Tamid and Leyla were both smart. And now that they’d told me the same thing, it was a safe bet they were probably right. It had seemed far away until now. But suddenly it seemed very near.
I felt myself reaching out for something to hang on to as everything seemed to spin around me. My hand closed around an earthenware pitcher next to the bed. It did nothing to keep me standing when it slid off the table and into my hands. Anger rushed in. Sudden, violent, irrational rage took over. Without thinking, I hurled the pitcher across the room, sending it splintering against the wall before I stormed out.
I wasn’t sure who I was looking for as I headed back into the courtyard, on the opposite side from the funeral pyre. Jin, maybe.
Instead, I ran straight into Sam. He caught me by the arms as I walked into his chest. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘isn’t this very Leofric and Elfleda of us?’ The love story he’d been babbling about back in Sazi. The one that ended with them both dying. ‘Meeting in secret in the dark …’ And then he trailed off as he saw my face. That I was in no mood for jokes. ‘Are you all right?’
I glanced over his shoulder. The twins were standing there, looking at me anxiously. I must really not look all right. ‘What are you three doing out here?’ I asked instead of answering.
‘Oh, well.’ Sam stepped away from me, releasing my arms. ‘Rahim got the news from one of his soldiers. After we left here, my former queen, long may she reign, struck an alliance with the Gallan king, may he die a painful death and rot in a ditch.’ For once, Sam sounded serious.
So the alliance had gone through. Since we hadn’t taken the captain’s deal, they had gone and made another ally. Made Miraji their enemy. The Gallan hated our kind, hated anything that wasn’t wholly human. Sam might’ve turned traitor on Her Highness, but his queen had betrayed a whole lot of her people by striking this alliance, too. ‘Captain Westcroft and the rest of all those nice fellows who want me dead marched down to join the siege three days ago.’
‘So we’re going to scout things out,’ Izz interjected, chipper as ever. He was clearly glad to be moving; the twins hated being in one place too long.
‘Shazad said we needed to use all our advantages now,’ Maz added.
‘How come you both get to be the Blue-Eyed Bandit and we’re known as advantages?’ Izz asked.
‘Yeah,’ Maz agreed. ‘We demand a better legendary nickname.’
I forced a smile and got the satisfaction of the pair of them grinning back, pleased that they’d amused me.
I glanced at Sam, understanding. ‘You’re going with them?’ The twins didn’t need an escort to report to Shazad. Maybe Sam thought this would impress her, acting like a real soldier. But then I saw the troubled look on his face. He might be one of us now, but he was born in Albis. Those were his people laying siege to our city. He needed to see it.
‘All right.’ I moved towards Izz. ‘Let’s go.’
They didn’t need me with them any more than they did Sam. But they didn’t question me coming with them either. The twins burst into Rocs as Sam and I wrapped our sheemas around our faces against the wind. I had to see whatever was awaiting us down in the city.
Night had fallen completely by the time we reached Izman, but we could still see everything from the air. The light from the dome of fire made it glow faintly in the dark. But more than that, the ground around the city burned like an ember.
The siege camp had been destroyed. The Gallan tents, which had stood in perfect military lines when we’d left just a few weeks back, were now smouldering ash. The bodies of the Albish who had joined forces with them would be among them, too. Thousands of men who’d lined up around the walls had been annihilated, the ground still burning from the force that had destroyed them: the Abdals turned against our enemies.
I couldn’t see Sam’s expression in the dark, but he would mourn his people, no doubt. In a way I couldn’t. The Sultan might be our enemy, but he had dispelled Miraji’s enemies.
Maybe it was right that it should end like this. This was a war between the people who belonged in this desert. Not the people who wanted to own it.
We would decide it for ourselves – no one else.
All I could hear were Izz’s wingbeats as we soared over the city. It reminded me of the destruction Noorsham used to cause. Fire. Annihilation. A force that wasn’t natural, that came from the Djinn, sweeping across armies and destroying everything in its path.
They’d dared to try to take power from the Sultan. So he’d shown them his true power.
This was what would happen to us if we tried to face the Sultan while he still controlled the Abdals. If we went to face armies of metal with an army of men.
We would burn, too. Everyone would: Jin, Ahmed, Shazad, Delila, Sam, Rahim, the refugees from Sazi, the soldiers from Iliaz, the hopeful men and women who had joined us in village after village.
Unless I dispelled Fereshteh’s power. Unless I used the words Tamid had given me. The first language, in a voice that could tell no lies. The same tongue that had trapped the Djinn, used to free him.
Either I died or we all did.
*
‘All right, here’s what we do.’ A map of Izman was rolled out in front of Shazad. Rahim had taken over Bilal’s rooms, but there was no time to clear them out. So for now, Shazad’s room was our war room. ‘We can march from here to here in a day.’ She pointed to a spot on the map that she had marked, in the desert west of Izman. ‘That puts us out of sight and out of range of the city when night falls. We wait here for morning. At dawn, you two fly to the east.’ She pointed at me and Sam with the tip of her knife. ‘Get into the tunnels and to the machine. While you do that, our army marches under cover of one of Delila’s illusions towards the city. When the fire drops, the Sultan will be unprepared for us to storm the walls. We want to break through Ikket’s Gate first to get access to Wren Street before the army is fully mobilised.’ She pointed in turn at the streets of the city she had grown up in. ‘From there, we can take the western ramparts and have the upper ground. Trained soldiers should be on the front lines; the less trained should hang back in the artillery.’
‘No,’ Rahim disagreed. ‘We should mix as many of the untrained rabble among my soldiers as we can.’
‘That’s too risky. It will be harder for untrained men to hold a line. The Sultan’s soldiers will break through that much quicker.’
‘It’s better than if they break through the first line to find no second line of defence,’ Rahim argued, ‘our soldiers would be mowed down like wheat.’
‘So you want to throw untrained men and women in the middle of soldiers so that they can draw fire away from trained soldiers.’ Shazad didn’t raise her voice. It was a steady kind of anger.
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘But you know they’re more likely to die.’
‘They’re untrained – of course they’re more likely to die,’ Rahim said, every inch the commanding officer.