The Midnight Sea (The Fourth Element #1) (8 page)

“And I believe you. Just make sure Ilyas does too.”

“Would he harm Darius?” I asked. “If he thought…we were being
improper
?”

“I don’t know. But if your daēva matters to you at all, you’ll protect him by staying away. “

I nodded, feeling unhappy but resigned. Shirtless fantasies aside, I knew the whole thing was ridiculous anyway. As for Ilyas, I felt flattered if he was interested in me, but I didn’t return his sentiments.

It was time to go back to basics—nursing my vendetta against the Undead. Just because Ashraf had stopped showing up in my dreams didn’t mean she’d forgotten about me. And frankly, s
he’s
the one I really didn’t want to piss off again.

“So you’re renouncing males of all species?” Tijah asked when we were alone that night, and I’d filled her in on my day. “Sounds boring.”

“Pretty much.”

“Ilyas is a fuckshit,” she said.

I laughed into my pillow. Tijah spoke Aramaic fluently, although it was her second language. But when she cursed, she tended to just string dirty words together with no concern for meaning or order.

“Tommas says he means well.”

“Poor Tommas. Look at him. He’s like an abused wife.”

I stared into the darkness. “I know. It’s not right.”

“Someday, he’s going to snap and rip Ilyas’s head off. His balls too.”

“I’m surprised he hasn’t already.”

“Fuckshit is lucky he’s here instead of in Tel Rasul. Did you hear what happened?”

I rolled to my side so I could see her face in the moonlight. “No, what?”

“There was some kind of rebellion in the Water Dogs. They put it down, but two daēvas are dead, and one of their bonded.”

“A rebellion?” I sat up. “What kind?”

“I’m not sure. Zohra says two of the Dogs were planning to run off, and tried to convince the others to come along. When they refused, there was fighting in the barracks. Finally, the satrap’s soldiers set fire to the building.”

“Holy Father.”

“Zohra thinks they might have been trying to run to the barbarian king.”

“But why would they do that?”

“You really don’t know the answer? Come, Nazafareen. Do you think the daēvas enjoy their bondage? Would you, in their place?”

“I suppose not,” I said uncomfortably.

“We use them because we must. There is no choice. The magi say it is the will of your Holy Father, but I think it is the will of the King. And that is the way of things, nomad girl. The victor makes the rules. But it doesn’t mean they will last forever. Nothing ever does.”

Except for the times we went out on patrol, Darius and I saw little of each other after that. His chore was to work in the gardens, and I would see him from a distance sometimes, using a spade one-handed or pruning the rosebushes. He must have sensed I was there, but he never looked over. Still, I knew when he was hungry or tired or restless. When he’d pricked his finger on a thorn, or taken a hard blow to the ribs in sparring practice.

I missed the sound of his voice. His rare smiles, which were nonexistent now. Would we live the rest of our impossibly long lives this way, privy to the most intimate, mundane details and yet hardly knowing anything that mattered? It was like the papyrus scrolls the magi kept in his study. I admired the graceful, flowing script, and suspected it held all sorts of fascinating secrets, but they were beyond my reach.

Ilyas settled down once he saw that Darius and I had learned our lesson, and if he still harbored any feelings for me—if he ever had—he showed no sign of it. In fact, on the King’s birthday, Ilyas gave us all permission to play a game of chaugan in a dirt field some distance from the palace that the satrap kept for that purpose.

We hardly ever got a day off, but Artaxeros the Second’s glorious entrance into the physical plane was a longstanding holiday throughout the empire. There would be a feast in the palace that night, and the servants had been dashing about for days, bringing in casks of fine Ramian wine and all manner of delicacies for the satrap’s table. He had a sweet tooth, favoring dishes like stuffed and candied ostrich, which probably accounted for both his impressive girth and abundance of gold teeth.

I had watched matches between Jaagos’s soldiers before, but never tried to play myself. It was a brutal sport, fast and lawless. Severe injuries were not uncommon. The King himself was an avid fan, and had even sent a taunting letter to Eskander suggesting he play chaugan instead of war-mongering. He had included the gift of a ball along with the message (a jab at the barbarian king’s youth), to which Eskander supposedly replied that the sphere represented the earth, which he intended to hold in the palm of his hand.

