It wasn’t easy to move through the streets of Izman in the dark during curfew, with Abdals patrolling the streets. In fact, it was impossible for most people. But we weren’t most people. We were Demdji. And by the time the sky started to lighten behind the wall of fire, we had managed to make our way to the outskirts of the palace.
We stayed hidden until the streets finally began to fill around us, until finally the square in front of the palace was busy enough to hide us in plain sight. We moved out into the open, taking our places among the people of Izman. There was an unusual restlessness to the crowd. They had gathered here just yesterday for the Sultim trials, which we’d interrupted. But today they didn’t know what they were going to see, an execution or a hostage exchange. I glanced at the faces around me as I pushed through the crowd. Something felt different today than it had for Ahmed’s execution, or Shira’s. Both of them had been accused of crimes. They’d been brought before the crowd to face what passed for justice in the Sultan’s world. This time, though, whoever appeared on that stage would be unquestionably innocent, standing there for crimes that were not her own. And I saw, in some of the grimly pressed-together mouths and downcast eyes, that I wasn’t the only one who recognised that.
But still, the people of Izman crowded in, even as the shadows of night retreated. We had split up: Jin and I at two different vantage points with guns at our hips, Izz and Maz in the shapes of starlings, perched on a rooftop nearby, Hala at the back so she could keep everyone in view. The way we saw it, our biggest threat was the Abdals. They were the reason I hadn’t been able to save Imin. Hala’s illusions didn’t work on them. And besides, they could burn us alive if we got too close. Shooting them through their metal chests didn’t work – we had to destroy the word inscribed on their heels that gave them life. Which Leyla had helpfully covered with metal armour. I was hoping a jaguar’s claws could prise those off – Izz would take care of that. Then either Jin or I would take the shot, depending on which one of us was closer. And then, under Hala’s illusion, Maz could swoop down and pick the girl up in his talons. It wasn’t a foolproof plan, but it was better than nothing, which was what we’d had when Imin died right in front of us.
I shifted restlessly, watching the place where Imin and Shira had both lost their lives. Finally dawn broke in earnest. All eyes were fixed on the stage now, waiting for the appearance of the girl who would die for our crimes. Minutes passed slowly as I touched the gun by my side over and over, making sure it was still there. But there was no movement from the palace. The doors didn’t swing open, there was no sign of an Abdal and a struggling girl.
‘Do you think the princess was sent home?’ a voice asked in the crowd behind me.
‘Maybe it was a bluff,’ another voice considered. But I knew that neither of those could be true. So what was the Sultan waiting for?
I caught movement from the corner of my eye. Not on the stage, but up above us and to the side, on the palace walls. When I glanced up, there was nothing there at first, and for a moment I thought I was seeing things, a trick of the light. But something kept my eyes fixed on that point on the wall, as if I could see through stone by sheer force of will.
And then the Sultan stepped into view, holding a girl around the waist.
He cut an impressive figure in the dawn light, dressed in a scarlet kurti with a bright gold sheema draped around his neck: the colours of blood shed over a dawn sky. He was flanked by his Abdals, the bronze of their artificial skin glinting in the sunlight. The rush of anger and hatred and humiliation was almost too much to take. Like it might send me doubling over.
The young girl was dressed in white nightclothes that whipped and twisted around her legs in the morning air, her dark hair falling around her shoulders in a wild tumble. She would’ve looked leached of all colour, if it wasn’t for the flash of red at her neck. For a moment I feared her throat had already been slashed and she was being brought out here to die slowly. But no, it wasn’t blood, just a bright red cloth. From far away it looked like a sheema thrown loosely around her neck as any desert girl might wear it. But there was another flash of red identical to it, tied around the crenellations of the palace walls. The same walls that Jin and I had jumped from in the chaos of Auranzeb, trusting a rope to get us to safety. But this rope wasn’t securing her.
He wasn’t going to execute her on the stage. He was going to hang her.
My heart started to beat frantically as I cast around, looking for the others. I couldn’t reach her up there. I desperately searched for the twins to give them a sign to forget the plan and fly to the walls of the palace. But we’d split ourselves up, scattering through the crowd that now hid the others from me.
I was on my own. And I was too far away.
