“Then let it fall,” she screams. “We will have peace, finally—”

“The peace of the dead,” I say. Why does she not understand? “Can’t you feel it, Umber? The air isn’t right. Has the Nightbringer told you what he is doing? Has he shared his plan with you?”

“The Meherya need share nothing with us. He is our king. He freed us. And he will rid us of you and your kind, that we may live quietly in the Sher Jinnaat—”

“He is waking the Sea of Suffering,” I shout at her, because reason doesn’t appear to be working. “He seeks to gather every bit of pain and horror and loneliness we took from the dead and return it to the world. Do you think that when it wakes, it will have mercy on you because you are a jinn?”

“You know nothing of what we have suffered!”

I wrench her glaive from her and cast it to one side. “I will not kill you,” I say. “But your Meherya will. Look at me and know that I do not lie. If you let your king continue to reap souls, what he awakens will destroy us all.”

I step back and lower my blades, even as the battle edges closer. “Please,” I say. “Stop him. He might not realize what he is doing, what he is unleashing.”

“I would not go against my Meherya.” Umber shakes her head, a shudder rippling through her flames. “He understands what you do not, Soul Catcher. We are too broken. We can never go back to what we were before.”

“You are needed,” I say desperately. “Essential to the balance—”

“The balance!” Umber cries. “Who benefits the most from the balance, Soul Catcher? Mauth, who let our children die, but expects us to do his bidding? Your kind, who kill and maim and give us all of your pain to clean up? We held the balance for millennia, and look what it got us. If it is so important to you, then tell Mauth to find more humans to pass the ghosts.”

She streaks away, and the battle closes around me, too swift for me to escape. I cut through a knot of legionnaires. Not far from me, Darin, Spiro, and a group of Saif Tribespeople fight off a platoon of Keris’s soldiers.

I move to help them, but another battle surges in front of me, and I catch a flash of blonde streaking past, a silver mask and pale gray eyes lit with unholy fury.

My mother impales a Tribeswoman and an aux soldier with two slashes of one scim while taking the head off a Scholar with her other, moving so swiftly that one might think she was windwalking. Her skill is otherworldly and yet grounded in savagery that is deeply, uniquely human. Though I have seen her fight hundreds of times, I have never seen her like this.

At first, I’m certain she doesn’t spot me—that she is too deep in the battle.

Then she stops, and though all around us, men and women strive and die, we are trapped in a pocket of quiet. All my memories of her flood my mind at once, sharp words and whippings and her watching—always watching, more than I ever knew.

“Stay far from the Nightbringer, Ilyaas,” she cautions me, and I disappear back into a moment years ago, in a desert far to the west of here. Go back to the caravan, Ilyaas. Dark creatures walk the desert at night.

Before I can make sense of her warning—of her—she is gone, her scim crashing into that of a man a foot and a half taller than her and decades older. Her father. My grandfather.

“Go, boy,” Grandfather says. “She’s been waiting to fight me for years. I’ll not disappoint her. Not in this.”

Grandfather evades Keris’s first attack easily, though she moves twice as fast, and seems to anticipate her every stroke. His mouth is a grim slash, his body taut, but the shrewd self-assurance I’m used to seeing in his gaze is gone. Instead, he looks like a man haunted, a man wishing to be anywhere but where he is. Strength and the wiles of more than seventy years as a fighter might be enough to keep him alive against Keris.

Or they might not.

A scream turns my head, and I barely avoid a spear aimed at my heart. Shan knocks the attacker unconscious, and then he is swallowed up in the battle, and though I try to make my way toward him, the sheer mass of bodies is impossible to get through, even windwalking.

“Soul Catcher!”

Darin appears, panting and blood-streaked, Spiro at his back. “Where is Laia?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “She was on her way to the plateau—”

Darin glances over his shoulder toward the rocky promontory, but we cannot see anything from here.

“I know she doesn’t want us there.” He is frantic. “I promised I wouldn’t interfere. But everything feels wrong. There’s something coming—and she’s the only family I have left, Soul Catcher. I can’t just leave her alone.”

Laia feared he would do what older siblings do and put himself in danger to help her. I grab his shoulder, sensing his anguish—and his intent. “If you go after her, it might distract her. It’s the last thing she needs or wants, Darin. Please—”

My words are drowned out by the shriek of rock—Faaz hurling a giant boulder down upon the farthest reaches of our army. Keris’s forces roar in triumph as it digs a grave-deep runnel into the earth, taking out dozens of our soldiers with it.

The Martials and Scholars around Darin howl at the abrupt death of so many comrades, and attack Keris’s men with newfound strength, driving them back toward the edge of the escarpment. My battle rage rises, screaming at me to fight, to kill. War is your past. War is your present. War is your future. So Talis, the jinn, told me. And so it is. I give in to my wrath, my scims whipping through the men around me.

“Darin!” I call out, but he does not respond. Spiro Teluman is next to me, scanning the faces around him for his apprentice. But Darin has disappeared. Distantly, the Blood Shrike bellows orders, and Keris shouts in horrific triumph. The earth groans, a jinn-spawned temblor, and huge fissures open and swallow dozens of my troops. One of the catapults explodes as Faaz slings a boulder into it. Two more erupt in a roar of flame.

The air, already weighted with the cacophony of war, thickens, as if a thunderstorm is about to break.

Banu al-Mauth.

Mauth’s voice is so quiet, but it rings in my head like a bell.

Forgive me, Banu al-Mauth, he says. I have not the strength to stop him.

Oh bleeding, burning hells. A vision flashes in my head—Mauth’s foresight. A terrifying, hungry maw, spearing through Mauth’s barrier, erupting into the world.

“Mauth,” I whisper. “No.”

LX: The Blood Shrike

When I see Elias streaking for the woods where Laia disappeared, I know something is wrong.

I cannot go to him. I cannot even call out to him. Keris’s forces have killed half our bowmen, and Umber lights up our catapults with that damnable glaive of hers. All our attempts to stop the jinn have been met by their fey superiority. The Soul Catcher said the creatures have their limitations. He said they would grow weak as they poured their life forces into destroying us.