Eliana
“The Nest is a continuing problem, but one I’m not sure we will ever rid ourselves of—or that we should. Its presence brings smugglers, murderers, gamblers, and even angelic wraiths into our country, but the advantage of that lies in their private soldiers, their networks of villains and thieves that reinforce our own military efforts. These scoundrels and killers will protect our country as fiercely as we do, if only because their beloved Annerkilak lies within its borders.”
—A report from Commander Lianti Haakoratto Kings Eri and Tavik Amaruk of Astavar
When Zahra had told her that the Nest was an underground market, Eliana had thought she meant in the figurative sense—illegal dealings, illicit substances, violence and depravity.
But the Nest was, in fact, truly underground, a subterranean city that existed in a series of caverns beneath the mountains on Vintervok’s northern border.
Eliana and Harkan stood in the shadows behind a damp stone outcropping furred with lichens. Below them stretched an elaborate spread of contradictions—craggy rock formations above and below, flanking the city of Annerkilak like rows of misshapen brown teeth. Walking paths paved with polished jade tiles. Four-story apartment buildings boasted manicured roof gardens that crawled with shadows Eliana couldn’t define. Ornate roof spires stretched feebly toward the high cavern ceilings that disappeared into darkness. Tiny galvanized lights hung on wires that had been strung across the cramped tiled roads, from shop front to shop front. The softer light of gas lamps pooled in courtyards and behind windowpanes, and a low roar of sound punctuated the tableau—cheers and shouts, clashing strains of music played on strings and horns, the bray of a donkey, an infant’s furious wail.
Throughout the city, massive columns of stone stretched from the ground up into darkness, displaying elaborate carvings of both humans and angels. The saints, brandishing their castings. Angels, wings spread wide. Godsbeasts, claws and fangs bared.
“Angelic and human art?” Eliana asked, rubbing heat back into her trembling arms. They had swum through nearly two miles of narrow flooded passages to find the Nest, climbed through cramped caves only wide enough to admit one person at a time—Harkan first, Eliana behind him. Now, the cold cave air cut through her drenched clothes like knives.
“The battle lines so starkly drawn above don’t matter as much down here,” Zahra said, “not when the partnership between human gangsters and angelic wraiths has proven so fruitful for both.”
“So a city of thieves and criminals has figured out how to live together peacefully down here while the rest of us on the surface tear each other to pieces,” Harkan observed wryly. “Perhaps we ought to take notes. Bring back suggestions to the kings.”
“Collaborative art notwithstanding, this is not a city at peace,” Zahra warned. “Do not let down your guard.”
Harkan touched Eliana’s arm. “Are you all right?”
Eliana snapped open her eyes. She hadn’t realized she had closed them while they spoke, that she was leaning heavily on the boulder to her left.
“You need food.” Harkan rummaged through the small oilskin bag he’d strapped to his torso and withdrew a slightly damp strip of dried pork. “Here. Eat this, and sit down.”
Eliana waved him away. “Stop pestering me. I’m fine.”
“You can’t do anything if you can’t walk. Don’t be foolish.”
“Don’t speak to me like that.”
Harkan blew out a sharp breath. “You barely controlled that fire in your room. Do you think you’ll be able to do so again, if you end up having to use your power while you can hardly hold yourself up?”
Eliana grabbed the meat from him and tore off a furious chunk. “There. Happy?”
“Honestly, El. Are you eight years old? I’m trying to help you—and by doing so, help Navi. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
To that, she had no reply. He wasn’t wrong, and she hated that, how he’d made her feel as small and guilty as a misbehaving child.
Almost as much as she hated the power that had forced her into this half-alive, half-wild state. Hungry and tired, frayed at the edges.
She didn’t tell him what she was truly thinking, for she was afraid that if she did, both he and Zahra would turn her around and force her back through the caves to the palace.
She didn’t tell him that she was afraid to eat even a few bites, for what if that quenched too much of her hunger? What if that left her softened and incapable of summoning her power when they needed it most?
If this was how her mother had existed, it was no wonder she’d gone mad and joined the angels.