Darius claimed that the sport had been invented by nomads, so I was feeling cocky when eight of us Water Dogs lined up on the field after breakfast. It was about three hundred feet long, with stone goalposts at each end, set eight feet apart. The teams consisted of Darius, myself, Tijah and Myrri, against Zohra and Behrouz, and their bonded. We all rode in the double saddle, and even the horses eyed each other warily as Tommas rolled the first ball between us.

Zohra’s daēva was a whip-thin man with pretty black eyes named Cyrus. He was missing an ear, and kept his hair long to cover it. Behrouz’s daēva, Rasam, had a twisted spine and wore a stiff leather girdle beneath his tunic. They were both very good, and soon Tijah was cursing foully under her breath as they shattered our defense and scored a series of goals.

I was an expert rider, but striking a little wooden ball with a mallet from horseback without whacking the horse or Darius turned out to be much harder than it looked.

“Can’t you just give me a little help with air?” I muttered as I swung and missed the ball entirely. Again. The horse snorted, clearly unhappy with the how close the wooden stick had come to its muzzle.

“Are you suggesting that we cheat, Nazafareen?” he asked innocently.

“It’s only cheating if you get caught.”

Darius laughed. “Well, we would be. Daēvas can sense the power, whether they’re wielding it themselves or not.”

Darius himself was riding with only his knees to keep seated, since he carried the mallet in his right hand and his left was useless.

“Fine.” I raised my eyes heavenward. “Holy Father, I know you’re a firm believer in humiliation, but please don’t let me permanently disfigure myself or others today. Especially the horse.”

It had rained the night before, and within minutes, we wore a generous coating of mud. Tijah, who had a competitive streak, got so mad at one point that she rode straight into Behrouz and ended up flat on her back in the dirt. As for myself, once I accepted that defeat was inevitable, I decided to just enjoy the rare chance to spend time with my daēva. Darius was in a good mood for a change. We pounded up and down the field, screaming at small victories and howling when our opponents scored.

At the break, I was sharing a water skin with Darius, feeling giddy and flushed and happier than I’d been in a long time, when Ilyas galloped up. His grey eyes surveyed us with disapproval, and I was about to remind him that he had given us his express permission to be there. But his next words came as a surprise.

“A messenger just arrived,” Ilyas said. “Half-dead, pursued by a pack of Druj to the very gates of the city. He came from Gorgon-e Gaz.”

Something sparked in Darius at the name. I’d never heard it before, and I was fairly certain it wasn’t on the map in the magus’s study.

“What’s Gorgon-e Gaz?” I asked.

Ilyas looked at Darius. “Tell her,” he said.

Darius’s expression didn’t change but I sensed turmoil in him. “It’s where they keep the old ones. The first to be leashed. Most of them have been there since the war. It’s a prison, Nazafareen.”

“Why?” I glanced from Ilyas to Darius. “I don’t understand. Didn’t they help beat back the Druj?”

“After fighting at their side,” Ilyas spat. “The Prophet knew they couldn’t be trusted. And he was right. There’s been an escape. Six daēvas.”

“That’s not possible,” Darius said.

“It is. Their bonded guards helped them. There was a massacre. More than a dozen are dead.”

Darius and I looked at each other in shock.

“Where is this place?” I asked.

“Half a day’s ride,” Ilyas said. “Tell the others and get back to the barracks, we leave in an hour.”

“So we’re…” I trailed off, suddenly afraid.

Ilyas’s face darkened. “Yes. We’re catching them and bringing them back,” he said.

Chapter Nine

I
saw the first body the moment we emerged from the pass.

He lay on the rocks, arms carefully arranged at his sides. A young man with pale skin and black hair. The gulls had been at him. A cloud of them rose as we galloped down the hillside. I knew that this was how we said goodbye to our dead. Beneath the open sky. Only after his bones had been picked clean would he be ready for burial.

