Jin did what he did best when I told him: he left me before I could leave him, joining Sam and Delila in the advance party headed towards Izman. He claimed to Ahmed that someone needed to take care of their little sister. I was grateful that he didn’t tell our prince the truth. If Ahmed knew he was sending me to die by disabling that machine, he would try to save me. That’s what he did, after all. He tried to save people.
That’s what I was doing, too.
Jin had been gone three days when a lookout reported there was an army making its way up the western side of the mountain. Not from Izman. From our side of the desert.
Rahim moved into action immediately, preparing his men to fight. They were used to this, to skirmishes in the mountains, though none of us had been expecting that we would need to defend ourselves before reaching Izman.
But as we stood watching from the walls in the early dawn air, over the crest of the hill below, a banner bobbed into view. Not one stitched with the Sultan’s colours. Instead, we saw Ahmed’s golden sun. A few moments later, the first figure came into view, and I realised that I knew her.
It was Samira, the daughter of the Emir of Saramotai. Or she had been until someone had overturned her father and killed him. We’d left her ruling her father’s city. Clearly the role suited her.
‘Hold your fire!’ I ordered Rahim and his men, who were poised with their guns on the wall. ‘Don’t shoot.’
I rushed into the courtyard, and I was out of the gates before anyone could stop me, Ahmed and Shazad close behind.
When she was near enough to be heard, Samira ducked her head in a quick nod to Ahmed as she reached the wall. ‘Your Exalted Highness, we heard you have need of men to fight. And women. I have a hundred with me who don’t want to sit behind our walls and wait for our enemies.’
‘One hundred,’ Shazad said under her breath, standing next to me. ‘That’s a good start.’ And then, speaking louder, she asked, ‘How did you know where we were?’
‘General Hamad,’ Samira said simply. I felt Shazad tense beside me.
‘My father?’ she said, and for just a second she sounded like a little girl again.
Samira nodded. ‘News that the Rebel Prince can’t be killed because he is protected by the Djinn reached even us in the west. And then the general rode through with news that if anyone truly wanted to defend their country, this was their last chance.’ She smiled at our startled faces. ‘Now, are you going to let us in, or do we have to storm your walls? I have to say, they don’t look like much next to ours.’
Saramotai wasn’t the last city to join us. A bigger party arrived from Fahali two days later, sent into action by the general as well. The port city of Ghasab joined us a day after that. And more kept trickling in from small desert and mountain towns, where the news had spread. Ahmed was alive. The Rebel Prince had come back from the dead to free the country from foreign rule. Sometimes they came in large groups, sometimes one by one, to pledge themselves to his cause. Until we couldn’t wait any more. We were out of time to train new recruits. Out of time to get more weapons. We needed to march. Before the Sultan marched on Iliaz, and we lost the element of surprise.
‘How many in all?’ Ahmed asked that night, before we descended the mountain.
Shazad and Rahim traded a look. ‘Enough,’ Shazad said.
‘Enough for what?’ I asked.
‘A fair fight,’ Rahim said.
‘Our father isn’t going to give us a fair fight, though, is he?’ Ahmed said.
‘No,’ Rahim replied. ‘I doubt he is.’
*
We had marched up the mountain with three hundred men and women. We marched down with close to a thousand. We made our way from Iliaz into the desert flats around the great city of Izman. We marched together to war.
The sun was just beginning to set when we reached the campsite where Sam, Jin, Delila and the rabble they had managed to get out of the city waited for us, just out of sight of Izman, covered by Delila’s illusion. There were a few hundred of them. I recognised our rebels and some other allies, but many more were strangers. I was all too conscious of how many people were left in the city if the whole thing went up in flames.
We pitched camp alongside them.
I didn’t see Jin among the crowd. I desperately wanted to go looking for him, but that would be selfish when we were trying to let each other go. When only he really had to let me go. And I’d spent a lot of time learning not to be so damn selfish.
He didn’t come looking for me either.
As night fell, I was summoned to see Ahmed and Shazad for a few last instructions before we went into battle.
This would all end tomorrow.
That thought hung over our army. By next sunset, either we would all be dead or Ahmed would be sitting on the throne.
Before I could enter Ahmed’s tent, the flap of his pavilion was flung open violently, blinding me for just a second as a blaze of light spilled into the darkness. I shielded my eyes instinctively, but I could still see through the gaps in my fingers.
I knew Jin from his outline alone. He was a dark silhouette against the light streaming from Ahmed’s tent. Caught, frozen, holding the tent flap open. The glare hid his expression from me. What I did see was his free hand twitch out towards me. As if to grab me and stop me. To hold me back from what I had to do.
And then his fingers curled inwards. Fighting the want. Fighting the need to stop me. The reaching turned into a fist that dropped to his side. He let the tent flap fall, plunging us both into darkness, as he walked past without touching me.
I didn’t turn around as he went, as I listened to his footsteps fade in the sand. I waited until I couldn’t feel him at my back before I pushed open the flap to Ahmed’s tent.
