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Anything.
A scaly shadow matches my footsteps. Deka want ride Ixa? Ixa asks, his eyes concerned.
Yes, I reply gratefully, hefting myself onto his back. The pain immediately fades—now a dull throbbing instead of the violent burning it just was.
Hurry, Ixa, I urge.
Ixa hurrying is my companion’s grumbled reply as he runs faster and faster until we burst through the circle of statues.
The moment Ixa’s claws scratch over a stone, whatever cocoon was muffling my friends’ senses seems to unravel. Belcalis is the first to react, and she whips toward us, the moonlight casting a hawkish shadow over her sharp, angular face.
“Deka,” she says, her usually coppery skin already grayish with worry. All the time spent running these past weeks has hollowed out Belcalis’s once-proud features—carved shadows under her eyes and whittled her body to an almost feral leanness. “What is it?” she asks, running to me.
“The mist,” I say, turning to the darkened city streets.
That’s when I stop, alarm suddenly a deafening shriek in my mind. Between the time I last saw it and now, the mist has spread, its tendrils knitting into a web that’s rapidly moving through the surrounding streets. Fear hitches my breath as I feel that strange heat rising, driving away the coolness of Gar Nasim’s night air.
The mist is corralling us in. Herding my friends and I like cattle.
The gryphs—the winged desert cats my friends use as mounts—growl low in their throats and pace the edges of the square.
But when Belcalis looks in the direction I’m pointing to, a puzzled expression creeps across her face. “What mist? All I feel is this gods-blasted heat.” She wipes her hands over the back of her neck, which is now glistening with sweat.
“It’s there.” I point, unnerved. “It’s wrapping around us.”
And yet, I notice, it’s not moving any closer in. I squint and see that the mist has formed an almost perfect circle around the square, but it’s not trying to approach us anymore.
Why?
“Wha’s there? Wha’s happened?” By now, Britta has noticed our discussion and is hurrying over, her blue eyes worried. Sweat drips down her forehead in little trails.
“There’s some sort of mist surrounding us,” Belcalis answers. “I can’t see it, but Deka can.”
“So it’s divine—like the river of stars in the Chamber of the Goddesses.” Britta immediately makes the connection, her eyes surveying the area.
“You can’t see it either?” Belcalis frowns at Britta.
“No.”
“You need to leave, now.” This statement comes from White Hands, who has hurried over, the others behind her. There’s a grim expression on her face, which, like the rest of her body, shimmers slightly at the edges—a subtle sign that she’s not actually physically here.
Everything in me stills. “You know what it is.”
White Hands nods.
“I’ve been hearing rumors of a new abomination of the gods: a shimmering mist that beguiles its victims, entices them before snatching them away.”
“Let’s be on our way, then,” Britta says, tugging her gryph’s reins, but a hand reaches out to stop her.
Lamin, the silent, gentle giant who’s Asha’s uruni.
He’s walked over so quietly, none of us even noticed his arrival—not that we ever do. Despite his height, Lamin is the stealthiest member of the group. We suspect he was some sort of spy before he entered the Warthu Bera, the training ground where we all learned to be warriors, but no one is certain. Lamin never talks about his past.
Lamin never talks about much of anything, truth be told.
We didn’t even know he was familiar with this region of the empire until he volunteered to come with us when the group was splitting into two.
“What about Deka’s mother?” he asks, his reddish-brown form a towering silhouette against the darkness of the night.