But the sight still unnerved me. I made the sign of the flame.

Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.

We are the light against the
darkness.

The corpse we passed lay about five hundred yards from the outer curtain wall of Gorgon-e Gaz. It started at the foot of the cliffs and extended into the shallow water. Grey stone, weathered by centuries of storms blowing in from the Salenian Sea. Curved walls twenty feet thick, with slits for windows.

The breath tightened in my lungs and I unwound the
qarha
from my face. It caught the wind, streaming out like a scarlet banner. Darius sat behind me in the double saddle, and I didn’t need to look at him to know his eyes were chips of blue ice. I sensed fury in him, and shame.

“Lord Father,” I muttered as we pass two more broken bodies, both in the gold and white tunic of the guards.

Our horse was too well-trained to shy at the carnage—better trained than I was, apparently. I’d become used to killing Druj, but human bodies were another thing entirely. My stomach churned but I kept my face impassive. Only Darius knew how close I was to being sick.

“Hold,” Ilyas barked.

Someone was coming out of the fortress.

I leaned back slightly and dropped the reins. To my right, Tijah and Myrri did the same. They both looked ready to kill anyone who came too close.

It was a man of middle years, with thick white hair and the neck of a bull. He ran up and I saw the badge on his chest, a roaring griffin in a circle—the King’s emblem. This must be the warden.

“What took you so long?” he demanded. “And where are the rest?” He squinted at the six of us and didn’t seem reassured by what he saw. “We need reinforcements—”

“You forget yourself,” Ilyas said calmly. “When you speak to me, you speak to Satrap Jaagos, who has the unpleasant task of informing the King of this disaster. It is eight days ride to Persepolae. Pray hard we find the runners and bring them back before that time.”

The warden paled.

“I need names, both daēva and bonded, including infirmities and whatever else you know about them,” Ilyas said.

The man nodded. “Aren’t you coming inside? I can show you what they did…”

“There’s no time. You can explain to the satrap how they accomplished it. My task is only to catch them.” Ilyas turned to me. “Find the trail while it’s still warm. We’ve already lost too many hours crossing the mountains as it is.”

“Where do you want to start?” I asked Darius.

“At the high tide line,” he replied.

On our way to the prison, I’d learned a few things about Gorgon-e Gaz, the secret stronghold that wasn’t on any maps.

It held one hundred and thirteen daēvas. One hundred and seven now. When the Prophet forged the cuffs during the war, he used the first daēvas he caught to capture the rest. Some died in the fighting. Those that remained after Queen Neblis was driven back across the mountains had been brought here.

They remembered what it was to be free—not like the Water Dog daēvas or the Immortals, who had all been bred in captivity and raised to follow the Way of the Flame. As a result, they couldn’t be trusted outside these walls. But Ilyas told me that the daēvas in Gorgon-e Gaz still served a useful purpose. Their bloodlines were strong. So it was both a prison and a nursery. Before he was sent to the magi in Karnopolis, Darius had been born here.

I was still grappling to understand all this as we rode down to the water. I’d joined the Water Dogs to kill Druj—the Undead kind. I never expected to be hunting daēvas who were more than two centuries old and powerful enough to crack the hulking fortress of Gorgon-e Gaz in half.

Because now that we had reached the tide line, I could see the shards of stone on the seaward side, the waves washing through a jagged crevice that must be forty feet high.

Darius dismounted and laid his good hand on the broken bones of the prison, the sea lapping at his feet. We stared at it for a moment and I felt the first flutter of fear in him. What daēva could channel so much destructive power and survive it? Earth was one of the most violent elements, I’d learned. If Tommas had tried to do this, it would have shattered him. I didn’t know if Darius had the strength. He might, but it would have cost him dearly. He’d snapped a rib just throwing a few rocks at the village of Ash Shiyda, and earth was his strongest element, just as air was Tommas’s.

My daēva turned to me. Our eyes met and I felt a trickle of power flow through the bond. He cupped a handful of sand and let it slip between his fingers. I was glad this kind of
sensing
didn’t hurt him. It was only when Darius used his will to affect an element that he paid a physical price.

