“What is this?”
“You wanted to share,” my aunt said. “You showed me yours. I’ll show you mine.”
I drew the curtain aside. The sound got louder, a sickening, chewing, slurping sound.
I pulled the last curtain aside. A bed strewn with a child’s toys and colorful pillows. A thing glared at me from the floor. Hairless, gray, awful, with huge owl eyes and bloodstained teeth. It clutched a child’s headless corpse in its front limbs. It stared at me and chewed.
“This is the way your uncle died,” my aunt said. “Also two of your aunts.”
I lunged forward. The thing shrieked, dragging the child’s body with it. I chased it. I had to kill it.
“They came from the sea,” Erra said. “You won’t find their names chiseled into any stone. We obliterated them and their memory. We erased them from existence. They had attacked the kingdoms like a plague, bringing their magic and their creations like that thing you’re trying too hard to kill.”
If only I could catch it, I would crack its skull like a walnut.
“We were betrayed by our neighbors. We had left to broker an alliance. When we returned, the palace of Shinar was silent. We found only half-eaten corpses.”
The thing darted toward my aunt. She looked at it and its bones broke, the big dome of its skull caving in on itself as if stomped.
“Look outside,” she said.
I stepped onto the balcony. A vast plain unrolled before me. An army charged at me. Shaggy, huge armored mammoths; strange beasts, their hindquarters striped, their heads too large for their bodies, their jaws filled with oversized hyena teeth; creatures for which I had no name; and people in armor. I glanced behind me. The dark room was gone. My aunt strode onto the field in front of her troops. She wore blood armor. Her loose hair streamed in the wind. Behind her the emerald standards snapped, pulled taut. She began to run, at first slowly, then picking up speed. The troops behind her broke into a charge. To the right, a man in blood armor on a white horse raised a spear and shouted. His horse reared and I saw his face, impossibly handsome and alight with magic. Father . . .
My aunt charged across the field, magic twisting around her.
The first line of the enemy was almost to her.
Erra opened her mouth. Power tore from her, an unstoppable blast that sent the armored mammoths flying.
At the other end of the field, my father raised his hands. The earth split, swallowing the enemy.
The two armies collided. A sword landed next to me. I grabbed it.
“This is also you,” Erra said next to me. “This is the wrath of Shinar. They who thought they would murder us, take our cities, and eat our children, they met our anger and it consumed them. It consumed us too, but not before we obliterated their very memory from history. We wiped them off the face of the planet. It is as if they never were.”
Around me the battle raged. My father spun in the center of a magical maelstrom. Behind him the earth shuddered and broke loose. A creature of metal and magic, a beautiful golden lion a hundred feet high, burst onto the field. My aunt twisted and sliced the head off an invader. It went flying.
“This is what you are asking me to betray,” Erra said into my ear.
I closed my eyes and imagined the weight and warmth of a child in my arms. When I opened them, my son looked back at me with Curran’s gray eyes. The battle was gone. We sat in the pavilion again.
I held my son out to Erra. “This is what I’m asking you to save.”
She took the child from me and looked at his face.
“I just want him to live a happy life,” I told her. “The war is terrible. It will never end, as long as my father is allowed to be free. He can’t stop. Maybe a part of him wants to, but even if it does, he doesn’t know how. Someone has to end it.”
A woman appeared behind us, regal, tall, her wrists heavy with golden bracelets, her flowing dress a deep emerald green. Black kohl lined her eyes, her eyelids and lips dusted with gold. Semiramis reached down, took my son from Erra’s hands, and smiled at him.
• • •
THE GARDENS FADED. The grip of the magic released me, its pain an echo in my bones. The arcane inferno died down. Semiramis withdrew, revealing Erra.
“He created an order of assassins to kill me,” she whispered. She had seen sahanu in my memories. There was something almost vulnerable in her face.
My grandmother reached for her, wrapping her ghostly arms about her daughter. Magic swirled around them.
“I know,” Erra whispered. “I understand.”
She turned to me, all tenderness vanishing from her face like a mask jerked aside.
“You will do two things for me. Once this is over, I will choose the burial place for myself and my mother. You will move us there.”
“Done.” I would’ve done it anyway.
“And you will abandon the city.”
“What?”
“You will agree to never rule the land you’ve claimed.”
I opened my mouth. Everything inside me rebelled at the idea. It was my city, my land, my people, mine . . .
No. It was not mine. I took it, but it was never mine.
I raised my hand.
It was so hard. I wanted to charge across the room and beat her head against the stone until I saw the color of her brain for even bringing it up.
This wasn’t me. I wouldn’t become my father.
I could lie.
I crushed the thought.
“I promise that the day my father is dead or contained, I will walk away from the land I claimed.”