Page 24 of The Jasad Crown (The Scorched Throne #2)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

SYLVIA

A black lake stretched between two mountains at the edge of the world.

On our right, the cliff disappeared into the familiar shroud of darkness. If I squinted, I could make out the surface of Suhna Sea gently undulating, the twinkle of hundreds of stars glimmering over its waves.

The Urabi had gathered at the lake’s perimeter. Three figures stepped from the crowd, treading lightly over the lake’s icy surface.

“I was frightened the first time they did this,” Maia murmured. “It’s rare to find one Visionist, so we are very fortunate to have three. When they store enough magic, they can pull sights from anywhere in the world for our display.”

At the current moment, their aim was to pull forward the scene in Galim’s Bend. Excited murmurs passed between half the circle; the other half waited in silent vigil. Efra stood with the first group, watching the ice with gleeful anticipation.

I licked my lips. “Can they pull… any sights?”

The Silver Serpent’s traitorous whore. Had they watched us the night of the Victor’s Ball?

They couldn’t have. My cuffs had resisted magic, including the strongest of tracking spells. Any Visionist trying to conjure an image of me would have run straight into their barricade.

I rubbed my wrists. I never thought their nakedness would leave me so bereft.

“Not any, no.” Maia yawned, her trimmed nails tapping lightly against her upper lip. “It is not a reliable science.”

Still, three Visionists? Not to mention Maia’s mysterious specialty and Efra’s annoying one. Who knew how many others among the Urabi had unique magic?

Arin was wrong. He’d thought the Urabi targeted Jasadis at random unless they were competing with the Mufsids for someone who’d held an important post in Jasad.

He couldn’t have known the Urabi were targeting rare and unusual magic.

Maia still hadn’t specified exactly what her specialty was, just that it included an ability to sever a consciousness without hurting the recipient.

I scanned the assembled Urabi and wondered how many other exceptional types of magic dwelled in our midst. It stirred a strange pride in my chest. Even after the siege, even after ten years of persecution—nobody could tamp out the spark that left Jasadis with magic and the other kingdoms barren.

Our magic lived through Rovial’s sacrifice, and it had adapted new ways to survive in an environment hostile to its existence.

With the pride came a rush of dread. The Mufsids had been determined to prevent the Urabi from gaining power.

Both groups must have been tracking Jasadis with specialized magic, which explained why the Mufsids never allowed those who refused recruitment to live past the rejection.

“How many Jasadis did the Mufsids kill?”

Namsa and Maia glanced around me at each other. Namsa massaged the corner of her jaw. “Too many.”

“You must have been relieved when the Nizahl Commander captured the bulk of their operation.”

She glanced at me sharply. “They are ours to punish. A common enemy does not make Nizahl our friend.”

Maia nodded. “And it bodes very ill for us that they haven’t been executed yet.”

At my quizzical glance, she continued, “Our spies alerted us that none of the Mufsids have been killed or made to stand trial. Either the Commander and the Supreme cannot see eye to eye on how to proceed, or they want something from the Mufsids.”

“Our location, our spies, and our numbers,” Namsa said. “The Mufsids are useless to Nizahl dead.”

The three Visionists locked hands in the center of the lake.

I became poignantly aware of the fragile shell of ice supporting their weight.

With a chill, I realized why the tableau looked so familiar.

My old nightmare had featured Niphran burning on a lake just like this one while I stood helplessly by.

“Where is your coat?” Maia asked, wincing sympathetically at my chattering teeth. “I thought you went to fetch it.”

“I got lost finding my way back to my room,” I sighed, the lie blooming easily between my lips. I raised a finger and drew a zigzag in the air, my nose scrunching in slight embarrassment. “Just wandered around the halls until I circled back out. I have an awful sense of direction.”

Maia giggled, launching into a story about her first week in the mountains and how she’d walked in on a naked couple chasing each other in the Geneina. I listened with one ear, relieved neither she nor Namsa had questioned my story.

It was partially true. I had entered the mountain and gotten temporarily turned around. But I possessed a keen sense of direction—I would’ve been an embarrassment of a crook and a Champion otherwise. Once I’d found my room, I spent ages pacing, panic ravaging through me.

Sefa and Marek could still be in Nizahl. I had no idea where I’d sent them during the Victor’s Ball.

Arin was in Nizahl.

