a life so different from my experience that it could only exist in the after. Keris—my mother—holds me, her sweet smile a revelation. My father takes me from her and swings me onto his shoulders. Avitas runs past us, green eyes sparkling as he pulls me down, and I chase him. My parents speak, and though I cannot hear their words, their language is that of love.
Seeing it is a scim to my soul, for I want so much for it to be real. For this to be a memory and not a wish. I want for suffering to have never touched any of us.
“Ah, my boy.” My father takes me in his arms. “It was not to be.”
He holds me to him for long minutes, and I close my eyes and let myself grieve.
“What if I don’t go back.” I pull away. “I could stay here. With you. Though—” I glance around, for a mist has rolled in, thick and cool, and Blackcliff’s stark walls fade. “Where is here? And how are you here? You died years ago.”
“I live in your blood, my son. I live in your soul.”
“So I’m dead too.”
“No,” he says. “When the Sea of Suffering broke through the barrier, it took you, but before it could consume you, Mauth snatched you away. You are in between. Walking a scim’s edge, as you have for so much of your life. You could fall into the Sea of Suffering and lose yourself in your pain. Or you could return to the world, for you are Soul Catcher still, and you have a duty. The balance must be restored.”
“The jinn.” Your duty is to the dead, even to the breaking of the world. “But the world is—” Broken, I was about to say, before I remember my words to Laia months ago. The world must be broken before it can be remade.
“Will you help remake the world, my son?” my father asks me.
“I—I begged the jinn already,” I say. “I told them the balance couldn’t be restored without them. They didn’t listen.”
“Because it was the Soul Catcher who asked them.” My father takes me by the shoulders, and his strength flows into me. “But that is not all of you. Tell me, who are you?”
“I am the Banu al-Mauth.” I do not understand him. “I pass the ghosts—”
“Who are you, son of mine?”
“I—” I had a name. What was my name? Laia said it. Over and over she said it. But I cannot recall it anymore.
“Who are you?”
“I am—I—” Who am I? “I am born of Keris Veturia,” I say. “Son to the Kehanni who told the Tale. Beloved to Laia of Serra. Friend to the Blood Shrike. I am brother to Avitas Harper and Shan An-Saif. Grandson to Quin Veturius. I am—”
Two words echo in my head, the last words Cain spoke to me before dying. Words that stir my blood, words that my grandfather taught me when I was a boy of six and he gave me my name. Words that were burned into me at Blackcliff.
“Always victorious.”
Some door bursts open inside me, and Blackcliff fades. The great maelstrom drags at me, as if the conversation with my father had never happened, as if there were only seconds between when the Sea of Suffering took me and now.
I fight my way out, toward a light coruscating distantly. The Sea is so close that I feel it dragging at my feet, but I battle my way up to the world of the living, screaming those two words over and over.
Always victorious.
Always victorious.
Always victorious.
LXVI: Keris Veturia
The Blood Shrike will die as her sisters died. As her parents died. Throat slit, a slow enough death that she will walk into the hereafter knowing I defeated her.
Part of me rages against how easily she fell. All she had to do was not love. If she hadn’t loved, she’d have been a worthy foe. I’d never have been able to hurt her, no matter who I killed.
Far away, a deep, earth-shuddering growl resounds. I ignore it.
The Shrike clutches her side as I approach, and she is a small, broken thing. A version of myself, if I had allowed defeat to enter my veins like a poison. Me, if I’d let myself love or care.
Give me a foe who challenges me, I shout in my mind. A foe who makes my body scream, who forces me to think faster, to fight harder.
“You sad creature,” I say. “Look at you. On your knees in the mud. Your army dies around you, and not one of them is brave enough to come to your aid. You weak, broken bird, mourning a man who was dead the moment he called out your name. You are a fool, Helene Aquilla. I thought I trained you better.”
She gazes up at me with fading blue eyes, her crown braid dark with blood and mud.
“Lovey.”
The word is a whisper, a breath from the Shrike’s mouth. My fingers go numb, and my belly twists as if crawling with snakes. I do not recognize the feeling. Not fear, certainly.
How did she learn that name?
“That’s what she called you.” The Shrike clutches her side ineffectually. If I do not kill her now, she will simply bleed to death.
Suddenly, I do not want her dead. Not yet.
I close the distance between us and crouch to grab
her throat.
