The City of Brass

by S. A. Chakraborty

  “The Creator be praised,” he said in Divasti. He stared at Nahri with wide black eyes, a mixture of something like fear, hope, and ecstasy crossing his face all at once. “You . . . you’re—”

  “Not a shafit,” the king interrupted. “As I told you.” He dropped his hand, and the torches flared back to life. Beside her, Dara shuddered.

  The Qahtani king hadn’t taken his eyes off her once. “An enchantment,” he finally concluded. “An enchantment to make you appear human. I have never heard of such a thing.” His eyes were bright with wonder. “Who are you?”

  Nahri helped Dara back to his feet. The Afshin was still pale and seemed to have trouble catching his breath. “My name is Nahri,” she said, struggling under his weight. “That Manizheh you mentioned, I . . . I think I’m her daughter.”

  The king abruptly drew himself up. “Excuse me?”

  “She’s a Nahid.” Dara hadn’t recovered entirely, and his voice came out in a low growl that sent a few courtiers skittering farther away.

  “A Nahid?” the seated prince repeated over the growing sounds of the shocked crowd. His voice was thick with disbelief. “Are you insane?”

  The king raised his hand to dismiss the room. “Out, all of you.”

  He did not have to issue the order twice—Nahri didn’t realize so many men could move that fast. She watched in silent fear as the courtiers were replaced by more soldiers. A line of guards—armed with those same strange copper swords—formed behind Dara and Nahri, blocking their escape.

  The king’s steely gaze finally left her face to fall upon Dara. “If she’s the daughter of Banu Manizheh, who exactly would that make you?”

  Dara tapped the mark on his face. “Her Afshin.”

  The king lifted his dark brows. “This should be an interesting story.”

  “None of this makes any sense,” the prince declared when Dara and Nahri finally fell silent. “Ifrit conspiracies, rukh assassins, the Gozan rising from its banks to howl at the moon? A captivating tale, to be sure . . . perhaps it will earn you entrance to the actors’ guild.”

  The king shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. The best tales always have at least a kernel of truth.”

  Dara bristled. “Should you not have your own witnesses to the events at the Gozan? Surely you have scouts there. Otherwise an army could be assembling at your threshold with you none the wiser.”

  “I’ll consider that professional advice,” the king replied, his tone light. He’d remained impassive as they spoke. “It is a remarkable story, however. There’s no denying the girl is under some sort of curse—that she should be plainly pureblooded to me while appearing shafit to the rest of you.” He studied her again. “And she does resemble Banu Manizheh,” he admitted, a hint of emotion stealing into his voice. “Strikingly so.”

  “And what of it?” the prince countered. “Abba, you can’t really believe Manizheh had a secret daughter? Manizheh? The woman used to give plague sores to men who looked too long upon her face!”

  Nahri would not have minded such an ability right now. She’d spent the last day being attacked by various creatures and had little patience for the Qahtani’s doubt. “Do you want proof that I’m a Nahid?” she demanded. She pointed at the curved dagger sheathed at the prince’s waist. “Toss that over, and I’ll heal before your eyes.”

  Dara stepped in front of her, and the air smoked. “That would be extremely unwise.”

  The young soldier, or prince, or whoever he was—the one with the scruffy beard and hostile expression—immediately edged closer to the prince. He dropped his hand to the hilt of his copper sword.

  “Alizayd,” the king warned. “Enough. And calm yourself, Afshin. Believe it or not, Geziri hospitality does not involve stabbing our guests. At least, not before we’ve been properly introduced.” He gave Nahri a sardonic smile and touched his chest. “I am King Ghassan al Qahtani, as surely you know. These are my sons, Emir Muntadhir and Prince Alizayd.” He pointed to the seated prince and the scowling young swordsman before gesturing to the older Daeva man. “And this is my grand wazir, Kaveh e-Pramukh. It was his son Jamshid who escorted you to the palace.”

  The familiarity of their Arabic names took her aback, as did the fact that two Daeva men served the royal family so prominently. Good signs, I suppose. “Peace be upon you,” she said cautiously.

  “And upon you as well.” Ghassan spread his hands. “You’ll forgive our doubts, my lady. It’s only that my son Muntadhir speaks correctly. Banu Manizheh had no children and has been dead twenty years.”

