“Why are you taking the ghosts?” I force myself to ignore Laia. “To strengthen your jinn? Yourself?”

“Not a single word for the woman you used to love,” the Nightbringer says. “And your kind think that I am cruel. Do you even remember those you’ve killed, boy? Or are there so many that their faces fade together? The latter, I think. That is how humans go through this life. Murdering and smashing and forgetting. But—” He looks at the city around him.

“I understand every death caused in service of my purpose. I do not take them lightly. Am I not kinder than you and your ilk, who cannot recall face or form of your foes? Your homes and lives and loves are built upon the graves of those you never even knew existed—”

Laia, who hangs limply from the Nightbringer’s hand, suddenly comes to life. Her chains go flying toward Umber, who screams when they touch her. I expect Laia to disappear. To escape.

Instead, she lunges for the Nightbringer.

For a moment, they tumble back in a tangle of shadow and flesh. But when he rises, he has Laia’s wrists caught in one of his hands.

“You cannot kill me, girl,” he sneers at her. “Have you not learned?”

“So everyone keeps saying,” Laia gasps, glaring at him, at the other jinn. “But you are all monsters. And monsters have weaknesses.”

“Monsters?” He twists her around until she faces me. “There stands a monster. Walking through a city burning, ignoring the screams of his own kind. Without a care for anything but his precious ghosts. He will not mourn you if I kill you slowly.”

“Can’t kill me,” she gasps. “Star—”

“Perhaps I’ve overcome that little hiccup,” the Nightbringer says. “What of it, Soul Catcher? Would you like another ghost for your kingdom? Or maybe I will reap her soul too. Would you let her die, knowing her spirit will never cross the river?”

My attention flicks again to what’s happening behind the Nightbringer. The girl thrashes, clawing at him.

But she’s not “the girl.” Cain made sure she never would be again.

If she let herself be cowed, I could look away. Instead she defies the Nightbringer, kicking and fighting even as he squeezes the life out of her.

A memory surfaces—a day long ago at Blackcliff, the first time we saw each other. Skies, the determination in her, the life. Even then, she was an ember ever burning, no matter how much the world tried to quench her fire.

Our eyes meet.

Walk away, Soul Catcher, I tell myself. Look to the jinn behind the Nightbringer. Figure out what he is doing. Save the spirits from whatever skies-awful fate he is inflicting upon them.

Walk away.

But for a moment, just a moment, the wrathful, imprisoned part of me, the old me, breaks free.

And I cannot walk away.

XXV: The Blood Shrike

The dark stone tunnels beneath Antium are laid out in a grid, meant to allow ease of movement when the weather is wretched. If you know the tunnels, traversing them is child’s play.

For me, they are a nightmare, stinking of mold and death, littered with the detritus of our flight from Antium months ago. Clothes and shoes. Blankets and heirlooms. And now my blood, a trail of it that any tracker could follow.

My ragged breathing is punctuated by the occasional skittering of rodents, their eyes flashing in the dark from afar. Move. Keep moving. I drag myself across the damp rock for hours. Pick my way through an unending reminder of what the Karkauns did to us.

No, I think. What we did to ourselves.

When the blood has all drained out of me, when I know that my healing power will not save me, I stop. My torch has burned down to almost nothing. You are a torch against the night—if you dare to let yourself burn. Cain said that to me.

Only it’s not true any longer. The Augurs are gone. There is no light in this place. Only my pathetic life, finally at its end, and everyone and everything we left behind.

I wait for pursuit but it does not come. I wish it would. I wish the Karkauns would just kill me quickly.

My eyes adjust to the darkness, and I realize I am staring into the face of a skeleton. It is picked clean, for there is life in these tunnels even if it isn’t human.

The skeleton is not large. A child, a wooden horse clutched in his shriveled hands. Injured in the attack and left here, perhaps. Or maybe separated from family and abandoned to fend for himself.

The horse appears to stare back at me. It reminds me of something. As I am waiting to die, I might as well try to remember. It feels important, suddenly. Where have I seen that horse before?