I started to move all the same, pushing my way through the mass of gawkers, praying I might be able to get close enough to the twins to call out to them, or to Hala to tell her to draw something up in the Sultan’s mind that would stall him. Or even close enough to fire off a shot, a bullet straight between the Sultan’s eyes. To do something other than watch a girl die. But the crowd fought against me like I was trying to push my way upstream in a raging river. Around me faces started to turn upwards, noticing that something was happening high above us.
The Sultan stepped up to the very edge of the palace walls.
I was close enough to see that the girl was shaking and crying as she stood on the precipice. Close enough to see the Sultan turn her away from him, towards the rising sun. To see him lean over the girl and whisper something in her ear. To see the girl squeeze her eyes shut.
But too far away to do anything.
He pushed her.
It was one swift, violent motion that sent her over the edge of the wall, falling fast. Her scream ripped the air open like a knife through cloth, drawing up every eye that hadn’t noticed her. Some cries from the crowd mingled with hers as the whole of the square watched helplessly as she fell. Nightclothes twisted cruelly around her flailing legs, feet frantically searching for a purchase they wouldn’t find. As she dropped, the long, colourful rope of the noose unfurled like a sheema caught in the desert wind, whipping behind her in a trail of red.
Until there was none of it left to unfurl.
It snapped taut. The noose around her throat pulled tight, bringing her fall to a wrenching stop.
Her scream cut off with sickening suddenness. And I knew it was over.
Her name was Rima. She was from a poor family that lived by the docks. Her father’s door had a sun emblazoned on it in scarlet paint, left over from the Blessed Sultima’s Uprising. That was why she had been taken. Ahmed’s sun had turned from a symbol of defiance into a target.
She was the middle daughter of five. The Sultan could have plucked any one of them from their beds that night. But Rima was closest in age to me.
*
The second girl was named Ghada. We never even got a chance to save her. We never so much as saw her alive. Dawn found her body already hanging from the palace walls next to Rima’s. She’d been killed inside, where we didn’t have a hope of reaching her. The Sultan wasn’t foolish enough to repeat the same trick twice.
On the afternoon after Ghada’s death, her father, who had rioted in the streets against the Sultan, stood in the square before the palace and denounced the rebellion that had condemned his innocent daughter. I didn’t blame him for his words. He had another daughter he needed to save.
*
Naima was the name of the third girl. The third one we failed to save. The third one who died for our crimes.
No matter what we did, what we tried, we were too late. Too slow. We would have to get into the palace to save them before they died. And we didn’t have any way in with Sam gone. Hell, we hadn’t managed to get in back when he was still with us.
‘No living parents.’ Sara was telling me what she had learned about Naima, as she rocked Fadi in her arms. ‘But she has four brothers.’ Curtains were pulled against prying eyes, but early morning light leaked through the lattice of the window to dance anxiously across her face as she moved. There was something else she wasn’t telling me.
‘What is it?’
‘You don’t need to torture yourself.’ Jin interrupted Sara before she could get out with it. He was leaning against the far wall, watching me. ‘You’re not responsible for every death in this rebellion any more than Ahmed was.’
It was good advice, the sort that Shazad might give me if she were still here. But she wasn’t. And I wasn’t Ahmed, either. I had told Tamid that I had changed, that I wasn’t someone who let folks die on my account. But there were three bodies hanging from the palace walls to prove me wrong. Maybe I hadn’t changed from that selfish Dustwalk girl as much as I’d thought. Maybe going back with Tamid really would take me right back to where I’d started. ‘I am responsible for this one, though.’
No one contradicted me. It was the truth, after all.
Sara’s eyes flitted between Jin and me for a moment before continuing. ‘They’re saying it was a neighbour who denounced them to the palace as allies of the Rebellion. Someone her brothers thought was a friend, who was just as much a part of the riots as they were.’
‘The neighbour will have sold them out to save his own family,’ Jin filled in, looking grim.
Sara nodded gravely. ‘Naima’s brothers figured out he was responsible. He was just found beaten to death in his home.’ I felt sick to my stomach. A violent act of revenge and grief. Brothers trying to make someone pay for a dead sister since they couldn’t reach the Sultan.
‘This is what the Sultan wants,’ Jin said. ‘For what’s left of the Rebellion’s support in the city to turn on itself.’
‘Well, nice of us to make it so easy for him, then,’ I muttered.
‘You know,’ Hala interjected, ‘we can wallow and continue to watch people die. Or we could just fix the mistake you made and give that useless princess back to her father.’
