circle that the djinn outnumbered them and that to go in would be a bloodbath?
He wanted to tell them to run. Instead, power building in his blood, Dara raised his scourge to the air.
“Today we end this!” he announced. “The djinn have returned our gesture of peace with deception and murder. They need to be taught a lesson. You will show no mercy and take no prisoners. We do not stop until they submit, lay down their arms, and hand over Zaynab al Qahtani.”
As the words poured from him, Dara prayed to see disquiet among their faces. Hesitation.
There was none. He had trained them too well. They roared their approval.
“For the Nahids!” Noshrad cried, brandishing his sword.
“For Banu Manizheh!” Dara snapped his fingers, and magic surged to his hand, a hundred times faster and more powerful than it ever had before, as if he’d jumped into a rushing river and been swept away. One of his conjured winged horses appeared before him, dazzling with a spray of smoldering embers in its ebony mane, the four wings billowing like smoke. He launched himself onto its back.
Dara had no sooner appeared in the midan than gunshots rang out, followed by a barrage of arrows. It didn’t matter. Manizheh had wished for him not to be harmed, and so the curse simply didn’t allow it—the projectiles bursting into flames and falling as ash before him.
“Djinn!” he roared, rising in the air on his winged horse. “I come with a simple message. Submit. Lay down your weapons and hand over Zaynab al Qahtani, or we will destroy you. The longer you take, the more of you will die.”
He didn’t wait for a response. He couldn’t. Manizheh’s wish was tearing through him, energy wrapping around his limbs and crackling down his fingers. His relic seared his skin.
Dara closed his hands into fists, and half the midan came down.
The three great gates, gates that had stood for centuries even when he was a boy—the stark Geziri archway, the studded pyramids with the proud Ayaanle standards, and the tiled columns leading to the warren of shops and shafit homes—crumbled into dust, the copper wall that connected them shattering. The wall came down with such violence that the buildings nestled against it were ripped apart, furniture and bricks and beams crashing down. It didn’t take much effort—the city had been slowly dying, rotting from the inside since its magical heart was torn out. But to see something once so mighty, so old, obliterated in seconds …
We were supposed to be the saviors of Daevabad.
Instead, Dara gazed upon ruins. There were already screams rising from them. Children crying for their parents, the wails of the dying.
But Manizheh had ordered him to bring down the streets until Zaynab was caught. And so Dara raised his hands again, crying out in his mind as people ran to the buildings that had already collapsed, scrabbling at the heap in hopes of rescuing those trapped inside.
He rained down the next block directly on top of them.
That brought silence. For a moment. Dust rose from the rubble, hazy in the air. Dara motioned to his warriors and pressed forward.
He didn’t have to speak. He’d given his orders and his soldiers, having spent the past weeks penned up in the Daeva Quarter as conspiracies and paranoia swirled, having just tended the funeral pyres of their comrades murdered in the failed coup, didn’t need a reminder.
They threw themselves on the survivors, hacking at the djinn and shafit trying to dig through the rubble and firing arrows into the backs of those who fled. On horseback, they were faster, running down their victims.
Go away from this in your head. It was an old instinct, as though a past version of himself—a forgotten version, the Dara who’d survived centuries of ifrit enslavement—had quietly risen to hold his hand and see him through this latest horror so it wouldn’t obliterate what was left of his soul.
But it was too late for that. Dara’s horse landed on the road, and he lashed a man across the chest, getting what he knew would only be the first of many coats of blood on his scourge. He roared for his men to charge forward and then brought down another block of buildings. Bricks exploded outward, the roof of a long alley of shops crashing down on the crowd that had rushed to shelter there. Dara scourged another man. A woman. A boy. Blood was thick on his skin, the bodies piling up