Chapter 6
It’s more than you three. It’s more than me. It’s the baker who used to fold rotis in the palace courtyard, whose shop is now boarded up. It’s the sprites who used to play in the morning dew, and now the wood is silent. It’s the magic, running through everything, now gone.
It’s all the life. Now gone.
—Letter from Kiyan to his family, unsent
Kiyan
I eyed the pile of rotted wood and dead creatures I’d begun to gather up in the abandoned royal wing of the palace. The smell alone would have attracted Salt soldiers, but with my slight magic, I managed to put a eucalyptus block on the room, which staunched the scent for the time being.
I glanced behind me, checking to make sure I hadn’t been followed to the destroyed royal bedchamber, before shutting the door behind me with a click.
Most of the royal rooms had been destroyed when the Salt Court had invaded—furniture broken, paintings slashed, bedding ripped apart.
Not just due to mindless destruction, but also to search for magical relics that may have been left behind.
Unluckily for them, the royal family had taken them all when they had had escaped to Tirich Mir.
Unluckily for me, that meant we’d had no magical weapons left to use.
Not that they would work against the Viceroy in any case.
My footsteps were soundless as I crept around the room, piecing together my collection of dead things.
It wasn’t as though the royal wing was off limits—I had reappropriated one of the bedrooms myself. But I didn’t want to arouse General Faisal’s suspicions by being discovered skulking around in abandoned corridors, not yet anyway.
Not until I could properly use this new access to magic. One that could actually attack the Salt Court.
Last month Reza had complained that the stink of death had clung to me. But for the first time I’d been able to conjure something for longer than a few minutes, and I couldn’t be bothered to care about bathing.
I hope he thought that death reeked from my pores because of the bodies that piled up in his dungeons. The ones I had been responsible for.
Let him think I’d become death, if that’s what it took.
I chuckled to myself, the idea that the River peri who possessed the thread of life magic could instead be a harbinger of death.
Where Salt sucked the magic from you, River gave life.
At least, we used to.
My experiments had been a mistake at first. The anger I’d felt from my magic being so stifled finally choked me with so much rage that I tried to unleash everything I had in the forest.
But it wasn’t life that answered, but the other side of that cycle.
Instead of the living root of a tree, or the sure-footed paws of a leopard, it was the power and force in decay and death that rose to my command.
That power hadn’t been muted, like my life magic had been since Reza had taken the ancient King of River’s crown. Instead, it had thrived, full of energy. Best of all, when I accessed death magic, I could overcome the limits the Salt Court had over the peris in the River Court’s magic.
When I tested my newfound power I found that the more decayed and closer to the vibrant, alive side of death a thing was, the better my death magic worked—a wet, rotted log, a decayed body of a khapisi (the bog hag, a casualty of a Salt soldier along the riverbank)—they were what responded to me.
Not the growth of a vine anymore, but something new and dark and fierce.
And that’s how I began to harness death.
I certainly had enough around me to use. But it was hard to smuggle out peri bodies, and a certain level of decomposition was needed for me to summon the power of decay, so for now I had to be content with dead animals and sprites, with decayed wood and fetid plants.
And the creature I created now wouldn’t have to kill a Salt soldier, only to provide enough panic to let me slip away and get to the River without notice.
I focused my power on the debris, summoning that thread of life magic that sank into death, the process of rot that was a rebirth, the rise of death on my fingertips.
And it answered.
It knew me by now—I’d summoned it so many times before.
But never to do something as big as this.
I compiled the pieces of a newly formed beast like a macabre monster of rotted leaves and split-open rats, until the thing grew higher and fiercer, the call of death building on each one, the different levels of rot and decay merging together into a swirling mass with teeth and eyes and claws.
It was larger than my other experiments—about the size of a snow leopard or a nihang from the River.
I molded it to resemble the water dragon, and like the nihang it had a mane and wings and scales, but these were now made of dead leaves and decomposed animals.
Sweat poured from me, the concentration to pull such a power immense—I had to tap into every single piece of the death cycle and call on it in different ways.
