The Empire of Gold Read online

  Until Manizheh’s conquest ripped that fabric to shreds. Daevabad was her home, her duty, and she’d torn out its heart. Which meant it was her responsibility to mend it.

  No matter the cost.

  She closed her eyes. Manizheh had not prayed since she’d watched two djinn scouts bleed out in the icy mud of northern Daevastana, dead at the hands of the poison she’d designed. She’d defended her plan to Dara; she’d gone forward with bringing an even worse wave of death to Daevabad. But she had not prayed through any of that. It felt like a link she had broken.

  And she knew the Creator would not help her now. She saw no alternative, only the path she’d forged and had to keep walking—even if there was nothing left of her by the time she finished.

  She made sure her voice was steady; Manizheh would not show the ifrit the wound he’d struck. “I can offer you her name. Her true one.

  “The name her father gave her.”

  PART ONE

  1

  NAHRI

  When Nahri was a very little girl, in the last orphans’ home that would take her, she met a storyteller.

  It had been Eid, a hot, chaotic day, but one of the few pleasant ones for children like her when Cairo’s better off were most inclined to look after the orphans whose welfare their faith preached. After she had feasted on sweets and stuffed butter cookies in new clothes—a pretty dress embroidered with blue lilies—the storyteller had appeared in the haze of sugar crashes and afternoon heat, and it wasn’t long before the children gathered around him had passed out, lulled into dreams of faraway lands and dashing adventures by his smooth voice.

  Nahri had not been lulled, however; she had been mesmerized, for tales of magical kingdoms and lost royal heirs were the exact fragile hopes a young girl with no name and no family might nurse in the hiddenmost corner of her heart. But the way the storyteller phrased it was confusing. Kan wa ma kan, he kept repeating when describing fantastical cities, mysterious djinn, and clever heroines. It was and it wasn’t. The tales seemed to exist between this world and another, between truth and lies, and it had driven Nahri mad with longing. She needed to know that they were real. To know that there might be a better place for her, a world in which the quiet things she did with her hands were normal.

  And so, she had pressed him. But was it real? she demanded. Did all that really happen?

  The storyteller had shrugged. Nahri could remember the rise of his shoulders, the twinkling of his eyes, no doubt amused by the young girl’s pluck. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.

  Nahri had persisted, reaching for the closest example she could find. Is it like the thing in your chest, then? The thing that looks like a crab around your lungs, that’s making you cough blood?

  His mouth had fallen open. God preserve me, he’d whispered in horror, while gasps rose from those who were listening. Tears filled his eyes. You cannot know that.

  She hadn’t been able to reply. The other adults had swiftly intervened, yanking her up by the arms so roughly they tore the sleeve of her new dress. It had been the last straw for the little girl who said such unnerving things, the girl who cried in her sleep in a language no one had ever heard and who showed no bruises or scrapes after being beaten by the other children. Nahri had been dragged out of the crumbling building still begging to know what she’d done wrong, stumbling to the dust in her holiday clothes and rising alone in the street as people celebrated with their families inside the kind of warm homes she’d never known.

  When the orphans’ home slammed its door behind her, Nahri had stopped believing in magic. Until years later, anyway, when a Daeva warrior came crashing to her feet among a tangle of tombs. But as Nahri stared now in utter incomprehension at Cairo’s familiar skyline, the Arabic words ran back through her memory.

  Kan wa ma kan.

  It was and it wasn’t.

  The storybook world of Daevabad was gone, replaced, and Cairo’s mosques and fortresses and old brick buildings were hazy in the distance, heat shimmering off the surrounding desert and flooded fields. She blinked and rubbed her eyes. The city was still there, as were the Pyramids, standing proud against the pale sky across the wide blue Nile.

  Egypt. I’m in Egypt. Nahri found herself pressing her knuckles against her temple, hard enough to hurt. Was this a dream?

  Or maybe Daevabad had been the dream. The nightmare. For surely it was more likely she was a human back in Cairo, a poor thief, a con artist taken in by her own scheme rather than someone who had lived the past six years as the future queen of a hidden kingdom of djinn.