“Who told you that name?” I hiss. “A Scholar? A Martial—”
“No one living,” the Shrike whispers. “A ghost told me. Karinna Veturia. She waits here in the Forest of Dusk, Keris. She has waited for more than thirty years.”
As I stare down at the Shrike, the battle still raging beyond us, memories rise, a dark miasma I put to rest a lifetime ago. Blonde hair and eyes as blue as a Serran summer sky. A barge traveling along the River Rei, north, toward Serra. Long hours with her inside a cabin brightly lit with multifaceted Tribal lamps and strewn with pillows of a thousand colors. The comforting thunk-thunk-thunk of my father’s men keeping guard on the decks.
A green string that danced in her hands, transforming into a broom and cat’s whiskers, a pointed hat, a ladder, a man with oysters on his back.
How do you do it? I remember asking.
Magic, little lovey, she said.
Show me, Mama.
Then strange sounds above us. The ominous steps of heavy boots. Shouts and smoke. Fire and unfamiliar faces pouring through the door, grabbing me. Grabbing my mother.
“You were a child.” The Blood Shrike brings me back to the killing field. To the battle. “It’s not your fault the Resistance took your mother. It’s not your fault they hurt her.”
I release the Shrike and stagger back. Yes, I was a child. A child who did nothing but watch as Scholar rebels killed off our guards and the barge captain. A child who was struck dumb even as my mother and I were kidnapped and taken to a grimy mountain lair. A child who wept and wailed as, in the room next to mine, those rebels tortured my mother.
A child who did nothing as her mother screamed.
And screamed.
And screamed.
The rebels wanted to get at my father. They wanted to strike a blow at one of the great Martial houses. But by the time he came, she was already dead.
“Your mother tried to be brave, Keris,” the Blood Shrike says, and I am so startled she’s still talking that I don’t bother to silence her. The Shrike should be dead. Why isn’t she dead yet?
“Your mother tried to be silent, but the rebels hurt her. The screams scared you at first. She could hear you begging them to stop hurting her.”
My own mother. My first love. I cried and then I begged and then I shouted at her to stop screaming because her cries drove me mad. She was weak. So weak. But I was weak too. I could have been silent. I could have been strong for her and I wasn’t—
“You were a child, Keris,” the Blood Shrike says, though I did not speak my thoughts out loud. Did I?
“What the Scholar rebels did to you and your mother was unforgivable. But what you did—crying out for her to stop screaming—skies, she forgave you for that the moment it happened. She only wants to see you again.”
The earth trembles, and a great groan splits the air. But I hardly notice, unable to look away from the Shrike. She staggers to her feet, not defeated as I expected, but grimly determined.
“She waits for you, Keris.”
Distantly, I sense the shadow that spins out of the battle seething around us. It slides a blade across the back of my legs, hamstringing me, and I drop—not understanding what has happened. The shadow knocks my scim free and whirls in front of me.
Then it throws its hood back and I am face-to-face with my own handiwork, a ghost out of the past, and my mind goes blank. For the first time in a long time, I am surprised.
“You die by my hand, Keris Veturia,” whispers Mirra of Serra, very much alive and still wretchedly scarred, her blue eyes burning with murderous fervor. Her blade is at my throat. “I wanted you to know.”
I could stop her. The Blood Shrike sees and screams a warning at Mirra, for instinct had me drawing a blade the moment she stepped out of the fray.
But I think of my mother. She waits for you, Keris.
And Mirra’s blade finds its mark.
Pain burns through my neck as the Lioness shoves the dagger into my throat, as she drags it across. She does not know my strength, that even bleeding out like this, I can stab her thigh, tear a hole into her that will leave her dead in moments. Even dying, I can destroy her.
But quite suddenly, I am not on the battlefield anymore. I rise above it, above my body, which is nothing but a shell now. Weak and useless and growing cold in the mud.
A great, violent maelstrom swirls down toward my army, tearing through it, annihilating it before my eyes.
“Lovey?”
“Mama.” I turn. And it is her, my mother, who I have mourned in the forgotten corners of my soul. Her smile is radiant, hitting me with the force of a sunrise. I reach out my hand to her.
She does not take it. A gasp escapes her, shock rippling through her vitreous form as she backs away.
“K-Keris?” She peers at me, bewildered. “You are not her.”
