by Joshua Khan
Text copyright © 2018 by Joshua Khan
Illustrations copyright © 2018 by Bin Hibon
Cover illustration © 2018 by Ben Hibon
Lettering by Russ Gray
Cover design by Marci Senders
All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.
ISBN 978-1-368-01482-3
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To my wife and daughters
Also by Joshua Khan
Shadow Magic
Dream Magic
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
House Shadow
Cast of Characters
Nahas, The City of Brass
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
The Shardlands
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Necropolis
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
The Lava Crown
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires.
—From Macbeth, by William Shakespeare
CAST OF CHARACTERS
HOUSE SHADOW
Lilith Shadow, ruler of Gehenna, a witch
Baron Sable, her adviser and loyal nobleman
Mary, her maid
Thorn, a squire
Iblis, father of Lilith, a ghost
HOUSE DJINN
Sa’if, a prince, soon to be sultan
Jambiya, a prince, blind and known as the Lawgiver
K’leef, a prince and friend to Lilith and Thorn
Ameera, K’leef’s twin sister
Samira, K’leef’s sister
Gabriel Solar, fiancé to one of the Djinnic princesses
Kali, executioner
THE SHARDLANDS
Kismet, leader of a nomad tribe
Nasr, warrior of the Scorpion tribe
Merriq, a lowly servant
BEASTS AND MONSTERS
Hades, a giant bat
Pazuzu, an efreet, a creature of fire
Farn, an efreet
The manticore, one of the many predators of the Shardlands
ONE
“Hey! You got any zombies up on deck?” shouted the girl from her small boat. “Can I see one?”
Thorn leaned over the railings of the ship. “What?”
She paddled her old skiff alongside the ship’s hull and raised a mango. “You can have this if you let me have a look at one.”
Thorn held out his hand. She tossed it up.
Ah, how he’d missed the smell of fresh mango. It was pure, warm sweetness. He’d used up his stock at Castle Gloom months ago, and ever since he’d been recruited for this trip to the Sultanate of Fire, the thought of obtaining a new crate of that golden fruit had not been far from his mind—or his belly, which gave a gentle rumble.
“You’re supposed to eat it, not kiss it,” the girl shouted as she waited below. “So can I come up?”
“I ain’t the captain,” Thorn shouted back. He then returned his attention to the mango.
The skin was orangey-gold, perfectly ripe, and soaked with a mouthwatering scent. He’d mash it up and put it in his sandwich. You couldn’t let a mango go to waste, but it was almost a shame to peel it. Almost.
“Hey!” yelled the girl. “Let me up or give me back my mango!”
“Permission to come aboard granted.”
The girl lashed the skiff to the nets, then scrabbled up the thick rope with the ease of a sailor. She slid over the railings and looked around. “So where are the zombies?”
Thorn sliced a strip of mango. There was an art to eating these, making sure you didn’t lose a drop of the juice. “On the other ship.” He tilted his head toward the larger black-sailed vessel a few miles behind them.
He peeled the flesh with his teeth. Oh, wow. It tasted even better than he remembered.
The girl scowled. “You lied to me. You said you had zombies.”
“I didn’t say nothing.” The golden juice dribbled down his throat. His belly responded loudly and gratefully.
The girl braced her lithe legs on the gently tilting deck. She wore a short shirt, much patched and faded, and a pair of calf-length pants belted with a sash of equal patchiness and fade. A bright scarf encircled her long neck, her thick curly hair was held in place by a bandana, and her dark eyes were ringed with even darker kohl. Those eyes were angry. “That’ll be a dinar.”
“A what?”
“A silver coin.” She held out her hand.
Her fingers were thin but tough. Typical wharf rat. Born and raised in the docks. And that was hard living. How old was she? Hard to tell. Her skin was a deep, vibrant brown, and her build was lean and wiry. She was a head taller than Thorn, and he wasn’t short, so he guessed sixteen or so. Her two front teeth were capped with gold, probably the only jewelry she owned.
“You mean a crown?” Thorn snorted. “A crown would get me a crate. One mango is worth a couple of pennies, at best.”
“A crown,” she insisted. “Consider it export tax.”
One of the sailors laughed. “She got you good, boy. Better cough up.”
Blushing, Thorn searched his pouch and handed over, very reluctantly, one of his precious crowns. “You’re a thief, you know that?”
The girl shrugged and tucked the silver coin into her sash. Then she sat on the railing, dangling her legs over the water. “The witch queen’s on the other ship?”
Thorn resisted the urge to push her overboard. His pouch felt a lot lighter without that crown. “That what they call her here in the south?”