I don’t think humans are meant to possess this kind of power, she told Zahra. We’re too small for it.
You are hardly small, my queen, Zahra said after a moment, but she didn’t sound convinced. Then a feeling of someone wringing their hands crept into Eliana’s mind. I shouldn’t have brought you here, Zahra said softly. I should never have told you about it.
And thereby condemned Navi to an unspeakable death? Eliana shoved the rest of the meat into her pocket. You did exactly as you should have. And if you try to force me back, I’ll never forgive you for it.
Zahra fell into a miserable silence.
“Using your mind-speak again?” Harkan asked. “Whispering secrets you don’t want me to hear?”
“Yes,” Eliana said simply, moving past him and ignoring his mutinous look. “Let’s do the job and get home.”
Harkan’s voice was thin and quiet in the dark. “Just like old times.”
• • •
With Zahra’s guidance, they worked their way slowly through the strange streets of Annerkilak. To avoid detection by the wraiths who ruled the Nest, Zahra had shrunken her presence to a mere palm-sized shadow in Eliana’s pocket, her thoughts so faint that Eliana had to strain to understand them.
Stop here, Zahra instructed, and Eliana obeyed, gently touching Harkan’s arm as they passed the mouth of an alleyway where a sullen vendor had set up shop—a sagging cart laden with startlingly beautiful statues carved from various precious stones. Saint Marzana, in ruby. Saint Ghovan, in diamonds and pearls. A topaz idol of the Emperor, his eyes of glittering obsidian.
At Zahra’s bidding, Eliana purchased an idol of the Emperor while Harkan flirted with the vendor.
They moved on, the idol a sharp and unwelcome weight in her left hip pocket. Her tired mind imagined its tiny stone fingers poking the flesh of her thigh, insistent and grinning. She resolved to dispose of it as soon as possible.
Turn there, Zahra ordered, directing them toward an archway that led to a plaza gurgling with fountains—one in the center, an ivory-white angel with water trickling from her eyes as tears would. Others in each corner—weeping angels all. Some despairing, some furious. Some in prayer; others in combat, with writhing humans caught beneath their boots. The water from the fountains collected in a series of shallow, square pools, where bathers lounged and drank.
Why are we here? Harkan tapped against Eliana’s wrist—the old, wordless language they had devised while growing up in Orline.
Because, Zahra replied, two strangers appearing out of nowhere and swiftly heading straight for the wraith nest will attract suspicion. We must be cautious. The moment they detect me, we’re finished.
Eliana relayed her answer to Harkan, tapping her fingers against his own.
He subsided, his expression tense.
They traveled through the city in such a fashion for what felt like hours—wandering through shabby neighborhoods on the perimeter of the Nest, where the streets were narrow and hushed; and then in and out of buildings crammed with markets stuffed into parlors and kitchens, like eccentric houses opening up their rooms for perusal by prospective buyers. Vendors shouted prices from behind their carts. Shoppers whispered furtively in corners, counting through damp purses of coins. Eyes liquid and dilated from fresh drops of lachryma; breath sweet and stale, bodies teetering.
And then, at last, her own body so stiff and tense she felt brittle, bleached, a bald mountain stripped of all woodland, Eliana sensed Zahra’s thoughts directing her toward a grand building across the road—circular, dark, quilted with windows lit amber from within.
Zahra’s fear poured through Eliana’s mind, slow and viscous.
“Is that it?” she murmured for Harkan’s benefit.
Zahra sent the feeling of a nod. “The hive, they call it.”
Then her presence stiffened, a shock of surprise. She pressed herself into the rigid flat of Eliana’s palm.
“We must move quickly.” Her low voice held a new urgency. “Sarash is on her way.”
Eliana tensed. “Sarash?”
“A wraith?” Harkan asked.
Zahra’s affirmative came with sharp, cool pressure against the fleshy part of Eliana’s thumb. “If she arrives before we are safely away, there will be very little I can do to protect you from her. The other wraiths are lustful, easily distractible. Not Sarash.” She cursed then, softly, an angelic vulgarity. “Last I was here, it seemed she would not return to Annerkilak for some weeks.”
