The air, already weighted with the cacophony of war, thickens, as if a thunderstorm is about to break.

Banu al-Mauth.

Mauth’s voice is so quiet, but it rings in my head like a bell.

Forgive me, Banu al-Mauth, he says. I have not the strength to stop him.

Oh bleeding, burning hells. A vision flashes in my head—Mauth’s foresight. A terrifying, hungry maw, spearing through Mauth’s barrier, erupting into the world.

“Mauth,” I whisper. “No.”

LX: The Blood Shrike

When I see Elias streaking for the woods where Laia disappeared, I know something is wrong.

I cannot go to him. I cannot even call out to him. Keris’s forces have killed half our bowmen, and Umber lights up our catapults with that damnable glaive of hers. All our attempts to stop the jinn have been met by their fey superiority. The Soul Catcher said the creatures have their limitations. He said they would grow weak as they poured their life forces into destroying us.

But if there is weakness, I do not see it. I only see our forces being annihilated, with no sign of Laia, no indication that she even still lives. The efrits fight valiantly—and fail, for they are no match for the jinn, fading sparks against screaming suns.

Wraiths pour from the Commandant’s ranks, and while her men shy back, ours do not. Scholars stand shoulder to shoulder with Martials and Tribespeople. A wave of wraiths is upon us, their infernal cold sending man after man to his knees. But I scream and swing my scims, lopping off their heads as if they are stalks of corn.

“Imperator Invictus!” My troops rally around me. “Imperator Invictus!”

But it’s not enough. There are too many wraiths, too many jinn, too many soldiers fighting for Keris.

Panic envelops me, the same terror I felt in Antium. The hopelessness of defeat, and the knowledge that nothing can be done to stop it.

You are all that holds back the darkness. Today, I will not be defeated. Today, I take vengeance for Antium. For Livia.

“Shrike!” Harper appears beside me, gasping, bleeding from too many wounds to count. I feel the urge to heal him. It is so powerful that his song is already on my lips. But I transform it into a demand.

“Where is she, Harper? This cannot end until she is destroyed.”

“Her standard is there—” Ahead of me, well past the catapults and near the escarpment, Keris’s banner snaps in the jinn-spawned wind. Near it, a man stands inches above those around him, white hair flying as he fights his daughter.

“She’s battling Quin,” I say. This is my best chance. I turn to Harper, catching his gaze. “You stay away,” I say. “She’ll use you against me. Do you understand? Stay away.”

I do not let him protest, instead shoving forward, breaking a path. As I close in on Keris’s standard, Quin drops out of view. Has she killed him? Her own father, bleeding hells.

The fighters coming toward me fall beneath the edge of my blade. I scream, snarl, and pitch fighters twice as wide as me out of the way, wrath consuming my mind, until Keris’s spike-crown standard is nigh and she is before me.

This demon. This tiny slip of muscled, deadly madness. This murderess, eviscerating one of my legionnaires, then turning to face me with a sneer.

My men surge around me, fighting hers back, leaving the Bitch of Blackcliff and the Blood Shrike to each other.

Don’t give Keris an inch, Blood Shrike. She’ll have something up her sleeve. She always does.

And who is to say I don’t, Soul Catcher?

I force away the memory, for with it comes the words Karinna spoke, what she showed me deep in the Waiting Place. The Nightbringer or his minions could pick such thoughts from my mind. They are a weakness, and today, I can have no weakness. Today, I must be a thousand times smarter and faster and better than I have ever been.

Keris unleashes her fury like she’s been saving it just for me. I will pay you back for every escape, every defiance. She screams the words with the violence of her body, the ferocity of her scims. I will punish you for all of them.

Her savagery is so startling that I stumble, on the defensive. She is not a normal foe, nor a fair one. This is the woman who taught me everything I know about war, survival, combat. The woman who honed killing machines—none more effective than herself.

Though she knows my skill, she does not know my heart. Keris did not witness her parents and sister’s throats slit in front of her. Keris did not watch her last living sibling stare into her child’s eyes as she died, all her hopes dead in the flash of a blade.

