Page 141 of A ?Sky Beyond the Storm

The sand efrit and his kin are already streaking toward the jinn, and my army stands fast.

Protected by their armor and wielding spears of their own, our infantry hold the line, supported by volley after volley of arrows from a thousand Scholar bowmen behind them. I shudder at the death—brutal and unending. The screams of the wounded fill the air.

The catapults creak as the Blood Shrike unleashes her unusual missiles: giant blocks of salt. One of the jinn screams as a block gets too close, and plummets. A cheer rises up from our soldiers, but Umber wreaks havoc in revenge. She slips through the dozens of bowmen we have guarding one of the catapults, ignoring the salt-coated arrows that penetrate her flameform, and slices through the ropes to render the war machine inert.

As I windwalk to the front line, an old rage rises up in me, the battle wolf howling, baying for blood. My scims sing as I whip them from their scabbards, and I weave through the fighters as easily as if I am born of smoke. I could kill dozens if I wished. Hundreds.

But it is not the humans I want. And it is not killing that will help. I must reach Umber.

I find her on the far western side of the line, tearing into a tightly packed phalanx, swiping their shields aside. She shrugs off the arrows sticking out of her, and Spiro Teluman appears, sliding under her guard, his scim whipping toward her neck.

But it only glances across her fiery body before she twists her glaive and disarms him. She moves in for the kill, but I meet her this time, and the wood of her glaive glances off my scims.

“Usurper,” she hisses. “You have no place here. No place fighting beside them.”

“And you have no place murdering people who had nothing to do with your imprisonment.” I dart around her, drawing her toward the forest, where there are fewer soldiers. But even with my speed, she smashes her glaive into my arm. It would be a bone-shattering blow if not for Spiro’s armor. Umber roars and strikes out again, but I parry, catching her blade between my scims.

“Your kind are a pestilence.” She tries to yank her glaive away, but I do not let her. “One that must be eradicated.”

“It’s not just us that will be eradicated,” I tell her. “If the Nightbringer brings the Sea of Suffering into this world, everyone—everything—will die. Including you. The world will fall—”

“Then let it fall,” she screams. “We will have peace, finally—”

“The peace of the dead,” I say. Why does she not understand? “Can’t you feel it, Umber? The air isn’t right. Has the Nightbringer told you what he is doing? Has he shared his plan with you?”

“The Meherya need share nothing with us. He is ourking. He freed us. And he will rid us of you and your kind, that we may live quietly in the Sher Jinnaat—”

“He is waking the Sea of Suffering,” I shout at her, because reason doesn’t appear to be working. “He seeks to gather every bit of pain and horror and loneliness we took from the dead and return it to the world. Do you think that when it wakes, it will have mercy on you because you are a jinn?”

“You know nothing of what we have suffered!”

I wrench her glaive from her and cast it to one side. “I will not kill you,” I say. “But your Meherya will. Look at me and know that I do not lie. If you let your king continue to reap souls, what he awakens will destroy us all.”

I step back and lower my blades, even as the battle edges closer. “Please,” I say. “Stop him. He might not realize what he is doing, what he is unleashing.”

“I would not go against my Meherya.” Umber shakes her head, a shudder rippling through her flames. “He understands what you do not, Soul Catcher. We are too broken. We can never go back to what we were before.”

“You are needed,” I say desperately. “Essential to the balance—”

“The balance!” Umber cries. “Who benefits the most from the balance, Soul Catcher? Mauth, who let our children die, but expects us to do his bidding? Your kind, who kill and maim and give us all of your pain to clean up? We held the balance for millennia, and look what it got us. If it is so important to you, then tell Mauth to find more humans to pass the ghosts.”

She streaks away, and the battle closes around me, too swift for me to escape. I cut through a knot of legionnaires. Not far from me, Darin, Spiro, and a group of Saif Tribespeople fight off a platoon of Keris’s soldiers.

I move to help them, but another battle surges in front of me, and I catch a flash of blonde streaking past, a silver mask and pale gray eyes lit with unholy fury.

My mother impales a Tribeswoman and an aux soldier with two slashes of one scim while taking the head off a Scholar with her other, moving so swiftly that one might think she was windwalking. Her skill is otherworldly and yet grounded in savagery that is deeply, uniquely human. Though I have seen her fight hundreds of times, I have never seen her like this.

At first, I’m certain she doesn’t spot me—that she is too deep in the battle.

Then she stops, and though all around us, men and women strive and die, we are trapped in a pocket of quiet. All my memories of her flood my mind at once, sharp words and whippings and her watching—always watching, more than I ever knew.

“Stay far from the Nightbringer, Ilyaas,” she cautions me, and I disappear back into a moment years ago, in a desert far to the west of here.Go back to the caravan, Ilyaas. Dark creatures walk the desert at night.

Before I can make sense of her warning—of her—she is gone, her scim crashing into that of a man a foot and a half taller than her and decades older. Her father. My grandfather.

“Go, boy,” Grandfather says. “She’s been waiting to fight me for years. I’ll not disappoint her. Not in this.”

Grandfather evades Keris’s first attack easily, though she moves twice as fast, and seems to anticipate her every stroke. His mouth is a grim slash, hisbody taut, but the shrewd self-assurance I’m used to seeing in his gaze is gone. Instead, he looks like a man haunted, a man wishing to be anywhere but where he is. Strength and the wiles of more than seventy years as a fighter might be enough to keep him alive against Keris.

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