Izman looked different from above.
I was standing on the ledge of the great prayer house and I could see the crowd assembled for the Sultim trials far below us. That was why we’d picked this spot, to keep an eye on this morning’s proceedings. Because it sure as hell wasn’t for the comfort of it.
I shifted as much as I dared on the narrow ledge, trying to get a better view of what was going on. I teetered forwards a little as gravity reached up for me, and to my right Jin instinctively grabbed my arm, steadying me before I could plunge hundreds of feet to my death.
‘I don’t have it in me to lose you, too, Bandit,’ he said as he anchored me to our perch.
Maz and Izz flanked us. They’d flown us up here, taking the form of two giant Rocs, just before daybreak, when people started to gather. The sun hitting the golden dome of the prayer house made it blaze so bright it almost blinded me, even with my back to it. Which meant it would blind anyone in the crowd who might happen to glance up our way, making us seem like kaleidoscopic illusions in the light instead of flesh and blood.
When I was down in the streets, the city was a latticed puzzle box. Sharp corners, hidden alcoves, unexpected dead ends. Long streets pierced occasionally by windows that leaked whole other worlds on to the dusty paving stones. Narrow passages made all the narrower for being lined by market stalls and a steady stream of people. The whole thing lidded by colourful canopies blotting out the sky. I still hadn’t managed to solve the city, even after nearly a month of being trapped inside it by the great dome of fire.
I knew it was one of Leyla’s unnatural inventions the moment I saw it. But the people had drawn the same conclusion as Sara that first night. That it was ancient magic, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the end of the First War.
Many were calling it Ahmed’s Wall. Some had even begun praying to it. Ahmed’s Acolytes, so called. Men and women who singed their clothing and smeared their faces in ash and spent their days trying to get as close to the great barrier of fire as they could in order to pray for it to hold against the invaders at our gates. No matter how many times the Sultan’s soldiers turned them away, they kept coming back, dawn after dawn. A few had even died, getting too close to the barrier. Disintegrating like the stone Jin had thrown at it the day it appeared. They preached that Ahmed had saved us all.
I hated to admit it, but it was possible the barrier had saved us. Though I knew it was nothing to do with Ahmed.
From up here on our perch I could see the lines of blue tents encircling our city with military precision. Waiting. Just like they had been for weeks. After the twins saw them on the horizon, it wasn’t long before they got to the city. But that was where their invasion stalled. The couldn’t get through the barrier on their side any more than we could. Their bullets disintegrated against the barrier of fire too. Soon enough the Gallan had gone silent. Even if they hadn’t gone anywhere else. We all knew better than to think they would give up so easy.
The Gallan had occupied our desert for nearly two decades. They had put our Sultan on his throne, helping him usurp his father and brother. And in return he had let them impose their laws on us. Let their twisted beliefs guide them to kill Demdji and First Beings. Force our poorest people into dangerous labour to churn out enough weapons for them to fight their wars. Inflict their violence on us without fear of repercussion from the law. The Sultan had let it happen and waited until the Gallan didn’t serve his purposes any more. Only then had he tried to annihilate them using Noorsham, my brother, a Demdji who could flatten cities. He had turned the thing they hated most, magic, against them. But we’d got in the way before Noorsham could finish them off. I wanted the Gallan out as much as anyone, but he would’ve killed a whole lot of Mirajin citizens on his warpath, too. In the end the only thing the Sultan achieved was making enemies of our occupiers. And now here we were, under siege from the largest empire in the world.
They seemed to think they could wait us out on the other side of that wall of fire. But I knew a thing or two about the Sultan. He didn’t play games he didn’t think he could win.
I wondered how many Mirajin villages and towns the Gallan had stormed through on the way to Izman. How many people had died in their path as the Sultan waited for them to come to him.
The Sultan had claimed to me once that his purpose was to protect his country. That he would make Miraji as a force to be reckoned with, one that no foreign army would occupy ever again. And maybe it would be. But every step towards that looked to me like a little more power in the Sultan’s hands, and bodies being trampled on the way. The people of Miraji had not agreed to be pawns in this game the Sultan was playing against foreign invaders.
The Rebellion was going to end the game. As soon as we figured out how the hell to get out of this city.
We were going to get Ahmed back. And Rahim back. And Shazad. And Delila. And all the others who had been captured. And we were going to end this. As soon as we figured out how the hell to get out of this city.
A bead of sweat tracked its way from under my sheema, down my neck and under my kurta.
‘You all right, Bandit?’ Jin asked me, his voice low next to my ear.
I’d have liked to have been able to lie and tell him that I was fit as a fiddle, but since I couldn’t I didn’t answer at all. ‘It’s time.’ I said, spreading my hands out across the city below, sprawling my fingers as far as they would go. ‘Get ready.’
I might not be able to reach the dunes beyond the Sultan’s artificial barricade, but this city was full of desert dust. It was in its bones. Its very soul.