Unlike life, which was a pulsing, vibrant thing, calling on death felt like cutting open my veins and spilling my blood over the dark marble floors of the palace.
I could feel it take its toll, the dizziness already rising up in me.
I didn’t have much time, and I needed to make it count.
The dead creature stood before me, a mass of darkness and rot. It stared at me with unseeing, dead eyes, and I felt the death inside it listening to me.
Waiting for my orders.
It was a heady feeling, creating something from the dead.
More intoxicating still, being able to command it.
But it didn’t feel wrong or corrupt, but rather like a side of my power I’d never been able to explore before—like seeing your reflection for the first time and realizing there was parts of you you’d never seen.
And I had given so much to death in these past few years, perhaps it owed me something after all.
“Downstairs,” I said aloud, wondering how long I could manage this. “To the courtyard.”
The creature took an awkward step, the sound of rotting animals hitting the ground like stepping through a swamp.
The smell was putrid as I followed behind it, watching it fulfil my bidding from the shadows.
It lumbered through the abandoned halls of the River Palace before I guided it to the large open courtyard where the majority of Salt soldiers usually were, clinging to the market stalls and looking for anyone they could arrest.
The creature trudged jerkily through the hall and into the opening of the courtyard.
The stench of it filled the air—it was a bog filled with rotting bodies, the decomposing food from the kitchens, and the decay of the underbelly of the forest. It was everything dark and foul but underneath I could sense it—that current of life that it held onto as well.
It was rot, but it was also growth. And it was mine.
I hung back as the screams began, watching the dead creature I’d created lurch through the courtyard, gnashing its blackened teeth.
Attack.
I spoke to it in my mind, more confident with controlling it now and the way I normally spoke to the plants and threads of life magic I commanded. It had been a long time since I’d felt so much power at my fingertips.
But unfortunately, I couldn’t stay and watch.
A row of Salt soldiers poured from the main hall in response to the shouts from the other guards. They tried to stab the dead thing with their sabers, crying out and pouring their Salt court magic into their weapons. I grinned, watching every single attack have no effect. How does one harm death?
Instead, the claws and wings of my creature wrapped themselves around their blades, pulling the weapons into itself.
General Faisal was there, issuing panicked orders, shouting at each other.
Amidst the din I smiled, as a dark, violent sense of justice seeped through my gut.
It had been a long time since I’d heard the melody of a Salt soldier screaming.
A pity then, that I couldn’t listen to more of it.
My brisk steps took me out of the courtyard, heading toward the bridge and beyond it, the River.
But before I lost sight of the courtyard completely, a different kind of scream stopped me.
I whirled around at hearing the low, devastating cry of death.
A Salt soldier had tried to physically fight the creature without weapons, and the death beast had grabbed his arm.
And the soldier’s arm had begun to rot.
His black flesh dropped off his arms in clumps. His piercing cry filled the halls.
I couldn’t move. By manipulating the power of death, I’d been able to harm a Salt soldier with death magic. River Court magic couldn’t normally harm those from the Salt Court after the Viceroy had cursed us.
That was new.
Soldiers ran toward us from all directions, a silver river of armed Salt warriors flooding the halls, sabers raised. It was as if every soldier in the both the Palace and Charvellan City was here.
Likely because they hadn’t been attacked like this in over seven years.
But unfortunately, I couldn’t stay to watch. I knew that when I moved too far from the creature, I would lose control, and it would fall to lifeless animals and rotting plants.
But hopefully what I had done would be enough of a distraction to keep General Faisal busy for a few hours. My eyes sought him in the crowd, picking him out instantly. He stood in the mass of Salt soldiers, barking out orders.
Good. I was glad he was there to witness what was coming for him.
After I let go, and as soon as the creature slipped apart, General Faisal would likely take credit for bringing it down, as he had done for so many battles and massacres since Salt had invaded River.
I held a grim smile as I slipped from the palace and toward the woods.
One day, I’d be there to see his body rot, and I’d use his corpse as a weapon against his own masters.