The Empire of Gold

The third and final installment of the Daevabad Trilogy opens in the aftermath of a violent coup. Banu (Lady) Manizheh, a member of the Nahid bloodline of hereditary djinn healers, has seized Daevabad, the hidden island city of the djinn. She is aided by her resurrected Afshin (elite warrior) Darayavahoush, known as Dara, and by the ifrit, ancient fire demons. Her poisonous copper vapor has killed over a thousand Geziri djinn, one of the city's tribal peoples. But the conquest is incomplete: Manizheh's estranged daughter Nahri slips Suleiman's seal ring, an artifact granting supreme magical authority, onto the finger of Alizayd al Qahtani (Ali), the youngest prince of the deposed royal family. The pair vanish through the enchanted lake, and magic disappears from the entire djinn world. The ifrit Aeshma demands Nahri's true name as payment for his continued aid. Manizheh, considering her daughter's betrayal unforgivable, surrenders it.

Nahri and Ali materialize in the Egyptian countryside near Cairo, stranded and powerless. Ali burns with fever as the ring scorches inside his heart. Nahri, her healing abilities blocked, drags him through the Nile on a makeshift raft to reach Yaqub, the elderly pharmacist who mentored her during her years as a Cairo orphan. Ali eventually wakes, devastated by his brother Muntadhir al Qahtani's apparent death. He discovers his djinn magic is gone, though water abilities from an earlier possession by a marid, a powerful water elemental, remain. Nahri performs a successful surgery without magic, saving a boy's life through a technique learned from Subha, a shafit (mixed human-djinn) doctor in Daevabad, and Yaqub offers her his apothecary as an inheritance. Ali proposes sailing south to Ta Ntry, the homeland of his mother, Queen Hatset of the Ayaanle tribe, to find allies. Nahri resists, wanting the peaceful life she has always craved. Ali insists they owe a duty to civilians trapped under Manizheh's rule. After wrestling with her conscience, Nahri agrees to go, but on her terms: honesty, no reckless plans, and the right to leave.

In Daevabad, Dara surveys the carnage and confronts the cost of Manizheh's conquest. He is the only person with magic left, and the burden of holding the city falls entirely on him. Manizheh interrogates the imprisoned Muntadhir, Daevabad's former emir and ruling heir, using psychological warfare to extract information. She reveals that Jamshid, the son of her partner Kaveh e-Pramukh, the grand wazir of the Daeva, Daevabad's founding djinn tribe, is actually Manizheh's own child, a Nahid whose healing abilities she bound at birth to protect him. Muntadhir, who loves Jamshid, breaks down and provides intelligence. Dara, increasingly conflicted, defies Manizheh to rescue a captured warrior from the fortified hospital and is shot with an iron bullet by Subha. Manizheh demotes him. The Daeva high priest Kartir later counsels Dara to work with Muntadhir and push Manizheh toward mercy.

As Nahri and Ali sail down the Nile, Ali reveals suppressed history: The marid helped his distant ancestor Zaydi al Qahtani overthrow the Nahids centuries ago, and the Qahtanis kept a hidden crypt of preserved Nahid bodies beneath the palace, along with Dara's original slave ring, the vessel the ifrit use to contain and control an enslaved djinn's soul. The ifrit Qandisha ambushes them, sinking their boat and nearly killing Nahri. The Nile marid Sobek, a primordial crocodile lord, drives Qandisha away and transports them through enchanted underwater pathways to Ta Ntry overnight. Sahrayn pirates, members of another djinn tribe, then capture them. Nahri and Ali recruit Fiza, a Daevabadi shafit indentured to the pirate captain through an iron brand in her neck. During the escape, Ali's marid magic nearly overwhelms him, and Nahri bans him from using it again.