‘No.’ I shook my head emphatically. ‘Even if she does turn out to be useless to us, she’s not useless to her father.’ I glanced at the closed door. Tamid was talking to Leyla again on the other side of it now. He hadn’t gotten anything useful out of her yet, but he wasn’t ready to give up. He’d returned the second day carrying one of the tomes of the Holy Books. He seemed to think he could compel her to repent with religion. She’d killed an immortal being, so I had to guess that it wasn’t going to work, but I was ready to try anything by now.
‘I didn’t say we should give her back alive,’ Hala said, drawing my attention sharply back to her. Her words shifted the mood in the room instantly. I searched her face for a sign that she was being sarcastic; Hala had a cruel sense of humour. But I hadn’t seen her laugh a whole lot since Imin died.
‘We’re not going to kill her,’ Jin said, raising his dark eyebrows at her, like he thought she wasn’t serious.
‘Why not?’ Hala raised her own in a mocking imitation. ‘Because she’s your sister? She’d jump at the chance to kill every single one of us. And the Sultan’s demand never said whether he wanted her returned dead or alive.’
‘I feel like alive was implied,’ Jin said drily. ‘That’s usually the way with hostages.’
‘He ought to know better,’ Hala said. ‘We’re Djinn’s children; we take things by the letter.’ She offered him a sarcastic smirk. The twins shifted where they were sitting on the windowsill, looking uneasy at being dragged into this talk of murder. ‘Besides,’ Hala added, finally breaking her staring contest with Jin, ‘I don’t think it’s your decision.’ And then she looked at me.
I could feel Jin’s eyes on me, too. He was expecting me to say no right away, to side with him against Hala’s idea to murder his sister.
I hesitated.
The Sultan was trying to turn the city against us. He’d gotten away with killing three girls so far because in this story he was spinning, we were the villains. Kidnapping princesses wasn’t the sort of thing a hero did; that was the monster’s role. Heroes saved the princess. And heroes didn’t stand idly by when innocent girls were killed. The people would forget that the Sultan was the one doing the killing. All they would remember was that we were the ones who had sent them to the gallows. Killing Leyla wouldn’t get us out of the city, but it might at least stop more girls from dying in our name. Might stop the whole city turning against us before we could ever get Ahmed back to lead them.
But what kind of monsters would we be to lay his daughter’s body on his doorstep?
I was saved from answering when the door to Leyla’s bedroom prison opened. Tamid joined us, holding his Holy Book.
‘Any luck?’ I asked without much hope but grateful for the distraction all the same.
‘No, but …’ He hesitated, looking at his feet, like he was already dreading what he was about to say. ‘I have an idea of what might make her talk.’
‘If it’s death threats, don’t bother,’ Hala said. ‘She’s already made it clear she’s not afraid to die. Or at least she thinks she isn’t.’ She gave me a pointed look, like that entirely justified her whole kill the princess plan.
‘No,’ Tamid agreed, ‘but there’s something she is afraid of. One thing she values more than anything.’
Everyone was hanging on Tamid’s words now, even as he hesitated. He knew that whatever he was about to tell us, we would use it, and it would be because of him. But instead of speaking to me, he glanced at Hala. ‘Is it true,’ he asked her, ‘what they say you did to the man who took your fingers?’
Even I’d never dared ask Hala about that. Most of the Demdji didn’t like to talk about their lives before the Rebellion. It was difficult being what we were in an occupied country that wanted to kill us. And even without the Gallan, Demdji tended to get sold, used, killed or worse. We all knew Hala hadn’t had it easy. We all knew that her mother had sold Hala. But the rumour around camp, back when we’d had a camp, was that Hala had gotten her revenge on the man who’d cut off her fingers. That she had used her Demdji gift and torn his mind asunder. That she had driven him so deep into madness that he’d never see the light of sanity again.
And I understood what Tamid meant. Death was one thing, but Leyla’s life without her intellect – well, that was something else. It would make her useless to her father, for one. And she’d seen madness before. Her mother had been driven mad trying to build a version of what Leyla had successfully completed. It was what made Rahim turn on his father. And Leyla had driven her brother Kadir’s wives to madness – Ayet, Mouhna and Uzma, three jealous but harmless girls in the harem whom she had put through her machine as sacrificial test subjects before using the full force of the machine to harness a Djinni’s energy.
She might not fear losing her head. But she would fear losing her mind.