“That’s what they call her everywhere.” The girl bent a leg to her mouth and bit off a toenail. “You serve her?”
Poor Lily. She wouldn’t be happy with the nickname “witch queen,” no matter
how true it was. “I work for Lady Shadow of Gehenna. I’m a squire.” There was more to their relationship, but he wasn’t going to give this girl his life story.
She eyed him. “You’re not Gehennish, though. Too much color in your face. The Gehennish have skin the color of watery milk.”
“I’m Gehennish now.”
“But you sound like you come from the Free Duchies. Herne’s Forest, maybe.” She sniffed. “Yes. You smell of bark.”
Thorn resisted smelling his armpit, but he was pretty sure he didn’t. Now that he was a squire, he dipped himself in a barrel of water once a week. Sometimes even twice.
The girl swung her legs back and forth. “You’re far from home, forest boy.”
He didn’t like the way this girl was picking at him, as if trying to unravel him. He finished off the mango. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
“Yes. There.” She pointed in the direction of the port ahead. “But that’s where you’re going anyway.”
He gave up. She wasn’t going to move until she wanted to. Thorn pushed the pit into his mouth and began working it clean. It made talking impossible, and that was fine with him. He joined the girl on the railing.
The journey was almost over. Thank the Six.
They’d spent two months living like sheep, packed in with no room to spread out, trapped by the noise and stink of fifty-three men snorting, snoring, swearing, and sweating as the ship sailed south, through the Lock, past the Lava Isles, and into the Siren Sea, each day hotter than the last.
While the captain had kept the crew busy, Baron Sable had done the same for Thorn and the other squires. They had spent days hanging from the rigging, furling and unfurling sails, and nights mending those same sails. In the time between, they’d learned about knots and navigation and watched the waters for dangers and delights.
One night, they’d heard mermaids singing. The next morning, two men were discovered missing.
Shark riders had followed alongside for two days, lurking in their wake until the captain had ended up, begrudgingly, tossing over a whole cow carcass.
“Best pay the Coral king his toll, before he asks for the whole ship,” Sable had said.
Thorn hadn’t minded the work, but he’d been uncomfortable for most of the voyage. It wasn’t just the constant swaying, and the tight living quarters, where everyone was on top of everyone else. After all, as a squire, he was used to being cramped. But the smells of hot tar and wet rope and the sounds of creaking timbers and flapping sails lit bad memories of the last time he’d been on board a ship. Back then, he’d been shackled and forced to live in the hold with other captives. This time he was accompanying a young queen, and thankfully not as a slave.
He craved firm land. To be able to walk toward a horizon that didn’t bob and tilt, to smell trees and earth and anything other than salt and the cook’s woeful cooking, the stench of which hung over the whole ship like a poisonous cloud. Sixty days of fish-head stew. Enough!
The seagulls clearly felt very different about the cooking. They circled and fought above the crow’s nest as they kept their eyes out for the slop bucket.
“We’re coming up to the Twins,” said the girl. “Look.”
Their ship, the Ebony Siren, sailed past rocky ledges into a bay beyond. The city of Nahas sat within the bay’s crescent, protected by high cliffs and accessible only through the small gap between the Horns, the point where each cliff ended. And upon each horn stood a dragon.
Radiant light beamed from the twin dragons’ eyes, and smoke rippled from their nostrils and partially parted jaws. The evening sun cast red light over their golden scales and the silver wings curled close to their sinewy bodies. The beasts had to be over a hundred feet tall, balanced on curled tails and hind claws, poised to launch into the clouds.
“Did people really build ’em?” said Thorn. “Or was it sorcery?”
The girl shrugged. “You don’t have lighthouses in Gehenna?”
“Not like these.” He craned his neck to gaze at the closest beast’s monstrous head. How big was it? The castle stables could fit inside its mouth!
The Ebony Siren passed under the mighty, immobile claws of the dragons and Nahas came into view.
Thorn squinted at the port on the horizon. “It looks like it’s burning.”
The port started with a thick cluster of warehouses and one-story houses and taverns squeezed together along the docks. Then, gradually, as the city rose on a natural slope—the wall of a smoking volcano—the buildings grew higher, more extravagant, and more spacious, until at the top, lit by the setting sun, was Palace Djinn. Spindle-thin towers surrounded it, and the great halls and chambers were crowned with golden domes. The buildings shimmered and seemed to move, as unsettled as firelight.
The girl stretched, yawning at what were everyday sights for her. “It was, once. Back in the days of the great sorcerers, the walls and towers were carved out of fire. Nowadays, the rich folk clad the walls in metal so it looks like flames. The whole palace is made of brass.”
“You been up there?”
“I get around.”