In Shefala, Ta Ntry's coral-walled castle, Ali reunites with Hatset. They find Jamshid imprisoned by Wajed, the Geziri military commander. Nahri frees Jamshid and reveals that Manizheh is his mother, making him a Nahid. Issa, an elderly freed scholar who escaped Daevabad, brings critical intelligence: Zaynab, Ali and Muntadhir's sister, is alive; the city is in civil war; and Muntadhir survives as a prisoner. Hatset urges Ali to declare himself king and marry Nahri, but Ali rejects kingship entirely, proposing to abolish the monarchy and let the people govern themselves. Nahri supports him.

A monsoon marid possesses Ali and delivers an ultimatum: He must submit to Tiamat, the primordial mother of the marid, or she will drown the coast. Sobek reveals that Ali is his direct descendant, part of a bloodline the Nile lord created millennia ago. Nahri removes Suleiman's ring from Ali's heart in desperate surgery, with Jamshid assisting through newly awakened healing abilities. She bonds the ring to her own heart. Ali and Nahri share a first kiss before he departs, and she makes him promise to return. At the bottom of the ocean, Tiamat forces Ali into combat against Sobek, then permanently drains his fire magic and replaces it with deeper marid powers. Ali emerges transformed, his eyes yellow-and-black, his skin traced with iridescent scales.

Meanwhile, Manizheh reveals devastating truths to Dara: Nahri is actually the daughter of Manizheh's brother Rustam, making her shafit, and Dara's resurrection was an accidental result of decades of experiments, not a divine miracle. She takes possession of his slave ring. When Muntadhir's long-planned coup fails, with Daeva nobles secretly allied with the Ayaanle turning against Manizheh and Kaveh killed in the chaos, Manizheh uses blood magic to resurrect Dara, forces over 260 Daeva nobles to surrender their true names and die, and seizes total control of Dara through his slave ring. She commands him to destroy the Geziri and shafit districts block by block. He levels entire neighborhoods, unable to resist, until Zaynab surrenders to save her people.

The peris, air elementals who normally avoid mortal affairs, offer Nahri a celestial dagger to kill Dara, along with a shedu, a winged lion mount she names Mishmish. Nahri flies to the devastated city and confronts Dara on the palace roof. He fights under Manizheh's compulsion but desperately signals his enslavement. Jamshid arrives on an ensorcelled simurgh, a giant magical bird, and Ali's fleet of resurrected shipwrecks, crewed by djinn recruited from around the world, emerges from the lake. Nahri sends Jamshid on Mishmish to protect the fleet. Dara then tricks Manizheh by denouncing Nahri and pledging total loyalty. When Manizheh grants him permission to fight, he plunges an arrow through her throat.

The ifrit Aeshma chains Nahri using her true name, Golbahar, which Manizheh surrendered at the story's start. Another ifrit, Vizaresh, murders Aeshma and flees with dozens of enslaved djinn souls stolen from the Grand Temple, Daevabad's principal holy site. Nahri breaks the blood-magic chains by reclaiming her chosen name, then stabs herself with the peri's dagger, forcing the peris to intervene. The dagger collides with Suleiman's ring in her heart, and the two fuse. Nahri uses the fully bonded seal to restore djinn magic worldwide, heal the city, and reshape the island, separating Daevabad from the marid's lake with new mountains and a river.

In the aftermath, Nahri saves Dara's life by removing iron from his blood, granting him the choice to live or pass on. He chooses to stay but recognizes he cannot remain in Daevabad. Unable to pass back through the city's protective veil—a magical barrier that conceals Daevabad from the human world and can only be crossed by those bearing Suleiman's curse, from which his resurrection as an original daeva, a djinn predating and unconstrained by Suleiman's curse, freed him—Dara departs permanently to hunt Vizaresh and free every enslaved djinn across the human world. Ali shares with Nahri the memories of her mother, Duriya, an Egyptian woman who died protecting her infant daughter from Manizheh. Nahri finds her maternal grandfather alive in the palace kitchens. Six months later, she and Ali enter a library where bickering representatives from every tribe and walk of life have gathered to form a new government: no king, no queen, only the noisy beginnings of something unprecedented.