Chapter 31
I scrambled back only to crash into the ship’s railing.
“God forgive me,” I breathed. “This cannot be real.”
Asif lunged against his chains, panting like a rabid animal. “No, don’t leave me!”
“ This cannot be real ,” I whispered again. I scrubbed my eyes, desperate for whatever hallucination or nightmare this was to vanish, but there
was no sign of the brass door or the cave. Only dark water and smoke surrounded us—the worst night of my life conjured into
reality.
“Nakhudha...” Asif begged. “Please just look at me.”
However, I was looking everywhere but at him. I had already lived this night once—to gaze upon Asif as he suffered and shrieked a second time would destroy me.
With a choked sob, I tried to turn away, but my body was slow to respond, as though trapped in a dream.
“ LOOK AT ME .”
My head snapped around like a spectral hand had seized me by the chin, forcing me to gaze upon the friend I had condemned.
It was Asif as I had seen him last, blood staining his lips and fingers.
A shroud soiled with grave dirt hung from his wasted body—his thin wrists and visible ribs evidence of the fever that had taken him, the sickness that had started as a cough and plagued him with such whiplashes of fever and chills, bleeding and vomiting, that in five days, he was gone.
Asif hadn’t been the only one to die that summer; a vicious wave of disease had swept through the ports of the Persian Gulf, taking nearly a fourth of my crew.
But Asif had been the only one to rise from the dead. To climb out of his shallow grave, ravenous and bewildered. To rip through a band of innocent merchants, sucking
down their flesh like a ghoul out of a monstrous fireside tale.
“Better,” he murmured, his yellowed eyes pinning me in place. His voice sounded briefly unfamiliar, breathy and high-pitched.
A heavy weight seemed to shift on my chest. “Much better. Just keep looking. Now...” A wave of dizziness swept over me,
the night coming even more alive with the acrid aroma of the burning sails and the gentle rock of the tide. Thoughts of the
cave, of Dunya and my mission were suddenly far away, as if that was all a dream and this was my true present.
Maybe it was. Maybe I had really condemned myself that night, the past ten years a hallucination.
“Nakhudha, please.” Asif’s voice was his own again, sounding exactly like it did in my memories and pulling me deeper into
whatever delusion or twisted reality had trapped me. “I won’t do it again, I swear! Amina, I was so hungry. I was just so
hungry. I couldn’t think straight.”
He will do it again . Raksh’s stammering explanation rose to my mind: a confession we only got when Asif, painted with the lifeblood of the men
he had slaughtered, begged Raksh to save him.
You promised to make me a legend! Asif had cried. We had a deal!
Raksh had turned away from him, looking to me. Fire , he’d said grimly. It’s the only way to prevent him from doing this again. His soul is gone, and he will not stop hungering without it.
“You killed a dozen men,” I choked out. “I had no choice.”
Asif fell to his knees, writhing as his chains grew hotter, the flames licking closer to his tattered shroud.
“Please don’t do this. I heard what Raksh said about my soul... I will be gone if you burn me. I will have no hope of redemption.” Asif’s desperate gaze met mine. “How can you condemn me to that?”
“Because I didn’t know what else to do!” The words ripped from me. It felt impossible to speak past the grief and pressure
in my chest, as though a vise were crushing my body. “I am sorry, my friend. I am so sorry. But I couldn’t let you hurt anyone
else.”
Asif stared mournfully at me, his mouth twisted in regret. “I just wanted to dream for a bit. To live a life greater than
the one that had been written. I thought I would have time to make up the cost. Was that so wrong?”
“No.” I was lost, unmoored within the memory and my own purpose. There was a stinging sensation at my throat, followed by
wetness. I tried to touch it, but my arm would not move. “I know how that feels.”
“Then how can you sentence me to this ?” Asif held out his arms. It wasn’t only flames ripping at him now, but wriggling worms of utter nothingness that winked
pieces of his body out of existence as if his body were a ragged sail. “You were my nakhudha!” he shrieked. “I trusted you!”
My chest hurt so much, the weight upon it growing heavier. I could barely gasp out a reply. “He swore he wouldn’t hurt any
of you. I didn’t know—”
Asif’s face snapped up. His eyes were gone, nothing but voids. “You did know. You knew what he was and still you let him dwell among us.”
“I—” The merchant’s ship was burning fiercely now all around me, rope snapping and pitch-soaked wood sizzling. If I did not
escape soon, I would burn to death alongside him. Dunya and Falco...