Countless bonfires sparkled throughout the city and along the cliffs, mixing the salty air with smoke.
Sultan Djinn was dead. During the hundred-day mourning period, it was the people’s custom to burn gifts for him to use in the afterlife. Some would cremate extravagant paper models and effigies. In the crueler past, wives, slaves, and animals had gone to the fire, to follow their master.
Lily had loved explaining that, and a whole lot more, to Thorn during the few occasions he had been invited aboard her ship.
He hadn’t minded her lessons one bit. The Shadow’s Blade was bigger and more comfortable than the Ebony Siren, as befitting Lily’s lofty station. And its cook was vastly more talented than the soon-to-be-convicted-of-poisoning fellow he had. Thorn always enjoyed learning new stuff. His problem was remembering it the next day.
It hadn’t all been her teaching him, though. Thorn knew the stars. How the tip of the Manticore’s Tail always pointed north. That the Witch’s Broom turned during the seasons, and the height of the Six Princes from the horizon told you how many hours were left before dawn. Little tricks that you wouldn’t learn while living in windowless Castle Gloom but everyone in Herne’s Forest knew. Lily studied her books; he studied the outdoors.
Now the wharf rat seemed fascinated with his friend. The girl glanced over her shoulder at the Shadow’s Blade. “They say she has her father’s ghost trapped in the catacombs beneath her castle, Glum.”
“It’s Castle Gloom, and it’s not really like that. Her dad is…sort of stuck down in the library, but that’s because—”
“And a sailor from Lumina told me she’s imprisoned her own brother in a tower of cobwebs.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the whole story. She had to—”
“What about the trolls? They say even the troll king fears her. That his own daughter is forced to serve the witch queen as her maid?”
“Dott isn’t forced to do anything she doesn’t want to,” said Thorn. “She likes working for Lily…I mean, Lady Shadow.”
“A minstrel sang a tale about how she cannot abide the living, that even her pet is one of the undead.”
“Custard is a fairly unique sort of puppy,” Thorn replied, knowing how feeble it sounded. “And he’s pretty happy as a, er, ghost.”
The girl shivered. “How can you stand it? Aren’t you afraid she’ll turn you into some monster?”
“What d’you have against monsters?”
She frowned. “What?”
Thorn pondered what—or who—lay sleeping in the hold. “Some of my best friends are monsters.”
Sure, he does eat people….
A fight broke out overhead as new arrivals confronted the squawking seagulls.
Bats poured from caves within the cliff walls and the roofs and lofts of the nearby buildings. They grew thick in the sky above them, and it didn’t take long before the seagulls
flew off.
“Bats don’t usually come out to the boats,” commented the girl.
A scream shook the ship. It rose from the hold: a hellish, skull-piercing cry that made one’s blood run cold.
“What in the Fire was that?” The girl backed toward the railing, trembling.
The bats flew lower over the deck, and the girl yelled as she tried to shoo them away. “They’re everywhere! What’s—”
Another terrifying scream broke out from below, and something heavy thudded against the double hatch, causing the deck to shake.
Thorn gasped. “It’s breaking free!”
“What? What is it?”
Thorn stumbled back. “No, it was supposed to sleep longer.…If it gets loose…” He turned to her as the deck shook again. “Save yourself! We have to jump!”
The girl dove off. She slipped into the lapping waves and a moment later bobbed up, already a safe five yards from the hull. “Come on! Jump! Before it gets out!”
Thorn laughed. “Nope. I think I’ll stay nice and dry a bit longer.”
“What about the monster?”
Thorn stamped on the deck. “You! Shut up!”
The screaming stopped. Instead there was a sullen snarl, promising that Thorn was going to pay for this later. Well, later was later. He wanted to make the most out of this moment. Thorn leaned over the railing. “There. All quiet.”
“That was a trick?” She slapped the water. “You dirty, filthy…” Thorn didn’t catch the next part as it was all in livid Djinnic, but then she switched back to Gehennish. “Hey, what about my boat? It’s still tied to your ship!”
“Boat? I thought it was driftwood.” Thorn waved at her as the Ebony Siren drifted past. “You can pick it up at the docks. Enjoy your swim!”
“That was a bit cruel,” said Baron Sable as he joined Thorn to admire the view. “It’s about a mile to the docks.”
“Cruel? Cruel is being conned out of a crown for a single mango.”
“You do get sharks in the bay from time to time.”
“Ah. I did not know that.” Thorn shrugged. “Still, a whole crown. That was a week’s worth of shoveling horse dung outta the stables.”
Sable twisted the tips of his mustache into points. “Nahas is a sight, isn’t it? I’ve been away too long.”