“Lower your weapons,” I call out to the Tribesmen, many of whom have never met him. “Skies, he’s the one who made them!”

My brother weaves through them and envelops me in a bear hug. I do not let him go, even when he tries to put me down. My brother. My blood. The only blood I have left in this world. I find that I am sobbing, and when I finally break away, his face is wet too.

“Thank the skies you’re all right,” he says. “I tried to tell you I was coming, but you didn’t let me get a word in edgewise when we spoke. The Shrike sent half a legion with me, to help the Tribes fight Keris. Most of them are a few miles away. The last we heard, Aish had fallen.”

“So much has happened since then.” I do not know where to begin. “What matters is that I have the scythe. I can kill him, Darin. But we cannot find him or his bleeding army. We think they’re here in the Tribal lands. Probably using fey magic to hide. We just need to get to them.”

Darin glances at the Martial commander with him—Jans, the Blood Shrike’s uncle. Something passes between them.

“That will be harder than you think, Laia,” Darin finally says. “Keris sent a massive force east. Three hundred ships. They left Navium when the rest of her forces were marching on Nur.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. “Keris was here—I saw her—”

“Not anymore. She and the Nightbringer are laying siege to Marinn. Laia—they’re a thousand miles away.”

XLVI: The Soul Catcher

For long days and nights, I am at peace as I haven’t been since I first merged with Mauth. Spring eludes the Waiting Place, but the vicious bite of winter has finally eased, and I spend my time passing the ghosts.

It is not easy. For the rot near the river has spread, and the ghosts do not wish to pass. But when I worry, the gentle sweep of Mauth’s magic eases it away. There is a rightness to this work. A clarity.

But that changes one night when I enter my cabin and knock something off a small table by the door. It hits the ground hard and bounces toward the fireplace. I stare at it, perplexed. It is a half-carved armlet—but where is it from? I should remember—I need to remember.

Laia.

Her name bursts in my head like a firework. The memories that Cain returned to me come back all at once—along with everything that happened since then. Laia was injured in Nur. Is she all right now? Afya and Mamie would have taken care of her, but—

A slow tide of magic sweeps through my mind. My worry fades. My memories fade.

No! a voice screams in my head. Remember!

I stumble back out the door of the cabin, the armlet clutched in my hand. From the trees, a ghost watches me.

“You’re back,” Karinna whispers. “You were gone a long time, little one.”

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I was . . .” Remember, the voice in me screams. But what does it want me to remember?

“You’ve seen what’s coming,” Karinna says. “The maelstrom. I smell the knowledge on you. And yet you do nothing. What if it hurts my lovey? You told me she was out there, still alive. What if the maelstrom destroys her?”

Maelstrom. Hunger. Darkness. Suffering.

The Nightbringer. I drag the name out of the molasses that Mauth has made of my brain. The Nightbringer is waking something up. Something he cannot control. He is using ghosts to strengthen it so it can break through Mauth’s protections and destroy the human world.

“What you see cannot come to pass,” Karinna says. “It will hurt my lovey. I can feel it. You must stop it.”

“How?” That tide of forgetting is upon me, Mauth manipulating my mind, but this time, I resist it.

“Yes.” Karinna nods. “Fight him. Fight for my lovey. Fight for those who live.”

“Mauth!” I call out. He ignores me, yet again.

Or perhaps, I realize with a sudden flash of intuition, he cannot hear me. I keep expecting Mauth to respond to my call. But he battles the Nightbringer endlessly. In the midst of a fight, I might not hear my own name called from beside me, let alone from another dimension.

I drop to my haunches beside my cabin. For long minutes, I keep my eyes closed and do not move. Instead, I feel out the magic, imagining it as Cain showed it to me, thick gold ropes that bind this place together. The image falls apart in my mind over and over. Each time, I rebuild it, rope by rope, until I feel as if I have the whole of the Waiting Place in my mind.

