I was in hell, and I’d walked into it willingly.
I began to feel exhaustion catching up with me. I hadn’t slept since Juniper City, and here in the dark I couldn’t tell how long it had been since we left Sazi, though I got the feeling dawn must’ve come and gone. Which would mean I’d been awake a full day. I stopped, sinking to the ground, leaning back against the wall. I just needed a moment to rest. Zaahir stopped as well, watching me with a curious look on his face. Had he forgotten, after all this time, how fragile we mortal things were?
As I was leaning there, I noticed something on the ground, in the light from his skin. I reached out to pick it up. It was a button. My button. I checked the collar of my shirt, and sure enough, there was a loose strand of thread there.
‘We’ve been this way already,’ I mumbled, trying to get my tired mind to focus.
‘Yes,’ Zaahir agreed cheerfully. ‘You’ve been walking in circles for some time now.’
My eyes snapped up to him, shaking off the haze of sleep. ‘Are we lost?’
‘You are.’ Zaahir smirked. ‘I know exactly where I am.’
My anger carried me to my feet, so that I was looking him in the eye instead of grovelling on the ground before him. ‘I want you to take me to the prisoners inside this mountain,’ I snapped. ‘And you agreed to do what I wanted.’
Zaahir nodded pensively, seeming unmoved. ‘You do want that, don’t you,’ he said. ‘But you’re also frightened of what you’ll find there. You don’t really want to know which of them is alive and which is dead. You’re afraid of knowing that. Or else you could have found out by now, little truth-teller.’ He was right. All those nights in the desert, I had held my tongue against checking on the others. Finding out if I could say out loud, Ahmed is still alive. Shazad is still alive. ‘You don’t really want to find out if maybe they wouldn’t be dead if you hadn’t taken quite so long to get to them. You want them all to still be alive. And they won’t be. See, daughter of Bahadur, you want so many conflicting things that I could lead you in circles around this mountain forever. Towards them, then away from them, then back towards them. Round and round and round we go.’ He spun his finger in a circle in the air above us. ‘Where she’ll drop dead, no one knows.’ Zaahir looked suddenly more dangerous than he had before. The way the light shifted around him seemed to show a glint of madness across that immortal face. ‘I could leave you under this mountain to die, hopelessly lost until you starved. Wouldn’t that be a nice revenge on my jailer Bahadur when he next came back to check on his prisoner – if your body were waiting for him instead?’
It occurred to me, not for the first time, that letting Zaahir out and putting my faith in him was an unbelievably stupid thing to do. But I’d done it now. I would have to play this game with him. And I wasn’t going to die down here. Not without saving the others. If nothing else, I knew I didn’t want to die.
‘Yeah, well, good luck with that.’ I tried to sound flippant, like I wasn’t gambling for my own life. ‘See, Bahadur is locked up right now, so chances are it’d be a while before he’d find me. Decades. By then I’d probably be nothing but bones. He might not even know it was me.’ He probably wouldn’t care either way. I didn’t say that though.
Zaahir’s unblinking stare didn’t even pretend to be human as he took in what I had said. I expected frustration at this foiled revenge. ‘Well, then.’ he spoke finally, and as he did his face suddenly split into a genial grin that was somehow more disturbing than his unblinking stare. ‘I’d better do what it is you want, then.’ He raised his hand, casting light on another branch of the tunnel that I hadn’t seen before. ‘This way, daughter of Bahadur.’
*
We’d been walking for hours more when I finally heard something up ahead. I drew my mind away from my aching, exhausted body to listen. It sounded like the ringing of hundreds of tin bells. The kind Aunt Farrah used to call everyone in for dinner.
I quickened my pace. We were near something. I wasn’t sure what, but it was something other than darkness and stone. As we kept moving, I became aware of a light up ahead. Not the sort of glowing starlight that came off Ashra’s Wall – a more natural one. Like the fire of torches or oil lamps. I was practically running now. Towards the clang of metal and the faint flicker of lamplight, until finally the tunnel opened up into an immense cavern and I stumbled to a stop.
If we were being swallowed by the mountain, then we’d finally reached the stomach. The tunnel had spat us out on to a ledge that dropped off so suddenly I’d almost stepped right off it. The cavern we’d emerged into was vast, disappearing into blackness far above us. And below, in the faint glow cast by the torches affixed to the wall, I saw the prisoners.
They were chained together like cattle. Bound up in iron, hands and feet linked to each other. Each of them had a pickaxe, and they were hewing at the rock at their feet. Swinging their axes down over and over again, metal clanging against stone noisily.
I remembered what Leyla had told me. Her father had sent them here because he was searching for the Destroyer of Worlds.
There was a different quality to the darkness inside this mountain. It wasn’t dark here like a solitary desert night or the inside of a prison cell. The air was a thicker more viscous sort of dark. A more purposeful dark that seemed to curl around me, encroaching not just on my body but on my mind and my soul.
Somewhere down here, I had no doubt, slept the Destroyer of Worlds.
I scanned the crowd, searching frantically for a familiar face. There were far more people than had been taken from us that night. Other prisoners, I guessed, who had been spared execution only to be sent here. I looked for Ahmed, Shazad – someone I knew. But the faces were so marked with dirt and dust that I wasn’t sure I’d know them even if they were right in front of me, let alone when I was searching from up here.
And then, just below me, I saw a soft, childlike face, dirty dyed hair sticking to her cheek, smudged in dust. She was shaking as she tried to raise her pickaxe again.
Delila.
My heart leaped. I had found our prisoners. And at least some of them were still alive. I glanced down. It wasn’t an easy jump, but I could make it. I could leap down and unchain them and then make a run for it if I …
My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of footsteps. I drew away from the edge as another prisoner entered the cavern, carrying an immense empty wooden bucket in one hand and a torch in the other. As he passed near the line of prisoners, the firelight he was carrying glinted against bronze.
‘You want to see clearly,’ Zaahir said, stepping up beside me. And before I could stop him the glow of his skin grew brighter, casting light on the scene below. There, just beyond the line of torches that illuminated the prisoners at work were hundreds upon hundreds of bronze and clay figures standing in silent vigil.