“How many down?” the Shrike calls to Elias.

“Nearly two hundred on our side,” he says. “Perhaps a thousand on theirs.”

“We sent the messenger as you requested,” the Shrike says. “Keris sent the head back. Body tied to the horse.”

“Soul Catcher!” Rowan Goldgale materializes before us. “The Martials are here. The Nightbringer—”

Elias grabs the Blood Shrike, already drawing her scim for battle.

“Don’t give Keris an inch, Blood Shrike. She’ll have something up her sleeve. She always does.”

The Shrike smiles grimly. “And who is to say I don’t, Soul Catcher?”

He grins at her, that old Elias smile, and with that she is gone. The sky is alight, the jinn among us, raining down hell on the army, trying their best to destroy us before we can fight back.

Elias turns to me, but I shove him away. “Go,” I say. “Hold them off.”

“Laia—”

I leave him, because if I say goodbye, I am already giving in. I will see him again. I will.

The camp is madness now, but I am not afraid. For Umber could have taken me down, and she did not. The Nightbringer wants me for himself.

An old calm consumes me. The same calm I felt before I rescued Elias from execution, and before I broke into Kauf. The calm of delivering Livia’s child in the middle of a battle. A calm born of the knowledge that I am as ready as I can be.

I plunge into the trees west of the jinn grove and make my way up to a small plateau of rock that looks out over the Sher Jinnaat. The rock is impossible to miss. Especially for a jinn watching the battle from above.

When I reach the plateau, Rehmat’s gold glow appears before me.

“I am here, Laia.”

“Thank the skies for that,” I say to Rehmat. She comes around to stand in front of me, and there is something almost formal about how her hands are clasped before her. She tilts her head, a question offered without words.

I nod, and she flows into me, joining my consciousness so completely that it takes my breath away. I am her and she is me. And though I know this is the way it must be, though she limits herself to but a corner of my mind, I chafe against her presence. I hate having someone else in my head.

We move to the edge of the promontory and peer down. Keris’s army has reached the escarpment and hurtles up it. The first wave of soldiers is impaled on the pikes there, but the army is not held back for long.

Umber swoops into a dive, incinerating the pikes, and Keris’s Martials are through, throwing themselves at Elias’s forces.

My eyes sting as I watch. So many dead. Who they fight for does not matter, because we are all the same to the Nightbringer. He has manipulated us into hating each other. Into seeing the other side as he sees us. Not as humans, but as vermin, worthy only of slaughter.

But where is that creature? Nowhere to be seen, though his jinn wreak havoc.

Enough of this. Every second that passes means more people dead, which is exactly what he wants.

The scythe is heavy on my back. Too heavy. I unsheathe it. Wan light glints upon the black diamond blade before the sun disappears behind a cloud. Rain threatens, and I stare at the approaching storm. If only it would break upon us, for the jinn hate the wet. But the sky does not open.

“Come on then, you monster,” I hiss, hoping the wind will carry my words to him. “Come for me.”

“As it pleases you, Laia of Serra.”

That deep growling voice. The voice of my nightmares. The voice that has taken so much.

I turn and face the Nightbringer.

LIX: The Soul Catcher

 

The troops from Antium do not wish to fight. I see it in their eyes, feel in it their spirits as they lock shields to face Keris’s cavalry, roaring up the escarpment.

If I have my way, they won’t fight for long. But I must get to Umber. She is the Nightbringer’s second, commanding the other jinn in his absence. If I could get her to listen to me, we could end this madness.

The air grows heavy and strange. As if some unseen hand presses up from the earth, seeking to tear through it. The maelstrom, I fear, is close.

Umber streaks across the front of the escarpment, laughing as she incinerates the stakes we’ve laid to deter Keris’s troops. Our soldiers cry out first in anger, and then in fear as the ground rumbles and shakes beneath them—Faaz using his powers to throw them off balance.

“Rowan!”

The sand efrit and his kin are already streaking toward the jinn, and my army stands fast.

Protected by their armor and wielding spears of their own, our infantry hold the line, supported by volley after volley of arrows from a thousand Scholar bowmen behind them. I shudder at the death—brutal and unending. The screams of the wounded fill the air.

The catapults creak as the Blood Shrike unleashes her unusual missiles: giant blocks of salt. One of the jinn screams as a block gets too close, and plummets. A cheer rises up from our soldiers, but Umber wreaks havoc in revenge. She slips through the dozens of bowmen we have guarding one of the catapults, ignoring the salt-coated arrows that penetrate her flame form, and slices through the ropes to render the war machine inert.

As I windwalk to the front line, an old rage rises up in me, the battle wolf howling, baying for blood. My scims sing as I whip them from their scabbards, and I weave through the fighters as easily as if I am born of smoke. I could kill dozens if I wished. Hundreds.

But it is not the humans I want. And it is not killing that will help. I must reach Umber.

I find her on the far western side of the line, tearing into a tightly packed phalanx, swiping their shields aside. She shrugs off the arrows sticking out of her, and Spiro Teluman appears, sliding under her guard, his scim whipping toward her neck.

But it only glances across her fiery body before she twists her glaive and disarms him. She moves in for the kill, but I meet her this time, and the wood of her glaive glances off my scims.

“Usurper,” she hisses. “You have no place here. No place fighting beside them.”

“And you have no place murdering people who had nothing to do with your imprisonment.” I dart around her, drawing her toward the forest, where there are fewer soldiers. But even with my speed, she smashes her glaive into my arm. It would be a bone-shattering blow if not for Spiro’s armor. Umber roars and strikes out again, but I parry, catching her blade between my scims.

“Your kind are a pestilence.” She tries to yank her glaive away, but I do not let her. “One that must be eradicated.”

“It’s not just us that will be eradicated,” I tell her. “If the Nightbringer brings the Sea of Suffering into this world, everyone—everything—will die. Including you. The world will fall—”