Chapter 41

41

Aiz

Stone walls rose around Aiz, and she was reminded of the Tohr. Of all the places in the Empire, she hated the feel of this place the most. Blackcliff , it was called, built of stygian granite, along cliffs that dropped straight down into an unending stretch of desert.

Aiz hoped to find Loha here. To transfer thousands of Kegari over the seas, they needed a great deal of it. And this was, after all, where the Masks were trained.

But Blackcliff was stripped before it was abandoned. The Kegari didn't find so much as an arrowhead, let alone a cache of Loha.

Still, the place was useful—primarily because its dungeons were the most secure in the city.

"Holy Tel Ilessi." Aiz turned to find Triarch Ghaz making his way across the courtyard, flanked by soldiers from his clan. The moon painted his skin a wan, milky blue.

Ghaz knelt and thumped his heart thrice. He and the other Triarchs still chafed against her authority. She'd noticed small defiances, recently. Oona calling her Aiz instead of Tel Ilessi. Hiwa setting his clan up in a large villa without permission. Ghaz torturing captured Martials for information.

Though she let the last one go. It had, after all, netted her the Empress.

After Ghaz knelt long enough to know he'd displeased Aiz, she gestured him up.

"The Empress is ready for your interrogation," Ghaz said. "We have two guards stationed in the room, and four outside. And she's been…prepared. I believe she will talk."

Aiz's fingers twitched, and she considered calling Div to her. But the cleric was far away, seeking sustenance after assisting with an attack on a Tribal city this morning.

"I would ask you one thing, Tel Ilessi," Ghaz said as they walked through an arched stone hallway. "Many of our people have found the Empire's lands to be to our liking. Some speak of remaining here. Finding a new homeland amid the fertile fields north of this desert. I thought—"

Aiz shook her head. "The Empire is cowed because of our bombs. Already their generals plot a return. If we stay, we will face decades of insurgency. More importantly"—her voice grew strident—"we are not meant to remain here, Triarch Ghaz. The spirit of Mother Div speaks to me because I vowed to return us to our homeland. This is my holy mission, and I won't abandon it."

"Of course, Tel Ilessi. I only wished to inform you of the people's sentiments."

Aiz held his gaze for a few seconds so he could see her resolve. Then she squared her shoulders. "Take me to the prisoner."

Triarch Ghaz led her down a set of steps and into a dank hallway underground. They passed old, smoky pitch torches that barely lit the space around them, and crumbling stairwells. Spiders and rats skittered in the dark, and somewhere, water dripped.

Aiz pulled at the neck of her scaled armor, feeling stifled. They soon arrived at a low, narrow door. Within, chains clanked and shifted.

Aiz felt for Div—still far away. She shrugged off her unease. She did not need Div's aid. Nor did she want to listen to the cleric's lecturing. Div always had an opinion on how to do things, and of late, Aiz didn't usually agree.

"I will accompany you," Ghaz said. "In case she—"

"I caught her, Ghaz," Aiz said. "I'll meet her alone." She nodded to the guards, who opened the door for her.

Once inside, she found herself face-to-face with the Empress of the Martials.

Empress Helene Aquilla didn't have the look of a broken monarch, despite presiding over a broken empire. She'd been stripped of her armor and wore a torn shift, her scars clearly showing. She sat cross-legged with her manacled hands in her lap. Her hair looked freshly braided. If not for the bruises and cuts on her body and the wrath pulsing in her glare, Aiz wouldn't have known she'd survived a Kegari interrogation.

But that wasn't what stole the words from Aiz's lips. It was how much she looked like Quil.

When she'd captured the Empress, Aiz hadn't noticed the resemblance. But now she saw that, though Quil's hair fell in dark waves and Helene's was silvery blond, they both had the same high cheekbones and mouth, with a top lip fuller than the bottom. They even had the same sprinkling of freckles across their noses. Aiz could be looking at Quil's mother if she didn't know that his mother had died.

Even without that, all she had to do was meet the Empress's eyes to know this was Quil's kin; they looked at her with the same implacable hostility.

Get what you need , Aiz reminded herself. Forget the rest.

"I've been wanting to meet you for months," Aiz said. "Since Quil first told me about you in the desert."

The Empress said nothing.

Aiz kept well away from her. Being in a room with this woman felt like being trapped with a storm.

The Empress watched Aiz pace, face expressionless. Aiz searched her skin for the scars that marked where her mask had been before she'd torn it off. Quil had told Aiz that his aunt considered the scars a mark of strength.

"I don't expect you'll answer my questions. I will have to pry answers from you, I think. But like me, you are the leader of a nation. Like me, you had to fight to get there. Out of respect, I will ask before I take. Is it possible to remove the masks from your soldier's faces without killing them? As you removed your own twenty years ago?"

The Empress remained silent.

