Page 46 of The Shrouded Queen
“Not exactly.” Rade’s gaze dipped to the Shaya figurine. “Ketet and Phadar were bound together by their love of humans, a love Shaya could not understand. While they work to keep us alive, Shaya works to kill us. Fundamentally opposing forces. He watched his wife slowly fall in love with the sun god. Shaya was losing his realm and his lover at the same time. The death god grew vengeful.”
I had heard the story of Shaya’s wrath countless times from the Gods-Chosen herself. “He gave up half his soul to create the moon goddess, Ayeen,” I said, “to fight against Phadar’s light. And then he gave up the other half of his soul to create the jinn, led by his son, Athar. The tricksters worked to lead humans to an early death, which started the war.”
“No,” Rade said. “That was not enough to start a war. Phadar lengthened lifespans, the jinn shortened them. When the balance started to tip, one of the gods would send a Gods-Chosen to restore it. The world remained in equilibrium. But Shaya’s magic corrupted the earth, infecting every living thing. Humans, animals, plants. It twisted them until they were monsters, little more than mindless beasts fighting over territory and food. He had changed the beingsthat Ketet loved so dearly, andthatwas not balance. She wouldn’t stand for it.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked. “What does the War of the Ancients have to do with the Shroud?”
“You know that Ketet and Phadar’s children and their children’s children fought Shaya until they managed to lock him—and most of his monsters—in the Underworld and seal the Gate. Except for jinn and Shifters, who got stuck on this side of the Gate, their powers significantly dampened. Jinn couldn’t cause the same havoc they had before, and Shifters were no longer slaves to their animal halves. Shifters don’t serve Shaya anymore, but the jinn are part of Shaya’s soul. They continue to work for him, help him. And what does someone in prison want more than anything else?”
A chill stole over me. “Freedom.”
Rade nodded darkly. “The jinn offer Shaya a foothold in our realm. And he has been using that to his advantage since he was imprisoned.”
“Are you saying the Shroud is jinn’s dark magic working to free Shaya?”
“Worse,” Velka answered. She licked her lips nervously, yellow eyes troubled. “The Shroud is a bleeding wound. But instead of blood, it’s leaking the Underworld.”
My heart stopped in my chest. “What?”
“We’re not entirely sure how it’s happening,” Rade said, “but we think it’s the equivalent of banging on a door enough that it cracks open. The Underworld is seeping into our realm.”
Holy gods. “How is that possible?”
“Shaya has always been powerful,” Velka reasoned. “If he can never leave the Underworld, he might have just thought to move it. As an Uncreated, he’s probably one of the only gods who could actually manage such a thing.”
Movethe Underworld? Move ithere?
Ketet and the other Seven Monarchs had imprisoned Shaya becauseof his greed for human souls. If the Underworld crossed over into this realm…
My blood turned to ice. “Why have I never heard of this in Ashorah?” If anyone should know about Shaya’s realm bleeding into ours, it should have been his Gods-Chosen.
They exchanged a look that I couldn’t decipher. Rade said, “It started slow. No one even knew what the Shroud was until it was too late. And it isn’t fully the Underworld. At least not yet. It’s seeping in bit by bit. First its darkness, then its creatures. By the time we realized what it was, it was already too big to fight back.” He scratched at his beard. “Some of the Kaldfolk refused to believe it was happening. Some cannot resist its call. You saw what happened today.”
I thought of that first woman’s wide, shiny eyes. Finan sitting stubbornly in his chair. My own temptation to draw closer. I swallowed past the dryness in my throat.
“Over the last two decades,” Rade said, “the Shroud has sped up. As it claims more land, more people, it grows stronger and it—it thinks.”
I stilled. “What do you mean?”
“I have my people watching it constantly,” he replied. “We monitor it. It doesn’t continuously spread. It… it’s like it strategizes. Decides which town to take and when. It should have continued north, to the coast, where all settlements had already been evacuated. But it seemed to know that, and instead it turned east. After we began work on the tunnel through the Frozen Sands a few years ago, its movements grew even more erratic. For now, Netherridge, the village we just evacuated, seems to have sated it, and it isn’t spreading farther. But that won’t last long.”
The Underworld was Shaya. Shaya was the Underworld. If the Shroud was the claw of the Underworld reaching into this realm, it made sense that it was as sentient as its ruler, even if it appeared to the naked eye to be just a writhing wall of night. A shudder worked through me.
“Even with all its pauses, our experts estimate we’ve got six months until all of Kaldfold will be swallowed. By then, the rate at which it moves will be so fast that it could take Ashorah in less than a year.”
My fingers tightened around Shaya’s figurine, a splinter digging into my skin. I’d only just learned about the Shroud. It had never been spoken of in Ashorah. Did my queen know of it? Or was she just as ignorant as I had been? I licked my dry lips. “What happens to people in the Shroud?”
Rade’s eyes dropped to his lap.
“It twists them,” Keir answered in a low voice. “Not right away. But living creatures are not meant to encounter the Underworld. Its darkness infests a person, and once it claims them…” He shook his head, eyes haunted.
And Finan had chosen that. Been ready to condemn his own grandchild to it, abandoned her in favor of it. He must have known all this and yet… Anger rose inside me, sudden and acute. An incomprehensible decision, choosing the dark over his family. A horrible, evil decision that spat in the very face of Ketet.
With physical effort, I pulled my gaze back to Rade. “You wrote to King Zaid about this,” I said, recalling what Keir had said that fateful night in the throne room.
“I did,” he confirmed. “Multiple times, in fact. He never answered my letters.”
If the king had known, had Amunet? But that didn’t make any sense. It was true that no Ashoran would stick their neck out to help the Kaldfolk, but if the threat was coming to us, and so swiftly, Amunet would have done something with that knowledge. Organized the Khada Guard on her own if she had to. She was stubborn. She would have acted. And unlike King Zaid, she would not have kept us ignorant of the threat that affected all of us.
