An explosion cut through the air. Dara spun as a projectile zipped past his face, smelling rankly of iron and close enough to singe his hair. He cursed, tightening his knees around the conjured shedu as he doubled back, searching wildly for what had targeted him. He traced a glimpse of white smoke to a balcony on a multistoried stone building near the Grand Bazaar. Two shafit men were wrestling with a long metal barrel.
A gun, he recognized. Like the one Kaveh said had been used to slaughter their people during the Navasatem attacks. Perhaps the very same one. For as Dara soared over the main avenue, he finally spotted what remained of one of his people’s most cherished traditions.
The enormous chariots of the Navasatem parade lay where they’d been attacked, many reduced to half-burned husks. Broken brass horses, shattered mirror-and-glass ornaments, and the twisted remnants of a traveling grove of jeweled cherry trees, most of their gems and golden bark stripped away, littered the dusty ground. Food carts festooned with dirty streamers were abandoned, children’s toys spilling from a turned-over wagon.
Rage scorched through him—the hatred Dara carried for the djinn and shafit stoked so fast it was as though someone had thrown oil upon smoldering coals. The bodies of the murdered Daevas were gone, but Dara could still see shoes and blood-soaked patches where they’d been cut down as they celebrated their youth, parading merrily through the streets of their sacred city.
Cut down by weapons like the one the shafit had just tried to use on him.
In truth, Dara knew very little about guns. There had been nothing like them in the world during his mortal life, and he’d rarely crossed humans since he was resurrected, catching sight only once of a human hunter bringing down a tiger in the mountains. He’d been shocked by the damage the gun had done, disgusted to see it happen in what seemed like some type of competition.
Perhaps Dara should have been frightened by such astonishing technology. By a weapon whose implication he could scarcely grasp.
But Dara had never frightened easily, and as he watched the shafit who’d tried to shoot him attempt to load their weapon again, fumbling and shouting at one another as he flew at them, it was not fear he felt. What a shame their guns took so much time and effort. Not enough time to keep dozens of his Daevas from being murdered, but still.
Dara didn’t need time. Roaring as magic boiled in his veins and crackled through his fingers, he raised his hand and then clenched it into a fist.
The entire building crumbled to the ground.
Dara collapsed nearly as fast, the power exhausting him. That wasn’t magic he should have done in his mortal form, and it took every bit of strength he had to urge the shedu to keep flying. Breathing heavily, he glanced back. Dust rose from a new hole in the skyline.
His stomach twisted. There had probably been innocent people in that building too.
But there were going to be a lot more innocent people dead before this was over, and not just at Dara’s hands. The Creator only knew how many human weapons had been smuggled into Daevabad over the years. There might be things worse than guns, weapons his Daevas—with their careful segregation from anything human—would have no clue how to counter. And as the full danger took shape before him, the cold realization he’d had while watching Manizheh’s copper vapor creep over the frozen ground of northern Daevastana returned to him.
We will never have peace with them. And if Manizheh’s forces weren’t going to have peace with the Geziris and shafit, then they would remain a threat. And Manizheh clearly dealt with threats the same way the Geziri kings who’d ruined her life had.
She eliminated them.
But she can’t. Not without her abilities. There would be no magical plagues striking down djinn in Daevabad while Suleiman’s seal rested in the heart of a ring-bearer possibly on the other side of the world. Trepidation stole over Dara, the shedu slowing in response. For the next part of his mission was meant to put them on the road to recovering that very seal.
You are the weapon of the Nahids, Dara reminded himself at last. The protector of the Daevas.
And a good Afshin obeyed.
IT TOOK A LONG TIME TO CROSS THE LAKE, THE WATER vast and glimmering. No longer a deathly still pane of liquid glass, now currents danced and whirled over the surface, the water lapping thirstily at the shore like a parched dog. Dara eyed it with apprehension as he flew overhead, keeping his distance. The marid might have claimed they wanted nothing more to do with the Daevas after they aided Manizheh in her conquest, but Dara strongly suspected the Daevas had not seen the last of them.
But thoughts of the marid ebbed away as Dara passed the lake, flying out over the mountains. The mist that had once shrouded them was gone, the trees ending abruptly in a sandy waste, and where the threshold had stood was a stand of dying forest. Rot crept up the trees, bulbous growths swelling their papery, flaking bark. Dara breathed deep, tasting decay on the air.
He kept flying, soaring over the rushing Gozan, and then he saw them camped out on the dusty plain above the river: the travelers Kaveh said would be heading to Daevabad for Navasatem. The tourists and traders who but for a quirk of timing had been on the other side of the veil when magic fell. The travelers on whom so much hung in the balance right
