For too many years the Arbil pyramid had taunted Luth. Brighter than the sun, taller than any building, it was rooted in the sands like a mountain he could never climb. The surface was too slippery. Arbil was a place of healing for the sick and vulnerable, but its walls were crafted to be a tomb for people like him. How many shadow casters had it ensnared over the centuries of its evil practice?
But no longer. Incredibly, and more so for not being of his making, he at last had the perfect way in. His sister’s child was the key. A naive and rash key, but she wasn’t only these things. The girl had raw power, just like Leena, and though she didn’t know how to use it all yet, she was brave enough to try.
Try. He hated that word. Adlai must not try, she must do. Do the impossible. Destroy Arbil from the inside.
He stood by the entrance and cast his shadow out barely a handspan in front of him. He just needed to know when to begin.
Manni’s presence filled his shadow. Eager, as he was, for the beginning of the end.
As he waited, Luth looked for city guards or trappers that he could use when the moment came. But there were just sick and ordinary people wandering around with no sense of urgency, no sense that change was in the air.
It’s time.
Luth hesitated. Yaxine wouldn’t like what he was about to do, but he saw no other way. Her shadow had been out of his reach for so long, and now he had a chance to get it back. No matter the cost.
It’s time, Manni repeated. Luth wished he could destroy suraci another way. One preferably without the god of Death’s help. But it was unavoidable—he knew that, and so he let his power sink into the clawing darkness.
Manni showed no hesitation. Using Luth’s shadow, the god leaped into action and grabbed a passerby at random. From his size and bulk, Luth thought it was a grown man, but when he felt the heartbeat inside his shadow, it was young and fast and healthy.
Too late to change his fate. The man—boy—was thrown against the entranceway. The heartbeat stilled. The boy’s death leaked down and coated the walls and floor.
It was regrettable. But so was much of Luth’s life. He stepped over the body and his shadow, large and menacing, stayed with him as he entered Arbil for the first time.
* * *
Kanwar sucked in a breath. They’d been watching Caster Luth for some time wondering when, or if, he would enter Arbil. Farrin fidgeted next to Nadir.
“I told you it wasn’t safe. We should go back,” she hissed. He knew she’d only come to keep Nadir out of danger, but seeing Caster Luth kill a stranger at random like that made Kanwar feel the same way.
This really is dangerous. More people will die.
But Adlai was inside Arbil already, as well as countless other shadow casters. This was supposed to be a rescue plan, not a massacre.
He started moving forward. Nadir tugged on his arm.
“Kan . . . what good can we do?”
“Nothing if we stay out here,” he said simply.
* * *
Luth wanted to laugh. Manni’s voice had guided him to just the place the trapper had told him about—a secret entrance behind a straight set of stairs. Only the trapper had failed to mention that the hidden door would have no handle or any clear way to open it. Perhaps the boy had hoped staring at the wall would make Luth think twice about coming up. Perhaps he’d hoped Luth wouldn’t even have been able to make it past the entrance with his shadow.
He pushed his power out over the wall and focused on the shape of the door. Black smoke trailed the ridges of it and he let the entire door sink into his shadow.
Luth was getting Yaxine’s shadow back today. He was bringing her home. He was bringing them all home, even if he had to rip out every damn door to do it.
* * *
Erikys’s eyes were still open. Wide and afraid. Wide and screaming at Adlai to do something.
The boy who had lied to her, the boy from the cell who had made her laugh and kissed her as though he needed her was lying still and staring, staring, staring.
What had been the last real conversation she’d had with Erikys? She couldn’t remember, but it would have been cold. She’d treated him like he was a stranger because that was how he’d felt to her. Not now. The boy lying on the ground wasn’t a stranger. His laugh had been real. His kiss had been. Moments she had doubted before appeared razor sharp in her mind, and she didn’t doubt them now. He hadn’t wanted her to come to Arbil because he’d feared she would end up lying cold on the ground, as he was. He had cared about her, and she had walked him to his death.
Her shadow had killed him.
In desperation, she moved her shadow over him. Bathed him in the darkness and tried to look through it. Did it contain his last breath? His soul? She couldn’t have stolen something so precious. She didn’t want it. Take it back! She willed her shadow to bring him back to life. Her father had told her once that she had to want a thing for her shadow to do it. That was all.
Trembling, she closed his eyes, wanting more than anything for those lashes to flutter, for this to be a mistake, because Adlai didn’t just want Erikys to come back, she needed him to.
And yet nothing happened. Her shadow held no miracle. Erikys stayed dead.
Time passed, each moment worse than the one before because there was no change, only a heavier silence. As if she were staring down a void, and it was staring back telling her there was nothing, nothing, nothing.
Then she heard movement. She looked up as her uncle stepped through the broken gate, and hope burst through her.
“My shadow,” she said, stammering, “it attacked Erikys.”
