Ali straightened up, urging his zulfiqar to brighten once again. “My fire magic …”
“Suleiman’s curse doesn’t extend to this realm. You have the magic you were born with, fire and water together.” Sobek’s eyes met Ali’s. “It will not be enough.”
The darkness was condensing, churning. Shades of gray and midnight swirled into the black, rain falling from the unseen sky.
It’s no sky, Ali realized. It’s the sea itself. He was at the bottom of the world, in a fragile bubble of air and sand, beneath the crush of the ocean. The teal water was sloshing violently around his feet, tendrils licking up like hungry tongues. The ground gave a second great shake, as if the entire abandoned city had been caught in the current of a passing ship, and a towering marble column fell, knocking over a troop of stone soldiers like falling dominoes. There was another dart of fins, closer this time, and a gleaming, impossibly large curve of muscled flank.
Any hostility he felt for Sobek vanished. “Sobek,” he whispered. “What do I—”
“She likes to be entertained,” the Nile marid cut in, his voice urgent. He’d grabbed Ali’s wrist again, so hard that it hurt, holding him firmly at his side. “She thrives on chaos and passion and will take it at your expense if it strikes her whim. Make sure it does not.”
How do I do that? Ali wanted to ask. But he couldn’t open his mouth anymore, couldn’t make another sound. The darkness had split, crashing waves and storm clouds surrounding the ruined city like it was an island about to be devoured. Thunder boomed, shaking him to his bones as more rain lashed his face. The air smelled like blood, like salt, like the sweet scent of death. Lightning cracked across the oceanic horizon, illuminating a wild sprawl of sea creatures in the deep. Sharks and squids and eels, but also stranger things—armored fish, human-faced merpeople and sea dragons with multiple searching heads.
Ali didn’t care about any of them. For swimming forth was a colossus that made the vast city he’d wandered for days seem small.
Tiamat.
THE MARID MOTHER CAME TO HIM IN INCREASINGLY fearsome pieces, too massive and too daunting to look at all at once. A spiked tail like a massive club and horselike forelegs that ended in talons. What might have been an udder, weeping waterfalls, and armored plates jutting from her back like hazy mountains, obscured by rainy gloom. Her serpentine belly could have contained five of Daevabad’s palaces and was sheathed by brilliant scales that glistened like wet marble in a dazzling array of colors—the scales he’d seen covering the bottom of Daevabad’s lake and the pathways of the Grand Temple. Another crack of lightning revealed barnacle- and coral-encrusted wings, like an entire section of the seabed had risen. Tentacles wriggled and stretched from seemingly everywhere.
And her face … Oh, God. Ali had to look up and up, to where clouds and the sun would have been, had he not been in this hellish unknown realm. Her face was almost too terrible to behold, a leering skull that mixed the worst features of a lion and a dragon. Bull ears jutted over eyes like swirling typhoons, and jagged teeth that could have bitten a chunk out of Shefala filled a muzzle framed with more tentacles.
Tiamat wriggled and stretched, then opened her mouth as if to yawn, and the resulting screeching roar, like the break of tidal waves and the death cries of seabirds, would have sent Ali back to his knees if Sobek hadn’t been gripping his arm. Even so, Ali abruptly shut his eyes, a primal part of his brain unable to process what was before him and closing off in response.
Sobek’s claws dug into his flesh. “Look upon her,” the marid hissed in warning. “Control yourself. Make clear you come as kin, not as an offering.”
Ali was shaking. He didn’t feel like kin to anything down here. But he forced himself to obey, gazing again at her monstrous visage. A churning, rainy mist orbited around her head like a loyal moon—the monsoon marid, Ali recognized, Tiamat’s messenger.
A voice boomed in his head, and Ali clapped his hands over his ears.
My children, Tiamat said lazily. Her voice was a drawl and a hiss and a pounding in his blood. What trouble have you gotten yourselves into now?
The monsoon marid spun faster. Sobek! He has lied, disobeyed you once again!
“I have done no such thing,” the Nile marid growled.
No? Tiamat’s tail lashed the ground, encircling the flooded plain they stood upon. You were ordered to bring your kin to me once, and instead you devoured them yourself. Now my messenger says one survives, that he stands with a foot in each world and has endangered us all.
“I acted in good faith when you ordered the annihilation of my daeva kin. You all know I did,” Sobek said, glaring at the marid swarming the stormy water. “I am sure you have feasted upon the memory I gave you more than once. Any survivors in Daevabad would have been unseen to us all.” He raised his voice in a crocodile’s bellow. “You were fools to tangle with the daevas again! Their generation had forgotten us, had forgotten how Anahid the Conqueror used her ring against us. This new Nahid might have held it and never come for the waters. Instead, you acted rashly and empowered her champion!”
An eel-like creature with a turtle’s face surged forth from the water. An easy thing for a river lord safe in exile on the other side of the world to say. It snapped its beak. You have never borne the yoke of their servitude.
There is a simple enough way to learn the truth, Tiamat declared, and the eel creature instantly bowed low. Sobek may be cut