I pulled. The wound in my side twinged with pain like a muscle protesting use. It had been doing that ever since the metal was removed from my skin. The scar on my side pained me like it remembered the iron and was fighting back against my Demdji power. It had only been a twinge at first, but it was getting worse every time. And once or twice I felt like the sand might slip out of my grip altogether.
I ignored it as best I could, as the dust rose out of the streets in a golden haze, like steam rising off a bath. From between cobblestones and where it was trapped in folds of clothes and resting on leaves in roof gardens. Filling the air, swirling up and gathering together. A thousand tiny grains of sand, nothing on their own, scattered across the city, but joining together into a riotous storm.
Somewhere below us in the crowd gathered to watch the Sultim trials was Hala, bundled up to her eyebrows against prying gazes that might notice her golden skin. She was with two other rebels who’d escaped with us, Riad and Karam. I trusted them both to keep her safe – or carry her away if the illusion became too much for her.
It was an illusion on a bigger scale than Hala had ever managed before: the Blessed Sultima come back to life. My cousin Shira, exactly as she looked in my nightmares, her head detached, her eyes full of accusations, projected into thousands of people’s minds at once to deliver a message designed to spark doubt over the Sultan and stall the Sultim trials.
It was a desperate, risky thing to do, stretching Hala’s powers to their limit. But we had to do something. The last thing we needed was the country falling in line behind a new prince while we were trying to rescue the old one. But stalling the Sultim trials was only our second purpose.
Hala was the distraction. I was the cover.
What we really needed was to get into the palace.
Things can be a distraction and serve the cause at the same time.
Shazad had told me that once, when she’d first tried to rescue me from the harem, with pamphlets raining from the sky. But then Shazad made everything seem easy.
Two targets. One bullet. That I could understand. Two purposes. One plan.
I heard a shout from below as Hala’s illusion crept into the minds around her, and for a moment my own focus faltered, my power slipping out of my grip. I felt the burning pain in my side start to ease. It was such a relief that for just a second it made me want to let go, to drop the storm and stop the pain. To just let everything go and rest.
I wrestled the sand back hastily, and instantly the pain came back with it as I fought for control. I worked until the sandstorm covered the square below in a swirling mass, shielding us from sight. My side still ached. I shifted, trying to ease the pain, and the storm shifted with me unexpectedly. I couldn’t stall giving the signal any longer. I was struggling to hold on already. I turned my head just far enough towards Jin and the twins to be heard over the storm, and said, ‘Now.’
They didn’t need to be told twice. Maz had been bursting for hours, shifting restlessly from one shape to another, waiting for the order. Now a huge grin spread over his face as he flung aside the cloak he was wearing, sending it tumbling down into the sandstorm below as he jumped from the edge of the roof without a second thought. For an instant he was just a boy in mid-air, at the pinnacle of a leap, before the inevitable fall, the moment when you stopped flying and came crashing back down to earth. And then he stopped being just a boy. His body shifted, arms turning into wings, feet becoming claws, skin exploding into feathers. Izz followed, flinging the bundle on his back around into his mouth as it turned into a beak before he launched himself from the edge. If the crowd below us had been able to see, it might have looked like a pair of Rocs had just burst from the golden dome of the prayer house, like some mystical egg had hatched them. They soared gracefully above the storm that hid them, desperately happy to be moving again.
Unlike the twins, Jin had barely moved since we got up here. He was good at that – at stillness when everyone around us was restless. But I could read it in him all the same, there below his skin: impatience waiting to burst into action. It’d been there for weeks now. Since the day we saw Imin executed as Ahmed. Since the night we found out we were trapped here, unable to get our people back. Unable to save the family that he had protected for years. Sometimes I caught him with his hand opening and closing over the brass compass compulsively, but that was the only sign he gave that he was as worried as the rest of us. Now he spared me a sideways glance, a heartbeat, just long enough for me to give him a nod, assurance that I was fine. That I could hang on. I wasn’t about to tell him that pain from the old wound was searing through my side and I didn’t know how long I could keep this up.
Jin gave me a small, wry smile, a ghost of the one he used to have back when things were simpler and there were other people running this rebellion for us. The smile that said we were about to get into trouble. We were already in trouble now.
And then he stepped into thin air.
Maz soared below him, catching Jin on his back easily, then shifting direction with one effortless beat of his wings to carry him towards the palace, where Izz waited in all his blue-feathered glory.
I let out an uneasy breath, fighting the urge to drop one of my hands and press it against my aching side. We needed a way through this impossible wall and out of Izman. We’d already searched the whole perimeter for some kind of gap – a gate, a fissure we could squeeze through, something, anything. But the city was locked up tight as a drum. Which meant we needed to look somewhere else for a way out. Somewhere like the mess of papers strewn across the Sultan’s desk that included everything from supply routes for the army to letters addressed to foreign rulers inviting them to Auranzeb, the celebration of the Sultan’s ascendancy to the throne. I’d rifled through these same papers during my own time in the palace.
