Chapter 51 Quil #2
Quil reached toward the walls with his magic, wondering if he could elicit a memory.
A rush of images flashed through his mind at a staggering speed.
Small flames trundling through a forest. Humans cutting them down, a great scything.
A circle of women wearing coin headdresses, deeper in the cave, in the chamber where Ruh died, chanting as a horrific void opened before them.
The memory ended and Quil was back in the cave, just behind Pithar.
“There are voices ahead, Emperor,” the jinn said. “I hear my kin. Please hurry—the stones speak to me. They cry out that some ill magic is at work.”
Quil forced himself to walk on, scim in hand, heart in his throat. The last time he was in this cave, he’d found Ruh’s broken body and what he thought were the remnants of Ilar. His mind flashed to Sirsha. He imagined her heart torn out. Her body in pieces. And him, once again far too late.
Quil quickened his step, for the voices ahead were raised now. Frantic.
The tunnel ended at another gate, and Quil entered a wide, high cave littered with huge boulders.
Another doorway led to the chamber on the left, where Div had ripped Ruh’s heart out.
Seven jinn stood in spokes around this cavern, cords of light flaring from their hands, all wrapped around a central figure. Sirsha.
“We cannot hold it, Diriya!” one of the jinn—Umber—called to another. “This isn’t working!”
“Quil!” Sirsha called out. “Quil, help me! Stop them! They’re—they’re going to kill me—”
Quil stepped toward her, scim out, though he knew it was no good against the jinn. Pithar grabbed his arm, his brow furrowed.
“No, Emperor—”
At almost the same time, the oddest thing caught Quil’s eye. A cat. Sitting in the shadows of one of the boulders, hissing, its green eyes fixed on Sirsha.
Beside Quil, Pithar gasped, like he was being strangled. He seemed to shrink before he was suddenly flying backward and pinioned to the wall. The blue ore that lit the cavern glowed and writhed, wrapping around his wrists, his ankles, his throat.
Quil turned back to a pleading Sirsha. But now he understood: That thing was not Sirsha. It was her body, certainly, her dark hair and brown skin and eyes. But whatever was in control of it was not her. His entire being recoiled against what he was looking at.
“Div,” he snarled at her. “Where is she? What are you doing to the jinn?”
“Ah, there is no fooling you, I see. She’s just inside.
” Div tapped Sirsha’s head. “Tucked away in her own mind, watching as I use her body as I wish. As for the jinn—” She flicked her fingers, as if to send a drop of water flying, and the golden cords binding her disappeared.
The jinn flew backward, pinned to the walls like Pithar.
“I’ve enjoyed toying with them,” Div said.
“But it’s you I’ve awaited. I did not know your skill at first, boy.
The little witch tried to hide it from me.
Tried to protect you.” The sneer on Sirsha’s face was so unlike her that Quil fought to remind himself that it was still her body.
That she was locked in that mind, somewhere.
That he needed to find a way to break her out.
“It was in the witch city that I finally saw you clearly,” Div said. “When you nearly broke the Jaduna with memories of your pain.”
She inhaled deeply, as if she smelled a wonderful meal. “The way your pain tore through them,” she said. “Oh, it was glorious. Now you will do the same for me. Only it is them”—she lifted a hand to the jinn—“that you shall break.”
Quil’s weapon was useless—he would not kill Sirsha’s body with it, even if Div was possessing her. The jinn couldn’t move. All he had was that which Ruh had been imploring him to use for months now.
He reached out gingerly with his magic. And he saw for the first time the truth of what she was, the reason he always felt that strange pressure when she was around. For Div was not some evil spirit or demon.
She was a memory.
Or really, a knot of them. He could not see where one ended and the next began, for they were all entwined with deep pain that colored everything a seething gray.
Quil understood now why the jinn Diriya had told him he must embrace his magic. Why Ruh had implored him to use it. For this. For a memory so vast he could hardly comprehend it.
“Leave Sirsha be,” Quil said, taking a careful step toward her. “Release her from her mind. And let me help you.”
