Hero at the Fall

‘What does your father want to send prisoners to Eremot for?’ Just saying the name made me feel uneasy. ‘If he was going to break his promise to his people of granting the Rebellion mercy, there have got to be easier ways to kill them.’

Leyla looked at me through dark eyelashes. ‘He doesn’t want them dead. He just doesn’t care if they die. There’s a difference. He’s after something in Eremot. And people who go in there don’t come back out – eventually the hours and hours of digging in the dark will wring all the life out of them. So he sends in expendable lives.’

But I wasn’t listening to her gloating. There was only one possible thing the Sultan could have his prisoners digging out in Eremot. ‘Your father wants to find the Destroyer of Worlds.’

I might know better than anyone the distance between legends and the truth, that stories were not always told whole. The monsters in them were less fierce in reality, the heroes less pure, the Djinn more complicated. But there were some things you didn’t prod at to find out if their teeth were really as big as the stories said. Because on the off-chance that the stories were really true, you were about to lose a finger. The Destroyer of Worlds was at the top of the list of things I didn’t want to find out the truth about. ‘I don’t know how close you’ve read the Holy Books, but there are a whole lot of reasons why letting her out of that prison is a bad idea. Starting with the destruction of all of humanity.’

‘Oh, he doesn’t want to let her out,’ Leyla said earnestly. ‘He wants her for the same reason he wants the Djinn. My father is a hero. He’s going to end her once and for all. And use what’s left of her for good. Just like Fereshteh.’

He was going to kill her, turn her immortal life into power that he could use. I remembered something he had said to me once: that the time for immortal things was over. Now was the time for us, time to stop living so attached to our legends and to magic. And sure enough, he was destroying our legends one at a time, dragging Miraji into a new age, whether it wanted to come or not. Whether letting great evils out of the earth was a good idea or not.

‘He can’t do it without you, though, can he?’

Leyla’s satisfaction drifted back to fear. ‘If you kill me, he will find another way. My mother’s homeland is full of people like me, makers of new ideas and new inventions.’ Some who would even be prepared to defy the laws of religion and good sense, too, I was sure.

I didn’t want to kill her. But we couldn’t keep her either. We might have a way out, but we couldn’t just vanish from the city without doing something about Leyla – not with girls dying every dawn in her name.

The beginning of a plan had started to form in my mind. Only we were missing someone if we were going to pull it off.

I needed to get Sam back.



Chapter 7

It took me the better part of the day to track Sam down, which didn’t exactly do a whole lot for how angry I was at him. I started imagining creative ways to kill him sometime around midday, when the sweat had soaked into my shirt in earnest and my hair was sticking to my sheema from the heat. By the time I finally ran him to ground just before sunset, I had built a very vivid image of how he’d meet his end at my hands.

We’d been damn lucky that Sam hadn’t bled to death that day he’d tried to slip into the palace. After he’d got himself shot, it was only thanks to Hala and Jin that we’d got him back to the Hidden House still breathing. The hours that followed had been a frenzy of trying to keep our foreign friend alive, as well as getting everyone ready to flee if we had to. I didn’t know if we’d been followed from the palace. But I’d already led the Sultan to one of our hideouts once. I wasn’t taking chances.

Finally Sam had stopped bleeding and kept breathing. Though barely on both counts. And no soldiers came knocking at the door of the Hidden House.

I’d spent the night keeping watch over him while everyone else kept watch over the streets. If we had to flee, I wasn’t sure we’d be able to take Sam with us, wounded as he was. So we’d waited and kept watch. I’d prayed a whole lot.

Then, three days after Sam got shot, I woke up next to an empty bed. My face had been pressed so hard into the stitching of the blanket that it had left a mark on my cheek. Where Sam had been, there was nothing but tangled sheets faintly stained with blood. My first thought was that Sam had died sometime in the night and Jin had moved the body to spare me. But then I saw the golden cuff set with emeralds, slipped on to my wrist while I slept. It was Shazad’s, one of the pieces of jewellery she’d paid Sam with, back when he was running information between the palace and the Rebellion.

I read it for what it was, a farewell note. No amount of money is worth dying for, it said. He wasn’t wrong, either. Money was a damn stupid thing to die for. I’d just been figuring Sam was still with us for something more.

Still, leaving me the bracelet seemed like it was more symbolic than anything, since he took everything else Shazad had paid him, down to the very last of her rings.

Shazad’s jewellery was how I found him in the end. There was a goldsmith on the corner of Moon Street who was known to trade coin for material without questions. It took a bit of bribery, but he told me Sam had been by. He was on his way to the White Fish, a bar on the docks that normally served sailors of all sorts passing through Izman. It’d become glutted with the same sailors lately, seeing as no one was getting in or out of the city. The barricade of fire even plunged deep into the sea.