Keris is fueled by anger. But mine burns hotter because of grief. And I unleash it.

The Commandant’s weapons of choice are dual scims. She is smaller, so she has to risk getting in close. I keep her at a distance, dodging her thrusts, matching her parry for parry, until I get a hit on her shoulder, and another on the side of her neck.

But she moves too quickly for me to slice at her legs or throat—her weakest spots.

A sting across my face—and the warm rush of blood pouring down my cheek. I jerk my head back as Keris’s blade comes within inches of my throat. At the same time, she whips her other scim across my left side so viciously that even Spiro’s armor cannot stop the blow. If I was wearing my ceremonials, I’d be dead.

The battle still swirls around us, and I catch sight of Harper shoving his scim into the throat of an attacker—barely avoiding the swing of a club at his legs. My men are beating the Commandant’s forces back, outnumbered as they are, and the sight gives me heart.

I move as if blood does not pour down my side, feinting with the scim in my right hand before pivoting around her. My blade is inches from her hamstrings, and I whip it across.

But instead of the satisfying give of metal cutting through flesh, I feel a deep burn in my left wrist. She tricked me. Left her back open so I’d go behind her and leave my left side, my weak side, exposed. Shrike, you fool.

My scim falls uselessly from my hand, and her blade rips through my armor into my hip. I stagger back before she tears me in half, my vision doubling. Get up, Shrike! Get up!

I lift my remaining scim in time to parry a blow that would have taken my head from my body. The force with which our scims meet knocks mine loose, but she slips on a stray bit of mud, giving me a chance to fall back.

Though it does little good. I am weaponless, my scims too far away to reach.

“Shrike!” Harper, ever watchful, breaks free from the battle on Keris’s left side and throws a dagger to me. No. No. Stay away. Stay away, you fool! Keris catches the dagger, but Harper has already thrown another.

Even as he hurls the second blade at me, as I pluck it from the air, I see his chest plate is askew, knocked loose in battle.

“Harper!” I scream, but Keris has turned, the blade she caught hurtling through the air at him. Death with wings.

It sinks into his chest.

A flesh wound, I think. I crawl through the mud toward him. I can fix it. I can sing him back. But another flash of steel cuts through the air. This blade lodges in his heart. He falls.

“No!” I reach him, my knees sinking into the mud. His green eyes glaze as the life leaves him, as blood oozes from his chest.

“Harper, no—” I whisper. “No—please—”

“Helene—” He says my name, but I cannot hear it. The battle is too fierce, my heart thunders too loudly. No—no. I do not want victory if this is the cost.

“Em-emifal F-F-Firdaant—” he whispers, and his hand, gripping mine only a moment before, drops to the mud.

I will sing him back to me. I will. But I do not, for something tears again into my left side. I cannot help the scream that explodes from my throat. It feels unending, the sum of all my pain, all my defeat and sorrow.

Keris watches me. Dagger in hand, she approaches, relishing my suffering, basking in it.

I try to rise. I cannot. Loyal. Loyal to the end.

But the end is here. And I am not ready.

LXI: Laia

Beware, Laia. Rehmat’s voice is sharp in my mind. Something isn’t right.

I do not speak as the Nightbringer thuds onto the plateau. Fear will not claim my mind. I will defeat him. I will destroy him.

“Can you feel it, my love?” the Nightbringer says, and I do not know if he speaks to me or Rehmat. When he steps toward me, Rehmat pushes me back, even as I hold my ground. I stumble.

Stay with me, I say to her in my head. I know this is difficult. I know you loved him. But we cannot win if we do not move as one.

“We will stop you.” Rehmat and I speak together, and though my voice trembles, I steel myself. “You will not crack open this world to the Sea of Suffering. I will not allow it.”

“Won’t you?” he says, and as he closes in, he lifts his hands to my face.

Stay with me, I say again to Rehmat. This time, we hold steady even as within my mind, she flinches at his touch.