Hero at the Fall

We were standing together, chest to chest, trying our hardest to choke out any air between us. It might’ve looked romantic if it weren’t for Jin looping a rope around us, securing us like we were some ship’s anchor about to be pushed overboard.

My brother was in the corner, unconscious and bound up in the shackles we’d taken off Sam after his brush with the firing squad. We needed to get this done before dawn came and Noorsham’s disciples woke up and wondered where he was. They would find him and free him eventually, but I was planning on being long gone by then.

Tamid was fretting anxiously at the mouth of the tunnel. My one-time friend might’ve thought he was done with our rebellion when we got here, but he was the only person I trusted to drug my brother safely. And more than that, I’d needed him to read the words in the first language scrawled over the door.

‘But isn’t this so much more romantic?’ Sam went on wistfully. ‘Braving near-certain death with me.’ The rope tightened so that I was pressed with my ear against his shoulder. I couldn’t see his face, but I was sure he was laughing at me. ‘Just like Cynbel and Sorcha or Leofric and Elfleda.’

‘I have no idea who those people are,’ I said into his shirt.

‘Albish love stories,’ he said. ‘You’d like Leofric and Elfleda. He’s a thief, she’s a powerful sorceress. They both die tragically at the end. That’s what happens in all great love stories.’

‘Well, it’s a good thing we’re not in love, then.’ Sam’s flirting had got a whole lot less outrageous the further south we’d got. Half of me thought it was because he and Jin were actually getting along. Better than I’d seen Jin get along with Ahmed in months, now I thought about it. Sam was only back to flirting with me now because he was trying to lighten the mood.

We were about to walk through solid mountain into unknown territory.

I’d made Tamid read the words carved above the doorway to me. ‘They’re in the first language,’ he had said, furrowing his brow as he read them by torchlight. ‘Something about … a prisoner?’ We all felt that simple word settle over us as he said it.

The man in the mountain. Monster or mortal maybe. But definitely not just myth.

Well, we’d come here looking for powerful help, and we might’ve found it.

‘We’ll need a name to open the door,’ Jin had said. ‘Like back … back in the Dev’s Valley.’ He cut himself off before he said back home. But I heard it.

‘There’s no name.’ Tamid squinted at the words above the doorway. ‘But there is something else, I think it’s …’ I saw the realisation settle over him a moment before he said the next words, low and reverent. ‘I think they’re the words to free a Djinni.’

There it was. The thing Tamid had been looking for in books. Our salvation. Not recorded on any paper in a northern library but buried in the mountains here far in the south. It was an answer, too. What to expect beyond that door. Not a man. A Djinni.

It didn’t matter that we didn’t have the right words to get the painted door to open for us. We had alternative ways in.

Nobody asked who would be going through with Sam. Nobody needed to.

Now, standing tied to Sam, I made Tamid read the words above the door out to me again. I repeated them back carefully.

‘Good,’ he said, like a patient teacher. He really would’ve made a good Holy Father. ‘And then at the end, you would say the Djinni’s true name—’

‘I know,’ I cut him off. ‘I’ve called Djinn before.’ Tamid looked away, shamefaced, that brief moment between us breaking as I reminded him that he was at least partly responsible for the Djinn currently imprisoned under the palace.

Jin pulled on the knot, dragging Sam and me together a little tighter. ‘That’s the best I can do without running out of rope,’ he said. The last thing I needed was to get separated from Sam halfway through the mountain. And the rope gave us something to guide us back out. Jin ran his hand along his jaw, a nervous gesture.

‘I was going to say, Just imagine it’s like diving through deep water.’ He smiled at me ruefully. ‘And then I remembered that you’re from—’

‘Here?’

‘I’m going to teach you how to swim someday,’ he promised. ‘Just try to stay alive long enough.’

It was time to go.

‘Take a deep breath,’ Sam said, sounding serious for the first time since we got here. ‘And whatever you do, don’t stop walking.’ I did as I was told, taking in all the air my lungs would hold, and he did the same. And then he took one big step, and we were submerged in stone.

There was dark and then there was the dark of being inside a mountain wall.

It pressed in on all sides of me as we moved, fighting against the ancient stone trying to settle back into the place it had occupied for thousands of years as we squeezed through. It felt like hands pressing against me, trying to pulverise me. We took another step, and then another. The further we went, the worse it got. I could feel my eyelashes being pressed against my cheek. My lungs were going to burst from not breathing. I was going to die entombed in a mountain.

And then air hit my body, my left arm first, then the rest of me, as we half stumbled through, plunging to the ground, ripping our bodies free of the stone. Sam collapsed on top of me, gasping for breath. We were still in the dark, but at least there was air here, even if it tasted stale, like it had been trapped in this stone chamber forever.