“Did they live here?” Ali asked, remembering what his grandfather had said about their family’s early history being a blank slate.
“For a time. But they moved frequently, especially the first generations. Their water magic was impossible to hide then, and your world was chaos for centuries after Suleiman’s punishment. My kin were careful.” Bitterness edged into his voice. “Until they were not.”
Ali tensed, but when Sobek submerged with a wave of his hand, Ali followed. The murky river was no trouble for his senses now; he could see clear as day, his ears picking up new underwater sounds he hadn’t been privy to earlier. He swam faster, easily keeping pace with Sobek as they dove beneath the curtain of waterfalls to emerge in a hidden cave. It had been enlarged, with benches cut into the stone and pictograms carved into the walls.
Ali traced the image of a man with a crocodile’s head. “Is this you?”
“Yes.” Sobek laid a palm against the hand-drawn letters, and if his expression betrayed nothing, Ali could see wistfulness in the gesture. “It is our history. Their names, the deeds I did for them. Our pact.”
Ali stared at the pictograms. “They mean nothing to me,” he confessed, a great loss opening inside his chest. “They don’t look like any Ayaanle script I know—they don’t look like any script I’ve ever seen. Their language may have been forgotten.” He could hear the ache in his voice. It shook him to think how thoroughly severed his family had been from its roots.
“That may have been intentional on the part of the survivors. Ignorance weakens the bond. It is more difficult to hold someone to a pact they had no part in making.”
Ali felt sick all over again. “Why did you kill them?” He had to know. “Tiamat said she ordered them brought before her. So why did you kill them?”
Sobek had crossed to the rocky wall, moving stones from a cairn set against it. “Tiamat and I have long been rivals. We both hail from the original generation of our kind, and I was not always keen to pay her obeisance, especially when she abandoned the lake and turned her back on those of our people forced to toil for the Nahids.” He pulled a bundle free.
“I don’t understand,” Ali said.
The marid returned, leaving a trail like a serpent across the damp sand. “You saw how she is. I was not going to give her my kin. She would have spent a thousand years slowly torturing them to death. It was more merciful—more swift—to handle them myself.”
More merciful. “Could you not have tried to save them? Warned them to run to the desert, spared the children?”
“That is not our way.” There was no malice in Sobek’s voice. It was the simple truth of a creature from a time and place Ali didn’t and would never understand. “They had a pact. They betrayed it.”
They saved us and were destroyed for it. Ali tried to imagine what might have happened if his Ayaanle ancestor had taken Suleiman’s seal away from Daevabad after the Nahid Council had been overthrown, magic vanishing with Zaydi’s victory. People would have thought it God’s revenge for rebelling against the Nahids, for daring to call for equality. The shafit probably would have been wiped out, the resulting civil war lasting centuries.
We do not cross the Ayaanle. Six words the only memory of a sacrifice that had decimated the half of his family Ali had grown up dismissing.
“What was his name?” he asked, his voice thick with emotion. “The name of my ancestor who betrayed you?”
There was a moment of silence before Sobek replied. “Armah.” He pronounced the name with somber respect. “He was talented with my magic. The first in many generations to be able to travel the currents and share memories.” Irritation slipped into his voice. “Apparently talented enough to keep me from realizing that he left a child or two in Daevabad.”
Armah. Ali committed the name to memory. He would pray for his murdered and martyred ancestors later, and if he survived all this, he’d make sure the rest of his family and their next generations did so as well.
But first he would fight. “What is that?” he asked, nodding at the bundle Sobek held.
“His vestments. I made them myself. You are mortal still, and they will protect you when you travel the currents.”
Ali took the vestments. A cross between clothing and armor, they looked like they were spun from crocodile hide and burnished to a pale green-gold. One was a flat, hooded helmet that trailed down the back and the other a sleeveless tunic, knee length and split down the middle.
He ran his fingers over the helmet and then noticed Sobek held something else—something more to Ali’s taste. “Is that his blade?”
“Yes,” Sobek grunted, handing it over.
Ali took it and admired the weapon: a long sickle-sword unlike anything he’d fought with before. The blade was iron and wickedly sharp, the hilt covered with polished bronze.
“You’ve preserved this,” Ali realized. This sword had not been abandoned in a rocky cairn, untouched for centuries. “You say he betrayed you and deserved death, yet you’ve kept safe his vestments and weapon.” He hesitated, then asked another question, one that had been spinning in his mind since their match. “Back in Tiamat’s realm, you stopped fighting me. Why?”
Sobek gave him an even stare. “I am sure you are mistaken.”
Ali held his ancestor’s gaze. In the pale light of the cave, Sobek looked as frightening and mystical as ever, the falling water throwing undulating shadows across his stern face. He looked untouchable.
But he wasn’t. Ali had seen Sobek’s memories and felt those long, lonely centuries—a toll of time and miserable solitude Ali could barely wrap his head around. Perhaps keeping himself apart was how the Nile marid survived it.
They weren’t the same.