“How long do we have?” Eliana asked.
“An hour. Perhaps a little more.”
Now Harkan was the one to curse.
A wave of exhaustion moved swiftly through Eliana, but she did not allow it to fell her. Her vision danced, careening. She clenched her fists and teeth, willed her sight steady. “Take us inside.”
• • •
Nearly an hour later, having successfully infiltrated the hive’s lower levels thanks to Zahra’s whispered instructions, they raced through a dark, clean honeycomb of basement tunnels. The walls were damp with the same black cave water through which they had swum, and small galvanized lights flickered and buzzed, haphazardly illuminating their path.
As Eliana ran, Harkan silent and swift beside her, she recited the steps of their mission as if intoning the verses of a prayer—get to the stores where the wraiths hoard their drugs. Medicine to treat the wounds and illnesses of their slaves, recreational substances like anodynum and lachryma.
Poisons.
Antidotes.
Then she recited the Lissar words Zahra had taught them as they crept through the upper levels of the hive—backs pressed flat against the tapestried walls, boots treading carefully down corridors slick with polished mosaic tiles. Lissar: the most basic of the angelic languages. Far easier than Qaharis and Azradil, Zahra had said, before Eliana hissed at her to shut up. Lissar might have been easier, but Eliana still found the unfamiliar words difficult to remember. Remy was the one with the gift for languages, with the memory like a steel trap.
But she could not think of Remy in these tunnels.
She had to fly through them unfettered, cycling through the Lissar words over and over, in case Zahra had to unexpectedly leave, create a diversion upstairs, give them time to complete their mission alone. She had to keep her mind as clear and sharp as it had once been as the Dread.
Upstairs, the wraiths held court in a series of darkened lounges, lit by galvanized lights in multicolored glass casings. Wild footsteps and whirling dance reels, performed on wailing pipes and frantic fiddles, floated down through the hive’s many floors—a faint spectral refrain.
Eliana pushed herself faster, ignoring the exhausted buzz in her head and the cramp pinching her side. She sent a fleeting thought to each of her castings and felt nothing in return. Her eyes stung with frustration. Harkan was right; she should have eaten, she should have slept. All her work, all her self-torment, and for what? For two castings that remained a mystery to her and provided no comfort.
She recalled the sensation of the flames lining the rafters in her room—how their heat had pulled at her, how her castings had felt tugged forward by an urgent, ruthless hunger. She had created the flames, and yet they had been of something else too—not just of her own will, but of something else’s.
She had felt, in that moment, that she was a mere vessel. A conduit between the power in her blood and the flames overhead, licking for a taste.
Would there ever come a time when she could use her power and not feel as if it was using her?
Zahra pressed against her fingers, her touch so faint and careful that it could have been a mere twitch of nerves. Later, my queen. We can talk about that later.
Eliana’s tears muddied the dark corridor. With each thin breath, her abused body protested. Promise me.
I promise. Once Navi is safe, you will be able to think more clearly.
Eliana didn’t dare to hope that could be true. It had been so long since she had been able to think clearly, since she had felt in control of her own tired mind, that she hardly remembered what it felt like.
“Here,” Zahra instructed, her voice small, contained, and they turned a corner, obeying her.
Eliana sensed her fear of speaking too loudly while within these walls, of existing too completely. She had explained it to Eliana: How easily would you find an unfamiliar aberration of the skin on the back of your hand? A sight you knew intimately and saw every day?
It would not take long. And so the wraiths would easily be able to catch her scent, if she wasn’t careful—an aberration in their hive. An unwelcome visitor.
At the end of a narrow stone corridor, they flew down two sets of stairs and then through a labyrinth of passages dimmer and lower-ceilinged than the rest. At last, their path deposited them before a black door set in the wall, one of several such doors in a corridor that stretched several yards in either direction. At one end of the hallway stood an archway that led to darkness.
At the other end, a wall of stone. A dead end.
Harkan withdrew a set of lock picks from his pocket and knelt, prepared to work while Eliana stood guard, Arabeth in hand. Her castings were dim and quiet.
But the door was not locked.