I felt his mind quiet as he stared down the beach.

“They’ve gone west,” he said. “Twelve riders. Half a day ahead.”

When we told Ilyas, he seemed confident we would catch up to them in the rugged terrain of the mountains. After seeing the cracked fortress, I couldn’t help but worry about what would happen when we did. But our captain had expected this—unless the runners took a ship, the only other escape route would cross the Khusk Range—and our saddlebags held supplies for a journey of up to two weeks, including quilted jackets similar to the
arqalok
of the Four-Legs clan.

“Dismount for the blessing,” Ilyas said, filling a bowl from the sea.

We knelt in a row on the sand, heads bowed, as Ilyas walked down the line. I shivered a little as the freezing water trickled through my
qarha
and down the back of my neck. Then my skin prickled a second time as Darius got doused.

“May the Holy Father guide and keep us. May our impurities be washed away.” Ilyas tipped his face back and unflinchingly poured the last of the icy water over himself. He shook wet hair out of his eyes. It shone like burnished copper in the sun. “This world is the battleground and we are the warriors, Dogs. Not in the next life, but here. Now. We will bring these renegades back alive if we can, dead if we must. But we will bring them back. If we fail, it is not only the king’s judgment we will suffer. It is the Holy Father’s.”

Ilyas made the sign of the flame.

Good thoughts, good words, good
deeds
.

I kept my head down for an extra moment, praying for courage. Just a few paces away, I could hear the buzz of flies.

“Nazafareen,” Ilyas said.

I looked up.

You know these mountains, don’t you?”

“Like my own mother’s face,” I said. “But only parts. It depends on which route they take.”

“You’ll be our guide then. Darius can track them, but we need to close the lead.”

“I know some shortcuts.” I held the bridle for Darius, then leaped into the forward saddle. Tommas hesitated for a moment, studying the horizon with a wistful expression. He was forever carving little shells and boats and fish, like the one he’d given me my first day in the stables. He said they kept his memories of the Middle Sea alive.

“It’s been twelve years since I’ve seen the ocean,” he said.

“And I doubt she’s changed much,” Ilyas replied, not unkindly. “Come, the trail follows the shore. You can look all you want, as long it’s from a saddle.”

Several of the guards came out of Gorgon-e Gaz to watch us leave as Tommas mounted in one graceful movement and spurred his horse to a walk.

“We’ll pray for you,” one of the guards called. “May the Prophet speed your journey.”

I took a final look at the stronghold and tried to imagine the force it took to shatter it. Then I made myself see the dead. All fourteen of them, scattered along the beach, their limbs snapped like kindling. The sweet rot of the bodies mingled with the salt tang of the sea and my bile rose. Could Darius really protect us from that? Could Myrri and Tommas?

The other, more seasoned Water Dogs had all been out on patrol when the messenger arrived. We were here only because Tel Khalujah was the closest satrapy to Gorgon-e Gaz. The prison was a backwater in the western reaches of the empire, a thousand leagues from the capitals. Nothing ever happened here. Until now.

The horses’ hooves kicked up clods of wet sand as we thundered down the beach. We passed a stand of boulders and I could see the tracks myself now. They could have ridden below the tide line but they didn’t bother. No effort was made to conceal their trail. Perhaps they knew that we could follow them regardless, or perhaps they just didn’t care.

Perhaps they didn’t fear us at all.

My hair was still damp from the blessing. Overhead, gulls hovered in the wind, crying to each other. I closed my eyes for a moment and felt the holiness of this place of convergence, this place where the water met the land.

I realized that part of me had stopped thinking of the daēvas as Druj. Stopped believing that their fundamental nature was evil. I didn’t know Myrri very well, but I knew Tommas. I knew Darius. They were Water Dogs. But what had happened at Gorgon-e Gaz seemed to confirm everything the magus had said. The daēvas had nearly destroyed us before we chained them. And if these broke free of their bonds, they would do it again.

I hadn’t gripped Darius’s power in a long time. I hadn’t felt the need to.

