Nasir didn’t think. Only reached for the hilt, looking up when Altair pulled it away.
“Always so eager,” he taunted. “We would be fools to face him now. Our efforts are better placed protecting the others.”
“He’s used far too much magic for a dose of dum sihr,” Nasir said with a frown. By all counts, the Lion would be winding down from a peak, needing to slit his palm and draw blood again.
“If only, brother. He’s armed with the si’lah heart. It’s inside him, as one with his body as it once was within the Sisters of Old.”
Inside him. As a heart was inside his mother, pumping magic into her blood. As half of his heart, and half of Altair’s. It was exactly as he’d feared but hadn’t had the words to express.
“I tried,” Altair said softly. The ground trembled and an earsplitting shriek made them both flinch. “We have to go. Let’s join the masses, shall we?”
He sheathed the dagger and gripped the boy’s arms, entering the fray with a quick “Yalla, habibi,” over his shoulder.
No, Nasir would never admit to missing the oaf. And yet he still wasn’t free of that moment yesterday when Altair had turned his back on him, because Nasir had lived a life wrought with deception. False smiles. Forged truths. Feigned love.
He stared as his half brother disappeared into the fleeing crowd, ignoring a swell of emotion when Altair turned back, noting Nasir’s absence with a furrowed brow followed by a jerk of his head. Yalla.
Nasir set his jaw. He had nothing left to lose.
He waited while the last of the people staggered out of the hall, one of them falling with a stave to his back, twitching and gasping until Nasir slit his throat to end his suffering. He stepped to the broken doorway of the banquet hall as the cold hand of death combed the growing silence.
Several high-ranking officials were soaked in crimson. The Zaramese wazir lay on her back, a stave through her heart. The Alder calipha’s pretentious abaya was now her death mantle. Loss stirred in his veins. Benyamin’s mother, the safi he had once believed to be his aunt. Gone. Immortality was a sham in the face of deliberate death.
Power once rested in their hands, wealth adorned every angle of their sight. None of them remembered the shroud has no pockets.
Nasir stopped just before turning away, stomach dropping at the sight of russet threads catching the light. Muzaffar. The merchant who would have turned Sarasin’s future.
His eyes were unseeing, his short beard doused in blood.
It was Nasir’s fault for mentioning the man to his father, for thinking it was truly Ghameq taking heed of his words and not the Lion, waiting to destroy his every hope.
Across the newly minted graveyard, Nasir’s eyes connected with the false king of Arawiya.
His father’s murderer. His mother’s ruination. The Lion had done it all with cunning and manipulation alone. What chance did they have now that magic was his, limitless and unchecked?
If the Lion was ruffled by Altair’s entrance, he hid it well—something else haunted his gaze. Yet he smiled as a horde of ifrit gathered to him. “See to our guests, my kin.”
One by one, they leaped to the open window and spilled into the night.
CHAPTER 57
Being rich and distinguished made no difference when people screamed. The endless corridors shrank, stifling and suffocating. The lit archways leading to the blue-black night were pinpricks in the distance, too far to offer any comfort as the stench of blood lifted bile to Zafira’s throat, sweat a sheen on her skin. She found Lana and tore her away from the Pelusians, her hand clammy in hers.
“Okhti?” Lana spoke loudly.
Skies, she was growing faint. Too many people. Too many smells.
“Breathe. We’re almost out.”
She nearly tripped on the sandals of the man in front of her and gave up, but at last they stumbled outside and Zafira doubled over, gulping down fresh air.
“Khara!” Lana yelped.
Zafira barely had the mind to reprimand her when she saw the dead body at her feet lit by the sconces along the wall enclosing the entirety of the courtyard. She snatched the man’s quiver and drew Lana to her side.
“I’m afraid the worst isn’t over yet,” Kifah said, joining them. Zafira followed her gaze to the hall window, where the chandelier swayed as ghosts of the dead snuffed out wick after oil wick. The gilded window frame outlined the dark forms of ifrit awaiting a command.
“Whoever broke that window needs to die,” Zafira groaned. She nocked an arrow into her bow. The arrows of the rich were less amenable than those of the poor, but how could she complain?
“That would be me,” said Kifah sheepishly. “Bleeding Guljul.”
Ifrit spilled into the courtyard. Zafira and Kifah put Lana behind them.
“What were you thinking?” Zafira shouted as shrieks filled the air.
“I thought we could climb our way out, but no one wanted to hitch their robes. Not even the daama men,” Kifah replied.
On the sandy stone of the courtyard, the ifrit billowed and wavered, too strange to look at too closely. Zafira remembered when, on Sharr, they had taken Yasmine’s form, then Baba’s, then Umm’s. She couldn’t decide which was worse, but she knew with utmost certainty that she was tired and weary and ready to lie down and take a nap. She wasn’t battle-hardened like the others. She was a hunter who gutted an animal and called it a day.
But what did the world care if one was ready for it or not? She took her place beside Kifah. Slowly, the rest of the Nine Elite did the same, hashashin and silver-liveried guards joining them. Even Lana picked up a sword.
As the first ifrit began racing toward them, she comforted herself with the thought that though she might not be ready for the world, though she might die this night, at least she wasn’t alone.
In moments, the courtyard fell to turmoil. The gates had yet to be unlocked, and panic built a suffocating dome around them. She paused with every shot, ensuring the arrow she fired was spiraling not toward a human, but an ifrit. A tedious task, for some of the wily soldiers shifted into men only to come up behind the susceptible and slit their throats.
Kifah cursed, and Zafira whirled to her. “Ghada. I have to—”
“Go,” Zafira said after a beat, and though she herself had said the word, it felt like a betrayal when Kifah rushed to her calipha and the Nine Elite. Zafira watched her leave, surprised to see Ghada herself battling ifrit with not one but two spears in her hands.
Then the ifrit disappeared.
All around her, people straightened in disbelief. A little ways away, Nasir rose from a crouch and Altair went perfectly still, a young boy at his side. A tremor shook the ground, loose stones rattling. Another tremor followed, and a third, almost like—
Footsteps.
“Okhti…，” Lana dragged out, fear high in her voice.
An unseen hand doused the sconces, leaving only the light of the shrouded moon. But it was enough to allow them to make out the towering form of a creature, winged and beastly. Made of the same shadows as the ifrit.
“What—” Zafira’s croak died in her throat.
“Elder ifrit,” someone nearby said. She caught a flash of a tattoo. A High Circle safi. “Far more difficult to command, likely why the Lion never summoned any before.”