Something hit me then.
This is not how it happened.
For Asif had not raged, had not blamed me. He had wept. He had sobbed for his mother, for God, for a few more moments. He
was terrified , not angry, and he’d begged me to stay not so I’d burn alongside him, but so he wouldn’t face his end alone. I had done so
shamefaced, holding my tongue when he said he knew I was not to blame, knowing the lie in that.
“You’re the one who deserves to die,” Asif hissed.
The burden on my chest was pressing me into a floor that was cold stone, not sizzling wood.
My arms and legs were tingling as though the limbs had fallen asleep and were slowly regaining sensation.
There were blurry spots before my eyes, like two clashing visions of the world. ..
Because this is not real. Asif is long dead or gone or whatever happened to him . And you can never undo it.
But I could still save others.
“Asif, brother...” I was weeping. “I cannot stay with you this time. But I swear on our Lord—I will save your child.”
He opened his mouth—to protest or scream or try to bite me, I do not know. I slammed my head forward.
The illusion shattered. Pinned over me was a humanoid creature that appeared to have been ripped in half lengthwise. One large
orange eye leered at me, one gray arm pressed against my collar, and one fang dripped with the blood it had been drinking
from my neck. Earthworms wriggled from its absent left half and its spongy flesh was soft enough that my head had left an
imprint in its severed brow.
Its eye widened with what appeared to be surprise. “You should not be able to see me,” it said in a slithering voice, hopping
back on its single foot. “This is a trick!”
I seized it by the wormy throat before it could flee farther. “Trust that I would rather not see you,” I snarled. “What is
this place? Where am I?”
“Nasnas do not answer to food,” it snapped, trying to wiggle away.
I tightened my grip on its mess of a neck, gagging as worms slithered between my fingers. With my other hand, I freed my sword
and pressed it to the so-called nasnas’s throat. “You answer to this food. Where am I?”
The nasnas glowered resentfully. “The place between realms.”
The same nonsensical explanation Raksh had given. “Another pair of humans should have recently come this way. Did you hurt
them?”
“No,” the creature spat. “The small one knew spells. Spells to ward away nasnas and other folk of the between realms.”
“Where did they go?”
It jerked its head to a section of cave that snaked toward the left. “To the eternal waters of chaos.”
Was there a rule by which the magical world could not speak plainly? I released the nasnas. “The food thanks you.”
The creature gave me a look of hateful, wounded pride. “I will not forget this,” it warned. “I will come for you in your dreams
of despair and make you relive them again and again until you are nothing but a mad husk.”
So the nasnas was the one who put that memory in my head? “Do you promise?”
“Yes! You will not know a single night of peace!”
With a single strike of my sword, I lopped off its head.
“Idiot.” I wiped the blade but kept the weapon handy. This seemed like the sort of place where I was going to need it. Then
I took a deep breath, wiping my eyes and realizing as I did so that tears were running down my cheeks. I could still hear
Asif weeping, see his doomed, pleading expression. He might have been a nasnas hallucination, but that didn’t make his final
torment—or the charges he’d rightfully laid at my feet—any less real.
Then keep your promise and save Dunya . I forced myself to focus, studying what I could of my surroundings. The air was warm and suffocating, smelling of a sickly
sweetness I couldn’t identify. The craggy walls were the color of dead flesh, with veins of smoky gray quartz, and stalactites
dripping with slimy weeds. Though there was no hint of sky, the stone ceiling seemed to glow like an enclosed lamp.
There was a decent chance the nasnas was leading me to a trap, but I had nowhere else to start.
“To the eternal waters of chaos we go,” I muttered and set off.
The sides of the corridor soon pressed even tighter, the rocky ceiling swooping low.
The weeds hanging from the stalactites were joined by feathery fronds that reached out from the walls to brush my arms and legs.
Occasionally they clung, thorned claws erupting from their tips.
I sliced them away, never losing sight of the path ahead.
Not even when the ceiling started whispering, buzzing words and soft susurrations, nor when the stone beneath my feet flooded with foul-smelling water thick with unnatural vermin and drowned insects.
Nothing would distract me. Not until Falco was dead at my hand and Dunya was safe.
Without warning, the corridor abruptly veered left, then right, doing so again several times before opening into a vast chamber
of astonishing wonders. Stone columns carved with the likenesses of beasts and strange symbols held up an intricately sculpted