Rhys relayed the information. Hanife looked pleased. “That is well. Very well! Tell them they are invited to have supper with me. They can marvel at this army I have carved out of the desert. Let me tell them of this hold and the four others I have conquered.”

Rhys watched the four men start back up into the main hold, leaving him and the jailer in the room. Rhys couldn’t help but glance into the only occupied cell in the block.

The light was dim. He squinted.

Recognition hit him like a fist to the kidney. He stumbled away from the door. Bit back an oath.

He knew that man.

36.

Nyx had figured Bomani would just be some kind of rock and mud-brick construction. Maybe a collection of hovels arranged inside a stone circle. It’s not like she expected anything like civilization this far north, not behind a bloody-minded desert wall in the middle of some flesh-eating sea of sand. This place was nobody’s friend, least of all any collection of people.

As they came to the edge of the forest of formations and gazed out to the rising dawn, she went still. There was a massive black conurbation blotting out a portion of the horizon. She peered at it. It was no derelict. This was… something else. Something constructed here? Not fallen… placed or grown. Nyx tried not to stare at it. It made her skin crawl.

“That’s the place,” Safiyah said.

“What is it?”

“It is Bomani,” Safiyah said.

“No, really,” Nyx said. “What the fuck is that? All right, what was that thing? That was nothing made by humans. Is it some bug house or something?”

Khatijah shrugged. “The Aadhya would know better than me.”

But Nyx hadn’t battled giant beasts, fought off mercenaries, run from pyromancing magicians, or hauled bodies across the desert just to walk back up to the nomads who’d slaughtered Eshe and ask them about a bunch of stories.

Safiyah smirked. “It’s not so strange. Just something your droll little mind could never conceive of,” she said.

“You’ve seen one before?” Nyx asked Safiyah. She should have thought to ask Safiyah—the fount of useless knowledge.

“There’s still some record of the early days of the world that is taught. I’ve seen illustrations, of course. A few tatty drawings re-created from old bug captures. The magicians who made the world habitable didn’t live in Nasheen, not the first magicians—the true conjurers. They lived up here in the beginning, long before the moons were even properly inhabited. For a thousand years they tended these great conflagrations. These organic machines powered all of their conjurings, even helped filter the atmosphere. There were six or eight, as I recall. The nomads continue to put them to use.”