“For good or ill, then,” he said. “I promised you a bond of trust.”
She did not know what compelled him—curiosity, thirst for knowledge, trust, or guilt—but he placed his head in the space between her hands. The ash rose from her skin to meet him. Her mind filled all the memories her soul had consumed: Nazrin, Tahir, Ushan. The blades. The mystics. The Maha. Great wings; a parent’s love.
She saw gray creep through Zahir’s blood roots. His skin. He closed his eyes. The storm around them, on Arwa’s path, rose wilder and wilder. Closed upon them, neat as a lock.
When Arwa next opened her eyes—her true eyes—she was lying on the workroom floor. The fire had guttered. Dawn was beginning to brighten the sky.
Zahir was slumped against the other wall.
“Lord Zahir,” she said, and clambered to her feet.
“Well,” he said hoarsely. “You have lit the lamp, Lady Arwa. If I could have…?”
“Yes,” she said. She brought him water from the library. Placed it next to him.
“I see now,” he said. “I saw.”
“What did you see?”
“I saw people forced into unbreakable vows. I saw those people—those Amrithi—forced to use their magic to manipulate the dreams of the Gods. I saw them used to death. I saw a people and civilization decimated. I see. I saw…”
He stopped.
“I saw what he did, Lady Arwa. I saw it all,” he said finally. He sounded raw, broken. He turned his face away.
She didn’t comfort him.
“The Empire’s strength,” he murmured, “was built on Amrithi magic.”
“Yes,” she said.
“That brings us a little closer to the truth. To… the nature of the curse upon the Empire.” He spoke slowly, as if piecing the truth together through a numb veil of horror. “Our mortal world is shaped by the dreams of the Gods—multitudes of dreams, woven into the fabric of everything. Dreams of life and death, light and dark, growth and decay. He used Amrithi magic—”
“Amata,” Arwa put in quietly.
“Yes. He used—amata—to crush the ill dreams, that would have brought the Empire ill fortune of any kind. He forced them into the dark. And brought only good fortune up to the light. To our world.” She heard him exhale, slow, shaken. “It was not his innate glory or the worship of his loyal mystics that made us strong, after all. It was the Amrithi.”
“He built the Empire on their blood,” said Arwa. “On their dead.Mydead.”
“The knowledge he must have had.” Zahir’s voice was cold, a whisper. “The knowledge he must have had. Of reality. Of all things.”
She flinched from that. Her body drew back, back. There was a wall behind her, holding her steady.
“Do youadmirehim for it? For this—monstrousness?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No. To know so much, as he must have done, to know the world is shaped by the dreams of the Gods and to then consciously,arrogantly, pervert the laws that govern reality, without thought or care or ethics—to commit a genocide…” He stopped sharply.
Then, after a moment, the fire dying between them, he said, “The Maha is gone. He cannot use the Amrithi any longer, and it is clear he has left the world… wounded. The unnatural terror, the sicknesses sweeping the Empire, the floods and the failed crops, the strange ill-starred luck our Empire suffers—Arwa, I think they are all the Empire’s dark dreams, long suppressed, finally coming for us. And every day, they grow ever worse.”
She saw him raise a hand, hold it before him, watching his own fingers tremble. “He broke the world, Lady Arwa. The curse is growing worse. Growing swift and strong. I have never read a book that could put to rights his work. There is no theory that can encompass the damage he may have wrought, because the act was… untested, unmeasured. The consequences—we see them all around us. Thousands of people will die. The Empire will be a husk, empty of the living. I do not know how to fix his ill work.” His hand lowered, still trembling, trembling. “I do not know how to fix it. But he still might.”
He must have sensed her horror, seen it written upon her face. His eyes were reddened; his cheeks tracked with tears.
“No,” she said. “No. You cannot still mean to seek his ash. You can’t, can you?”
“To fix a broken tool, you must understand the intent of its maker,” said Zahir. “The Empire is broken, Lady Arwa, but it is a terrible weapon, built of the living and the dead alike. If it falls, all the people within it…” His voice cracked like kindling wood. “He is a monster. I do not deny it. I saw what you saw. And yet I cannot see—cannot imagine—what else to do but seek what he knew.”
She made a sound—almost a howl, that rose out of her unbidden. He looked at her with those eyes, those eyes that saw too much, and yet he didn’t see at all, she was at the center of her own storm and hedid not see her.