  And that might have been a possibility, were it not for the wheezing, sweating, and still slightly glowing prince who stepped between Nahri and her view of the countryside. Not a dream, then—not unless she’d brought a piece of it back with her.

  “Nahri,” Ali whispered. His eyes were bloodshot and desperate, water beading down his face. “Nahri, please tell me I’m seeing things. Please tell me this isn’t what it looks like.”

  Still numb, Nahri glanced past his shoulder. She couldn’t look away from the Egyptian countryside, not after aching for it for so long. A warm breeze played through her hair, and a pair of sunbirds twittered as they climbed through a patch of thick brush that had swallowed a crumbling mudbrick building. It was flood season, a thing the inundated banks and water lapping at the roots of the palms made clear to any Egyptian in a moment.

  “It looks like home.” Her throat was horribly strained, her healing magic still blocked by Suleiman’s seal blazing on Ali’s cheek. “It looks like Egypt.”

  “We cannot be in Egypt!” Ali stepped back, falling heavily against the minaret’s crumbling inner wall. There was a feverish flush to his face, and hazy heat rose from his skin. “W-we were just in Daevabad. You pulled me off the wall … did you mean to—?”

  “No! I just wanted to get away from Manizheh. You said the curse was off the lake. I figured we’d swim back to shore, not rematerialize on the other side of the world!”

  “The other side of the world.” Ali’s voice was hollow. “Oh my God. Oh my God. We need to go back. We need to—” His words slipped into a pained hiss, one hand flying to his chest.

  “Ali?” She grabbed him by the shoulder. Closer now, Nahri could see that he didn’t just look upset—he looked sick, shivering and sweating more than a human in the death throes of tuberculosis.

  Her training took over. “Sit,” she ordered, helping him to the ground.

  Ali squeezed his eyes shut, pressing the back of his head into the wall. It looked like it was taking all his strength not to scream. “I think it’s the ring,” he gasped, pressing a fist to his chest—or to his heart rather, where Suleiman’s ring should now be resting, courtesy of Nahri’s sleight of hand back in Daevabad. “It burns.”

  “Let me see.” Nahri grabbed his hand—it was so hot it felt like plunging her own into a simmering kettle—and pried it away from his chest. The skin beneath looked completely normal. And without her magic, there was no examining further—Suleiman’s eight-pointed mark still blazed on Ali’s cheek, blocking her powers.

  Nahri swallowed back her fear. “It’s going to be okay,” she insisted. “Lift the seal. I’ll take the pain away and be able to better examine you.”

  Ali opened his eyes, bewilderment swirling into the pain in his expression. “Lift the seal?”

  “Yes, the seal, Ali,” Nahri repeated, fighting panic. “Suleiman’s seal. I can’t do any magic with it glowing on your face like that!”

  He took a deep breath, looking worse by the minute. “I … okay.” He glanced back at her, seeming to struggle to focus on her face. “How do I do that?”

  Nahri stared at him. “What do you mean, how? Your family has held the seal for centuries. Don’t you know?”

  “No. Only the emir is allowed—” Fresh grief ripped across Ali’s expression. “Oh God, Dhiru …”

  “Ali, please.”

  But already dazed as he was, the reminder of his brother’s death
seemed too much. Ali slumped against the wall, weeping in Geziriyya. Tears rolled down his cheeks, cutting paths through the dust and dried blood on his skin.

  The sound of birdsong came, a breeze rattling through the bristling palms towering over the broken mosque. Her own heart wanted to burst, the sweet relief of being home warring with the nightmarish events that had ended in the two of them appearing here.

  She sat back on her heels. Think, Nahri, think. She had to have a plan.

  But Nahri couldn’t think. Not when she could still smell the poisoned edge of Muntadhir’s blood and hear Manizheh cracking Ali’s bones.

  Not when she could see Dara’s green gaze, pleading from across the ruined palace corridor.

  Nahri took a deep breath. Magic. Just get your magic back, and this will all be better. She felt horribly vulnerable without her abilities, weak in a way she’d never been. Her entire body ached, the metallic smell of blood thick in her nose.