Only we didn’t have a spy in the palace any more. So we needed to get back in if we were going to get information out.
This was far from our first try at getting in. Sam had made a stab at going through the palace walls first, a few weeks back. His strange Albish magic allowed him to slip through solid stone like it was water. It was a gift no one in Miraji had ever seen, and so nobody knew to guard against it.
Only we’d shown our hand when the Sultan ambushed us. After our narrow escape, the Sultan knew exactly what extraordinary powers we had up our sleeves. The walls of the palace were now lined on the inside with wooden panels, which were as solid to Sam as to anybody else.
And more than that, they were expecting us to try that night.
The bullet would have torn straight through his heart if Sam hadn’t moved at the last second, unable to resist leaning back through the wall to where we waited, cloaked in Hala’s illusion, to toss some offhand sarcastic comment. The gunshot caught him in the shoulder instead. There was a lot of blood. Everywhere. Smeared on the stone of the wall as he stumbled out, with no retreat except into the open. On my hands when I caught him as he lost consciousness. On Jin’s shirt when he heaved him over his shoulder hastily. Soaked into the once-clean linen of the bed when we finally got him back to the Hidden House, still breathing. Barely.
Not that saving him did us much good in the long run.
But that was how we learned our lesson. We had to wait for a cleaner shot. Even if every second we waited meant the prisoners were getting further away from us. Meant they might be getting tortured. Might be killed. We had to wait.
The Sultim trials was the shot we’d been waiting for. So we had to take it. No matter how desperate it was.
Below me Izz spread his immense blue wings, riding an updraught from the sandstorm I was creating, letting it carry him over the palace, his huge shadow skimming easily over the walls and the gardens of the harem, then over the glass dome that crowned the Sultan’s chambers.
We couldn’t get in through the walls. Fine. We’d try something less subtle.
Izz dropped the explosives he was carrying, sending them careening down towards the glass. The dome exploded, shattering into a rain of shards that caught the sun like stars falling from the heavens. Jin and Maz plunged through the new entrance to the palace, straight into the Sultan’s rooms, even as Izz circled back for me.
He soared below me, and I took a deep breath, fighting to keep the sandstorm under my control even as I split my attention. The pain was distracting, but I had to trust that if I jumped Izz would catch me. So, bending my knees just a little, spreading my body flat, I leaped into nothingness. I landed on Izz’s back, and the impact knocked the air out of my lungs, turning my vision black. But I didn’t let go. I fought to hold on both to his back and to the desert as he soared upwards.
We didn’t have much time.
Hala’s illusions ought to work on the people of Izman, get them to believe Shira really had come back from the dead, but the Sultan would guess it was us easily enough. And it wouldn’t take him long to figure out that we were doing more than just whipping his people into a frenzy against him and his sons. He would come looking for us. I was going to have to buy Jin some more time.
Izz looped us around in the air until we were over the shattered dome. Jin and Maz had disappeared from sight, retreating to the Sultan’s study. I could just make out the edge of the table where the Sultan and I had once sat, eating a duck I had killed in his gardens while he needled at my mind, making me doubt Ahmed.
It was covered in shards of glass now.
Ignoring the shooting pain in my side, I pushed away from Izz’s back, so I could see the sand. I fought to keep my balance, even as the wind whipped through my hair, lashing it around my face, tugging at my clothes. I gathered the sand back towards us, tightening my grip. I lifted my arms like I would if I were clearing the sandstorm. But instead of letting it scatter through the streets of Izman, I whipped it in a great swirling vacuum towards us.
The sand shot past me, narrowly missing Izz’s wing, the force buffeting him upwards. I didn’t lose my grip as he beat his wings, frantically trying to regain his balance. I plunged every grain of sand I’d drawn from Izman’s streets down through the broken glass dome in a tightly controlled cascade, ignoring the twisting agony. I focused the sand towards the hallway that led into the Sultan’s chambers, flooding it, blocking the entrance like a stopper in a bottle, cutting off any access the soldiers might have to Jin.
I let go. The pain finally eased, going from a sharp stab to a dull ache as it retreated. I slumped on to Izz’s back as I looked down on my work. It wouldn’t last forever. It was sand; they would dig through it eventually. But it ought to be long enough for Jin to find what we needed. If it was even there.
With a few powerful beats of his wings, Izz carried us up and out of reach of gunfire from the ground. The palace spread out below us like a little toy model. Soldiers were already running towards the Sultan’s chambers. Men and women in the square dropped to their knees as the vision of Shira dissipated from their minds. The twelve princes stood in shock, one standing, sword drawn, with nothing to fight. Others fled the sandstorm and the sound of the explosion nearby and the sudden appearance of a giant Roc hovering above them.
And then I spotted a lone figure in the gardens of the harem, staring up at us. It was her stillness that caught my eye. I knew her on sight, even this far away, from the way she tied her hair and the slope of her shoulders. She was like a statue, as motionless as one of her Abdals before they moved in for the kill.
Leyla.
Our traitor princess.