A Sky Beyond the Storm (An Ember in the Ashes #4) - Sabaa Tahir Page 0,114

hold on to the jinn and reach for Mauth’s magic. I need a shield—something to protect me so that I can spirit Maro away and question him without the Nightbringer’s interference.

But the magic is too far away, just like when Umber chased me. The power fills me slowly, like droplets in an empty bucket.

“Give me back my ghosts,” I tell the king of the jinn, “and I’ll let him go.”

The Nightbringer’s flame eyes narrow, his attention drifting to the city, to the screams of the efrits, louder than before as the fire draws closer. Understanding lights his gaze, and it is terrible to behold.

“Ah, I see now, little Soul Catcher, the game you have played,” he says. “So clever to empty out the city. To use the efrits. But it changes nothing. Your kind is a plague on this world. There are always more humans, and so there will always be more to reap. If not here, then another city.”

“Not if you don’t have your soul thief.” I dig my blade into Maro again, and this time, fire leaks out.

“Stop.” The Nightbringer’s fists clench. “Or I will find her, I swear to the skies. And I will tear her soul from her tortured body myself.”

“Spending time with my mother, I see.” The Nightbringer is usually completely in control. But now his anger is reassuring. He is vulnerable.

And I can take advantage of it. I need to understand him. If he were a human, I would reach out with the tendrils of my magic, a touch too light to be felt. But the Nightbringer will sense any scrutiny—and he will not welcome it. If I want into his head, I will have to force my way in. So I scrape up every last drop of Mauth’s magic and launch my consciousness at him.

The moment I do, I hit a wall, miles high, miles thick, and I drift through it like a ghost. I know instantly that I am not in the Nightbringer’s mind. I am somewhere else. Somewhere real, even if it is a place where I have no corporeal form. The wall is magic, and that magic speaks to my own, for the source is the same. This wall is Mauth’s creation. I am in Mauth’s dimension.

Behind the wall is an aching Sea of Suffering that is too powerful to understand, too vast for any earthly being, fey or human, to control. I have seen it before, I realize, every time I have visited Mauth in his realm.

The Sea surges against Mauth’s wall, even as the Nightbringer pours the suffering of the ghosts he has thieved into it, giving the Sea more power than it should have. With every ghost, that raging ocean grows stronger. With every bit of suffering fed to it, it wears away at Mauth’s wall a little more. In time, it will destroy the wall altogether.

How much time, I wonder? How much more suffering does the Nightbringer need?

“Where are you?”

The Nightbringer’s question is heavy with contempt. For the blink of an eye, I think I see him, a thread of fire in the darkness, blazing with hate. Between us, an enormous whirlpool of wailing souls cries out, spinning down endlessly into the Sea. I reach for them, trying to pull them with me, trying to escape this place with them.

Then I am flung away from the Sea, the wall, the ghosts, and back into my body. I still have an arm around Maro, but he wrenches away from me and runs toward the Nightbringer.

Bleeding, burning hells. The king of the jinn pushes Maro behind him and strides toward me, murder thrumming in every sinew of his body.

Then an arrow flies out of the night from the staircase, sinking into Maro with a strange, hollow thump.

She didn’t run. Of course she didn’t.

Maro collapses, and the Nightbringer howls as he did in Aish. I am already past him, down the stairs, grabbing Laia and leaping out a window, harnessing the wind so we do not break our necks. Still, I hit the flagstones too hard and spin into a roll. Her head hits the ground with a sickening crack, knocking her out cold. I sweep her over my shoulder and tear through the city away from the jinn, not stopping until I reach the desert beyond the northern gate, empty now that the Tribes have evacuated.

“Soul Catcher!” Afya appears from over a hill, my brother Shan riding beside her.

“What the hells happened?” Her face drains of color as