Instead it stood slightly ajar, a faint artificial light beyond.
Harkan froze, shoulders tense.
Eliana stared at the door, her heart pounding so fast she could feel it in her forehead.
Zahra?
I don’t know, Zahra replied, fainter now than she had been before. Quickly. Inside. I’ll keep watch at the door. She is close.
Wraiths could be careless, Zahra had told her during their swim, distracting Eliana’s thoughts from the cold and the dark with information that would have made Remy’s eyes shine like stars. The wraiths of Annerkilak weren’t Empire soldiers, efficient and disciplined. They were gangsters, dulled by debauchery and spoiled with power. They could have come downstairs to retrieve a fresh jar of lachryma and been so drug-addled that they’d carelessly left the door open.
Whatever the reason, Eliana didn’t have time for debate.
She held her breath, tightened her hand around Arabeth, and stepped past Harkan into the room.
It was larger than she’d expected—deep and wide, lined with dozens of tall shelving units. A smooth black ladder on wheels stood attached to each one. The floor was stone, but polished smooth. Galvanized lights—harsh and white, buzzing faintly—hung from the ceiling rafters in an orderly grid. Neatly labeled white tins lined each shelf, their labels marked with angelic writing. Lissar.
They moved quickly along the shelves, scanning the unfamiliar lettering. The air was cool, but so still Eliana felt suffocated by it. She drew a hand across her sweaty forehead, squinting up at the ocean of angelic markings overhead.
“Nothing here,” Harkan muttered, hurrying past her to the next aisle of shelves.
They searched in silence for long moments that felt as vast as ages, and then, at last, a particular word caught Eliana’s eye.
She climbed a nearby ladder to the fourth shelf up, where a row of rectangular tins labeled zapheliar sat in neat stacks.
Zapheliar—the angelic word for crawler, Zahra had told her. And if she was interpreting the markings correctly, it seemed that there were variations of the antidote, perhaps for different forms of crawlers.
She cursed, hesitated for a moment, and then grabbed one of each. She turned on the ladder, whispering softly for Harkan.
He was already there, holding open his bag at the base of the ladder. She tossed the tins down to him—eighteen in total. They were lighter than she’d expected and rattled oddly, as if they contained items made out of alien material.
“Is that all of them?” Harkan asked.
“I saw nine variations. Grabbed two of each.”
Harkan fastened his bag shut and looked around the room, frowning as if chasing a sound he couldn’t pinpoint, and Eliana had just started to climb down, a question on her lips, when the air in the room changed.
She looked down just in time to hear Zahra cry out a warning and see a slender metal net shoot out of the darkness—a spider’s web, gilded silver. Copper plates snapped open from its heart, like wings unfurling, and Zahra screamed at the sight of it, the sound of her unrestrained terror one of the most frightening Eliana had ever heard.
Harkan drew his sword; Eliana jumped down to the floor, brandishing Arabeth. Distantly, she thought of her castings, but they remained dark, useless. Everything was happening too quickly for her to focus her thoughts and summon anything but panic.
Instead she watched, horrified, as Zahra’s faint dark form diminished, sucked violently into the spinning copper contraption. Then the awful thing snapped closed and clattered across the floor with a hollow metallic racket, where it quaked, buzzing, as if it now housed a swarm of bees. It was a flat octagonal box, glinting and copper-plated, small enough to fit into Eliana’s palm, and from within it came a distant wail that sounded faintly like it could belong to Zahra—but a smaller, frightened version of her that Eliana hardly recognized.
She darted forward, grabbed the box, and shoved it into her pocket. Harkan was at her side at once, his expression ferocious. His free hand hovered over his coat pocket, where Eliana knew a bombardier waited, ready to be uncapped and thrown.
“Show yourself,” she demanded of Zahra’s attacker. “What did you do to her?”
“Such indelicate manners,” came a woman’s voice. Silken. An amused sort of boredom. She entered the room slowly, her gait supple and unhurried, and dragged the blade of a long, curved sword across the floor. She was golden-skinned, tall, slender, her hair a net of shining bronze knots. She wore a high-collared, square-shouldered gown of indigo and gold—one sleeve dark, the other woven with golden thread. The gown fell to her heels, leaving slits on each side for her trousered legs to move freely.