Luth came over, but it seemed to her that he did so in slow motion. He tried to lift her up, away from Erikys, but she shook him off.
“No, you have to help him,” she said. “What did it do? Do you know what it did to him?”
Her uncle knelt beside Erikys. She thought he was examining him, until she saw him look down at the suraci anklet. Like the one in his study, it was now just copper.
You can’t trust your uncle. Erikys had told her that. She heard him say it with such clarity, it was as if he was saying the words to her right now.
Her shadow had destroyed suraci, just as her uncle said it would. But he hadn’t told her it would kill to do so, and that anyone wearing suraci would be a target. That was why her shadow had gone for Erikys. Because of his anklet.
“Help him!” she yelled and dragged her uncle’s hands over Erikys’s chest. “Use your shadow, do something!”
Erikys had said their shadows could heal, and her uncle was the most powerful caster of them all. He could do it. He could save him.
Finally he moved. He checked Erikys’s pulse, then he looked at Adlai and spoke, but the words were meaningless.
It was only when he left her there and moved toward the stairs leading up that the words hit her.
You’ll thank me, Adlai, when you meet your parents again.
* * *
Bosma hadn’t returned. That wasn’t like Dressla’s old guard at all. It wasn’t in his nature to keep her waiting.
She paced around the cold chamber. Death seemed to cling to the air more than usual. Her eyes kept falling back to Corwyn, drawn to his shock of red hair like blood and the stiffness of his body, reeking of failure.
Subject 187 was the only living person in the room besides herself, and he would kill her if it meant escape. She held tight to the dagger.
Truthfully, 187 looked too weak to move. He was slumped far away from her and had his eyes closed. When was the last time he’d eaten? Perhaps it would be best if she put him down like the other subjects. His information hadn’t even helped her with her experiment. Yes, the shadow had attached, but so had it before. She wanted more. She wanted the shadows to give their new hosts resurrection ability. Power over death.
A scream ripped through her pacing. She stopped short and 187’s eyes flashed open. The scream had come from the floor below, where the ground had shook moments ago. But there were dozens of equitors down there, many of them seasoned fighters. They wouldn’t be screaming in terror—there was no danger on those floors.
And yet there was another scream from below, louder this time. Uncertainty flooded her. Dressla gripped the dagger’s handle so tightly she thought she’d bruise her palm.
She was too exposed in the cold chamber; it was too full of potential enemies, she thought, as she side-eyed 187.
The logical thing to do would be to kill him and lock herself in her office. But, she realized with distaste, she was afraid. Fear drew her to his secluded corner of the room, so well hidden from the entrance, and she crouched down beside him. It felt better to be hidden, to be next to someone, and to be the one holding the dagger.
If 187 noticed her fear or her sudden closeness, he showed no signs of acknowledgment. His eyes stayed closed, his breathing slow and weak. It could be all an act though. Dressla kept the dagger steady in her grip.
From this low position, she watched the door open. But it wasn’t Bosma. It was a face she recognized, though she’d never met him before, because he was the mirror of his sister, Subject 179. Like his sister’s, his power loomed large, and even from this distance she felt the air change as though his shadow came with a wind of its own. She shivered.
Luth Blacksun had entered the cold chamber room.
The leader of the shadow wielders had been sighted all over Zodian for decades. A phantom that could appear on the beaches of Piscet one morning, then across farmlands in Virgo the next. He was everywhere and nowhere. Arbil had hunted him throughout the kingdom, never catching more than a sighting, a mere whisper to add to his legend.
Now he was here. Dressla shrank further into her hiding place. It was impossible. He couldn’t have escaped so many equitors. One man could not have done this.
* * *
Footsteps rushed toward Adlai. She tensed, expecting enemies to come through the broken gate, but when she looked up, she saw three familiar figures.
Through the gloom she made out their faces. Kanwar. Nadir. Farrin. They’d followed somehow. Perhaps Kanwar had been worried after their last conversation. Or Nadir’s mother, maybe even Farrin’s brother, had known more than Adlai about what would happen here.
She gripped Erikys harder. Protective. Tense. Afraid of what they would say.
They came cautiously. She saw their eyes take in the two dead guards, the broken gate, and Adlai crouched over Erikys, holding on to him as though he would slip away otherwise.
Nadir bent down on the other side of Erikys. The concern wrinkling her face made Adlai want to vomit.
“Did . . . did Caster Luth . . .” she began. That was worse. Adlai couldn’t keep listening. She couldn’t tell them that it was her shadow that had done this.
She turned away and caught Kanwar’s gaze. His eyes were lit with an intensity as if he already knew what she was going to ask of him.
“Save him,” she said, her voice hoarse. “Bring him back.”
He was the top student of the class; every task Caster Shani gave him, he completed without struggling for a moment. He never failed at anything.