  Nahri frowned. She wasn’t one to share information easily, but she wanted answers more than anything else. “The ifrit said they were working with her.”

  “Working with her?” For the first time, she saw a hint of anger in Ghassan’s face. “The ifrit were the ones who murdered her. A thing they apparently did with much glee.”

  Nahri’s skin crawled. “What do you mean?”

  It was the grand wazir who spoke up now. “Banu Manizheh and her brother Rustam were ambushed by the ifrit on their way to my estate in Zariaspa. I . . . I was among the ones who found what was left of their traveling party.” He cleared his throat. “Most of the bodies were impossible to identify, but the Nahids . . .” He trailed off, looking close to tears.

  “The ifrit put their heads on spikes,” Ghassan finished grimly. “And stuffed their mouths with the relics of all the djinn they enslaved in the traveling party, as an added bit of mockery.” Smoke curled around his collar. “Working with her, indeed.”

  Nahri recoiled. She saw no hint of deception from the men on the platform—not on this matter at least. The grand wazir looked ill, and barely checked grief and rage swirled in the king’s gray eyes.

  And I came so close to falling into the hands of the demons who did that. Nahri was shaken, truly shaken. She considered herself skilled at detecting lies, but the ifrit had her almost convinced. She guessed Dara was right about them being talented liars.

  Dara, of course, did not bother concealing his rage at the Nahid siblings’ grisly demise. An angry heat radiated from his skin. “Why were Banu Manizheh and her brother even allowed outside the city walls? Did you not see the danger in allowing the last two Nahids in the world to go traipsing about outer Daevastana?”

  Emir Muntadhir’s eyes flashed. “They weren’t our prisoners,” he said heatedly. “And the ifrit hadn’t been heard from in over a century. We scarcely—”

  “No . . . he is right to question me.” Ghassan’s voice, quiet and devastated, silenced his elder son. “God knows I’ve done so myself, every day since they died.” He leaned back against his throne, suddenly looking older. “It should have been Rustam alone. There was a blight in Zariaspa affecting their healing herbs, and he was the more skilled at botany. But Manizheh insisted on accompanying him. She was very dear to me—and very, very stubborn. A poor combination, I admit.” He shook his head. “At the time, she was so adamant that I . . . ah.”

  Nahri narrowed her eyes. “What?”

  Ghassan met her gaze, his expression simmering with an emotion she couldn’t quite decipher. He studied her for a long moment and then finally asked, “How old are you, Banu Nahri?”

  “I can’t be sure. I think about twenty.”

  He pressed his mouth in a thin line. “An interesting coincidence.” He did not sound pleased.

  The grand wazir blushed, furious red spots blooming in his cheeks. “My king, surely you do not mean to suggest that Banu Manizheh—one of Suleiman’s blessed and a woman of unimpeachable morals—”

  “Had sudden cause twenty years ago to flee Daevabad for a distant mountain estate where she’d be surrounded by discreet and utterly loyal fellow Daevas?” He arched an eyebrow. “Stranger things have happened.”

  The meaning of their conversation suddenly became clear. A flicker of hope—stupid, naive hope—rose in Nahri’s chest before she could squash it down. “Then . . . my father . . . is he still alive? Does he live in Daevabad?”
She couldn’t hide the desperation in her voice.

  “Manizheh refused to marry,” Ghassan said flatly. “And she had no . . . attachments. None that I was aware of, at least.”

  It was a curt answer that brooked no room for further discussion. But Nahri frowned, trying to puzzle things out. “But that doesn’t make sense. The ifrit knew of me. If she fled before anyone learned of her pregnancy, if she was murdered on her journey, then . . .”

  I shouldn’t be alive. Nahri left the last part unspoken, but Ghassan looked equally stymied.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Perhaps you were born while they were still traveling, but I cannot imagine how you survived, let alone wound up in a human city on the other side of the world.” He raised his hands. “We might never have those answers. I only pray that your mother’s final moments may have been lightened by the knowledge that her daughter lived.”

  “Someone must have saved her,” Dara pointed out.

  The king raised his hands. “Your guess is as good as mine. The curse affecting her appearance is a strong one . . . it might not have been cast by a djinn.”