Her eyes flickered from an inky black, like those of an imperial general, to brown, to gray, and back to black. An ever-shifting cascade of ill color.
Eliana recognized her at once. The sensation of the woman before her matched the rising currents of fear Zahra had been sending her only moments before.
Sarash. It must have been.
“Yes, that’s me,” Sarash said, her words lazy and smooth. She nodded at Eliana’s pocket, where the strange box now rested. “It was a mistake to trust her. Too weak to claim a body for more than a few moments at a time. Too small-minded to both protect you from my friends upstairs and also sense danger coming. Until it’s too late.”
She stopped, tilting her head. Her eyes shifted to gray and stayed there.
Eliana’s stomach dropped. She recognized that look. All at once, she was back in the outpost in Ventera. Beneath her, Lord Morbrae sat rigid and gray-eyed in his chair.
Harkan shifted. “Eliana,” he muttered. “What’s happening?”
“Eliana,” Sarash said, her voice changing. Now it was no longer simply her, speaking. It was someone else, too—a voice Eliana recognized.
Her mouth went dry, the fingers of her right hand clenching around Arabeth’s hilt. Her grip pressed her casting hard against her palm.
The Emperor. Corien. He was speaking to her through this wraith, from half a world away.
Sarash’s gaze dropped to Eliana’s hands. A tiny smile played at her mouth. “A pity,” came her double voice—woman and man. Near and far. “Your mother didn’t need those.”
Then, with no further warning, Sarash attacked, the blade of her sword cutting a mean grin through the humming galvanized light.
Eliana and Harkan lunged to meet her.
The wraith moved like a dancer, coattails flying. She blocked every jab of Eliana’s dagger, every thrust of Harkan’s sword. Eliana flung Arabeth at her heart. Sarash dodged it, and the blade went skidding across the floor.
Then Harkan threw one of his small knives, catching the exposed juncture of the wraith’s neck and shoulder. She roared in fury; her form quaked, shifting, and then realigned itself. Harkan’s dagger went clattering away into the shadows.
Sarash recovered quickly. Grinning, sword raised, she ran at Harkan. Their swords crashed silver, and then Harkan spun away from her, avoiding a deadly swing. Eliana ran after her, daggers flashing—Whistler and Tuora. Harkan stayed quick on his feet as Sarash volleyed between him and Eliana.
The wraith whirled, slammed Harkan’s sword out of his hands, and sent it flying across the floor. Then she knocked Harkan off his feet with an elbow to the face. She did not stab him; she wanted to play. She laughed as he staggered off, blood gushing from his nose.
Eliana darted forward. Sarash knocked Whistler to the floor, but then Eliana ducked under her arm and thrust Tuora into Sarash’s gut.
The wraith howled, then spun around, ripped the knife from her belly, and let her sword fly.
The blade caught Eliana on the shoulder—not a deep cut, but a cut nonetheless. She cried out, stumbling, and then Harkan shouted her name. He tossed Arabeth to her, but Sarash smashed it out of the air with her sword. Eliana grabbed Harkan’s discarded sword from the ground and jumped to her feet right as Sarash attacked.
They moved together between the stacked shelves, swords spinning. Eliana’s skin was drenched with sweat, her weakened muscles pulsing with fire.
Then, at last, Sarash growled and tossed away her sword. Eliana faltered, caught off guard, and swung hard for Sarash’s torso.
But the wraith caught her blade with both gloved hands and held it fast. Eliana fought to jerk the sword from her grip, but Sarash would not budge. She backed Eliana against the wall, blood darkening her sleeves and her eyes flickering black-gray.
“I’ll find you, Eliana,” came her voice—half Sarash, half Emperor. Livid, and strangely tender.
A wave of revulsion swept through Eliana’s body, scraping hard against her bones.
Without warning, her castings flared savagely to life.
