A Sky Beyond the Storm (An Ember in the Ashes #4) - Sabaa Tahir Page 0,7

When Mauth can no longer magic away the screams in your head. On that day, seek out Siladh, lord of the sea efrits.”

“Is that you?”

The creature doesn’t answer, instead collapsing to the sand, leaving me soaked to the knees.

Once back in the forest, I pass on a dozen ghosts. Doing so means understanding and unraveling their hurt and wrath so they can release it and move on from this dimension. Mauth’s magic suffuses me, allowing me swift, deep insight into the spirits’ suffering.

Most take only a few moments to pass. After I finish, I check for weakness in the border wall, which is invisible to human eyes. The trees open for me as I walk, the path beneath my feet smooth as an Empire road.

It has been like this since I surrendered myself to Mauth. When I built the cabin, wood appeared at regular intervals, hewn and sanded as if by a craftsman. I’ve never been bitten nor suffered illness, nor struggled to find game. This forest is a physical manifestation of Mauth. Though to an outsider, it appears as any other forest would, he alters it to fit my needs.

Only so long as you’re useful to him.

Screams and faces rise in my head again, and this time they do not fade. I windwalk back into the storm to the heart of the Waiting Place: the jinn grove, or what is left of it.

Before I joined with Mauth, I avoided the grove assiduously. But now it is a place where I can forget my troubles. It is a vast plain on a bluff high above the City of the Jinn. Beyond the dark sprawl of that eerily silent place, the River Dusk winds, a serpentine glimmer.

I survey the blackened husks of the grove’s few remaining trees, which stand like sentinels, lonely between drenching sheets of rain. In the five months since the Nightbringer freed the jinn, I have not seen signs of a single one. Not even here, in the place that was once their prison.

“ . . . guide me to Kauf Prison . . . help me break my brother out of there.”

The words trigger a memory of the gold-eyed girl. I grit my teeth and head to the largest of the trees, a dead yew whose branches are blackened by fire. Its trunk is deeply scored on either side. Beside it sits an iron chain with links half the size of my hand, burgled from a Martial village.

I heft the chain and bring it down on one side of the tree trunk, and then the other, deepening the score marks. After only a few minutes, my arms begin to ache.

When your mind does not hear you, train your body. Your mind will follow. Skies know who said those words to me, but I have clung to them these past few months, returning to the jinn grove again and again when my thoughts grow unruly.

After half an hour, I am soaked in sweat. I peel off my shirt, my body screaming, but I have just begun. For as I heave stones and whip the tree and run the escarpment that leads down to the jinn city, the faces and sounds that haunt me fade away.

My body is the only part of me that is still human. It is solid and real and suffers hunger and exhaustion just as it always did. Flogging it means I must breathe a certain way, balance a certain way. Doing so takes all of my focus, leaving nothing for my demons.

Once I’ve exhausted the possibilities of the jinn grove, I trudge to its eastern edge, which slopes down to the River Dusk, swift and treacherous from the storm. I dive in, gasping at the frigid water, and swim the quarter mile across, emptying my mind of everything but the cold and the current.

I return to shore soaked and exhausted, but clearheaded. I am ready to face the ghosts that will be waiting in the trees. For even as I swam, I felt a great sundering of life far to the north. I will be busy this night.

I make for the old yew to collect my clothes. But someone stands beside it.

Mauth put an awareness of the Waiting Place into my mind that is much like a map. I reach for that awareness now, seeking the pulsing glow that indicates the presence of an outsider.

The map is empty.

I squint through the rain—a jinn, perhaps? But no—even the fey creatures leave a mark, their magic