"We know that if we cut your Masks' heads off," Aiz said, "the metal releases. I have done this myself. But I would like the violence between our people to end. I'd like to take the metal without killing anyone."

The Empress blinked.

"I saw Quil," Aiz said. The Empress tried to retain her stoicism, but a twitch in her jaw gave her away. Triumph surged through Aiz's blood. "I spoke with him. I told him everything. And would you believe, he sat there and listened. Didn't even try to kill me, at first. He tried to treat with me. I wonder if that makes you ashamed?

"I told him that if we could get the Loha, we would leave," Aiz went on. "We don't want to stay here, Empress. This isn't our home."

The Empress looked more interested now. The hate had faded into cold calculation.

"I have a holy mission. To return my people to our homeland. We'd leave tomorrow—if only you told me where your Loha is. I don't want to hurt you anymore. I cared deeply for Quil—"

The Empress moved so fast that at first Aiz didn't understand what was happening. One moment, she was five feet from the woman. The next, Aiz was on her back, unable to speak because of the vise around her neck. The Empress's hand.

"That is the third time you have invoked the name of my nephew and heir." The Empress kept her voice low so the guards wouldn't hear her, but somehow that made her more terrifying.

"Three times too many," she said. "Quil listened to you because he loved you, once. Perhaps he thought that somewhere in here"— she shook Aiz—"there might be a beating heart, or at the very least, a functioning brain. Someone who understood that we cannot mine Loha, and thus call off her sky-pigs so that fewer innocents died. He tried to treat with you because he loves his people. That doesn't make him weak. It makes him a better leader than you could hope to be."

Aiz couldn't breathe. White spots bloomed at the edges of her vision, and she clawed at the Empress's arm. She screamed for the wind in her mind, relishing the thought of tearing the Empress's head from her body in retaliation for this indignity.

But the wind did not come.

"You think because you spent a few months with my family that you know us," the Empress said. "You think we're soft because we have so much. But that only gives us more to fight for. Know this, Tel Ilessi . The only reason that you caught me is because I let you." The woman smiled, a knife's blade shining in the dark.

Now, finally, Aiz heard Helene's history in her voice. All that she'd lost and given and taken and sacrificed for her people.

And Aiz knew she had made a grave mistake in thinking the Empress was beaten.

"I wanted to meet you too, sky-rat." Helene twisted Aiz's head back to gaze upon her, hatred seeping from every pore. "I wanted to look into your face when the light died. Did you really think you could kill Ruhyan"—her voice cracked—"our beautiful Ruhyan, and his family wouldn't take their vengeance?"

Desperately Aiz reached for the link in her mind. Div. Help.

"You're nothing," the Empress said, and then fell silent, calm as she tightened her fist, looked into Aiz's eyes, and waited for her to die.

Div! Please!

She screamed it in her mind, and suddenly power flooded her, as if Div was right here instead of far away, feeding. Aiz's magic exploded out of her in an uncontrolled burst the likes of which she hadn't seen since before she was tossed in the Tohr. The walls of the dungeon shook, cracks spiderwebbing across them. The Empress flew back, skidding along the floor, but was on her feet almost instantly.

Aiz used another whip of wind to shove her away, but she needed more from Div. The door splintered open, and relief flooded Aiz. She expected her soldiers to sweep in, to tackle the Empress.

Instead, she saw bodies collapsed under rubble in the hallway. A huge, familiar figure entered, bloodied scims in each hand.

"You," Elias Veturius said.

Aiz threw all her power at the man, grim satisfaction filling her as she heard Elias's head hit the wall. She flitted past him, stumbling out the door and over the bodies, down the dark hallway.

She felt a sting—something hit her back. She clawed at it but couldn't feel it. She twisted the air behind her viciously, draining Div of everything she had, and bringing down the roof to block the Martials from coming after her.

By the time she reached the stairs and began crawling up them, she couldn't feel her legs anymore, and collapsed short of the top, breath wheezing out of her.

A figure crouched down next to her, glowing silver face chiding. "Next time, child," Div said, "call me before you enter a room with a Mask."

"I—I'm sorry," Aiz wheezed.

"No matter," Div said. "I'm here now. I will help you. Look at her. At the Empress. Invade her mind."

Aiz glanced back through the clouds of dust to see the Empress emerging from the rubble—escaping.

"Make an arrow of your intent," Mother Div said. "Pierce her with it. Seek the location of the Loha. It is there, inside her."

As in the desert, Aiz did not think, she simply acted. Loha, Loha, show me the Loha.

The Empress walked through an orchard. Rubble behind her. A house stood ahead, painted the drab colors of the desert, with palms shading it. Inside, it was bare. Abandoned. But in the center of the room, a rug, beneath the rug, a door, and inside—

Masks. More than twenty. Every last one a child.