  Dara glanced down at her, something briefly unreadable in his bright eyes before he turned back to the king. “She truly doesn’t appear a shafit to you?” Nahri could hear a hint of relief in his voice. And it hurt, there was no denying it. Clearly, for all their growing “closeness,” blood purity was still important to him.

  Ghassan shook his head. “She looks as Daeva as you do. And if she’s truly the daughter of Banu Manizheh . . .” He hesitated, and something flickered in his face; it was replaced by his calm mask in a moment, but she was good at reading people, and she noticed.

  It was fear.

  Dara prodded him. “If she is . . . then what?”

  Kaveh answered first, his black eyes meeting hers. Nahri suspected the grand wazir—a fellow Daeva—didn’t want the king massaging this answer. “Banu Manizheh was the most talented healer born to the Nahids in the last millennium. If you are her daughter . . .” His voice turned reverent—and a little defiant. “The Creator has smiled upon us.”

  The king shot the other man an annoyed look. “My grand wazir is easily excited, but yes, your arrival in Daevabad might prove quite the blessing.” His eyes slid to Dara. “Yours, on the other hand . . . you said you were an Afshin, but you’ve not yet offered your name.”

  “It must have slipped my mind,” Dara replied, his voice cool.

  “Why don’t you share it now?”

  Dara lifted his chin slightly and then spoke. “Darayavahoush e-Afshin.”

  He might as well have drawn a blade. Muntadhir’s eyes went wide, and Kaveh paled. The younger prince dropped his hand to his sword again, stepping closer to his family.

  Even the implacable king now looked tense. “Just to be clear: are you the Darayavahoush who led the Daeva rebellion against Zaydi al Qahtani?”

  The what? Nahri whirled on Dara, but he wasn’t looking at her. His attention was locked on Ghassan al Qahtani. A small smile—the same dangerous smile he’d flashed at the shafit in the plaza—played around his mouth.

  “Ah . . . so your people remember that?”

  “Quite well,” Ghassan said coolly. “Our history has a lot to say about you, Darayavahoush e-Afshin.” He crossed his arms over his black robe. “Though I could have sworn one of my ancestors beheaded you at Isbanir.”

  It was a trick, Nahri knew, a slight to his honor meant to pull a better answer from the Afshin.

  Dara, of course, rushed right into it. “Your ancestor did no such thing,” he said acidly. “I never made it to Isbanir—you would not be sitting on that throne if I had.” He held up his hand, and the emerald winked. “I was captured by the ifrit while battling Zaydi’s forces in the Dasht-e Loot. Surely you can work out the rest.”

  “That doesn’t explain how you stand before us now,” Ghassan said pointedly. “You would have needed a Nahid to break the ifrit’s slave curse, no?”

  Though Nahri’s head was swimming with new information, she noticed Dara hesitate before answering.

  “I don’t know,” he finally confessed. “I thought the same . . . but it was the peri, Khayzur—the one who saved us at the river—who freed me. He said he found my ring on the body of a human traveler in his lands. His people don’t typically intervene in our matters, but . . .” She heard Dara’s throat catch. “He took mercy on me.”

  Something twisted in Nahri’s heart. Khayzur had freed him from slavery and saved their lives at the Gozan? The sudden image of the peri alone and in pain, awaiting death from his fellows in the sky, played through her mind.

  But Ghassan certainly didn’t seem worried over the fate of a peri he’d never met. “When was this?”

  “About a decade ago,” Dara replied easily.

  Ghassan looked taken aback again. “A decade? Surely you don’t mean to say you spent the past fourteen centuries as an ifrit slave?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean to say.”

  The king pressed his fingers together, looking down his long nose. “Forgive me for speaking plainly, but I’ve known hardened warriors driven to gibbering madness by less than three centuries of slavery. What you’re suggesting . . . no man could survive it.”

  What? Ghassan’s dark words sent ice flooding into her veins. Dara’s life as a slave was the one thing she hadn’t pressed him on; he didn’t want to talk about it, and she didn’t want to think about the bloody memories she’d been forced to relive alongside him.

  “I didn’t say I survived it,” Dara corrected, his voice curt. “I remember almost nothing of my time as a slave. It’s difficult to be driven insane by memories you don’t have.”

