Hazan exhaled, looking grim. “I suppose I should forewarn you,” he said. “It’s not a letter.”

  Five

  ALIZEH TRAVELED CAUTIOUSLY, TAKING CARE not to tread on the overlong hem of her robe as she moved. Her extremities had deadened with cold; she’d finally admitted defeat and begun the trek back to the palace. The stars withdrew as a new day threatened, black skies now feathered with gray. Despite this promise of light, the journey seemed more menacing now that she traveled alone, and it was odd to think she’d felt safer with Cyrus about. Nevertheless, there had been no point in waiting for him to reappear; he was too wise, she’d realized, to retrace his steps upon returning home, and she’d refused to waste another minute waiting for him.

  In fact, the whole business had left her feeling angry and foolish.

  It had been hard to accept that her efforts to track Cyrus had come to naught; but it had been a grave error, too, thinking she could crack the enigma that was the king of Tulan, for he possessed advantages Alizeh was unable to match. She’d followed him and he’d vanished. His use of magic, she’d felt, was deeply unfair.

  With a sigh she strode on, absently smoothing her hands down her cloak as she went, brushing away lingering salt from her garment. Her palms prickled, and she shook them, slightly, before pulling the heavy hood forward, hiding her face as much as was practical. She advanced in the direction of the castle, its magnificent spires beckoning in the moonlight, and wondered what more awaited her here, in this foreign land.

  Both the king and his country perplexed her.

  Tulan was a much smaller empire than Ardunia, yet its geography still managed to impress. Alizeh didn’t know whether it was the abundance of magic in this region that made it so, but Tulan appeared home to various microclimates and geographical variations. From the middle of the salt flat she could count the teeth of a distant mountain range, savor the scents of night blooms, hear the muted hush of waterfalls, shrink from the eerie calls of jackals. With its dynamic landscape and elevation changes, Alizeh was beginning to see how rare such a piece of land might be, situated as it was along the Mashti River—and parallel to the sea.

  It was no wonder to her that Ardunia desired to possess it.

  Still, she struggled to understand how an empire as powerful as Ardunia had been unable to overtake the humble nation. No doubt many had tried and failed to conquer this fertile piece of land. Tulan seemed a place both accessible and unfathomable; diminutive yet vast. It was the kind of contradiction she often felt repeated in herself: that she was both useless and powerful; unimportant and essential.

  If only she might learn how to reconcile all these feelings.

  Then again, her life had changed so dramatically in so short a time that it was easy to imagine why she felt emotionally uncertain; indeed, if she agreed to Cyrus’s offer for the Tulanian throne, she might never return to Ardunia. Already she’d accepted that she’d never again see Kamran, whose own life had recently been eviscerated—and she stopped, suddenly, nearly tripping over her cloak at the thought of him. She wondered how he was managing in the wake of so much ruin. She wondered whether he would one day look back upon the days during which their lives had so serendipitously intersected, and she wondered how—or whether—he might remember her.

  With her whole heart, she wished him well. Wished him peace, wherever he was. She’d always be grateful for his kindness. For truly seeing her when no one else had.

  Alizeh shivered, curling inward as an icy wind blustered against her back. Her heart had grown heavy under the weight of her thoughts, making her body harder to carry. Never again would she see her trio of unlikely friends. Never again would she see Hazan, who was doubtless buried in an unmarked grave. Her breath caught at this last thought, her chest constricting as she felt acutely the pain of loss, of loneliness.

  And yet—somehow—she was no longer alone.

  Hours ago she’d addressed a crowd of thousands as their queen.

  Even so, between her shocking scene with the southern king and her subsequent performance before a surging mass of Jinn, Alizeh had begun to worry that, upon her return to the palace, she might discover herself the center of extraordinary scandal. She didn’t relish the idea of becoming fodder for gossip. Moreover, she had no interest in dealing with Sarra—whose recent insistence that she murder Cyrus remained an unresolved issue. Heavens, but the woman was peculiar.