  “Ali.” She took his face in her hands, trying not to worry at the frighteningly unnatural—even for a djinn—heat in his clammy skin. She brushed the tears from his cheeks, forcing his bloodshot eyes to meet hers. “Just breathe. We’ll grieve him, we’ll grieve them all, I promise. But right now, we need to focus.” The wind had picked up, whipping her hair into her face. “Muntadhir told me it could take a few days to recover from possessing the ring,” she remembered. “Maybe this is normal.”

  Ali was shivering so hard it looked like he was seizing. His skin had taken on a grayish tone, his lips cracking. “I don’t think this is normal.” Steam was rising from his body in a humid cloud. “It wants you,” he whispered. “I can feel it.”

  “I-I couldn’t,” she stammered. “I couldn’t take it. You heard what Manizheh said about me being a shafit. If the ring had killed me, she would have murdered you and then taken it for herself. I couldn’t risk that!”

  As if in angry response, the seal blazed against his cheek. Where Ghassan’s mark had resembled a tattoo, blacker than night against his skin, Ali’s looked like it had been painted in quick-silver, the mercury color reflecting the sun’s light.

  He cried out as it flashed brighter. “Oh, God,” he gasped, fumbling for the blades at his waist—miraculously, Ali’s khanjar and zulfiqar had come through, belted at his stomach. “I need to get this out of me.”

  Nahri ripped the weapons away. “Are you mad? You can’t cut into your heart!”

  Ali didn’t respond. He suddenly didn’t look capable of responding. There was a vacant, lost glaze in his eyes that terrified her. It was a look Nahri associated with the infirmary, with patients brought to her too late.

  “Ali.” It was killing Nahri not to be able to simply lay hands upon him and take away his pain. “Please,” she begged. “Just try to lift the seal. I can’t help you like this!”

  His gaze briefly fixed on hers, and her heart dropped—Ali’s eyes were now so dilated the pupils had nearly overtaken the gray. He blinked, but there was nothing in his face that even indicated he’d understood her plea. God, why hadn’t she asked Muntadhir more about the seal? All he’d said was that it had to be cut out of Ghassan’s heart and burned, that it might take the new ringbearer a couple of days to recover, and that …

  And that it couldn’t leave Daevabad.

  Cold fear stole through her even as a hot breeze rushed across her skin. No, please, no. That couldn’t be why this was happening. It couldn’t be. Nahri hadn’t even asked Ali’s permission—he’d tried to jerk away, and she’d shoved the ring on his finger anyway. Too desperate to save him, she hadn’t cared what he thought.

  And now you might have killed him.

  A scorching wind blew her hair straight back, sand whipping past her face. One of the swaying trees across from the ruined mosque suddenly crashed to the ground, and Nahri jumped, realizing only then that the air had grown hotter, the wind picking up to howl around her.

  She glanced up.

  In the desert beyond the Nile, orange and green clouds were roiling across the pale sky. As Nahri watched, the river’s glistening brightness vanished, turning a dull gray as clouds overtook the gentle dawn. Sand swirled over the rocky ground, branches and leaves cartwheeling through the air.

  It looked like the storm that brought Dara. Once, that might have given Nahri comfort. Now she was terrified, shaking as she rose to her feet, Ali’s zulfiqar in her grip.

  With a howl, the sandy wind rushed forward. Nahri cried out, raising an arm to protect her face. But she needn’t have. Far from being lashed and torn to pieces, she blinked to find herself and Ali inside a churning funnel of sand, an eye of protection inside the storm.

  They weren’t alone.

  A darker shadow lurked, vanishing and reappearing with the movement of the wind before it landed on the edge of the broken minaret, like a predator who’d caught a mouse in a hole. The creature came to her in unbelievable pieces. A tawny, lithe body, muscles rippling beneath amber fur. Clawed paws the size of her head and a tail that cut the air like a scythe. Silver eyes set in a leonine face.

  And wings. Dazzling, iridescent wings in what seemed all the colors in the world. Nahri nearly dropped the zulfiqar, a startled gasp leaving her mouth. She’d seen renderings of the beast too many times to deny what was before her eyes.

  It was a shedu. The near-mythical winged lion her ancestors were said to have ridden into battle against the ifrit, one that remained their symbol long after the mysterious creatures themselves had vanished.

