Ali suddenly knew what Sobek meant when he said the marid were connected. They were more than a family—they swam among one another’s minds and memories, intensely bonded with their kin and their waters, one foot in the physical world and another in the collective where the currents churned. Not all currents were the same. There were certain nodes, great waters where the marid met and shared memories, cavorted and birthed. A cold northern sea ringed with ice, and the warm, salty darkness at the bottom of the earth where Ali was now. A humid tropical waterfall surrounded by jungle and a riverine cave lit by glowing quartz.
A mist-shrouded lake. Deep and serene, perhaps the most sacred place they had. Ali saw it stolen, felt the air burn with choking, foreign smoke and fill with the cries of those of his people who were now trapped, who labored to build a city of dry stone and were crushed underfoot. He saw generations of cruelty before the daevas began to weaken and forget, and the marid fled, one by one.
He saw a daeva warrior on a chilly beach smash in the head of a screaming human acolyte. Watched the body burn, the lake burn, as the fiery-eyed man promised devastation and death. Ali felt sheer existential terror on a level he never had as his people tried to avoid a fate that seemed inevitable.
They will burn our waters. They will make us slaves.
Ali witnessed, through the eyes of an elder who’d been trapped in the molten crust of the lake since the days of Anahid, a young daeva man thrown to the waters. He was already dying, arrows through his throat and chest. A warrior, a gray-eyed youth whose blood didn’t have quite the same acrid taste as the rest of the daevas, but the marid elder didn’t think to worry about that. Here was a chance to rid themselves of the doom that seemed inescapable, to rid themselves of the Nahid’s champion who the peris whispered would destroy them all.
They seized it.
Sobek relaxed his grip, the torrent of memories fading as Ali drifted in the water.
“Do you understand now?” the Nile lord asked.
Yes, Ali replied. I understand.
38
DARA
“Wake up.”
Dara’s eyes shot open.
For a second, he didn’t understand where he was, or why the blackness he’d been dragged from was so encompassing, as though his very existence had briefly ceased. There was movement, the floor beneath him rumbling as though being wheeled over an uneven road. Above was a narrow silk-draped ceiling, patterned like those found in the palace carriages. A throbbing ache spiked from the relic clamped around his wrist …
The relic. The ring. Dara jerked up, reaching for his knife. “Lie down.”
He collapsed, the back of his skull slamming into the carriage floor.
There was an impressed whistle—Aeshma’s, he recognized—and then three people were leaning over his prone form, Manizheh and her two ifrit. Dara writhed against her control, twisting and clenching his hands, but he couldn’t remove himself from the ground.
“You did it.” Awe glittered in Aeshma’s fiery eyes when he turned his attention to Dara. “Have a nice sleep, Afshin?”
Dara had never felt such a violent need to murder someone. He dug his fingers into the wood. “I will kill you. I will rip out your fucking throat—”
“Enough.” At Manizheh’s command, the words died in his mouth. Dara hissed, wriggling once more against the invisible bonds holding him.
Vizaresh examined Dara’s cuff, tapping the relic and pressing a finger against the pulse in his wrist. Dara wanted to scream. He wanted to weep. To burn down the world and himself along with it. He thought he’d given everything to serve the Nahids, only to learn that there were still things they could take from him. The little freedom that remained. His agency. His very dignity as these vile creatures poked and prodded his body.
“He’s still alive,” Vizaresh said. “I thought we agreed you would kill him. The curse would have bonded better.” He sounded more fascinated than disappointed, though, and Dara chided himself for not paying more attention to Vizaresh’s obsession with new forms of magic. To the slave rings the ifrit wore around his neck. Of course he and Manizheh would have experimented together.
“He’s still my Afshin. I’m not going to kill him.” Manizheh looked on Dara with affection. “Indeed, I’m hoping at the end of all this, when our enemies are dead, and we finally have peace …” She smiled gently. “When you understand why I did this, I will grant you your freedom.”
Dara was too desperate not to beg. “Banu Nahida, please.”
“Be quiet and listen.”
His mouth snapped shut.
The furrowed line in her brow relaxed. “Better. Now, you have put me in a difficult position by meeting with Ghassan’s daughter. Not only did we miss an opportunity to arrest her, but the Creator only knows what stories she’s been spreading of your disloyalty. I cannot have that, Afshin. I cannot have the djinn whispering that my own general takes meetings behind my back. I need all of Daevabad to know your loyalty is mine alone. I need them to know what happens when they defy me.”
Dara struggled to peel himself off the floor, to scream. But all he could do was make a strangled sound of protest in the back of his throat.
A knife. A knife. If he could just get a knife, he could cut his throat. Puncture his lungs, his heart, slice off the
