‘Lots of people wind up dead without meaning to, you know.’ Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Albish captain brush a hand across his moustache quickly, as if he was hiding a smile.
‘Yes, well –’ Bilal’s shaking hand twitched – ‘as amusing as your sense of self-importance is, you don’t really think you were my last resort, do you?’ He waved an arm weakly around himself, at the chaos that dominated the rest of the room. ‘I have tried a thousand ways to stay alive already. This is just one more. See for yourself.’
A few steps took me to the table where the servant had tossed the letter that acknowledged Bilal’s treason. I could barely see the table itself under the chaos. ‘I have tested and used and searched for every single piece of Mirajin sorcery to save me. Without any result. It is time to move away from desert magic.’ My fingers danced across the papers and scribbled, half-mad notes. There were pages violently ripped out of books, the torn edges painted with bright-pigmented flowers and gold-leaf animals. ‘The Albish know how to heal with water and earth instead of fire and words. You’ve already seen what they are capable of in battle.’ So he was trading our country to foreigners for a chance at a cure.
A page on the corner of the table caught my attention. The whole thing was taken up by a drawing of a mountain, a single grey peak that stretched up from the bottom of the page, and invaded the sky. Except this mountain was hollow, and inside it was a man with crimson skin, like shifting fire, and chains around his arms. In bright gilded letters the words inscribed below him glinted at me: The man below the mountain.
I ran my finger along the jagged edge of the paper, where it had been torn out of a book. I had seen this image before, though never this finely done. There was a pale illustration in cheap water paints in one of Tamid’s books back in Dustwalk. In his, the man was an angry, violent shade of purple, and he had huge, sharp teeth that protruded from his mouth in a snarl. Not a man but a monster. But otherwise, the image was the same, down to the particular peaks on the mountain.
‘This is a story they used to tell to scare us back home,’ I said, pulling out the page from the pile. I was six years old and being scolded by Tamid’s mother. Be good, or the monster in the mountain will get you. He eats naughty children alive, you know. ‘They told us there was a monster who had done such a great wrong to the Djinn that he’d been locked under a mountain for all eternity. That he survived by eating children who disobeyed their parents.’
Bilal shook his head. ‘Trust them to get it wrong all the way south.’ He said south like it was an insult. ‘Not a monster, just a man. And he didn’t wrong the Djinn; they wronged him. They stole his true love. Like many Djinn steal good men’s wives.’ His eyes danced across me pointedly. ‘But this man, unlike the others, dared to take vengeance on them. Or he tried. The Djinn put him in chains and locked him below the mountain until he repented. But if any man freed him early, that man would be granted his heart’s greatest desire.’
So that was why Bilal had this. Another way out of death – a wish granted by some impossibly immortal man below the mountain. ‘You shouldn’t trust stories,’ I said. But I was still holding the page. I’d never seen the picture like this. He didn’t look like a monster, but not quite like a man either. He looked like a creature made of fire. ‘They’re never true all the way through.’ It reminded me of the game we used to play as children, where one child whispered a sentence into the ear of another, who whispered it on and on, until the last child spoke aloud some distorted version of the original. Only I didn’t know which one was the copy. The man or the monster.
‘Is it just a story, though?’ Bilal was watching me intently. ‘Because I sent a dozen soldiers down south to find this man below the mountain, and they didn’t come back. And I don’t think it was make-believe that killed them.’
No, it was probably Skinwalkers, or a foreign army, or the Sultan’s army, or hungry Mirajin people, or any other number of things they could have encountered on their fool’s errand.
I put the page down reluctantly. ‘There’s no such thing as just a story.’
Another coughing fit seized Bilal, doubling him over, and this time he didn’t have the strength to wave away the servant who stepped forward. The coughing didn’t abate. The servant and the soldier helped Bilal to his feet, supporting him through a door that led to the more private areas of his chambers.
His coughs echoed noisily back down the hallway long after the door had closed behind him, leaving me alone in the room with the fox-haired Albish captain.
I dropped down heavily into the seat that Bilal had indicated I ought to take, at his other side, across from the captain. I picked up a stuffed vine leaf and shoved it in my mouth. ‘So,’ I addressed the captain in Mirajin around the mouthful of food. I hadn’t been raised finely – that much Bilal had been good enough to remind me of – so there was no point acting like I had been. ‘Are you really going to cure him? Or is this some story you’re peddling to get a foothold in my country?’ The captain watched me for a moment, the studied blankness slipping before reappearing. But I wasn’t in the mood to play games. ‘I know you can understand me,’ I said. ‘And if you want to pretend you can’t, I’ve got my own translator I can bring in here. But be warned, he’s more annoying than me.’