  Or so everyone thought. Because feline eyes were fixed on her now, seeming to search her face and size her up. She’d swear she saw a flicker of what might have been confusion. But also intelligence. Deep, undeniable intelligence.

  “Help me,” she begged, feeling half mad. “Please.”

  The shedu’s eyes narrowed. They were a silver so pale it edged on clear—the color of glittering ice—and they traveled over Nahri’s skin, taking in the zulfiqar in her hands and the injured prince at her feet. The mark on Ali’s temple.

  The creature ruffled its wings like a discontented bird, a rumbling growl coming from its throat.

  Nahri instantly tightened her grip on the zulfiqar, not that it would do much to protect them against such a magnificent beast.

  “Please,” she tried again. “I’m a Nahid. My magic isn’t working, and we need to get back to—”

  The shedu lunged.

  Nahri dropped to the ground, but the creature simply soared over her, its dazzling wings throwing the minaret into shadow. “Wait!” she cried as it vanished into the golden wave of sand. The storm was pulling away, rolling into itself. “Wait!”

  But it was already gone, dissipating like dust on the wind. In a moment, it was as if there had been no storm at all, the birds singing and the sky bright and blue.

  Ali let out a single sigh—a hush of breath like it was his last—and then crumpled to the ground.

  “Ali!” Nahri fell back to his side, shaking his shoulder. “Ali, wake up! Please wake up!” She checked his pulse, relief and despair warring inside her. He was still breathing, but the beat of his heart was wildly erratic.

  This is your fault. You put that ring on his hand. You pulled him into the lake. Nahri swallowed a sob. “You don’t get to die. Understand? I didn’t save your life a dozen times so you could leave me here.”

  Silence met her angry words. Nahri could shout all she liked. She still had no magic and no idea what to do next. She didn’t even know how they were here. Rising to her feet, she glanced at Cairo. She was no expert, but she’d guess it was a few hours distant by boat. Clustered closer to the city were more villages, surrounded by flooded fields and tiny boats gliding over the river.

  Nahri looked again at the broken mosque and what appeared to be a scorched pigeon coop. Cracked foundation stones outlined what might once have been homes along a meandering, overgrown path that led to the river. As her eyes traced the ruined village, a strange sense of familiarity danced over the nape of her neck.
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  Her gaze settled on the swollen Nile, Cairo shimmering in the distance across from the mighty Pyramids. There was no trace of the shedu, no hint of magic. Not in the air, nor in her blood.

  Its absence made her angry, and as she stared at the Pyramids—the mighty human monuments that had been ancient before Daevabad was even a dream—her anger only burned hotter. She wasn’t waiting around for the magical world to save her.

  Nahri had another world.

  ALI WAS EERILY LIGHT IN NAHRI’S ARMS, HIS SKIN scorching where it touched hers, as if half his presence had already burned away. It made it easier to drag the overly tall prince down from the minaret, but any relief Nahri might have felt was dashed by the awful suspicion that this was not a good sign.

  She eased him to the ground once they were out, taking a moment to catch her breath. Sweat dampened her forehead, and she straightened up, her spine cracking.

  Again came the unnerving sensation she’d been here before. Nahri glanced down the path, trying to let whatever teasing pieces of familiarity drifted through her mind settle, but they refused. The village looked like it had been razed and abandoned decades ago, the surrounding greenery well on its way to swallowing the buildings entirely.

  I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that of all the places in Egypt two fire-blooded djinn could have been magically whisked to, a creepy, burnt-down village was it.

  Throughly unsettled, Nahri picked Ali back up, following the path to the river as though she’d walked it a hundred times. Once she was there, she laid him along the shallows.

  The water instantly lapped forth, submerging the line of dried grass underneath Ali’s unconscious body. Before she could react, tiny rivulets were creeping over his limbs, racing across his hot skin like watery fingers. Nahri moved to pull him away, but then Ali sighed in his sleep, some of the pain leaving his expression.

  The marid did nothing to you, really? Nahri recalled Ali’s zulfiqar flying to him on a wave and the way he’d controlled the waterfall in the library to bring down the zahhak. Just what secrets was he still harboring about the marid’s possession?