As soon as I thought his name, the world had vanished. I’d found myself on a gloomy garden path, penned in by rosebushes on either side. Then Arin had turned the corner, blade expertly tucked under his thumb for quick slashing.

I had known as soon as I saw him that this was no dream.

No imagination of mine could conjure the complexity of the reaction that twisted across his face at the sight of me.

The rough plea in his voice when he said, Don’t.

The way he’d looked almost resigned when he asked if he was going mad.

At the end, before Wes arrived, he’d hardened into the man I remembered from the Relic Room.

From our first days of training. As though everything that happened in between was the real hallucination, and our only lingering truth was the promise of violence.

I had tried to warn him. Whether or not he believed me… we were about to find out.

Part of me recognized that the others would consider this a betrayal.

I couldn’t care less. They hadn’t batted an eye when Efra decided to let me drown as some demented test of magic, leaving me to either climb up the side of a cliff or become a morning treat for the waiting monsters.

They had also agreed and executed a release of the Alcalah’s monsters—monsters only I had faced—into the poorest string of villages in Nizahl, where they were housed.

“It isn’t our problem Nizahl saw fit to harbor those creatures beneath active villages,” Efra had said. “They knew the risk of storing them there.”

“Those cages were built centuries ago,” I’d snapped. “Long before a village formed on top of them.”

The Visionists broke apart, arms extended on either side. In a single, uniform line, they stepped backward. A crack formed in the spot where they had stood and raced toward the Visionists, ice collapsing in its wake. I glanced at Namsa in alarm, but none of the Urabi seemed to share my concern.

By the time the Visionists were back on solid ground, the rest of the ice had collapsed. The lake churned, and a whirlpool formed at the spot where the Visionists had stood, funneling the lake down until we were staring at a dry, empty canyon.

The ground quaked. With a dull roar, the water shot upward, a pillar rising high above our heads, and unrolled itself like a scroll beneath an impatient palm. In a blink, the sloshing surface solidified into the scene at Galim’s Bend.

My hand flew over my mouth as a nisnas chased a screaming girl down the street, dragging itself after her with jarring speed. The creature Wes had once charmingly described as what happens when you crush a body like a walnut and soak the remains in sewage .

“What is that?” Maia covered her mouth, horrified.

Another nisnas flung its arm around the ankles of a man and unhinged its jaw, revealing spikes of teeth covering the entire roof and bottom of its mouth. It clamped them around the screaming man’s face. Maia turned green at the crunch of bone.

A figure leaned against the side of a wagon, watching the chaos with leisurely interest. Between one blink and the next, its features shifted, rearranging themselves to resemble the man lying bloody beneath the nisnas.

A chill of recognition swept through me. But it couldn’t be. I’d buried my axe in his neck during the second trial.

“Is that a…” Namsa trailed off as the man caught the reins of a fleeing horse and laid a comforting hand on its nose.

His neck pulsed. The tendons thickened, pushing out like veins in a tree trunk. He swallowed, and his neck solidified once more.

“Dulhath,” I hissed. Magic Eater. They must have kept multiple of them imprisoned.

The dulhath swung onto the horse and snapped the reins. He rode into the carnage and disappeared.

I wanted to storm around the lake and shove Efra’s head into the water.

He’d released a dulhath ? That idiot—a dulhath had no interest in Nizahl or random violence.

It just wanted to eat. It would ride straight for the nearest source of magic and drain it dry.

Efra may as well have unleashed a sentient compass pointing straight toward Jasadis.

In the distance, a zulal burst between the rows of flaming roofs.

I’d never seen the worm extended to its full height before.

When it killed Mehti, it had been tightly wound around the Omal Champion as it absorbed the moisture from his desiccating corpse.

The yellow of the zulal’s fleshy body split the horizon.

Several of the Jasadis jumped when it suddenly struck, diving between the houses in an impossible burst of speed. Dirt sprayed in long arcs through the air, landing on the thatched roofs of the flaming village.

I lost track of the number of monsters razing through Galim’s Bend. I recognized a mere handful, many of which I’d thought had gone extinct during the purge that wiped monsters from Essam Woods decades ago.

The scene shifted, expanding outward, and I saw Efra whispering to the Visionists.

Above the wreckage, the sunrise wings of the creature that haunted my nightmares unfolded in the sky.