I haven’t, I realize. But I saw one like it. Long ago, after Marcus ordered me to hunt Elias, and Cain took me to the ashes of an Illustrian home. He told me a story of a family who lived there. A boy. What the bleeding hells was his name? Remember. He deserves to be remembered.

But it is the Scholar slave who I remember—Siyyad. He carved the horse for the boy because he loved him like a son. And he went back for the boy, though it cost him his life.

I cannot remember the child’s name, though. And I won’t ever know this child’s name either. Is it a Scholar child? A Martial? A Mariner or a Tribal child, caught in the chaos?

It doesn’t matter. The knowledge rolls over me like an ocean wave after an earth tremor, ruthless and unending. It doesn’t matter because it was a life cut down too early. Even if he was a Karkaun child, he would still be worth mourning, because at this age, he would have been tender and soft, not yet molded by the violence of his elders.

Whoever he was, he did not deserve any of this. Adults brought this upon him. I brought this upon him. The Commandant. All of us striving for power and control, and destroying any who got in the way.

Laia of Serra knows this. Of course she does, for she has lived it. All her pent-up rage at what was done to her people—and I never understood it until now. I thought I served a great cause: protecting the Empire. But all I did was protect people who were never in any danger.

Maybe this is what Elias learned from Mamie and her stories. The ones where I never understood who the villain was and who the hero was. Maybe all of us need more stories like hers.

“S-s-sorry,” I whisper to the skeleton. “I’m so sorry.”

Skies, I hurt so many. And I only realize it now, at the end, when I am a torch no more, but an ember with no air, the great dark closing in forever.

Too late to say sorry, Helene. I think my own name for the first time in months. Too late to fix anything.

At least I saved Harper. At least he did not come with me. I let myself drift in thoughts of our kiss. It was months ago, but I remember every second. How he tasted of cinnamon, and how his eyes fell closed as he pulled me toward him, and how—

Ping. Ping. Ping.

The sound jars me from my thoughts, and I stare at the skeleton, listening. Greetings, Death, I think, and strangely, it is a relief. You come to claim me at last.

But all is silent, until, after a few minutes—

Ping. Ping. Ping.

I let myself drift into the dark. I want sleep now. I want to fall away with thoughts of Avitas Harper in my mind.

Ping. Ping. Ping.

What the bleeding hells is that noise? I try to turn, but I cannot. And then in the darkness, a voice.

“Rise, Blood Shrike, for your people have need of you yet. Loyal to the end, remember?”

“F-father?”

“Father and mother. Sister and brother and friend. Rise.”

Hands come under my arms, lift me to my feet, but when I turn to look, there is no one there, and I think perhaps there were no hands. I stagger forward, leaning against the wall, one tiny step at a time.

Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping.

That was four. The last few were only three. There’s a rhythm to the sound too, like music. Like something only a human could make.

It could be the caves. When I came here before the siege on Antium, I heard a sound just like this one. Just the caves singing their stories, Cain had said.

If that’s a song, what the bleeding skies is it saying? It won’t stop and it keeps changing. I just want to die, but it won’t let me.

“That’s it,” the voice that spoke before says. “Keep going. Find that sound.”

Soon, the sound is not a ping but something deeper, like the ringing of a bell. But no—it is too flat and short to be a bell. It is not joyous or gentle like a bell. It is cold and hard. Like me.

Ahead, I make out light and drag myself toward it, my vision clearing. The light grows brighter until I stumble into a room lit with torches and hot from an unnaturally blue-green fire. It burns in a furnace that creates no smoke.

PING. PING. PING.

A man I’ve never seen before looks up from an anvil. His head is shaved, and his dark skin is covered in tattoos. He is perhaps a decade older than me. In one hand, he holds a hammer, and in the other, a helmet that glows with a strange, silvery light.

“Blood Shrike.” The man appears entirely unsurprised as he walks to me, puts an arm around me, and helps me to a bed in the corner. “I’m Spiro Teluman. I have been waiting for you.”

XXVI: Laia