But I did now.

I closed my fist on that shimmering tidal pool and felt him stiffen. It wounded him, my sudden lack of trust, but I had to do it. I kept seeing those bodies. That jagged crack.

We rode hard for an hour or so. The beach narrowed to a spit and the trail turned west into the Khusk range, just as Darius had predicted. The highest snow-clad peaks were still several days’ journey ahead, but as soon as we entered the foothills, the temperature began to drop. I could feel the bite of the wind through my
qarha
. Tijah blew on her fingers, shivering. She was a child of Al Miraj, of the brutal Sayhad desert, and had no idea what true cold felt like. She would though, very soon.

We were entering the lands of the Four-Legs Clan. I hadn’t been back this way since I had left my people to join the Water Dogs. The Khusk range lay south and east of Tel Khalujah. On the other side was the Great Salt Plain, and beyond that, the Royal Road to the summer capital of Persepolae. I wondered if that was the runners’ destination, or if it was someplace else.

When we camped that night, Ilyas told us he thought they were probably planning to join Eskander.

“If they make it across the western border, he’ll give them sanctuary. It’s their only chance,” Ilyas said. The cold hardly seemed to touch him as he pored over his maps, checking different routes, trying to predict exactly when and where we would catch our quarry, and what advantage we could wring from that knowledge.

The firelight softened his sharp cheekbones, his long, straight nose and thin mouth. Our captain wasn’t handsome like Tommas, or even Darius, but he had a quiet intensity, a restless intelligence that made him interesting to watch. In the years I’d known him, I’d learned that his mood could change like quicksilver, especially where Tommas was concerned. Ilyas would be charming one instant, icily disdainful the next. But he was a good leader. I trusted his judgment. He never took risks that weren’t carefully calculated. And his courage in combat was legendary among the Water Dogs. I’d seen it myself, many times.

“Victor is the one we should worry about,” Ilyas muttered, tossing the calfskin maps aside. “The warden said he killed more Druj in the war than any other daēva. A bloodthirsty animal, by all accounts.”

“What’s his infirmity?” Tijah asked, breaking off a hunk of bread.

“Minor. Three missing fingers on the right hand. He’s very strong in earth. I have no doubt that he’s the one who broke the fortress.”

“What about the others?” I asked.

Ilyas reeled off a list of names. They meant nothing to me.

“But they’re all still bonded to their guards?” Tijah asked.

Ilyas scowled. “Yes. Which means that the guards collaborated in the escape. It couldn’t be done any other way.” He gave us a level look. “When we find them, stay focused on the humans. Don’t try to engage the daēvas. Your job will be to keep the guards at bay while the demons fight each other. You are the iron. They are the power.”

“But why did the guards turn?” I wondered. “One, I might understand. But six? All at the same time?”

Ilyas shook his head. I could see he was troubled. “I don’t know. The warden didn’t know either. He said they were all trusted. And the protocol was to rotate the cuffs so no attachments could form between daēva and bonded.”

I gave up trying to make sense of it and fed another piece of wood to the fire. Darius had left the moment Tijah struck the flint. He feared fire—all the daēvas did. It drew them in, enticed them, but it couldn’t be controlled. Fire was their single weakness.

And, since they looked exactly like us, the one infallible test.

All daēvas were cursed by the Holy Father with physical infirmities, but some of them were hidden. Like Myrri’s missing tongue. And most were things that humans might have too—a blind eye, a club foot. The King needed a sure way to tell us apart. To ensure that no one tried to breed them illegally.

His answer was the Numerators. Thousands of them roamed the empire, their white robes bearing the royal seal. They could bang on any door at any time, including the satrap’s own sleeping chambers, and none would dare refuse them entry. Officially, they were census-takers, counting people and livestock to assess the proper taxes. But everyone knew what they really were: daēva-hunters.

We all had tattoos from the Numerators on our palms. Mine was two triangles, one inside the other. Darius’s was a triangle with a slash through it, marking him as daēva. It was a special kind of iridescent ink that couldn’t be forged.