Kushiel's Mercy

over his daughter’s head.
    Sidonie’s dark, dark eyes searched mine.
    “Emmenghanom.”
    It was faint, so faint! I could barely hear it, couldn’t make out if her pronunciation differed from mine. For the space of a few heartbeats, I thought it must not have. I thought that we had failed, that we’d gotten it wrong. That her knowledge of the Punic alphabet had been too imperfect, that Ptolemy Solon had been mistaken after all, that we’d failed to fulfill the terms of the spell. And then I felt the chain wrapped around my wrist quiver. Sidonie made a startled sound and dropped the leather talisman.
    The talisman was smoldering, the edges black and curling.
    The emerald was glowing beneath the dirt that encrusted it, the symbols of the Houses of the Cosmos etched into its facets shining whitely.
    “Move away from him, Sidonie!” Drustan shouted. “Step away!”
    She didn’t budge. I could feel heat from the demon-stone rising. The silver chains wrapped around my wrist were growing warm. I dropped my dagger and unwound the chain.
    “I think you’d all better get back!” I called. “It’s too late to stop this!”
    I swung the chain like a goatherd with a rope lariat. The demon-stone left emerald trails of brightness lingering in the air. Circles upon circles. I meant to scare them, and it worked. They scrambled, pushing and shoving, trying to flee in a panic. Pressing outward, clearing a space. The chain was beginning to burn my palm. I prayed to Elua no one got crushed, and tossed the gem and chain into the empty space.
    The emerald glare intensified. The gem spun on the trampled dirt, the chain lashing in circles around it. The silver links turned ruddy with heat. Brighter and brighter. The air grew hot and dry and hard to breathe.
    The demon-stone burst.
    I heard the sound of the first crack and moved without thinking, spinning Sidonie against the oak tree and shielding her with my body. The sound when it burst was like a splintering thunderclap, loud and deafening. Tiny shards flew outward with tremendous force. I felt a spray of them pierce me from behind, lodging in my flesh, needle-sharp.
    And then the world roared.
    It was a roar of fury, a roar of triumph. A roar of freedom. It seemed to suck all the air from Elua’s Square. A hot, dry wind rose—rose and rose. Spiraling. I warded my face with one arm, turning to peer behind me. I could see people struggling to flee, could see their mouths open to shout. I couldn’t hear anything but the roaring. But mostly I saw it .
    It gathered itself out of dirt, sucking up the trampled soil. Desiccating it, pulverizing it, rendering it as fine and dry as desert sand. A whirlwind of earth. Through slitted eyes, I watched it grow, rising into a column fit to rival the height of Elua’s Oak. I watched it sprout horns, wicked and curving, shiny as mica. I watched a dark maw gape open in the whirlwind’s midst, revealing jagged fangs the color of old bones.
    It grew and grew.
    And then it stopped growing. It spun in one place. The dirt spun; the horns and maw didn’t. High in the sky, at the apex of the whirlwind, the wicked horns dipped. Toward us, toward Sidonie and me.
    I looked at her.
    She gazed back at me with awe.
    We had freed a demon.
    The world roared again. There was a rushing sound. When it moved, it moved quickly. It passed over the Square, passed over the City, scouring everything in its path with a blast of fine-ground dirt. In its wake, it left abraded skin, terrified and weeping folk. A deafening absence of sound. It passed beyond the walls of the City without slowing and continued. Moving south, going home.
    Gone.

Eighty-Three

    In the aftermath of the ghafrid ’s passage, Elua’s Square was hushed.
    The folk of the City were frightened; many were injured. And all of them were awakening from a malevolent dream to a terrible, terrible truth. The looks on their faces nearly broke my heart.
    “What have I done?” Ysandre said. She was speaking for everyone present. Her voice shook. “Elua! What have we all done?”
    Drustan fixed me with his dark gaze. One side of his face was bleeding, scored by myriad gashes from flying gem fragments. Here and there, shards of emerald glinted amid the tattooed whorls. “Not all of us.”
    Now that it was over, I was trembling, too. My head ached and I stung in a hundred different places, shards embedded in my own flesh. Gods, it had been a near thing! “It was a spell,” I said. “It wasn’t