You fling yourself into fears, it crooned. Death. Service. Your Amrithi blood.
“I am not afraid of such things.”
The nightmare’s face, for a glimmer of a moment, was her mother’s—fierce and furious, ashamed. Then it was broken once more.
You can’t lie to your own dark blood. You are always afraid. And yet you throw yourself into the things you fear. As if choosing the knife will make the pain less. So, my kin, let me tell you the truth.
Its face changed once more. Mehr’s face. Throat oozing great black pearls of blood.
It doesn’t, said the thing wearing her sister as a mask.
She was frozen. Her insides were ice. She could not even weep.
“No,” she managed.
Her sister’s face, wrought in ivory and bone, smiled once more.
She held her courage close. She forced herself to ignore her sister’s face, the awful whisper of the nightmare’s voice reaching into her skull. She met its flat silver eyes and said, “How can I convince you to let this caravanserai live?”
I have done nothing, it said. You have no need to convince me.
“What has been done to the captain’s mind is not nothing,” Arwa said, clinging to the dregs of her strength. “What has been done to pilgrims he calls heretics is not nothing.”
That was done by men.
“You whispered in the captain’s ears.”
That is merely my nature. Your bird-spirits fly. Your death-spirits kill. I am part of the balance, my kin. I speak, and sometimes mortals listen.
Argeb. Hungry for purity and purpose. He must have been easily swayed.
Arwa swallowed.
“Everyone died, at Darez Fort.”
Ah.
The daiva whirled around the nightmare like a crown. Her sister’s face peeled at the edges; she saw the bones of a jaw, shaped into a permanent smile.
The daiva control us. Bind us. Slow, they say. The world must change slowly or it will shatter. But sometimes…
The face peeled away. All bone again.
Sometimes they lose their grip, and we are entirely free.
“You are a curse,” Arwa whispered.
It laughed. She had not expected it to be capable of such a noise.
We are not a curse, it said. We are balance. You think your Empire’s glory was natural? Built upon the backs of the dead? No. Your Empire is a blight. But now the Maha is dead, the dreams he crushed using Amrithi gifts are free. Ill dreams. Death. Disaster. Ruin. They must shape the world, as they always should have.
“Darez Fort wasn’t right,” she said, sickened. “No matter what the Maha did, Darez Fort wasn’t balance. It wasn’t just.”
Justice is the business of mortals. It is no concern to us.
“How can I beg you to set this place free?” Arwa asked again, knowing her voice was pleading, knowing she was full to the brim not with nameless fear, but with true, solid terror, shaped by the knowledge of what was happening within the caravanserai’s walls.
You cannot. We are like the tide. Slow. The daiva make us slow, but we will reach the shore of all mortal minds eventually, all the same. That is our purpose. The fear. The knife in a mortal’s hands. The pleasure of blood.
“I understand.” Her voice did not shake. “I saw what was happening beyond the walls of this grief-house. I saw your hands upon those minds. But please, my kin, help me understand this: Why do the widows not turn on one another? Why are they less afraid here, nearly in your grasp, than those out in the open and far from you?”
The nightmare tilted its head. She heard the click of its vertebrae. She followed the turn of its head. Looked down.
She was staring at the grave-tokens.
They showed us respect. As the daiva are shown. As the Gods are shown.
They worshipped us.
No. They had worshipped the Maha. But by accident or design, the daiva had trapped the nightmare within the Maha’s effigy, where all unwitting the widows had offered it grave-tokens and flowers and prayers and soft awe, bloody and heart-sweet. And in return, they stood in the House of Tears above the trapped nightmare, and did not flay one another alive.
Arwa shuddered, and kneeled.
“Then let me worship you also,” she whispered. She pressed her face to the sand of her desert, glittering and cold. “Let me pray that you will leave the people of this caravanserai unharmed and untouched. That you will not ask for the knife or the pleasure of blood. Please.”
As she spoke, as she began to recite a mantra, she felt her mind sharpen and the fear peel away from her. Prayer had power. Oh, it did. But the nightmare was moving, prowling on its sharp bones, and it crooned to her, Perhaps you will live. My kin.
But we will have our due.
Her prayer was not enough. Of course it was not.
She thought of the inevitability of the tide, and the way it could turn any stone to the finest dust. Perhaps if she had a little more time, she could seek out the widows, and ask them to pray with her. They could clasp hands, worship the nightmare until its terror was small and its power broken. Perhaps together they could beg some benevolence from the nightmare. Pass over this caravanserai, kin. We beg you: Do not bring the dark here.
But she had no time. She was, in fact, running out of time. There were screams beyond the walls of the House of Tears. Her voice faltered. She raised her eyes. A howl, unfurling once more, at the base of her skull. And the nightmare was watching her, all flat and smiling malevolence, its mouth a rictus.
You cannot reason with a nightmare. You cannot cajole fear or make it serve your will. The nightmare was a thing born from horror and history, and Arwa could not destroy it.
But the nightmare had given her a key, nonetheless. Something to fuel the hope that had sustained her ever since Kamran’s death.
Prayer. There were many ways to pray.
She remembered a memory that was not her own: of dancing an Amrithi rite upon Irinah’s sands, and the way the daiva had moved with her. For Amrithi, their rites were worship. Every sigil shaped by a hand, every stance. Worship.
Worship had power. And Amrithi worship had power over the daiva.
She remained kneeling upon the desert, as if overcome.
Around the nightmare, the daiva shifted in a black corona. They clawed at its arms. They struggled to hold it. Balance. In Darez Fort, the nightmare had been surrounded by a daiva’s flesh. It was only when the flesh shattered that the nightmare had flown free. The daiva sought balance. She had begged them so many times to save her, and they had done so. But there was a price. She knew there was a price. At the dovecote tower, she’d been forced to use the ash she’d consumed and she’d almost been destroyed by it.
Who am I?
Beat of her heart. One, two.
Losing herself was a risk she would have to take.
This was her realm. Her path. The place where the echoes of the dead lay within her soul, still.
She remembered the bodies of the Amrithi dead upon her desert. Her desert, which lay beneath her. She pressed her hands deep into the sand, lowered her head, and breathed in.
The ash rose from the desert to meet her. Filled her dreamed lungs, her soul’s flesh.
Dozens of memories. Thousands. The nightmare skittered toward her, with a menacing click of its limbs. She was screaming, somewhere where she was flesh. Footsteps pounded on the stairs. Zahir was holding on to her tight, fumbling for something on the ground. Ceramic shattered.
She was—