Ali ducked under the low doorway and followed. Muntadhir flung his hand out, scattering the flames to light the torches on the walls, illuminating a large cavern roughly hacked out of the city’s bedrock. Ali covered his nose as he took another step on the soft, sandy ground. The cavern reeked, and as his eyes adjusted to the blackness, he stilled.
The floor was covered with coffins. Scores, he realized, as Muntadhir lit another torch. Some were neatly lined up in identical rows of matching stone sarcophagi, while others were simply jumbled piles of plain wooden boxes. The smell wasn’t mildew. It was rot. The sharply astringent odor of the ashy decay of a djinn.
Ali gasped in horror. “What is this?” All djinn, regardless of their tribe, burned their dead. It was one of the few rituals they shared after Suleiman divided them.
Muntadhir scanned the room. “Our handiwork, apparently.”
“What?”
His brother motioned him toward a large rack of scrolls concealed behind an enormous marble sarcophagus. All were sealed in lead containers marked with tar. Muntadhir cracked open one of the seals, pulled out the scroll, and handed it to Ali. “You’re the scholar.”
Ali carefully unrolled the fragile parchment. It was covered in an archaic form of Geziriyya, a simple line drawing of names leading to other names.
Daeva names.
A family tree. He glanced at the next page. This one had several entries, all following roughly the same format. He struggled to read one.
“Banu Narin e-Ninkarrik, aged one hundred and one. Drowning. Verified by Qays al Qahtani and her uncle Azad . . . Azad e-Nahid . . . Aleph noon nine nine,” Ali read out the symbols at the end of the entry and raised his gaze to the pile of coffins before him. All had a four-digit pattern of numbers and letters painted in black tar on their sides.
“Merciful God,” he whispered. “It’s the Nahids.”
“All of them,” his brother confirmed, an edge to his voice. “All those who’ve died since the war anyway. No matter the cause.” He nodded at one dark corner, so far back Ali could only make out shadowy shapes of boxes. “Some Afshins, as well, though their family was wiped out in the war itself, of course.”
Ali gazed around. He spotted a pair of tiny coffins across the room and turned away, his stomach souring. Regardless of how he felt about the fire worshippers, this was ghastly. Only the worst criminals were buried in their world, dirt and water said to be so contaminating to djinn remains that they concealed one’s soul from God’s judgment entirely. Ali wasn’t sure he believed that, but still, they were creatures of fire, and to fire they were supposed to return. Not to some dark, dank cave under a cursed lake.
“This is obscene,” he said softly as he rolled up the scroll; he didn’t need to read further. “Abba showed you this?”
His brother nodded and stared at the pair of small coffins. “When Manizheh died.”
“I take it she’s down here somewhere?”
Muntadhir shook his head. “No. You know how Abba felt about her. He had her burned in the Grand Temple. He said that when he became king he wanted to have all the remains blessed and burned, but he didn’t think there was a way to do so discreetly.”
Shame gnawed at Ali. “The Daevas would tear down the palace gates if they found out about this place.”
“Probably.”
“Then why do all this?”
Muntadhir shrugged. “You think it was Abba’s decision? Look at how old some of these bodies are. This place was likely built by Zaydi himself . . . oh, don’t give me that look, I know he’s your hero, Ali, but don’t be that naive. You must know the things people used to say about the Nahids, that they could change their faces, swap forms, resurrect each other from ash . . .”
“Rumors,” Ali said dismissively. “Propaganda. Any scholar could—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Muntadhir said evenly. “Ali, look at this place.” He pointed to the scrolls. “They kept records, they verified the bodies. We might have won the war, but at least some of our ancestors were so frightened of the Nahids, they literally kept their bodies to reassure themselves that they were truly dead.”
Ali didn’t respond. He wasn’t sure how to. The whole room made his skin crawl; Suleiman’s chosen, reduced to rotting in their burial shrouds. The cavern—no, the tomb—was silent save for the sound of spitting torches.
Muntadhir spoke again. “It gets worse.” He jiggled free a small drawer in the side of the rack and plucked out a copper box about the size of his hand. “Another blood seal, though what you have on your hand should be enough to open it.” He offered it to Ali. “Trust me, our ancestors never wanted anyone to find this. I’m not even sure why they kept it.”
The box grew warm in Ali’s bloody hand, and a tiny spring was released. Nestled inside was a dusty brass amulet.
A relic, he recognized. All djinn wore something similar, a bit of blood and hair, sometimes a baby tooth or flayed piece of skin—all bound up with holy verses in molten metal. It was the only means by which they could be returned to a body if they were enslaved by an ifrit. Ali wore one, as did Muntadhir, copper bolts through their right ears in the manner of all Geziri.
He frowned. “Whose relic is this?”
Muntadhir gave him a bleak smile. “Darayavahoush e-Afshin’s.”
Ali dropped the amulet as if it had bitten him. “The Scourge of Qui-zi?”
“May God strike him down.”
“We shouldn’t have this,” Ali insisted. A shiver of fear ran down his spine. “That—that’s not what the books say happened to him.”
Muntadhir gave him a knowing look. “And what do the books say happened, Alizayd? That the Scourge mysteriously disappeared when his rebellion was at its height, as he prepared to retake Daevabad?” His brother knelt to retrieve the amulet. “Strange timing, that.”
Ali shook his head. “It’s not possible. No djinn would turn over another to the ifrit. Not even their worst enemy.”
“Grow up, little brother,” Muntadhir chided and replaced the box. “It was the worst war our people have ever seen. And Darayavahoush was a monster. Even I know that much of our history. If Zaydi al Qahtani cared for his people, he would have done anything to end it. Even this.”
Ali reeled. A fate worse than death: That’s what everyone said about enslavement. Eternal servitude, forced to grant the most savage and intimate desires of an endless slew of human masters. Of the slaves that were found and freed, very few survived with their sanity intact.
Zaydi al Qahtani couldn’t have arranged such a thing, he tried to tell himself. His family’s long reign could not be the product of such an awful betrayal of their race.
His heart skipped a beat. “Wait, you don’t think the man the scout saw . . .”
“No,” Muntadhir said, a little too quickly. “I mean, he can’t be. His relic is right here. So he couldn’t have been returned to a body.”