  With a final sigh, Alizeh summoned the last of her strength to propel herself, with preternatural speed, back to the castle. She all but flew as she ran, her murky surroundings bleeding together, and soon enough she was back on the palace grounds, gasping for air as the deafening roar of water inundated all with its clamor.

  She took a moment, easing her shaking body against the trunk of a towering tree. It had been a hellish few weeks, and she wasn’t sure she could go on like this, at this breakneck pace. She desperately desired sleep, but she needed a minute more before she embarked upon the final, impossible task of finding her rooms in the mountainous castle.

  She clenched her teeth against the icy gusts of air lifting off the waterfalls, absently patting down the countless folds of her cloak in search of pockets. She’d thus far been curling her fists in the extra length of her sleeves, but the bitter chill was proving unconquerable, and it was with great relief that she shoved her frozen hands into the fleece-lined pockets, clenching and unclenching her fists to warm them. It was then that she felt something like a shock—an electric heat sparking painfully against her fingertips.

  Alizeh froze.

  Her heart thudding in her chest, she pulled one hand free, lifting the offending digits to the moonlight.

  The tips of her fingers had turned blue.

  Quickly she rubbed at them, grateful to discover a strange dust shifting from her skin. Still, there was no relief. The friction caused more sparks to course through her fingers, the feeling not unlike flint striking against stone until the pain crescendoed and she cried out, nearly doubling over as she heard the wisp of a familiar whisper, the chokehold of a familiar terror—

  Pain exploded behind her eyes, seared her throat. She nearly fainted from the force of it, sweat breaking out across her forehead as her body shook with terrible tremors. A scream was building in her chest, fear snaking through her veins.

  This was the devil.

  She knew this feeling, knew this slithering terror, knew these horrors, and yet he’d never come to her like this, never broken her mind with such violence—

  Alizeh didn’t know when she’d fallen down, only that the earth was cold and damp beneath her face, tendrils of moss tickling the inside of her nose with every inhalation. Dirt and lichen nudged at the edges of her lips, but her head was leaden, immovable. She soon became aware that she’d injured herself in the fall—that there was a cool plane of rock wedged under her cheek where a separate pain had begun to bloom. Still, the discovery felt slippery; dreamlike. More present was a disembodied voice shrieking indistinguishable nonsense as her mind spun, sparks still flaring beneath her skin, pain expanding relentlessly inside her. She made only a pitiful sound as she lay there, pinned to the ground by an impossible gravity, when a single word finally separated from the noise. There was no doubt now that the voice belonged to the devil—but the sound was distorted, skipping as if caught in a broken loop, as if the rest of the sentence had been lost on the wind.

  Eyes

  Eyes

  Eyes

  Eyes

  Six

  CYRUS MATERIALIZED AT THE SAGGING mouth of a moldering cave, the smell of damp earth and cold air greeting him with the blunt force of a club. He drew in the heavy, musty scents as he stepped over a shallow pool of water, silt grinding beneath his boots. Ducking under a jut of rock, he was careful to touch nothing as he straightened into an antechamber, his eyes adjusting slowly to the darkness. The humble entrance had opened onto deep rooms of dizzying heights, the discrete spaces divided only by webbed columns of calcite formations. Coins of moonlight dropped through slots in the distant ceilings, casting spectral globes of illumination upon dripping stalactites and a set of crudely formed stairs that ascended, without end, into a smear of black.

  Cyrus remained absolutely still.

  He was no longer afraid of these visits—not the way he’d once been—but fear was a slippery thing. He’d been surprised in his green life to discover the manifold ways in which a person might experience terror, the creativity with which dread and horror might be provoked in a soul. He’d overcome one nightmare only to discover its child, outrun another only to encounter its twin. No matter his efforts he could not outsmart that which he could not anticipate, and his only comfort as he stared up at the familiar, sinister staircase was a cold one.

  He either did or did not.

  He would not live by half measure.

