The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,147

Her command has been spoken, and the signal passed along, and on the shores of the great river there are fires blazing now. By their light, I see covers coming off the enormous barges I’d assumed were cargo boats.

Bodies swarm around them, struggle and heave, and I see the splashes as the anchors enter the water.

The lights nearest to them go out instantly, and I see the signal travel along the waterways. As it meets between each anchor, the net is complete, and the lights go out across the city, darkness sweeping inward, every pinpoint of light extinguished as the wave sweeps toward us.

The people below me are invisible now, but … Inshara is still illuminated.

Skyfall, Jezara was telling the truth. Her daughter, immune to the sky-steel, stares up defiantly at the mist-storm and the wild goddess riding it, watching as it begins to tear itself apart.

Surrounded by sky-steel, Nimh screams. The sound is an echo of the mist-wraiths back at the dead village. My skin crawls horribly, and for an instant I’m sure my eardrums are going to burst. Her whirling pillar shudders once, and then implodes around her, until all that remains is a writhing orb, hovering just above the stone terrace.

“Nimh!”

Her name’s ripped out of me as I push to my feet, as I break into a run, unsure if she’s even still inside the cocoon—unsure if she’s even alive. “NIMH, NO!”

I skid to a stop beside the roiling ball of mist, helpless. The storm within it rages, though now and then a flicker of light shows me a glimpse of an arm, a leg—she’s braced, frozen, locked in a struggle with the force of Inshara’s sky-steel. I reach out toward her, then snatch my hand back as a shock runs through me. I’m raging at my own helplessness, but to touch her cage of mist would surely be deadly—to become like Quenti, or worse, like the mist-wraiths.

But Nimh is in there, my heart cries. The orb hovers just in front of me, barely large enough to contain her form.

Footsteps behind me make me whirl in time to see Inshara descending to this level of the terrace. Her guards hurry after her, Techeki on their heels. She stares at the condensed, raging storm for a moment. Then she turns and snatches a spear from a nearby guard. She whirls back, raising her arm.

My muscles bunch before I’ve time to think it through, ready to launch me in between the spear and what’s left of Nimh.

Then a voice rings out like a bell, singing across the crowd. “That’s enough!” For a moment, I can’t tell who spoke—and then a figure shoves its way through the throngs of people to emerge just in front of us. Her gaze is lifted.

Fixed upon her daughter.

“I did not raise you to be a monster,” Jezara calls, panting with effort. How she made it through the destruction below, through the wide swath of rubble that marks Nimh’s path into the city, I have no idea. “Stop this now.”

The spear drops from Inshara’s hands, clattering harmlessly to the stone. She lifts her chin. Is it in attempt to maintain her composure? “Mother. Why are you here?”

Confusion permeates those assembled on the terrace. Many of them clearly recognize their former goddess. But they had no idea Inshara was her forbidden child. Jezara moves up the bottom few steps until she’s standing just below me. “I’m here,” she says, “to stop you from becoming this. This isn’t who you are.”

“This is exactly who I am!” Inshara snaps back, eyes blazing. “I am the one the Lightbringer speaks to! I have heard him all my life—he has told me I am special, I am chosen. I am chosen, not her!”

Slowly, Jezara makes her limping way up the stairs until she can stand alongside me, between her daughter and the still-struggling Nimh, fighting her own battle against the mist.

“How can you stand at her side?” Inshara bursts out, voice agonized. “She is nothing to you—a symbol of the world that cast you out! I was the one who lived with you in squalor, raised on the jeers and disgust of everyone around us. I was the one they spat on when I passed them in the street. I was the one who went hungry so that we could raise enough to leave that place. She is not your daughter!” Inshara’s voice cracks with her intensity, the last words emerging in a ragged shout as she extends a shaking