‘Is it true?’ Tamid pressed.
Hala was running the thumb of her three-fingered hand in a slow, thoughtful circle over her golden mouth as she thought. ‘No,’ she admitted finally. ‘What I did to him was worse than you’ve ever heard.’
*
When I let myself into her room, Leyla was curled up on her side. She reminded me of my cousin Olia sulking in our shared room back in Dustwalk, when she clearly wanted someone to pay attention to her but wanted it to look like she didn’t.
‘Are you here to shoot me again?’ Leyla muttered into her pillow. The way she was lying made the bandages on her arm conspicuous. I guessed Tamid had sewn her up, too. Probably smart; we didn’t want her to bleed out on us. Though I could’ve let her suffer for a bit.
‘No.’ I leaned against the door. ‘I’m here to give you one last chance to keep that clever little head of yours screwed on the right way.’ I sat down at the end of her bed. ‘Have you ever seen anyone go sun-mad, Leyla? I have – once – a man named Bazet, back in the town where I grew up. It was like watching someone whose head had been set on fire from the inside and he couldn’t put it out. He went absolutely raving, babbling, screaming, seeing things, and in the end my uncle shot him like a dog in the middle of the street out of mercy.’
Leyla sat up, her hand pressing hard into the pillow, leaving a small indent next to where her face had been.
‘Hala’s power, it’s a bit like sun-madness. She can make you see things for a little while, sure, but if she wants to, she can also rip your mind into such fractured pieces you’ll never again be wholly sure what’s just in your head and what’s really there. And believe me, she really wants to do that to you.’
Leyla’s mouth had parted slightly, her eyes looking huge and childlike. ‘You wouldn’t do that. You need me.’
‘Right now you’re costing us a lot more lives than you’re helping us save,’ I said. ‘And here’s the thing: I don’t think your father can keep this city on lockdown forever. Eventually, I reckon this siege will end and we’ll get out. But, see, I want people to stop dying before that. And if I return you to him without your head screwed on straight, the killings stop, and I don’t think you’ll be much good to him any more either, when you can’t build him little toys for his wars. Do you reckon you’ll still be his favourite daughter when you’ve lost your mind?’
I could see her churning it over, the cost of telling.
‘Where will you go?’ she asked finally. And then, more quietly, ‘Are you going to rescue my brother?’
The question caught me off guard. I hadn’t thought Leyla gave a damn about Rahim. She’d let him be imprisoned with the rest of the Rebellion. She blamed him as a traitor. But she sounded tentative, almost shy. I supposed he was still her brother, the only one of the Sultan’s many children who shared a mother with her.
‘That’s the plan.’
In fact, the plan was to rescue two of her brothers, but she didn’t need to know Ahmed was still alive, even if she didn’t have any way of getting that information to her father.
Leyla chewed on her lip thoughtfully for a long moment before finally answering me. ‘There are tunnels. Below the city.’ She started talking quicker, as if she could get all the treasonous words off her tongue at once. ‘I needed a way of feeding the power all the way out to the walls. So my father had tunnels dug from the palace, running wires through them to feed the walls with fire from the machine. His wives and the children of the harem slipped out through one of the tunnels to a waiting ship before the Gallan invaders arrived. But the exits are all bricked up now.’
Bricked up wasn’t so bad – easier to get through than a wall of fire. I stood. ‘I’m going to get a map of the city, and I’m going to want you to tell me where these tunnels run, every single one of them. And I’ll know if you try to lie to me again.’ I gave the bandage on her wounded arm a pointed glance.
‘It won’t matter, you know.’ Leyla interrupted my retreat from the room. She was awfully chatty now that she’d started talking. I ignored her. ‘Even if you can get through this wall, you won’t get through the next.’
I stopped, my hand resting on the door. She was baiting me, I could tell by the way her words rose at the end mockingly. She wanted me to ask. Which was exactly what made me not want to ask. Except I probably ought to. Pettiness wasn’t the right hill to make my stand on in this war.
I turned around and gave her what she wanted. ‘What do you mean, the next wall?’
‘The one around the prison where the traitors have been sent.’ She looked all too pleased with herself now she had regained the upper hand, knees pulled up to her chin. There was an annoying singsong quality to her words when she asked, ‘Where do you think my father got the idea to protect our city this way?’
