The City of Brass (The Daevabad Trilogy #1) - S. A. Chakraborty Page 0,42

“This was before my time.”

Nahri exhaled. “Of course.” She could barely wrap her mind around how long three thousand years was. “But Suleiman was human. What could he possibly do to a daeva?”

A dark expression flickered across Dara’s face. “Anything he liked, apparently. Suleiman was given a seal ring—some say by the Creator himself—that granted him the ability to control us. A thing he went about doing with a vengeance after we . . . well, supposedly there was some sort of human war the daevas might have had a part in instigating—”

Nahri held up a hand. “Yes, yes, I’m sure it was a most unfair punishment. What did he do?”

Dara beckoned the smoky pillar forward. “Suleiman stripped us of our abilities with a single word and commanded that all daevas come before him to be judged.” The smoke spread before them; one corner condensed to become a misty throne while the rest dissipated into hundreds of fiery figures the size of her thumb. They drifted past the carpet, their smoky heads bowed before the throne.

“Most obeyed; they were nothing without their powers. They went to his kingdom and toiled for a hundred years.” The throne vanished, and the fiery creatures swirled into workers heating bricks and stacking enormous stones several times their size. A vast temple began to grow in the sky. “Those who made penance were forgiven, but there was a catch.”

Nahri watched the temple rise, entranced. “What was it?”

The temple vanished, and the daevas were bowing again to the distant throne. “Suleiman didn’t trust us,” Dara replied. “He said our very nature as shapeshifters made us manipulative and deceitful. So we were forgiven but changed forever.”

In an instant, the fire was extinguished from the bowing daevas’ smoky skin. They shrank in size, and some grew hunched, their spines bent in old age.

“He trapped us in humanlike bodies,” Dara explained. “Bodies with limited abilities that only lasted a few centuries. It meant that those daevas who originally tormented humanity would die and be replaced by their descendants, descendants Suleiman believed would be less destructive.”

“God forbid,” Nahri cut in. “Only living for a few centuries with magical abilities . . . what an awful fate.”

He ignored her sarcasm. “It was. Too awful for some. Not all daevas were willing to subject themselves to Suleiman’s judgment in the first place.”

The familiar hate returned to his face. “The ifrit,” she guessed.

He nodded. “The very same.”

“The very same?” she repeated. “You mean they’re still alive?”

“Unfortunately. Suleiman bound them to their original daeva bodies, but those bodies were meant to survive millennia.” He gave her a dark look. “I’m sure you can imagine what three thousand years of seething resentment does to the mind.”

“But Suleiman took their powers away, didn’t he? How much of a threat can they be?”

Dara raised his brows. “Did the thing that possessed your friend and ordered the dead to eat us seem powerless?” He shook his head. “The ifrit have had millennia to test the boundaries of Suleiman’s punishment and have risen to the task spectacularly. Many of my people believe they descended to hell itself, selling their souls to learn new magic.” He twisted his ring again. “And they’re obsessed with revenge. They believe humanity a parasite and consider my kind to be the worst of traitors for submitting to Suleiman.”

Nahri shivered. “So where do I fit in all this? If I’m just some lowly, mixed-blood shafit, why are they bothering with me?”

“I suspect it’s whose blood—however little—you have in you that provoked their interest.”

“These Nahids? The family of healers you mentioned?”

He nodded. “Anahid was Suleiman’s vizier and the only daeva he ever trusted. When the daevas’ penance was complete, Suleiman not only gave Anahid healing abilities, he gave her his seal ring, and with it the ability to undo any magic—whether a harmless spell gone wrong or an ifrit curse. Those abilities passed to her descendants, and the Nahids became the sworn enemies of the ifrit. Even Nahid blood was poisonous to an ifrit, more fatal than any blade.”

Nahri was suddenly very aware of how Dara was speaking of the Nahids. “Was poisonous?”

“The Nahid family is no more,” Dara said. “The ifrit spent centuries hunting them down and killed the last, a pair of siblings, about twenty years ago.”

Her heart skipped a beat. “So what you’re saying—” she started, her voice hoarse, “is that you think I’m the last living descendant of a family that a group of crazed, revenge-obsessed former daevas have been trying to