  “Convenient,” Muntadhir muttered.

  “Quite,” Dara shot back. “For surely a—what did you say, a gibbering madman?—would have little patience for all this.”

  “And your life before you were a slave?”

  Nahri startled at the sound of a new voice. The younger prince, she realized; Alizayd, the one she’d mistaken for a guard.

  “Do you remember the war, Afshin?” he asked, in one of the coldest voices Nahri had ever heard. “The villages in Manzadar and Bayt Qadr?” Alizayd stared at Dara with open hostility, with a hatred that rivaled how Dara himself had looked upon the ifrit. “Do you remember Qui-zi?”

  At her side, Dara tensed. “I remember what your namesake did to my city when he took it.”

  “And we’ll leave it at that,” Ghassan cut in, throwing his youngest son a warning look. “The war is over, and our peoples are at peace. A thing you must have known, Afshin, to willingly bring a Nahid here.”

  “I assumed it was the safest place for her,” Dara said coolly. “Until I arrived to find an armed mob of shafit preparing to sack the Daeva Quarter.”

  “An internal matter,” Ghassan assured him. “Believe me, your people were never in any danger. Those arrested today will be thrown in the lake by week’s end.”

  Dara snorted, but the king remained impassive. Impressively so—Nahri sensed it took a lot to rattle Ghassan al Qahtani. She was not sure whether or not to be pleased by such a thing but decided to match his frankness. “What do you want?”

  He smiled—a true smile. “Loyalty. Pledge yourselves to me and swear to preserve the peace between our tribes.”

  “And in return?” Nahri asked, before Dara could speak.

  “I will declare you Banu Manizheh’s pureblooded daughter. Shafit appearance or not, none in Daevabad will dare question your origin once I speak on such a thing. You’ll have a home in the palace—your every material desire granted—and take your rightful place as Banu Nahida.” The king inclined his head toward Dara. “I will formally pardon your Afshin and grant him a pension and position commensurate with his rank. He may even continue to serve you should you wish.”

  Nahri checked her surprise. She could not imagine a better offer. Which of course made her distrust it. He was essentially asking for nothing, in return for givin
g her everything she could imagine wanting.

  Dara dropped his voice. “It’s a trick,” he warned in Divasti. “You will no sooner bend the knee to that sand fly than he will ask some—”

  “The sand fly speaks perfect Divasti,” Ghassan interrupted. “And does not require the bending of any knees. I am Geziri. My people don’t share your tribe’s love for overinflated ceremony. For me, your word is sufficient.”

  Nahri hesitated. She glanced again at the soldiers behind them. She and Dara were thoroughly outnumbered by the Royal Guard—not to mention the young prince clearly itching for a fight. However abhorrent the thought was to Dara, this was Ghassan’s city.

  And Nahri hadn’t survived this long without learning to recognize when she was outmatched. “You have my word,” she said.

  “Excellent. May God strike us both down if we break it.” Nahri flinched, but Ghassan only smiled. “And now that we have that unpleasantness behind us, may I be honest? You both look terrible. Banu Nahida, there appears to be a journey’s worth of blood on your clothes alone.”

  “I’m fine,” she insisted. “It’s not all mine.”

  Kaveh blanched, but the king laughed. “I do believe I am going to like you, Banu Nahri.” He studied her for another moment. “You said you were from the country of the Nile?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tatakallam arabi?”

  The king’s Arabic was rough but comprehensible. Surprised, she nonetheless replied, “Of course.”

  “I thought so. It is one of our liturgical languages.” Ghassan paused, looking thoughtful. “My Alizayd is a rather devoted student of it.” He nodded at the scowling young prince. “Ali, why don’t you escort Banu Nahri to the gardens?” He turned back to her. “You may relax, get cleaned up, have something to eat. Whatever you desire. I will have my daughter, Zaynab, keep you company. Your Afshin can stay behind to discuss our strategy with the ifrit. I suspect this isn’t the last we’ve heard from those demons.”

  “That isn’t necessary,” she protested. She wasn’t the only one. Alizayd pointed in Dara’s direction, a flurry of Geziriyya coming from his mouth.