Preparations were ringing around the sands when I stepped outside. Rahim was running his soldiers and our rabble through drills. No one was going to get much sleep with a battle on the horizon, and Izman was an imposing inky-black silhouette against the stars in the distance. It loomed large next to our small tents that dotted the sands, a behemoth facing a scattering of scarabs. Like the Destroyer of Worlds’ huge monster in the old stories, the great snake who had been slain by the First Hero. In the stories, it was always the monster who lost. But I knew better than anyone that stories and truth weren’t the same thing. Shazad could talk numbers all she liked, but we were awfully bold to think we were going to win – a rabble of half-trained, barely armed rebels against the might of the Sultan and his unstoppable Abdal army.
The city had seemed to get bigger as the sky darkened, like it was growing into the night itself, shadowed edges blurring into the sky until it was blotting out even the stars, pulling me to it with its long shadow.
‘There will be a great deal of death here tomorrow.’
The voice slithered unexpectedly out of the darkness, making me turn around sharply. There was a man standing a few paces behind me. I could only see an outline of him against the light from the tents, but I could tell he was wearing one of the uniforms of Iliaz. One of ours, then. I relaxed.
I hadn’t realised how far I’d strayed until I looked back. I was halfway between my people and my enemy’s city, on the edge of straying outside the bounds of Delila’s illusion. Now I saw it laid out below me, colourful tents dotted across the sands, lit up by the campfires and oil lamps. From here it looked like thousands of lanterns littering the desert, screaming defiance against the encroaching night.
‘Did Rahim send you to fetch me back?’ I asked the soldier. There was no other reason he’d be this far out from camp as well.
The silhouetted man seemed unnaturally still. ‘No, he didn’t send me. No man commands me any more.’
It was a strange answer given in a strange accent. And it was strange that he had been able to sneak up on me, too. I drew back a cautious step, glancing behind him to see if I might be able to dodge around him, outrun him back to the tents. That was when I noticed he hadn’t left any footprints in the sand. And I let out a breath. Not strange, then. Just not human.
‘Zaahir,’ I greeted the Djinni.
‘Daughter of Bahadur.’ I still couldn’t see his face in the darkness. It was unsettling. ‘It seems you’ve discarded another chance to save your prince.’
‘I didn’t discard anything. I just gave it to someone else.’ If the Sin Maker’s gift was real, Shazad was now untouchable in battle. ‘Someone who needs it.’
He shook his head, like some mockery of a disappointed human expression he had seen and was doing a bad imitation of now. A sorrowful gesture without any real sorrow. ‘You wouldn’t kill a prince. You wouldn’t kiss a prince. What am I to do with you, daughter of Bahadur?’
‘I think you’ve done enough.’
He ignored me. ‘Luckily, I have one more gift for you.’
‘I don’t want any more of your gifts, Zaahir.’ I was tired. Too tired to argue with him, to try to outsmart him in whatever game he was playing with me this time.
‘Trust me, you want this one, daughter of Bahadur.’ He pulled a ring off his finger and offered it to me. I didn’t reach out for it. This tasted of a trick. I just wasn’t sure what the trick was yet. ‘Take it,’ Zaahir urged. ‘I made a promise that I am bound to keep: to give you what you want.’
‘And what is it that I want?’ I asked.
‘You want to live,’ Zaahir said simply. I felt the chasm of fear I’d been trying to look away from all these weeks open inside me anew. And even in the dark I could tell he was smirking. Because we both knew he was right. More than anything, that was what I wanted. He turned the ring so that it caught the light from the camp, drawing my eye. It was a bronze band with a single bauble mounted on it. But when I looked closer, I saw that it wasn’t a gemstone or a pearl. It looked like glass, and inside there was a shifting, colourless light. ‘You want to release Fereshteh’s soul and stay alive. Fereshteh’s endless fire has to go somewhere. But you don’t need to burn. It can be contained inside this ring. All you have to do, once you are near enough to the machine, is smash the glass on this ring. And all that immortal energy, it will not lash out and annihilate you like an insect in the path of a fire. The ring will draw the fire instead. Absorb it like water dashed across the sand. Instead of swelling up to drown you. And you, little Demdji, you can live.’
It still felt like a trick. I knew enough stories of the Djinn to know that if it seemed too good to be true, then it probably was. But it was too late to stop the jump of hope in my chest that came with his words. And as I stared at the ring, I could feel the hope seducing me.
I thought of being in Eremot with Zaahir. The way he had simply touched the Abdals and their light went out. It had been like watching their spark get sucked into a greater fire. I remembered how he had reached out a hand and Ashra’s Wall had shattered harmlessly. He had some power over Djinni fire that I didn’t understand.
And Zaahir was right. I didn’t want to die. It didn’t matter how far I’d come across the desert. A part of me would always be that selfish girl from Dustwalk bent on surviving.
My hand closed around the ring. And then suddenly, like a shadow disappearing into the night, Zaahir was gone.
And I was holding my salvation in my hand.