But I cannot make sense of the shimmer they are chasing. I only know that if it’s running from the wraiths, then we share a common enemy.

“You have to behead them,” I tell Harper, but he’s already charged forward, his scim flashing as he slices through one of the wraiths. It screams, and the sound is followed by another.

Then they are upon me, their spectral hands reaching out. One closes its fingers on my throat, and cold lances into me.

“Not today,” I snarl at it before wrenching away and slicing off its head. The last two rush me, but they are sloppy—panicked. Their screams still linger in my ears when I turn to the shimmer in the air, which is not a shimmer at all, but a cloud of glittering sand, roughly man-shaped and clearly in distress.

“Peace, Blood Shrike,” the efrit whispers, and though I feel as though I must heal it, I realize that I cannot sing for it. Sand efrits hate songs.

“I bring a message,” it says. “From Laia of Serra. A message Keris did not wish you to hear.”

“How do I know I can trust you?”

“Laia said you should ask this question of me: What were Marcus Farrar’s last words?”

Laia is the only person with whom I shared that detail, one night a few months ago, when neither of us could sleep.

“Very well,” I say. “What were Marcus Farrar’s last words?”

“‘Please, Shrike.’ Satisfied?” At my nod, the efrit goes on. “The Nightbringer sought to draw the Soul Catcher’s army to Marinn. Instead, the Soul Catcher moves his forces toward the City of the Jinn, in the Waiting Place. There, they hope to lure the Nightbringer and finish him for good. But—but—” The efrit’s breathing grows labored. It has seconds, if that. “They cannot do it alone.”

“I can’t possibly march an army—”

“Laia of Serra said something else.” The efrit’s sand grows dull, its light fading. “Strive even unto your own end, else all is lost—”

The efrit’s words trail off. Between one breath and the next, he is gone, his sand form disappearing in the wind.

Thank the skies Harper tends toward silence, because it gives me a moment to piece it all together. The Commandant left the south open because she wanted me to attack. Because if I’m focused on Silas, I cannot help the one person who can destroy her master.

“Shrike,” Harper finally says. “We need to leave. It’s getting colder. The river will freeze, and we won’t be able to sail south.”

“Let it freeze,” I tell him. “Today, we do not sail. Today, we march.”

Part IV

   The Sher Jinnaat

LI: The Nightbringer

For years, I raged. Villages burned. Caravans disappeared. Families murdered. But in the end, there were too many humans. I annihilated thousands, yet when I turned, I would find hundreds more.

Vengeance would take years. Centuries. And I could not do it alone. I needed to prey on humanity’s worst traits. Tribalism. Prejudice. Greed. And while I pitted them against each other, I needed to reconstitute the Star, a far more difficult task. For it had shattered, its pieces scattered to the winds. Each piece had to be hunted down. Each returned to me in love.

The first human I ever loved was a Scholar. Husani of Nava—what would later become Navium. She wore the shard of the Star as a necklace, fashioned by her late husband. Her child died of a fever when she had only just learned to speak. So I came to her as an orphan, red-haired and brown-eyed, grappling with my own pain. She called me her son and named me Roshan.

Light.

My presence filled a hole within her. She loved me instantly.

It took me longer to love her. Though I lived in the body of a human child, my mind was my own, and I could not forget what her kind had done to mine. But she soothed my nightmares and tended my wounds. She attacked my face with kisses, and hugged me so much that I began to crave the comfort of her arms.

Soon after coming to her, I learned to respect her. And in time, I loved her.

She gave me the necklace after I told her I was leaving home to seek my fortune. All my love goes with you, beloved son. Those were her words when she set the necklace around my neck, tears in her eyes.

In that moment, I wanted to transform. To scream at her that I was beloved, once, but that all who loved me were gone. That her kind had not just stolen my people, but my name.

The only parent I had ever had was Mauth, and his love for me was rooted in the duty he laid upon my shoulders. Husani offered me the love of a mother: fierce where Mauth was sober, pure where Mauth was calculated.

And how did I, the one she loved the best, repay her? How did I thank the human who gave me everything, who taught me more of love in a few short years than I had learned in all my millennia?

I abandoned her. After taking her necklace, I left. I did not return.

When she died a few years later, she died nirbara—forsaken. She left this earth with her adopted son’s name on her lips, not knowing where he had gone, or whether he lived, or what she had done to deserve his silence.

I mourned her then. I mourn her still.

Like the Tribes, the Mariners have their own rites for the dead. Like the Tribes, they begin to understand that against me, those rites mean nothing.

The palace of the Mariner royal family is rubble around me—as is much of Adisa. The city that gave haven to my enemies has been laid low by Keris Veturia. Thousands of souls flow from her killing fields and into my hands.

Maro still recovers from the wound Laia dealt him. But I catch nearly as many spirits as him. The souls of men are fickle and thin. They come to me easily. Almost willingly.

“The city is ours.” Keris walks gingerly through the ruins of the palace, her gaze snagging on the shattered glass dome that used to sit above Irmand’s driftwood throne. There is a proprietary air about her. This is her city. Her palace. An extension of her Empire. Just as I promised.

She is splattered with the blood of Marinn’s brave soldiers, none of them a match for her savagery. “Before I killed her, Nikla raised the white flag—”

I give her a withering look, and she bows her head, barely cowed. “My lord,” she adds.

“Adisa is a fallen city,” I tell her. “But the Mariners are not a broken people. Many in the city fled. How many dead?”

“More than twelve thousand, my lord.”

More, the Sea whispers in my mind. More.

I shift my gaze to my lieutenant. “What troubles you, Keris?”

“I should have killed the child.” She shifts from foot to foot, her boots crunching the multicolored glass of the dome. “Zacharias.”

“You had your opportunity. Why did you not strike?”

“I needed him,” she says. “To lure the Blood Shrike. But as I was holding him, I was reminded of Ilyaas.”

“There is no weakness in having remembered your child,” I tell her. “The weakness lies in denying it. What did you feel?”

Keris is silent for a long time, and though she is a grown woman, she looks, for a moment, like the child she was long ago. I suppose to me, they are all children.

She grasps at the hilt of her bloody scim.

“It does not matter—”

But I do not let her turn away, for the weakness must out, so that it does not fester within her.

“When you see your son again, will you be able to do what must be done?”

“I did see him again,” she says. “In Aish. He was—different. But the same. A Veturius.” She offers the name unemotionally. For a long time, we do not speak.

“I do not know,” she finally says, “if I will be able to do what must be done.”

It is one of the talents of humans to surprise, even after millennia of knowing their kind. She meets my flame eyes, for of all creatures who walk this earth, only Keris Veturia has never flinched from my gaze. Her darkest moments are long behind her.

“There are some things that do not die. No matter how many blades we put into them,” she says.

“Indeed, Keris.” I know it better than any.

We stare out at the burning city. A white flag hangs limp in the still air. The Sea stirs, hungry. More.

Thousands are dead. So much suffering.

But not enough.

LII: Laia

We trek out of the Tribal desert and into the grasslands of the southern Empire. It is sparsely populated, so it is easy enough to stay far from villages and garrisons. About three weeks after we set out, the mottled horizon thickens into a mass of tangled green branches.

“The Waiting Place. Not long to go, Laia.” Darin speaks from beside me. I have cloaked him so it appears his horse is riderless—something the horse protested with vigorous head-tossing and angry whinnies. Elias, riding ahead of us, is also invisible, though I can hear the steady hum of conversation between him and Jans Aquillus.