  Cyrus had learned this sobering lesson on his first visit to this particular rung of hell. He’d been tender and unseasoned then, so colonized by fear he’d broken into a cold sweat before even entering the abyss. He’d vacillated at the bottom of the towering staircase for nigh on an hour, cowed not only by indecision but by the hostilities of the cave itself. His skin pallid, his limbs occasionally locking in protest, Cyrus had wanted nothing more than to flee this den of horrors; it had been his only clinging thought as he slowly mounted the steps, each advance more tentative than the last. Always he glanced over his shoulder at possible escape, never committing to his footfalls, and he’d nearly made it to the top when his wavering finally cost him.

  Cyrus had fallen from the precipice without mercy, without grace.

  It was a fifty-foot drop to his death, and he’d slammed bodily against every jagged lip of stone on the way down, landing with an impact so severe he broke his back.

  The young royal had lain there bleeding on the cold, damp ground, enduring an agony of incalculable depths. He could see that he’d snapped two bones in one leg, that a jut of rib pierced through his shirt. His vision blurred; blood pooled slowly in his open mouth; his chest spasmed with some unknown damage and still he smiled, for what he felt in that moment was nothing short of joy.

  It was over.

  He would not have to face this terror, for Death had come. He’d tried to do the right thing, but his efforts had come to naught, and now he could lie here until his blood ran cold and know no guilt. His world would unravel, countless innocents would die—but he’d be long departed by then, unaccountable for these tragedies.

  He’d cried soundlessly, and they were tears of relief.

  Cyrus couldn’t have known that Iblees would animate his shattered body with the ease of a puppeteer, articulating his broken limbs in a display of breathtaking cruelty the young man had never even thought to imagine. The devil, Cyrus soon discovered, would not allow his debtors to default on a contract.

  Inch by harrowing inch Cyrus was made to ascend the stairs by way of dark magic, his own blood choking in his throat. He was half-blind as his severed bones scraped together, piercing organs and tearing flesh. It was a state of suffering so excruciating he’d lost consciousness over and over, only to wake up each time on the slick ground in a shallow pool of his own gore, and made to climb the stairs again.

  That day, Cyrus had learned cowardice was a luxury.

  Only the privileged few could afford to run away, to lock their doors and close their eyes to ugliness. The rest lived in homes without doors to lock, looked through eyes without lids to shut. They confronted the dark even as their hearts trembled, as their souls shook—for even strangled by fear, there was no choice but to endure.

  No one would be along to slay their demons.

  Cyrus had been a sheltered royal the first time he’d stepped foot in this cave, and he’d paid a tall price for the timidity of his heart.

  He’d been careful never to make that mistake again.

  Now he took a steadying breath and, very carefully, made his first move since arriving in the antechamber. He looked up.

  It was like activating an alarm.

  A swarm of sound enveloped him as he stared skyward, clocking the presence of several thousand bats hung like so many pendants from a neck of darkness. Their disembodied eyes watched him closely as they screeched, the eerie cacophony soon overtaken by the harsh, echoing skitter of small, hard legs rushing toward him. Cyrus, who’d experienced this spine-chilling phenomenon many times, knew he was being crowded on three sides by a clutter of arachnids and was careful to remain calm. A whisper along his spine alerted him to the growing presence of one in particular and, slowly, he turned to face his appraiser.

  A spider roughly the size of his face peered at him from its perch in midair, the gleam of a silk thread barely legible in the light. Her long legs writhed not unlike the last, grasping reach of a man in need, several glassy eyes glinting in his direction as she assessed him. She spoke without precisely meaning to, relating her thoughts in a fractured communication that was never meant to be parsed by humans.

  You are? You are?

  No danger to you, said Cyrus soundlessly.

  The spider only stared at him.

  He held out his hand, palm down, and, after a brief hesitation, the massive arachnid lowered herself, then climbed aboard his body with an eager scuttle of legs. She investigated his fingers before climbing up his forearm, pausing at his elbow to consider his face more closely.