Then, like I did with the Nightbringer, I throw myself at it. At first, the image shudders and flickers, as if about to come apart. No, damn you—

Then the oddest sensation grips me, like some enormous hand has dragged me into the bowels of the earth itself. I see my body, kneeling in the world of the living.

But my consciousness is not there. Instead I am pulled down through the web of magic, and I emerge onto a rocky promontory beneath a pale yellow sky. The promontory stretches behind me, lost in fog. A savage ocean tosses below, the waves so massive that they defy understanding. I have a body—or a semblance of one, but it is more a suggestion than anything solid.

When I attacked the Nightbringer’s mind, I was seeing this very place, this dimension, from his perspective. The jinn lord sees Mauth as the wall between himself and vengeance. Now I see Mauth’s dimension from my own perspective.

Along the horizon, a familiar, man-like form approaches.

Soul Catcher, Mauth says. You do not belong here. Return.

“There’s something wrong with the Waiting Place,” I tell him. “I’ve tried to tell you—”

I fight wars you have no concept of, child. Return.

“The Nightbringer siphons souls from the living.”

I know the sins of my son. They are no concern of yours. I have given you enough of my magic to uphold the wall. To aid the ghosts. Go then, and pass them on. You have spent too much time away.

I must break through to him. But how? I speak to Death itself. I am an ant, waving my feelers, attempting to get the attention of the universe.

“There are no ghosts,” I say. “The Nightbringer has taken them all. Only a few remain, and those will not pass, for they sense only a great evil awaiting them on the other side.”

A long silence.

Speak.

I tell him of the rot along the River Dusk and the ghosts’ fear. I tell him of the Nightbringer’s war, how he has used Maro to steal souls. I tell Mauth what I saw when I entered the Nightbringer’s mind.

“How can you not know this?” I say. “How—how can you not see?”

I am not of fire or clay, Banu al-Mauth, he says. The minutiae of your human lives is beneath me. It must be, else I would be mired in it.

A sigh gusts out of him, and his magic weakens.

To my folly. The Nightbringer’s wrath is unending. I did not know. As you see my dimension in one way, I see yours in another.

A universe, I realize, trying to understand the world of the ant.

I believed the jinn needed to be freed and returned to their duty. That is the purpose for which I created them. I did not understand the depth of their pain. Nor did I understand the Nightbringer’s fury. Thus I battle him, and I fear I am losing.

“How can you lose against him?” I ask. “You are Death.”

If you underestimate the spider, Banu al-Mauth, it can bite. And if its bite is poison, it can kill. So it is with the Nightbringer. He knows where to bite. And he is riven with poison.

“Why can you not take the magic from him as you took it from me?” I say.

The magic you use to pass the ghosts and hold the wall is an extension of my own. You borrow it. Nothing more. Your windwalking, however, was a gift. I cannot take it away. When I created the Meherya, I gifted him all of my magic. What I have given I cannot take back. Even Death has rules.

“He wants to release the Sea of Suffering. Destroy all life,” I say. “I could stop him. And I think I can remind the jinn of their duty. Bring them back into the fold. But I have to be able to leave the Waiting Place. I cannot be trapped there.”

Mauth appears to stare down at the roiling ocean. Tell me your vow.

“To light the way for the weak, the weary, the fallen, and the forgotten in the darkness that follows death.”

Then that is what you must do. The balance must be restored. If this means leaving the Waiting Place, so be it. But hold to your duty, Banu al-Mauth. Memory will make you weak. And emotion will not serve you well.

Even as he says it, numbness steals over me. But this time, something in me bucks wildly against it.

“If Cain hadn’t put memories of Laia and Helene and Keris back inside me,” I say, “I never would have left the Waiting Place. I never would have realized what the Nightbringer is doing. I need my memories. I need my emotion.” I think of Laia and what she’s been trying to tell me for weeks. “I cannot inspire humans to fight if I’m not one myself.”