The City of Brass (The Daevabad Trilogy #1) - S. A. Chakraborty Page 0,97

the zulfiqar, bent down, and ran the blade lightly along his ankle. He pressed his palm against the bloody wound and handed the zulfiqar back to Ali. “Your turn. Take the blood from somewhere Abba won’t see. He’d kill me if he found out I brought you down here.”

Ali frowned but followed his brother’s example with the blade. “Now what?”

“Put your hand here.” Muntadhir gestured to a pair of grimy copper seals on the door, and they each pressed a bloody hand against a seal. The ancient doors opened with a whisper of dust into yawning blackness. His brother stepped through and raised his fistful of flames.

Ali ducked under the low doorway and followed. Muntadhir flung his hand out, scattering the flames to light the torches on the walls, illuminating a large cavern roughly hacked out of the city’s bedrock. Ali covered his nose as he took another step on the soft, sandy ground. The cavern reeked, and as his eyes adjusted to the blackness, he stilled.

The floor was covered with coffins. Scores, he realized, as Muntadhir lit another torch. Some were neatly lined up in identical rows of matching stone sarcophagi, while others were simply jumbled piles of plain wooden boxes. The smell wasn’t mildew. It was rot. The sharply astringent odor of the ashy decay of a djinn.

Ali gasped in horror. “What is this?” All djinn, regardless of their tribe, burned their dead. It was one of the few rituals they shared after Suleiman divided them.

Muntadhir scanned the room. “Our handiwork, apparently.”

“What?”

His brother motioned him toward a large rack of scrolls concealed behind an enormous marble sarcophagus. All were sealed in lead containers marked with tar. Muntadhir cracked open one of the seals, pulled out the scroll, and handed it to Ali. “You’re the scholar.”

Ali carefully unrolled the fragile parchment. It was covered in an archaic form of Geziriyya, a simple line drawing of names leading to other names.

Daeva names.

A family tree. He glanced at the next page. This one had several entries, all following roughly the same format. He struggled to read one.

“Banu Narin e-Ninkarrik, aged one hundred and one. Drowning. Verified by Qays al Qahtani and her uncle Azad . . . Azad e-Nahid . . . Aleph noon nine nine,” Ali read out the symbols at the end of the entry and raised his gaze to the pile of coffins before him. All had a four-digit pattern of numbers and letters painted in black tar on their sides.

“Merciful God,” he whispered. “It’s the Nahids.”

“All of them,” his brother confirmed, an edge to his voice. “All those who’ve died since the war anyway. No matter the cause.” He nodded at one dark corner, so far back Ali could only make out shadowy shapes of boxes. “Some Afshins, as well, though their family was wiped out in the war itself, of course.”

Ali gazed around. He spotted a pair of tiny coffins across the room and turned away, his stomach souring. Regardless of how he felt about the fire worshippers, this was ghastly. Only the worst criminals were buried in their world, dirt and water said to be so contaminating to djinn remains that they concealed one’s soul from God’s judgment entirely. Ali wasn’t sure he believed that, but still, they were creatures of fire, and to fire they were supposed to return. Not to some dark, dank cave under a cursed lake.

“This is obscene,” he said softly as he rolled up the scroll; he didn’t need to read further. “Abba showed you this?”

His brother nodded and stared at the pair of small coffins. “When Manizheh died.”

“I take it she’s down here somewhere?”

Muntadhir shook his head. “No. You know how Abba felt about her. He had her burned in the Grand Temple. He said that when he became king he wanted to have all the remains blessed and burned, but he didn’t think there was a way to do so discreetly.”

Shame gnawed at Ali. “The Daevas would tear down the palace gates if they found out about this place.”

“Probably.”

“Then why do all this?”

Muntadhir shrugged. “You think it was Abba’s decision? Look at how old some of these bodies are. This place was likely built by Zaydi himself . . . oh, don’t give me that look, I know he’s your hero, Ali, but don’t be that naive. You must know the things people used to say about the Nahids, that they could change their faces, swap forms, resurrect each other from ash . . .”

“Rumors,” Ali said dismissively.