  You are? Before?

  Yes. I’ve come before. You are in no danger from me, I swear it.

  In response, the spider scaled the incline of his shoulder, then his neck, the prickle of her hard, lightly-furred pins raising goose bumps along his skin. Cyrus conquered the impulse to recoil from the unnerving sensation, holding still as she cautiously boarded his cheek, lifting her forelegs slightly to better study his eyes.

  It was a torturously long moment before she said—

  You are? Sad. Sad. Sad.

  Cyrus swallowed. “Yes,” he whispered.

  The spider regarded him a moment more before scurrying from whence she came. She stepped off the plank of his arm and into the unknown with a final judgment:

  No danger.

  The young king shook off a lingering unease as he waited for the path before him to clear of arachnids. It was always an unsettling business, being psychoanalyzed by spiders. He did not want to ponder that the creature was able to dismiss him with three words of shrewd observation; neither did he did want to wonder how else he might’ve survived these trials had he not trained for so many years as a Diviner. If he’d been unable to communicate with living creatures, if he’d been unable to wield magic to fight for his life. It bothered him to think of it as anything but coincidence; he didn’t like to imagine he’d been born for this role, brought into the world only to endure this misery.

  Fate, he thought bitterly, was only romantic when one was destined to be the hero.

  Once his safe passage had been granted, Cyrus did not tarry; he thundered up the steep incline of the endless staircase, taking the steps two at a time. He was eager to be done with this hateful, infinite night. He reasoned that the sooner this fresh hell commenced, the sooner it might end—and before long, his destination came into view.

  Towering above him was a colossal black archway suspended in midair, the structure as tall as a castle and half as wide. At the base of the ornate passageway spilled forth a herd of ominous gray clouds, within which Cyrus could make out only the spark of a familiar orange light. He headed toward this thick haze, pounding up the last few steps before launching himself, like a bird, into the rift.

  Seven

  WIND BATTERED HIS FACE, SOUNDS screamed in his ears. Cyrus spun until his flesh was wrung out, his face chapped by the currents, cheeks ablaze with color. He landed on his feet with a heavy thud that rattled his teeth before he straightened slowly, regaining his balance by careful degrees. The stench of rotting matter struck him swiftly, and he fought the impulse to gag, nearly doubling over as his eyes burned.

  Before him loomed a curtain of charred flesh.

  Iblees had never presented himself to the young king as anything but a whisper—a force transmittable from anywhere—and yet, too often Cyrus was summoned here. Here, the scene of every great missive and every great castigation, this decomposing suite of rooms separated only by patchwork veils of scorched human skin, was the devil’s preferred place of communication.

  It was, in Cyrus’s approximation, a parallel to purgatory.

  He closed his eyes now and braced himself, fighting not to inhale the putrid air as the familiar whisper blew through him, a voice like smoke pooling in the hollows of his body, curling around his joints, and tugging him downward—a suggestion that he fall to his knees. Cyrus fought this compulsion, snapping the connection with a violent jolt and straightening to his full height. He felt the haunting impression of a laugh, and then—

  Clay King was once a little boy,

  and he would often cry

  for milk and sleep and wooden rattles

  and a soothing lullaby

  Now he is a strong young man

  and still we see him cry!

  Poor heart is broken

  Weak mind is weary

  He simply wants to DIE

  Cyrus’s eyes flew open. His fists had clenched, unbidden, but there was no one to fight; nothing to see.

  “Did you bring me here to mock me?” he said quietly, turning about the room. “What is it you want tonight?”

  Oh, the jester is a lonely sort

  who seldom gets to play

  despite the jokes he loves to make

  of witless, greedy Clay

  Cyrus stiffened. He bade himself be calm despite a creeping instinct to panic.

  With forced composure he said, “What does that mean?”

  Clay girls and boys

  my favorite toys!

  Soon they’ll come together

  And she will choose

  and you will lose