Freedom's Slave

  I am Ghan Aisouri.

  Nalia wasn’t prepared for the feeling that washed over her as she entered the throne room. Memory after memory flowed through her—ceremonies, celebrations, special audiences with the empress. And then, of course, there was the coup. The last time Nalia had been in the throne room, a battle had been raging between the Ifrit and the Aisouri, gryphons ripping out throats left and right, chiaan everywhere and still it wasn’t enough, still the royals had been gunned down in a dark cell. The human weapons had echoed off the walls, deafening, terrifying. It was the first time Nalia had ever seen a gun. She could still hear the cries of the dead, as though the very stones had recorded them.

  As Nalia moved down the central aisle that led to the throne, it became apparent the room was much changed. She’d expected it to be different, of course, but it affected her more than she thought it would. The once-beautiful carvings of the Ghan Aisouri’s history had been defaced, with crude words and images over Nalia’s ancestors. Though the elegant mosaic ceilings that arced high above the marble floor were still intact, Calar had replaced the Aisouri throne with a sinister seat made of Ithkar’s volcanic rock, not unlike the one Nalia had been forced to sit on in the Cauldron.

  And then she saw the bottles.

  Nalia gasped, horrified. Hundreds of bottles lined shelves behind the throne, each one containing a jinni. It was so cruel, so twisted. All that pain and misery on display, the evidence of Calar’s sick mind.

  The jinn behind Nalia stared, silent, their collective chiaan heavy with sorrow.

  Raif gripped her hand tighter and she could feel his anguish through her skin. The jinn trapped in the bottles hadn’t noticed the arrival of Nalia and her small company. Part of her was terrified to stand before them. In the end, it was her fault they were there. Her fault the coup had happened at all.

  Nalia moved closer as she noticed that some of the bottles had gone dark, the jinn inside them still, some of them little more than a collection of bones. Dead. She stared at the darkened bottles, grief and fury spinning inside her. She wanted to sob, to rage at the gods, but she had no tears left with which to mourn the dead.

  Chiaan sparked at her fingertips, violet wisps of light that cut into the inky black that surrounded her.

  “We have to free them,” she said.

  “There’ll be time for that later,” Thatur argued.

  “No.” Nalia shook her head. “I will not stand by and let these jinn suffer for one moment longer. I serve the realm, not myself. We will free them.”

  Thatur sighed. “So it would seem that you no longer wish this to be a somewhat stealthy operation?”

  “Fuck stealth,” Raif said. “We’re here to free slaves. And these ones need freeing.”

  Pride surged through Nalia as she stood beside her husband, the first emperor of Arjinna. This was how she wanted to begin their rule—not with murdering a tyrant, but freeing her victims.

  They lifted their hands at the same time, and when Raif glanced at her, a slow smile spread across Nalia’s face.

  “Remember how we messed up all those cars in Malek’s garage?” she asked.

  He smiled. “Yeah.”

  “Let’s do that again.”

  Chiaan streamed from their fingertips and the bottles shattered, the walls of the jinn prisons falling away, freeing the captives inside. The throne room filled with their cries as they floated out of their bottles, full-sized jinn once more, their evanescence tumbling over the throne and into the cavernous room. The jinn were of all ages, most of them terribly ill. They stared at Nalia and the others, shell-shocked, just like the Brass Army had been when they’d been freed from their bottles in the Sahara.

  Nalia turned to the few Brass soldiers she’d allowed into the throne room. “Help them get out of here.”

  “My Empress—” Touma began, but Nalia held up her hand. “Our group will be large enough for one jinni. Please,” she said to the soldiers, “go.”

  Touma sighed, but bowed and stepped back to await further instruction. Soon the room was empty.

  “Where are all Calar’s guards?” Raif murmured. “I would have expected someone to come running at the sound.”

  “Gone, I suppose,” Nalia said.

  The entire Brass Army and what was left of the tavrai were stationed outside the palace, awaiting their signal. But there was no one to fight. So many jinn had been lost on the Godsnight, and the refugee camps in Ithkar were now full of former Ifrit soldiers who no longer claimed Calar as their empress.

