Mazen glanced at Omar’s blade. Vaguely, he recalled the Midnight Merchant’s comment about the knives being enchanted. But he had no time to think about what that meant. He readied himself for the next wave of ghouls.
That was when he saw a blur of color in the landscape of white. He glanced to the entrance of the room and saw nondescript brown robes. Loulie al-Nazari glowered at him from a distance. Moments later, she was joined by Aisha bint Louas, who sighed when she saw him.
Her exhale shattered the eerie silence. The ghouls scattered, some heading for the doors, others for the pedestal where Mazen was still standing. Mazen focused on staying alive. He sliced his blade through the air, sometimes hitting flesh and bone. Whatever he touched disintegrated to ash, and he soon realized all he had to do to destroy the ghouls was nick them with the blade.
The knowledge did not make him invincible. Nor did it stop the trembling in his hands or clear his head. But it was better than being helpless, so Mazen leaned desperately into every strike, hoping it would carve out an escape. An end.
Moments or minutes or hours passed. When Mazen finally looked up and beyond the ashy carnage in front of him, he saw the merchant and the thief. Aisha was relying on speed rather than power, knocking down ghouls and severing their limbs before they could give chase. Loulie al-Nazari was at the opposite end of the room, using the curtains as cover. She had just disappeared behind one of them when he heard a snap.
When the merchant reappeared, her knife was on fire. She was grinning triumphantly as she swept the blade through the air and set the ghouls aflame. Mazen watched as one of those ghouls collapsed with a wail, its hands outstretched as if reaching for something. He tracked its gaze and cursed when he saw the collar lying on the ground.
The Midnight Merchant paused to look at the relic. For moments, she was absolutely still, head cocked as if she were listening for something. Mazen approached her on shaking legs.
“Al-Nazari.” He forced her name out through cold lips. She ignored him. “Midnight Merchant!” She began to walk slowly toward the collar, fingers outstretched.
“Stop, al-Nazari!”
She reached down to pick it up.
Mazen collided with her headfirst, knocking the thing from her hands and tackling her to the ground. He gasped as she drove a knee into his stomach, but forced himself to hold tightly to her wrists as he gritted his teeth against the pain. He pinned her to the ground. “Snap out of it!”
The merchant dug her fingernails into his skin. Mazen pulled back with a yell, and she used the opening to slash at him with her dagger. He flinched away from the flaming blade, eyes closed—and felt only heat on his skin. When he eased his eyes open, the dagger’s blue flame danced before his eyes, bright but harmless. The merchant gave him no time to ponder why he hadn’t been scorched.
She punched him in the face. Stars danced before his eyes as she rose. Mazen blinked to clear his vision. The darkness receded enough he could see the smudge of Loulie’s brown robes as she turned away. Instinctively, he stretched out a leg and tripped her. She fell, hard.
They struggled against each other until they were nothing but an entangled mesh of bodies and blades and curses. The next time Mazen saw the merchant’s face with clarity, she was looming over him with the flaming blade angled at his face.
Desperation took over. Mazen just barely rolled away from her incoming strike and drove his dagger down into her hand. Loulie fell off him with a raw, animal cry. His stomach clenched with guilt when he saw the gaping wound—the deep, weeping gash he had left.
“Prince!” Mazen turned and saw Aisha standing behind them, covered in white dust. Her eyes flickered to Loulie’s wound and then back to Mazen. “We have to leave. Where is the jinn?” Her eyes snagged on the collar before he could respond. A perplexed frown tugged at her lips. “It’s… a relic?”
No! Before he could reach for it, Aisha grabbed it and tucked it into her satchel.
The moment it vanished, the room shuddered and groaned as if in danger of giving way beneath some gargantuan weight. The remaining ghouls bled to sand, and the flames on the merchant’s blade died into smoke. Above them, the ceiling began to crack, and sand rushed in through the gaps.
No one said anything. Aisha ripped off a part of her shawl, wrapped it around the merchant’s hand to stanch the bleeding, then grabbed her by her good arm and hauled her up and off the ground. The three of them ran—the merchant stumbling behind them with blood dripping between her fingers.
They made it down the crumbling staircase and onto the ground floor before a wall collapsed and a torrent of sand crashed down through the fissure. The force of the impact knocked Mazen off his feet. He fell hard on his hands and knees, hissing in pain. When he regained his footing, the corridor was dark with a dense layer of falling dust. The walls creaked, the mosaics bled colorful dirt, and the floor trembled.
Someone shoved him forward. Aisha, already hurrying ahead with Loulie.
There came a terrible groan. An ear-piercing screech as stone scraped together. And then the ceiling above them shattered, and sand engulfed the world, rushing toward them in a wave.
Mazen fled.
He chased after Aisha and Loulie, sprinting through sinking halls and weaving past falling rubble until the labyrinth narrowed into a single hall and light—glorious, gods-sent light—poured in from the exit at the end.
The ruins, as if aware of this fact, began to fall faster. The walls pressed closer; the ceilings loomed. A tremor ran through the building, strong enough to send a jolt through Mazen’s body and cause him to lose his balance. He stumbled into a wall, knees shaking.
Pressure built on his shoulders and weighed down his limbs as the building groaned and tipped. There was sand, sand everywhere. In his eyes, his ears, his lungs.
He couldn’t breathe. Could barely run. But—
Almost there.
He lurched to his feet. The floor slanted sideways. He slid. Quickly regained his footing.
Almost there, almost there.
He sprinted until the light was no longer distant, until it overwhelmed his senses and he was stumbling blindly, madly through the exit after Aisha and Loulie. There was a curtain of dust. A gasp of fresh air. And a whisper, quavering with excitement.
Finally, the Queen of Dunes said. I am free.
25
LOULIE
Loulie dreamed of fire.
In her dream, the sand was ash and the sky was filled with crackling embers. Her tribe’s campsite burned in the distance, engulfed in so much smoke it was impossible to tell victim from killer. When Loulie attempted to approach the slaughter, the embers in the sky blew harder, and the ground beneath her feet began to burn.
One of the shadows emerged from the smoke, garbed in robes the color of darkest midnight. His charcoal eyes locked on her. Vermilion blood glinted on his knife as he stepped toward her. Do you desire death or slavery, girl?
Loulie came back to the world of the living swallowing a scream. The memory of the burning campsite was already fading as she brushed beads of sweat off her forehead. The movement made her aware of the pain in her hand, and she remembered, suddenly and with great clarity, the wound the high prince had inflicted upon her.
“Finally, the dead has awakened.”
Loulie looked up and saw Qadir sitting beside her, frowning. A lantern sat on the desk beside him, flickering an ominous green. It contoured Qadir’s face with shades of shadow, making his frown appear deeper, more severe.
She eyed him warily. “You’re not an illusion, are you?”
When he simply raised a brow, she sighed. Qadir’s calm, no matter how skeptical, always put her at ease. Her eyes traveled to his hand, where she saw a familiar strand of beads wrapped around his fingers. The sleep-inducing relic. “To help you sleep,” Qadir explained. “You were in so much pain riding to Dhyme I thought it better for you to enter the city passed out.”