Ashra’s Wall. The story had leaped into my mind the moment I’d seen the great barrier of fire. And I wasn’t alone in that. Everyone had been whispering Ashra’s name around the city since we saw the wall of fire. It was impossible not to think of the legend from the Holy Books. But there was no way Leyla was talking about that. Because that would mean Ahmed and the others were being kept prisoner in …
‘Eremot.’ Dark satisfaction was scrawled all over Leyla’s face. ‘They’ve been sent to Eremot.’
The ancient name sent a feeling of wrongness through me, an unease that went deeper than my skin and bones and seemed to churn even my soul into unrest. Half of me was immortal. Half of me had been there, at Eremot, in the ancient days. Half of me remembered.
Eremot was a name that belonged in the Holy Books. It was the place where the Destroyer of Worlds had emerged, leading her army of ghouls, and the place she had been imprisoned again at the end of the First War. Behind Ashra’s Wall, a great barrier of fire to keep the dark at bay.
‘Eremot is …’ not real. Only that wouldn’t get past my lips.
‘The stuff of legends,’ Leyla finished for me, with a pinched, self-satisfied look on her face. ‘Past the end of civilisation where no one can find it. But I found it.’
She meant to intimidate me. But I’d grown up past the end of civilisation and Jin had found me just fine. ‘We’ve got our own ways of finding it.’ Jin’s compass would lead us to wherever the prisoners were being held. Whether that was Eremot or not.
‘Well.’ Leyla shrugged. ‘Even if you do find it, do you really think you can cross a great and impenetrable barrier against evil, risen from the trueness of sacrifice and which—’
‘And which will stand un-breached until such time as humanity’s courage fails,’ I finished for her. ‘I can quote the Holy Books, too, when I want to.’
Ashra had been a carpet weaver’s daughter born when the First War was coming to an end. The ghouls were being driven into hiding and darkness, skulking the desert alone at night instead of swarming in armies. The Destroyer of Worlds’ greatest monsters were dead, slain by the First Hero and all the heroes that came after him: Attallah, the Grey Prince, Sultan Soroush, and the Champion of Bashib. The Destroyer of Worlds was being beaten back to the darkness of the earth from whence she came.
But she could not be held back permanently. Each time, she burst free from her prison again to roam and terrorise the desert. And the Djinn looked on in despair at the humans who had defended them for so long and feared that they would not be able to accomplish this final task. So they made it known among the humans that they would grant immortality to whichever man could imprison the Destroyer of Worlds forevermore. Many a hero died trying.
Ashra was not a hero. She was just a girl from a small village in the mountains, the eldest of twelve children, who spent her days helping her father dye wool and her evenings helping her mother cook meals for her eleven brothers and sisters.
Until the day the Destroyer of Worlds came to her village.
The villagers had no weapons, and they lit torches against the Destroyer of Worlds, placing them in a circle as they huddled together, trying to stay alive until dawn, when they would be able to flee.
The Destroyer of Worlds stalked through the dark in one great circle around the village, around their torches. And then she laughed, and with her breath she extinguished all the torches. All except one, which stood by Ashra and her family.
Before the Destroyer of Worlds could attack, Ashra seized the last torch and set herself on fire with it. A body does not burn much, but it was said that she swallowed a spark, just enough to light her soul as well as her body. And her soul burned much brighter than her body ever could. And when the burning girl took a step towards the Destroyer of Worlds, the Destroyer of Worlds took a step back. So Ashra took another step, then another, and another, and slowly the Destroyer of Worlds retreated.
Ashra walked the Destroyer of Worlds all the way back towards Eremot. And as she walked, she did as her father had taught her and wove the fire burning inside her body together, as one would a carpet, until it became an impenetrable wall. By the time they reached Eremot, she had made it so high and wide that it held back even the Destroyer of Worlds. It was wide enough to encircle the entrance to Eremot and keep the Destroyer of Worlds trapped inside the mountain forever.
The Djinn saw her sacrifice, and they kept their promise. They granted Ashra immortal life so that her soul would burn forever as the great wall she had made. They said that as long as Ashra’s Wall stood, the Destroyer of Worlds would be imprisoned. If it fell, so would a new age of darkness fall on the world.
So that was why Leyla had asked if we were headed to rescue Rahim. Not because she had had a change of heart about her brother, but because she wanted to know for sure that even if she betrayed her father and let us through this wall, we would still fail. There was another wall between us and our purpose.
‘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.