  “I see you’ve been admiring my collection,” said a cold voice near the entrance to the empress’s private chambers.

  Nalia kept her hands raised as she turned to the jinni across the room. Pure white hair, blood-red lips, a sawala made of rich ruby and black velvet. The Amethyst Crown glinted atop her head. Nalia’s violet eyes met Calar’s crimson ones.

  This was the jinni who’d killed Nalia’s brother, butchered an entire caste, laid waste to her homeland. This was the jinni who grew powerful off the enslavement of hundreds of jinn, who frolicked with Mora and worshipped the darkness. The jinni who’d taken Kesmir from Taz.

  “Your collection,” Nalia said, “is no longer yours. And it never was.” Nalia smiled, the kind of smile that Malek would have approved of. The kind he gave to men just before he killed them. “Did it make you feel powerful, Calar, having those jinn behind you?” She remembered something Taz had told her about Calar that he’d learned from Kes. He’d called it her weak spot. “Did it turn you on, seeing their pain?”

  Calar’s eyes sparked. “When I kill you it will be slow, and excruciating, and I will love every second of it.”

  “You mean if you kill me,” Nalia said. She moved closer, feeling her training in every step, every move. She was a tiger about to leap, a dragon’s claw, a storm tamer.

  I am Ghan Aisouri.

  Calar’s hands flicked in the air above her, as though she were batting away a horde of flies. But there was nothing there.

  “I want my crown,” Nalia said, her voice even.

  Calar smiled. “Then come and get it.”

  Nalia threw her chiaan at Calar’s chest, the force of it knocking the Ifrit empress off her feet. Outside there were shouts and the sound of battle: Calar’s meager forces had finally realized the palace had been breached.

  Calar leaped to her feet, flames roaring toward Nalia, but Nalia flipped into the air, missing them by a hair’s breadth. Raif and Thatur flanked Nalia as she vaulted toward Calar, but the Ifrit empress was faster.

  She pulled the yaghin off her neck and held it up, triumphant. “Sahai!” she cried, putting her lips against it.

  Raif threw a swirling ball of chiaan at Calar, but it was too late. The shadows inside burst from the stone, a lightning-fast swarm that flew straight toward Nalia.

  49

  NALIA LAY SLUMPED AGAINST THE BASE OF THE THRONE. Her eyes fluttered open as Raif called her name. But he was so far away.

  Calar’s voice was louder, though, and came from the deepest recesses of Nalia’s mind: Come, Aisouri, let’s take a trip together.

  This time, Nalia didn’t push back when Calar forced herself into Nalia’s mind. She rode the wave of pain as though it were a fast-moving river that held Nalia in its blistering embrace, a current she could no longer fight. There was no here, no there, no boundaries. Just sensation and undulating light: pain, the light the color of her pain—blinding, searing red.

  Then: a room.

  No, the room. It slowly began to materialize around Nalia—the dungeon where Nalia and Calar had first met, when Nalia had watched her own mother torture the then-unknown Ifrit girl. Nalia remembered the way her mother had washed the blood off her hands, how the water turned pink.

  “Familiar, no?” Calar said.

  Nalia turned. The Ifrit empress stood behind her, wearing the same bloodied shift she’d worn that day, her face the same patchwork of bruises that Nalia’s mother had inflicted on the delicate jaw, t
he small nose. Calar was barefoot and somehow that simultaneously made her seem both vulnerable and more powerful, as though in exposing herself, she had no intention of holding anything back. Just like that day so long ago, she showed no fear. Calar stared at Nalia, her bloodred eyes hungry, calculating.

  Is this really happening? Nalia thought.

  Does it matter? Calar answered.

  There were so many levels to exist on—Nalia was familiar with these planes from her time in the Eye. Mindspace, dreamscape, memories of the past, visions of the future. She and Calar were suspended between the universe’s exhales.

  “I set you free,” Nalia said. Her voice echoed off the cell’s stones. “I don’t understand—why am I the person you hate the most?”

  “Because you thought it was enough,” Calar said. She threw back her head and laughed, then twirled as though she were at a ball. “You thought you were good, yes, and merciful. Kind Nalia lets bad Calar go.” Calar spit on the ground. “That’s what I think of your benevolence.”