A jagged force erupted from her palms, an explosion of light like the birth of a new star. It blinded her. She saw a solid field of white. The ground shook underfoot. She could not feel her fingers; instead she felt only a blazing, biting heat. Smoke stung her throat. At the rim of her vision, orange light snapped and flickered. The hairs on her arms stood rigid, and her mouth felt suddenly parched, as if all the moisture had been sucked from the air.
Whatever had happened, it sent Sarash flying. She collided with the nearest stack of shelves, toppling it. A cascade of tins rained down upon her, and she scrambled away, dazed, just before the shelves themselves teetered and crashed to the floor, pinning her beneath them.
She howled in rage, her scream more the Emperor’s than her own. Eliana felt immobilized by the sound. It scrabbled for her with unseen fingers. It wrapped itself around her throat, voracious.
“El, move!” Harkan shouted, then grabbed her arm and pulled her back with him, toward the door. As if through a fog, Eliana watched him, his mouth and chin streaked with blood, uncap a bombardier and throw it at Sarash. They ran from the explosion, Harkan pulling her on, out into the corridor, up the steps, into the winding basement corridors.
But she could hardly breathe, her ears ringing, and no matter how insistently Harkan pulled her onward, she couldn’t keep up with him. Smoke clogged her lungs, stung her eyes, and that orange light still flickered at her eyes, chasing her. It wasn’t until they were upstairs in one of the abandoned lounges—the air thick and sweet, lachryma-stained rags littering the tile—and then tumbling out onto the street that Eliana understood what was happening.
She had unleashed a fire. Massive and hungry, it had already consumed the wraith’s hive, and was climbing higher, faster, zipping through the tiled roads of Annerkilak, climbing up the sculpted stone pillars, reaching for the roof gardens. Faster than ordinary fire, tenacious and unnatural. It roared, it devoured. Her ears filled with screams, with the crashing groan of buildings collapsing beneath the weight of the fire’s rage.
She searched dizzily for Harkan. There, very near—his skin gleaming with sweat and blackened with ash. He was pulling her on, from light into darkness, from the inferno of her fire to the cool black of the outer caves. People were pushing past them, fleeing the flames, climbing up staircases cut into the cave walls, cramming themselves into tunnels, jumping into boats that would take them down subterranean rivers out to the sea.
Eliana stumbled and caught herself on the rocks below. Her hands slammed against stone. Dazzling pain ricocheted from her palms up her arms, burning tears from her eyes.
“My hands,” she whispered, too afraid to look at them.
Harkan pulled her up, coughing. The air was full of smoke. It suffused the entire vast chamber, a toxic black cloud blotting out all light. Eliana looked over her shoulder once and glimpsed the massive terror of the fire she had created. Flames crawled to the stone sky above. Spitting tongues of fire trailed after her, marking her path. Explosions rattled the caverns, echoing each of her frantic breaths—the fire, perhaps reaching storage rooms full of smuggled explosives.
They ran until they were climb-crawling alone through damp, sloping tunnels of stone. The pain in her hands was extraordinary. She wanted to sit and scream over them, but Harkan wouldn’t let her stop. She concentrated on the weight of the horrid copper box in her pocket, the slap of Harkan’s bag against her side.
She didn’t understand what had happened to Zahra. She couldn’t imagine what they would do if the antidotes they had stolen didn’t save Navi. Her mind was a roar of impossible questions, each of them exhausted.
They stopped running. Harkan put a hand on her arm. He coughed, a terrible, harsh sound.
“Hold your breath,” he instructed, and she did, and the distant explosions stopped rattling the walls.
Then he said, “We’re going to swim now.” His voice was taut, worried. “Follow me, all right? Stay close.”
Eliana nodded and jumped after him into the water that she knew, thanks to a vague nudge of memory, would lead them back to Tameryn’s cave. When her scorched hands met the water, her castings hissed. The still black water bubbled, frothing.
A voice followed her as she swam, unmuddied by the water’s depths and the weight of the mountains above. She couldn’t understand the words, but she understood their sentiment, and the accompanying feeling of rage that gnashed its teeth at her toes.
And worse, a sense of loss and frustration so immense, so profound and old, that the sensation punched her chest in two and sent her clawing up to the surface, gasping for air in the darkness.