“You will help me,” Div spat. “But I will not release her. I hunger for vengeance and you will give it to me, boy. If I am pleased, perhaps I shall give her back to you.” She advanced on Quil, but he held his ground.
“I know you hunger,” Quil said. “But I think you do not know what you hunger for.”
“I hunger for freedom,” Div said. “I hunger for the hearts of the young and innocent.”
“You hunger to be heard,” Quil said. “You hunger to release your pain. Adding to it won’t help. Let me make it better.”
“You can make it better by taking this—” She flung a memory at him, and he flinched and withdrew his magic to protect himself.
Before he did, he saw the same memory as in the hallway.
The little jinn, dying. The Jaduna, chanting.
“You will take that memory,” Div growled, “and shove it into their minds so that it is all they see until they go mad with it! Until they are as hungry as I!”
Quil knew that the events of a memory were as powerful as the feelings they evoked. For Div, the hunger had taken over everything. And she could not see the event that lay at the heart of it.
“The hunger,” he said, “is not what you think it is. Look.” Quil summoned his magic and walked into her memory.
He braced, expected her to try to throw him out, but she did nothing and he saw that the surface of her memory was a mix of recent events—her time in the Tribal Desert, traveling with Sirsha, seeing Kotama for the first time.
Quil wandered deeper, but instantly, he was stuck, ensnared by the sheer number of pathways ahead of him. Memory atop memory atop memory. So many—because of her age?
But no single creature could have so many memories, even one who had lived for a long time. He could not make his way into the morass.
He stepped back and looked more carefully at the jumble.
These were not the memories of one being, he realized.
Almost at the exact same time, a voice broke through to him.
His chest burned where his Adah coin had always rested—Sirsha, fighting from a locked room in her own mind, fighting to help him.
Quil, she is not one. She is many.
Suddenly, the memories made sense. He was looking at hundreds of recollections of the same event, jumbled together in one horror. The moment he understood it, the memory coalesced at the touch of his magic, falling into place like the weave of a rug.
And Div began to speak in Sirsha’s voice, the words exploding from her in a rush, a dam breaking after far too long.
There was no one in all the world like us, she said. Magic flowed from us like water. We could change form. We could fly on the back of the north wind. We were unstoppable. Or so we thought.
Men came. Vicious men. Violent men. We did not want to run, but our parents told us we must leave. Our monarch ordered us out of our beautiful home of glowing lamplight and into the wilds beyond the city walls.
We set out deep in the night, for we wished to reach our destination by the next evening.
The deep night was a time for monsters, and we moved carefully through the wood.
Alas, we could not survive the most vicious hunter of all.
Men. They stalked and cornered us. It was the heat of summer and rain lashed. Wind whipped.
Do you know what it is to quench a jinn’s fire? A slow suffocation. Like snuffing out ten thousand flames in one body one by one by one. But our captors were very patient. Our enemies made sure we died slow.
Those with us, our elders, they could not save us. They died quickly, prophecy on their lips, though there was no one to catch it. They saved their city, but they could not save us. There was no one to help us. We were alone. We are alone. We will always be alone.
Quil could imagine them, hundreds of jinn flames, contained with salt and steel and then quenched with summer rain. His mind was staggered at the extent of the violence unleashed upon them. And at what they had become.
But beneath what he had already unearthed, he sensed something else. A great, seething worm of a memory that he couldn’t get to. But he had to—because the only way to free Sirsha from this thing was to fully unknot the memory at the heart of it.
Pale threads snaked out from that under-memory. But he couldn’t reach it—he couldn’t—
“You dare!”
He was flung from Div’s mind so powerfully that he gasped, dropping to his knees.
“Why did you make me remember?” she shrieked at him, her hands curled into claws. “I didn’t wish to remember!”
She advanced upon him, an unholy light in her eyes, mouth twisted in a sneer that was obscene on a face so beloved.
“So be it,” she said. “You will be first.”
Then her hand shot toward him. She dug her fingers into the skin over his heart and pulled.