  This time the pain Calar unleashed on Nalia’s mind was lacerating, as though every nerve ending that moored Nalia’s consciousness to her body were being severed. She must have passed out, because when she came to, her body was slumped in the chair Calar had been sitting in that fateful day. Her hands and feet were bound with iron chains, the metal weakening her, stealing her energy. The room faded in and out of focus. The walls had begun to ooze—when had that happened? Thick, black muck slowly sank to the floor and Calar danced in it, laughing. A fetid stench filled Nalia’s nose as the black poison came closer and she gagged.

  “I danced in your blood,” Calar sang out. “I danced and danced and danced.”

  The floor filled with blood and the room shuddered until it became, briefly, the room where Nalia had lain, riddled with bullets, under a pile of corpses. The chair Nalia had been tied to disappeared and she fled to a corner, as far away as possible from her Aisouri dead. Calar paid her no mind; it was as if Nalia weren’t even there.

  This isn’t real, Nalia tried to remind herself, but there was nothing to distinguish it from reality. The smell, gods, blood and shit and fear. Nalia trembled, watching in horror as Calar’s feet became stained red with blood.

  “I danced,” Calar sang, “and I danced and I dan—” Her voice cut off with a cry as the walls gave way to an endless plain scattered with obsidian and ash. Ithkar. The sky was filled with the noxious smoke the volcanos belched, but it was torn, as though someone had burned holes in it with the end of a very large cigarette.

  And suddenly it began to make sense, what was happening. Calar was losing her mind—it was fracturing, burning up—and she’d taken Nalia along for the ride. A year with shadow creatures that fed on chiaan would do that. They’d infiltrated her energy, infused it with their own deathly vapors.

  “This is your mind,” Nalia said, “not mine.” But Calar didn’t hear her.

  Nalia turned in a slow circle. How was she supposed to get out of here? Would she be trapped forever on this plane with Calar, waiting for the empress to die?

  Calar was digging at the ground with her bare hands, her fingers bloody. “Where is it?” Calar screamed, tears falling down her face. She gave a cry of delight when she found what she’d been looking for: a roughly made doll. She hugged it to her chest. The face had been badly burned.

  “They came in the night,” Calar said, her voice soft. “The Aisouri. Fire. So much fire.”

  The sky darkened and the air filled with screams. Nalia remembered this, too. She wished she didn’t.

  Flames, everywhere. A village filled with Ifrit who tried to outrun the violet chiaan aimed at them. Nalia and the other Aisouri sat on their gryphons. The elder Aisouri ran down women, children. The gryphons’ beaks filled with flesh and blood. Nalia could see herself in the farthest ring of Aisouri, sitting atop Thatur. She was only six summers old and her eyes were filled with terror.

  Calar—as an adult, Calar in the present—was standing before a burning home. “No!” she screamed. She dropped the doll and tried to enter the hovel, heedless of the inferno. The flames licked her skin, but she was Ifrit, so she did not burn. A gryphon reared up and knocked her down.

  Darkness.

  The scene was swept away, a wave of nothing crashing upon the shore of Calar’s memory.

  “Please, please, make it stop, Kes, make it stop,” she mumbled.

  In the distance a volcano erupted, its red lava startling. Calar stared at it, hungry. The smoke that wafted toward them took on the faint green hue of gaujuri. It enveloped them in a cloud every color of the rainbow. Calar lay on her back, arms outstretched, surrendering to the drug.

  “Thank you,” Calar whispered.

  The smoke cleared and Calar leaned over a crib, a dagger in her hand. Tears streamed down her face as she looked at the baby inside it. Yasri. Nalia froze; she couldn’t move as Calar raised the blade—and let it drop to the rug at her feet. She reached inside the crib and picked Yasri up, holding the child to her, kissing her over and over.

  “My baby,” she whispered. “My sweet one. I’ll never hurt you, I promise. Mama will never hurt you.”

  There was the sound of paper tearing, and Nalia and Calar were thrown from the room and into another.