But Kanwar shook his head. Slowly. Sadly.
“He doesn’t have a shadow,” he said. “He can’t come back without one.”
“He can have mine.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Nadir said. Her voice was soft but final.
But it did work like that. Erikys had had a shadow. He had taken it somehow to trick them all. Arbil had found a way to give people shadows, and Erikys had told her uncle how they did it.
She relaxed her grip on Erikys and slowly pulled away from him. It all came back to her uncle. His plan. His secrets. She would force him to help her this time.
Farrin was whispering urgently to Nadir, the two arguing about something. Adlai drew away from them and headed for the stairs her uncle had gone up.
Only Kanwar stepped in front of her.
“This isn’t the place for us,” he said. “We came to take you home.”
She flinched at the word home. “I chose to come,” she said, moving around him. “You can make your own choices.”
“The girl has a death wish,” Farrin said. Adlai ignored her. Already Nadir and Kanwar were following her up the stairs, and then even Farrin, with some more grumbling, joined them.
Each step got heavier. She was leaving Erikys behind, and she prayed, as she’d never prayed before, that it wouldn’t be the last time she saw him.
The doors on the fourth floor were as tall as three men, heavy, sturdy things that had been flung wide open. The rooms inside were large and entirely destroyed. Bodies, weapons, books—they were muddled as though a giant toddler had gone on a rampage and tossed their toys in every direction, breaking them.
“Did your uncle . . .?” Nadir started. “How did he do this?”
Kanwar answered for her. “He couldn’t have caused this destruction. This is a god’s power.”
Manni. The god of Death. Her uncle was using the god’s power, as she had, and this was all it knew how to do: to destroy.
The hallway on the fifth floor was less chaotic than the one below. Only a handful of guards lay dead. Adlai heard something clatter to the ground behind one of the doors and headed in its direction.
Inside was a huge, gray room with neatly lined metal tables surrounding the space. Goosebumps prickled over her arms. The air was deathly cold, and in the center of the room was her uncle, his shadow impossibly large as it spread across the many tables, his back to the door as he focused on his task.
The four of them stood transfixed. Farrin with a protective stance in front of Nadir, and Kanwar looked at Adlai warily. She moved away from them. Whatever her uncle was doing, no good could come of it.
Clang.
Suraci watches broke from their chains and clattered to the floor as she walked the path to her uncle. Each one opened as it fell and black smoke trailed upwards, darkening the ceiling like a night sky.
Her steps faltered. She was awed by her uncle’s power, too scared to move forward and feeling more than ever that Kanwar was right: she shouldn’t be here.
Then she saw a figure rise from the corner of the room. She wouldn’t have noticed him if he hadn’t moved; that end was blocked by a half wall and too much clutter.
Unsteady on his feet, the figure of a man came toward her, swaying like he was drunk. But the face . . . the face . . .
Adlai had struggled to remember her father’s face all these years, but now she thought it hadn’t changed, not one bit. He had looked exactly like this. Dark, messy hair, a thin, scratchy beard and bright, bright eyes as he smiled.
Her feet could move again and she ran to him. Burying her face in his chest, she started shaking and sobbing as she clung to his familiar smell. He was real. She had been lied to over and over again, but this was true. Her father was alive, he was here.
“Little Drizzle.” His voice rumbled by her ear. The same voice, the same nickname. Adlai wanted this moment to stretch on, to be as endless as shadow and frozen in place. She had her father now, and he would know what to do.
“You have to help,” she said, though her voice was muffled and she didn’t think he heard her. She lifted her face up but her arms were still hugging him and she became aware of how baggy his clothes seemed to be. He was so skinny, paper-thin flesh wrapped around awkward bones, and his whole body trembled.
She’d never seen her father ill before. She’d never seen him weakened by anything.
“What have they done to you?”
He didn’t get a chance to answer. The room brightened around them and they both turned to see that Luth’s shadow had lessened. He stared across at them over the mounds on the tables, bewilderment written over his face as if seeing a ghost, but the wrong ghost.
* * *
The work is not complete. There’s still more suraci.
Luth ignored the growl in his shadow. He stared at Dendray hugging his daughter and something twisted in his stomach. Why, of all the shadow casters here, would he be the only one to resurrect? His power had never been anything special.
“Where’s Leena?” he asked.
“Brother,” Dendray said, smiling still. It wasn’t a true smile though, just as they weren’t truly brothers. Dendray looked over his shoulder and Luth took in a breath, thinking for a moment that Leena would be there and all would be right. But although Luth registered a woman slowly rising as if out of a dream, it wasn’t his sister.
He didn’t know this woman. She was undoubtedly beautiful though in a rich blue dress, and a gold band like a crown was laced through her dark, puffed hair. And she was holding a dagger.
“What number did you give my wife?” Dendray asked the woman.