“Mama,” I whisper. “It’s me. Keris. Your lovey.”
She drifts farther from me, those familiar blue eyes enormous and stricken.
“No,” she says. “You are not my lovey. My lovey is dead.”
I reach for her, and a strange, strangled sound comes from my throat. But something else approaches. That great, earth-shattering roar, as if a thousand hounds have been unleashed on my heels. I turn to find myself facing the maelstrom. It consumes the horizon, swirling and ravenous.
I have never seen its like before. And yet, I know it.
“Nightbringer?”
Keris. He utters my name, though he doesn’t sound like himself.
“Nightbringer. Bring me back,” I say. “I am not finished. The battle yet wages. Nightbringer!”
He does not hear me—or he no longer cares.
“I fought for you,” I say. “I would never have forded that river or fought a foe on higher ground if not for you. I trusted you—”
The storm rolls on, and I know then that I am dead. That there will be no return.
Fury consumes me—and terror. This betrayal at the last from the only creature I ever trusted—this cannot be borne. This cannot be my death. There is more—there must be more.
“Mama—” I call out, searching for her.
But she is gone, and there is only the hunger and the storm and a suffering that, for me, does not end.
LXVII: Laia
The maelstrom has teeth, and they sink into my mind, injecting me with memory. My father, my sister, my mother—everyone who has ever been taken from me.
The memories fade, replaced by others I do not recognize. First a few, then hundreds, then thousands swirling around me. Story upon story. Sorrow upon sorrow.
Though the bodies of the dead have disappeared, I am still corporeal, and I let myself fade into the nothingness. This is a jinn-made madness and I have had a jinn living within me for a long time.
But she is in you no more, the maelstrom hisses. You are alone. I will consume you, Laia of Serra. For all is suffering and suffering is all.
Flickers alight near my vision. Sweet laughter, and small figures of flame—Rehmat’s children, I realize. The Nightbringer’s children. Though I want to look away, I make myself watch their family, their joy. I make myself witness their light go out.
This maelstrom—it is all him. He has subsumed the suffering of generations, combined it with his own. He was right. For him, the world was a cage. Now he is everywhere. Living in all of these memories, all of this suffering. Lost in it.
But even a maelstrom has a center. A heart. I must find it.
Each step takes an eon as memories shriek past me. Laia. I whip my head around, for it is Darin’s voice howling out of the darkness. He says something, and I cannot understand it. I know if I reach out to him, we will be reunited. Death will have claimed us all—Darin and Father and Mother and Lis and Nan and Pop. When was the last time the seven of us were together and happy?
&nb
sp; When was the last time we were not running, or hiding, or whispering so the Empire would not catch us? I do not remember. All I remember is fear. Mother and Father leaving and the ache of their loss. The knowledge, that day when Nan howled for her daughter, that I would never see my parents again.
But Mother came back. She came back and she fought for me, and I hold on to her words. I love you, Laia. I immerse myself in her love. For, tortured as it was, it was still love, in the only way she could give it to me.
All is suffering, the maelstrom says. And suffering is all.
How many more has this cyclone swallowed? Is anyone left? I force myself to think practically. There must be. And as long as even one person remains, they are worth fighting for.
One step in front of the other, I battle my way through the swirling wind. If I stop fighting, for even one second, I am lost.
But then, the Nightbringer is also lost. Perhaps if I accept it, we will end up in the same place.
I let go.
I expect the storm to tear at me, but instead I float up and drift, a leaf in the wind. The Nightbringer’s memories flow through me. All the years and loves I did not see. All that he has endured. My heart shudders at the loneliness. Once before, I saw a glimpse of this, when I gave him the armlet. Now the abyss of his pain yawns before me, and there is no place to hide.
I realize I am circling something—the center of the maelstrom. Once, twice, each revolution shorter, until the mist settles and I can make out a scrap of bright white—a tear between worlds, through which sorrow after sorrow explodes. Each one breathes, and they claw at each other in a frenzy of cannibalistic hunger.
At the heart of the rent, a thin scrap of soul writhes in torment, vaguely human-shaped, a thousand bruised colors.
The Nightbringer. Or whatever it is that he has become.
“All the world will fall,” I whisper to him. If I cannot get him to close the tear between worlds, we are lost. “And I know you do not want that. You must stop.”