The Sultan pressed his fingers to my lips, cutting me off sharply. He was leaning in so close now he filled my whole world. There was something unsettlingly familiar about him – more than just the face he shared with Ahmed. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.
‘I don’t want to hear tricks or half-truths.’ He spoke so low only I could hear. ‘My father was a fool and he died at my hands, with a surprised look on his face. I am clearly not a fool, or else my rebel son would have done the same to me already. Now’ – he carefully peeled one last strand of hair away from my face – ‘all I want is six simple words from you.’
The Blue-Eyed Bandit might be the stuff of campfire stories, but Demdji, we were the stuff of legends. Half of Miraji wasn’t even sure we were real. But the Sultan seemed well informed.
I had to lie. I couldn’t lie, but I had to. Everything depended on it. Not just me getting out of here, and not just my life. Everyone’s. If I couldn’t lie now, he might pull truth after truth from my lips – maybe even about the Rebellion. He’d pull knowledge out of my silences. And he’d turn me into a weapon like he had with Noorsham. Into a slave.
I reached desperately for the lie that would get me out of there. Get me away from this enemy wearing the face of my prince.
I fought with everything in me. But everything in me was Demdji.
And Demdji couldn’t tell lies.
The Sultan laughed. It was an unexpectedly honest sound. ‘No need to strain yourself. I knew what you were from the moment I saw you, little Demdji.’ He’d been toying with me.
‘Reward this good woman.’ He gestured to my aunt lazily. The soldier snapped to attention and gestured for my aunt to follow him. His shoulders seemed to sag in relief as he left the room. She looked so damn pleased with herself as she turned, disappearing from the room. And I hated her. God, I hated her.
From the corner of my eye I noticed Tamid shifting in the corner, like he was expecting a dismissal, too. Like he’d rather leave than watch whatever the Sultan was about to do to me.
‘Sit down, Amani,’ the Sultan ordered.
I didn’t want to sit. I wanted to stand and face our enemy. But suddenly, and against my will, my body moved on its own, folding my legs under myself until I was sitting back on the marble slab where I’d woken up.
Panic rose up, almost choking me. I’d never been betrayed by my own body like that before. ‘What did you do to me?’
The Sultan didn’t answer right away. ‘Your eyes betrayed you from the start.’ Traitor eyes. ‘There was another Demdji before you. He had blue eyes, too.’ Noorsham. He was talking about Noorsham. ‘It’s one of the great justices of our world that your kind, for all your power, are yet so vulnerable to words.’ They’d had Noorsham’s true name. That was how they’d controlled him. Noorsham had worn a mask, made of bronze, engraved with his name. The Sultan knew Noorsham’s true name. ‘What do you think the chances are there are two Demdji in the desert with blue eyes who don’t share the same father? I would say they were small.’ Which meant the Sultan knew our father’s name. And my true name. My eyes shot around the room, looking for a bronze suit like the one they’d encased Noorsham in. But the room looked like nothing more than a Holy Father’s chambers. Tamid had always wanted to be a Holy Man.
‘We lost our last Demdji, unfortunately,’ the Sultan was saying. ‘It was our young Tamid’s idea to make things a little more secure this time.’ He nodded to my one-time friend. Tamid was still looking anywhere but at me.
And finally I understood what was below the bandages.
‘You put metal beneath my skin.’ It would be bronze. Bronze with my name on it. My true name. Including the name of my real father. Like they’d used to control Noorsham. I looked for a bronze ring on his hand like the one Naguib had used to control Noorsham. Something I could wrench off his fingers, breaking his control over me and letting me make a run for it. Instead I spied a small bandage across the Sultan’s forearm. Like mine. He was taking precautions.
‘Bronze.’ The Sultan touched one of the scars. ‘And iron.’
Iron.
My stomach lurched at that. They had cut my skin open, put iron underneath it, and stitched me back up.
I was powerless.
Only … the Sultan had wanted Noorsham so he could use his power as a weapon. If that wasn’t why he wanted me, then what had he just paid my aunt so highly for?
‘You’re wondering why,’ the Sultan said. I wished I wasn’t so easy to read. ‘I made the mistake last time of thinking I could control a Demdji. But there are so many loopholes. So many small gaps in my orders you could squeeze through. As a girl you are largely harmless if you do wriggle through those loopholes. As a Demdji … well, the chance of harnessing your power is not worth the price if you disobeyed and turned it against me. It would be like letting you loose in my palace with a gun.’ He mentioned guns in a cast-off comment, but it still made me nervous. He couldn’t know I was the Blue-Eyed Bandit. If he did, he’d know I was part of the Rebellion and I doubted we’d be having such a pleasant conversation. ‘The iron was Tamid’s idea again. He has been very useful since coming to the palace. He is from the Last County, too, you know – where was it, my boy?’
‘Sazi,’ Tamid said. It was a bare-faced lie. Sazi was near enough Dustwalk, but far enough away that I’d never been there until I went with Jin. It was where Noorsham was from. Where Naguib had been encamped before coming to Dustwalk. Tamid was hiding from the Sultan that we were from the same place. He hated me enough to stick iron under my skin but not to put a noose around my neck, it seemed.
I willed Tamid to look at me. But he kept his eyes firmly on the ground. I was so stupid. I’d seen him and for just a second I’d felt like nothing had changed. But I was wrong. I should’ve known that. Last time I was with Tamid I was a girl who left people behind. And he was a boy who’d never have betrayed me.
‘Your part of the desert remembers things that most of the rest of us have forgotten,’ the Sultan was saying.
‘So what good am I to you as a Demdji with no power?’ I carefully turned my attention back to the Sultan.
The Sultan smiled enigmatically. ‘Follow me and find out.’
And against my will, I felt my feet move. I just had time to glance over my shoulder to see Tamid finally look up at me, his face marked with something that looked a lot like worry, before the door closed between us.
Chapter 14
I had to follow him, but I didn’t have to shut up about it. ‘Where are we going?’ Smooth marble echoed my own words mockingly back at me as we wove our way through the palace. ‘Where are you taking me?’
The Sultan didn’t answer any of the questions I shouted at his back as I trailed him. Finally he stopped in the middle of a hallway. I halted a few paces from him. Behind us an archway twice my height opened into a small garden filled with roaming peacocks. Across from it, so as to be framed in the line of sight from the door, was a mosaic of Princess Hawa. She stood on what I guessed were the walls of Saramotai, hands spread wide as the sun rose behind her. Her eyes stared straight ahead. They were blue in this picture, too. Just like they’d been in Saramotai.
The Sultan pressed a hand to Hawa’s. I heard a click, and then the section of the wall that extended from one of Hawa’s hands to the other shifted, swinging out like a door. Behind it a long staircase plunged downward sinto darkness.
We’d passed the last guard a way back now. And there were none here. Whatever was at the bottom of those stairs was truly meant to stay secret. ‘What’s down there?’ My voice bounced eerily down the stone steps.
‘There are some things that are better to do in places where God is blind.’ The Destroyer of Worlds came from the place where God was blind, they said. Deep inside the earth. ‘After you.’