“Number?” Luth scowled. She wasn’t a shadow caster. She wasn’t one of them. The claws in his shadow itched and he let them extend the twenty paces out toward the woman. “Who are you?”
“I’m Dressla. Head of Research in Arbil.” She said the words as if they were an achievement, a light she’d pulled up in front of her and not a death sentence.
“And where,” he said through gritted teeth, “do you keep my sister, Leena Bringer?”
“We don’t resurrect 179,” she said.
His shadow lost its patience and ripped the dagger from her hand. She stumbled backward, marveling at her empty palm as if something interesting was written in its lines.
“Today is a special day,” he said. “Perhaps your last if you want to make things difficult.”
The woman—Dressla—looked at him carefully. Assessing an opponent, he thought, which was ridiculous because this woman merely studied power; she had no power herself.
“She’s over there,” Dressla said finally, pointing to a line of tables a few rows behind them.
Luth moved quickly to the line of tables. Leena had taken many shadows that day; it was time for them to be released.
* * *
The ceiling above them rumbled. The black smoke Adlai had seen leaving the watches had gathered like clouds building toward a storm. Power she didn’t understand was shifting above them.
Adlai drew her father to the door. She wanted to leave. To be safe somewhere with him.
“Can we go now, princess?” Farrin called out to her. The three of them hadn’t moved further into the room. Their shadows were out, smoke trailing upward as if they were ready and waiting to leave.
But something was strange about their faces. The strain written across them.
“Adlai,” Nadir said. “Our shadows are being pulled. I can’t . . .”
Adlai looked again at the smoke. It was trailing upward, as she’d seen so many times in class, but there were wisps coming down from the ceiling. As if coaxing her three friends’ shadows to join them.
Nadir fell to her knees. Adlai rushed to her but not before Farrin took charge. Her shadow swirled around Nadir and the two of them vanished.
Kanwar blinked in surprise. His own shadow was trembling. He looked at Adlai and her father.
“I can’t take both of you.”
Suddenly there was a cry behind them. They all turned to see Luth bent over a body. It was a woman. Adlai saw a glimpse of golden hair, the mirror of Luth’s. The mirror of Adlai’s.
You’ll thank me when you meet your parents again.
Her uncle’s words repeated in her head. He had done all of this for this moment. Her father was here and soon her mother would be too.
She stayed rooted to the spot. She couldn’t picture her mother being here. She was someone Adlai wasn’t supposed to see because then she would be real, and then Adlai would need her.
They should go. Kanwar could take her father away, and Adlai . . . she would find a way out of here, somehow.
But her father looked down at her, a soft expression on his face.
“She’d want you to be there,” her father was saying to her. “She won’t want to miss another moment.”
It was a mistake. Kanwar’s eyes bore into her as her father took her hand and led her through the tables, like he was bringing her through the desert market and she was that little girl again. Safe because her father held her hand.
“I don’t understand.” Luth’s golden hair covered his face as his fingers gripped tight on the watch still chained to the table. It had turned to plain copper like Erikys’s anklet. Like most of the watches in the room. Which meant that her mother’s shadow had been released.
And yet her mother was lying still on her metal bed. She didn’t look like Yaxine had—it was harder to mistake her for sleeping because her skin looked deathly pale, her lips had a bluish tinge, and the stillness was too absolute. Too final.
Everyone had told her she looked like her mother, but Adlai couldn’t recognize herself because this wasn’t a person: this was a corpse.
Luth threw down the watch. He stared wildly around until he found what he was looking for. Who.
His shadow twisted out and wrapped around Dressla, the self-proclaimed head of research, and dragged her toward them.
“Where is her shadow?” he demanded. “Explain what you’ve done to her.”
The woman caught her breath. She steadied herself, watching Luth’s shadow retreating with something akin to hunger, Adlai thought. That shadow could as easily kill her as it had dragged her across the room, but still the woman looked at it like it was something she could reach out and take for her own.
“They aren’t resurrecting,” Dressla said, quietly as though to herself. She picked up the broken watch Luth had discarded. “The shadows are released, but they don’t attach themselves . . .” Again, it was like she was making notes to herself. She looked up at the black smoke pulsing above them. The released shadows had grouped together and were drifting untethered. Raw power just waiting to fall down on them.
“What does that mean?” Luth said. “You’re here.” He pointed to Adlai’s father. “Why would you be the only one to resurrect?”
Her father opened his mouth to answer, but Adlai answered for him.
“It’s you,” she said to her uncle. “Your shadow killed them.”
Luth shook his head. “No. I—there were others downstairs. I killed trappers on the floor below. It’s their deaths that are destroying the suraci now.”
But he didn’t sound convinced, looking around the room with new eyes. There were still some bodies his shadow hadn’t reached. Adlai could see the suraci metal gleaming in the distance.
“They’re dead,” Dressla said, astonished. “My subjects are really dead.”