Mehr was far too tired for this.
“What good will it do to harm me?” she yelled, stumbling back as he strode ever closer.
There were red scratches on Abhiman’s face and a new bruise swelling up his left eye. “You did this,” he snarled. “I know you did. I found the Maha dead. My brothers and sisters are gone, or scattered to the winds.” His sword wavered in his grip. His face was stained with blood and sweat. “You’ve destroyed all that’s pure and good. The Empire will fall. We will all fall.”
Mehr shook her head. “No, Abhiman,” she said. Her head was pounding terribly. She didn’t want to die here, but Abhiman was weeping now, teeth bared, and she thought,He will not let me go. “I’ve saved us. That’s all.”
Abhiman howled. It was a sound of pure animal fury.
“You wretched bitch,” he snarled. “I’ll cut your heart out, I swear it!”
He ran toward her, swinging his sword with fury and no finesse. Mehr tried to scramble away from him, tried to run—and froze all over again.
Something dark shifted under the sand beneath her feet.
A daiva ruptured up from the ground between them. It was a monstrous thing, vast, its shadowy body bristling with thorns. She saw its vast array of teeth, its glittering stretch of eyes. It stretched its body out between them, a great wall that blotted Abhiman from her vision. Then it swooped down. Mehr heard an awful sound: the snap of teeth meeting resistant flesh.
Abhiman was dead before he hit the ground.
Mehr bit her tongue hard enough to bleed, forcibly holding back her instinctual scream of horror at the sight of the severed remains of him. She didn’t even shudder as the mystics shrieked and recoiled, faces gray with terror. She curled her hands into fists and stood stock-still.
The daiva curled itself up, small and sleek, its teeth carefully tucked away. It glided across the sand to her. A tendril of smoke wound its way gently around her wrist and uncurled her fingers.
A weight pressed itself into her palm. The daiva made a soft sound, somewhere between a coo and chitter, and sank back into the sand.
Mehr looked down into her open palm. On it lay the black blade, its teary gem gleaming in the light. She stared at it, long and wondering, then tucked it carefully into the sash of her robe.
Mehr had made no vows to the daiva. Apparently, they had decided to protect her regardless.
Thank you, she thought.
“You should leave this place.” She didn’t bother to imbue her voice with threat. She let the threat of the daiva act as her armor. When she took a step forward, the armed mystics flinched. “Irinah has no place for the Saltborn any longer.”
She knew her words were true. She’d felt the dreams of Gods. She’d been in the presence of a daiva so ancient it spoke her tongue. Returning the balance of the world, allowing the Gods to dream naturally, would return the world to order. But balance did not have to bekind. Balance wore the face of a nightmare as easily as it wore the guise of a daiva veiled in stars.
The mystics had praised the Maha. The mystics had loved him. The mystics had helped him chain the Gods and weaken the daiva, and now with the Maha’s death the world had slipped swiftly, brutally from their grasp.
Mehr looked at their feet, pressed to the sand. Beneath it, the Gods they had helped chain slept and dreamed their unleashed dreams. She thought of the shadow of the daiva and the way it had risen beneath her feet. She thought of the flat, silver eyes of nightmares too-long crushed beneath mortal heels. She thought, too, of Abhiman’s death. His blood hadn’t yet begun to cool.
They shouldn’t be surprised, Mehr thought,if the world shows them its teeth.
They would be wise to leave Irinah swiftly. She did not think they would find what passed for balance, here on the backs of sleeping Gods, anything akin to a kindness.
She held her courage, held the iron in her spine, and walked toward the temple. The mystics parted like a sea to let her pass. Their weapons hung useless at their sides. She knew she would never see them again.
Amun was still unconscious. Mehr leaned over him. Sand had come into the room through the open shutters. His face glittered with dust, the loose curls of his dark hair etched with gold. Mehr brushed the sand from his eyelids. He didn’t stir.
“Please wake up,” Mehr whispered. She whispered it against his forehead as she kissed him, just once, as if her mouth could pass on blessings just as Elder’s had. “I can feel you. I know you’re not gone. Come back and see the world we’ve saved.”
She took his hand. His skin was warm. “Please, Amun.”
She was too raw not to feel her own fears. They washed over her. She feared that fighting his vows to the Maha had broken him irreparably. She feared that the Maha controlled him still, those vows extending beyond death. She feared having to let him go. She feared that it had all been for nothing, that the world would go on but Amun would not, and Mehr would be left behind, alone with nothing but her grief to sustain her.
It turned out that she had the strength left to cry after all.
She curled up beside him like she had so many times before. She wiped her tears on her sand-stained sleeve. She nestled herself against the crook of his shoulder and took hold of his hand again, taking comfort in the warmth of his skin, the roughness of his knuckles, the familiar softness of his palms. In a voice hoarse from all she’d been through, she sang to him. She sang the lullaby she’d sung to him that night when the pain had consumed him, when there had been no hope left inside either of them. She sang him the lullaby she’d sung on the night when they had made their own hope.
Eventually, her voice began to fade. Her eyes began to close, exhaustion claiming her.