  They were lying on a bed now, the curtains around the four posters tattered and blowing in a breeze. Nalia had never been inside the empress’s chambers, but she knew these must be her rooms. She recognized the intricately carved balcony, its recurring teardrop pattern. Soft candlelight filled the room, but the shadows in the corners writhed. Nalia lay beside Calar, no longer afraid of her.

  “Rohifsa, rohifsa,” a male voice whispered.

  Nalia scrambled out of the bed, blushing as Calar and a jinni with a scar covering one cheek began to make love, unaware of her presence. Nalia looked away, but not before she noticed the adoration in their eyes, his gentleness, how her head fit perfectly in the crook of his shoulder. It was the first time Calar seemed happy.

  Raif.

  She had to get back to him. Nalia ran to the balcony and stared up at the sky. The Three Widows beamed, all in different phases.

  Calar let out a bloodcurdling howl, and when Nalia turned she saw what Taz could only have imagined: Kesmir lay on the floor beside the bed, his lifeless eyes open, a dagger inches from his hand. He was covered in blood. Shadows descended upon his corpse, feeding on his chiaan. Calar stared, her mouth open in a frozen scream. The shadows lifted off the corpse, satiated. Calar fell to her knees and crawled to Kesmir.

  “Why?” she screamed. “Wake up.” She sobbed, her hands covered in his blood. “Kes, wake up!”

  But he didn’t and so she lay beside him, pulling him closer, holding him for the longest time. Then she raised her hand, and the flames that stood suspended in a corner of the room rushed to Kesmir, covering his body. Calar keeled over as she said the prayer of the dead.

  The sky began to melt then, like wax, and the balcony Nalia stood on fell away. Nalia screamed, and as she plummeted toward an unfathomable darkness, Calar tumbled past her, twisting in an invisible grip, eyes wide with terror. Nalia landed hard on the dungeon floor, pain shooting up her arm. She looked up. Calar was in the chair, bloodied, bruised.

  The beginning.

  The end.

  “Pretty Aisouri,” Calar trilled. She pulled against the iron chains that bound her hands and feet. Her eyes roved continually around the cell and a manic smile flitted across her face, then disappeared, like the sun passing behind clouds, then bursting out again. “Kill me. You want to. I know you do.”

  The walls began to crack, the openings between stones shot through with bright red light.

  Nalia stood before Calar, uncertain.

  This was the jinni who’d killed Bashil.

  Massacred Nalia’s entire race.

  Forced Nalia into slavery.

  Shut Nalia out of Arjinna once she was finally free.

  This was the tyrant who had destroyed t
he realm.

  If Calar lived, thousands more would die.

  “Kill me!” Calar screamed.

  Nalia’s jade dagger appeared between them. She leaned forward and picked it up, then stood before her enemy, uncertain. She’d made the wrong decision the last time. She could make the right decision now. Shadows slipped through the walls, silent witnesses. Nalia stepped forward. Stopped.

  Once again, she was filled with that same uncertainty that had made her choose to set Calar free, all those years ago. It was so unfair, all of it. Who would Calar be if the Aisouri hadn’t burned down her villages, if Kesmir’s love had been enough? Who would Calar be if she’d grown up in the palace, surrounded by beauty and privilege? And the darkness in her—wasn’t it in Nalia, too? It was the same thing that had drawn her to Malek, the same thing that had made her kill Jaqar in cold blood.

  “Do it!” Calar screamed. She closed her eyes, chanting in the old tongue. “Mora sahai mundeer. Mordam jal’la.”

  Mora wake my soul. Death, take me.

  “No,” Nalia said softly.

  There had been enough death. She wanted to build, heal, grow. The only way she could do that, the only way Nalia could truly serve Arjinna and its jinn, was if she was willing to kill the parts of her that wanted to gut Calar. The Aisouri who had been trained to hate and oppress, that jinni needed to die, too. Nalia knelt before Calar.

  “Dari ehakar mordam ne salaam,” she whispered in the old tongue.

  Sister in death as well as life.

  Nalia raised the knife, its point directed at her own chest.

  The room filled with song, faint at first, and then louder. Familiar. Calar went silent, her eyes filling with tears as shimmering light pure as snow fell through the ceiling, a cascade of glittering rain. The white phoenix swooped down and landed on Nalia’s shoulder.