The Kingdom of Copper (The Daevabad Trilogy #2) - S. A. Chakraborty Page 0,57

deceptions. The belief he’d desperately clung to until he’d met a shafit woman—Nahri—whose company made him fear that everything he’d been told about the mixed-bloods was a lie.

Except Nahri wasn’t shafit. That had been the lie, a deception put in place by the very creature before him. A marid curse, a marid lie.

“Can you do it?” he demanded of the marid, abruptly done with these games. “Is it possible for us to travel through the waters back to Daevabad?”

“We will not help a Nahid retake Suleiman’s seal.”

“That is not what I asked,” he said through his teeth. “I asked if you could.”

The marid drew up. “We do not take commands from fire-born devils.”

That was answer enough for Dara.

It took very little to call up the raw power burning bright and angry inside him. Dara had spilled so much blood. It couldn’t be for nothing, and if the marid needed to learn that lesson the hard way, so be it.

He scorched the ground in a burst of heat that baked the clay beneath his feet, shaking the entire lake bed. The water churned as it came to a vicious boil, steaming away in gigantic clouds of vapor. More fire poured down his hands, dashing to consume everything that had been safely nestled in the lake’s embrace. The waterweeds that had been dancing and the fossilized teeth of creatures lost to time; a pair of writhing eels and the remains of countless fishing boats. A flock of cranes beat a hasty retreat, the frightened cry of birds filling the air.

The marid howled as its sanctuary burned, falling to its knees and screeching in pain as if it had taken the blow itself. Its clawed hands scrabbled at the dust.

Dara approached, kneeling at its side. He took the marid by its chin, its skin like pebbles beneath his fingertips. He forced its oily gaze to meet his. “You take commands from this fire-born devil,” he said coldly. “You will obey those commands or I will burn every water you consider sacred, every place your kind has ever called home. I will reduce it all to ash and dust and murder every human follower you have left on the wreckage of your shores.”

The marid jerked free. It stared at its burning sanctuary. In the puddles that remained, writhing fish were ablaze, looking like a sick parody of a Daeva fire altar.

The marid’s gaze lingered on the charred remains of a water snake. “When Suleiman punished your people, he shed no blood. He offered a choice … a choice to spend your penance building a temple to the Creator, not a command to take part in a war.”

The words came far easier to Dara now. “I am no Suleiman.”

“No,” the marid agreed. “You are not.” It seemed to have grown smaller, its teeth and scales dull.

A moment passed, the only sound the crackling of flames. The fire was spreading to the trees, to the evergreen forest he’d briefly longed to escape into.

The marid spoke again, its voice lower. “You will consider the blood debt paid if we let you pass through Daevabad’s lake?”

A loud crack from ahead caught his attention. The flames had taken a large tree on the opposite shore. It had stood alone, a towering sentinel, but as Dara watched, it broke, shattering from its base. It fell, landing across the smoking lake like the husk of a bridge.

He went very still. “No. That is not my only price,” he said softly. “Before you killed me on the lake, you attacked me at the Gozan. You transformed the river itself into a serpent, a beast as large as a mountain. Could you do that to the lake?”

“Perhaps.” The marid tensed. “Briefly. The lake is Tiamat’s birthplace. Its waters are not easily controlled.” It frowned. “Why would you want to do such a thing?”

Dara’s eyes returned to the burning tree. “I want to bring down a tower.”

Daevabad’s lake stretched before him, a pane of murky green glass.

No ripples played upon the dark water, nor did any leaping fish break its surface. The only movement came from the clumps of dead leaves that floated past. The thick, cold air smelled of earthen decay and lightning, an eerie silence hanging over the boat. The lake looked dead, a place cursed and left abandoned long ago.

Ali knew better.

As if in a trance, he stepped closer to the deck’s edge, his skin prickling as he watched the ferry course through the water. Its stern looked like a blunt