‘Well.’ Leyla shrugged. ‘Even if you do find it, do you really think you can cross a great and impenetrable barrier against evil, risen from the trueness of sacrifice and which—’
‘And which will stand un-breached until such time as humanity’s courage fails,’ I finished for her. ‘I can quote the Holy Books, too, when I want to.’
Ashra had been a carpet weaver’s daughter born when the First War was coming to an end. The ghouls were being driven into hiding and darkness, skulking the desert alone at night instead of swarming in armies. The Destroyer of Worlds’ greatest monsters were dead, slain by the First Hero and all the heroes that came after him: Attallah, the Grey Prince, Sultan Soroush, and the Champion of Bashib. The Destroyer of Worlds was being beaten back to the darkness of the earth from whence she came.
But she could not be held back permanently. Each time, she burst free from her prison again to roam and terrorise the desert. And the Djinn looked on in despair at the humans who had defended them for so long and feared that they would not be able to accomplish this final task. So they made it known among the humans that they would grant immortality to whichever man could imprison the Destroyer of Worlds forevermore. Many a hero died trying.
Ashra was not a hero. She was just a girl from a small village in the mountains, the eldest of twelve children, who spent her days helping her father dye wool and her evenings helping her mother cook meals for her eleven brothers and sisters.
Until the day the Destroyer of Worlds came to her village.
The villagers had no weapons, and they lit torches against the Destroyer of Worlds, placing them in a circle as they huddled together, trying to stay alive until dawn, when they would be able to flee.
The Destroyer of Worlds stalked through the dark in one great circle around the village, around their torches. And then she laughed, and with her breath she extinguished all the torches. All except one, which stood by Ashra and her family.
Before the Destroyer of Worlds could attack, Ashra seized the last torch and set herself on fire with it. A body does not burn much, but it was said that she swallowed a spark, just enough to light her soul as well as her body. And her soul burned much brighter than her body ever could. And when the burning girl took a step towards the Destroyer of Worlds, the Destroyer of Worlds took a step back. So Ashra took another step, then another, and another, and slowly the Destroyer of Worlds retreated.
Ashra walked the Destroyer of Worlds all the way back towards Eremot. And as she walked, she did as her father had taught her and wove the fire burning inside her body together, as one would a carpet, until it became an impenetrable wall. By the time they reached Eremot, she had made it so high and wide that it held back even the Destroyer of Worlds. It was wide enough to encircle the entrance to Eremot and keep the Destroyer of Worlds trapped inside the mountain forever.
The Djinn saw her sacrifice, and they kept their promise. They granted Ashra immortal life so that her soul would burn forever as the great wall she had made. They said that as long as Ashra’s Wall stood, the Destroyer of Worlds would be imprisoned. If it fell, so would a new age of darkness fall on the world.
So that was why Leyla had asked if we were headed to rescue Rahim. Not because she had had a change of heart about her brother, but because she wanted to know for sure that even if she betrayed her father and let us through this wall, we would still fail. There was another wall between us and our purpose.
‘What does your father want to send prisoners to Eremot for?’ Just saying the name made me feel uneasy. ‘If he was going to break his promise to his people of granting the Rebellion mercy, there have got to be easier ways to kill them.’
Leyla looked at me through dark eyelashes. ‘He doesn’t want them dead. He just doesn’t care if they die. There’s a difference. He’s after something in Eremot. And people who go in there don’t come back out – eventually the hours and hours of digging in the dark will wring all the life out of them. So he sends in expendable lives.’
But I wasn’t listening to her gloating. There was only one possible thing the Sultan could have his prisoners digging out in Eremot. ‘Your father wants to find the Destroyer of Worlds.’
I might know better than anyone the distance between legends and the truth, that stories were not always told whole. The monsters in them were less fierce in reality, the heroes less pure, the Djinn more complicated. But there were some things you didn’t prod at to find out if their teeth were really as big as the stories said. Because on the off-chance that the stories were really true, you were about to lose a finger. The Destroyer of Worlds was at the top of the list of things I didn’t want to find out the truth about. ‘I don’t know how close you’ve read the Holy Books, but there are a whole lot of reasons why letting her out of that prison is a bad idea. Starting with the destruction of all of humanity.’
‘Oh, he doesn’t want to let her out,’ Leyla said earnestly. ‘He wants her for the same reason he wants the Djinn. My father is a hero. He’s going to end her once and for all. And use what’s left of her for good. Just like Fereshteh.’
He was going to kill her, turn her immortal life into power that he could use. I remembered something he had said to me once: that the time for immortal things was over. Now was the time for us, time to stop living so attached to our legends and to magic. And sure enough, he was destroying our legends one at a time, dragging Miraji into a new age, whether it wanted to come or not. Whether letting great evils out of the earth was a good idea or not.
‘He can’t do it without you, though, can he?’
Leyla’s satisfaction drifted back to fear. ‘If you kill me, he will find another way. My mother’s homeland is full of people like me, makers of new ideas and new inventions.’ Some who would even be prepared to defy the laws of religion and good sense, too, I was sure.
I didn’t want to kill her. But we couldn’t keep her either. We might have a way out, but we couldn’t just vanish from the city without doing something about Leyla – not with girls dying every dawn in her name.
The beginning of a plan had started to form in my mind. Only we were missing someone if we were going to pull it off.
I needed to get Sam back.
Chapter 7
It took me the better part of the day to track Sam down, which didn’t exactly do a whole lot for how angry I was at him. I started imagining creative ways to kill him sometime around midday, when the sweat had soaked into my shirt in earnest and my hair was sticking to my sheema from the heat. By the time I finally ran him to ground just before sunset, I had built a very vivid image of how he’d meet his end at my hands.
We’d been damn lucky that Sam hadn’t bled to death that day he’d tried to slip into the palace. After he’d got himself shot, it was only thanks to Hala and Jin that we’d got him back to the Hidden House still breathing. The hours that followed had been a frenzy of trying to keep our foreign friend alive, as well as getting everyone ready to flee if we had to. I didn’t know if we’d been followed from the palace. But I’d already led the Sultan to one of our hideouts once. I wasn’t taking chances.
Finally Sam had stopped bleeding and kept breathing. Though barely on both counts. And no soldiers came knocking at the door of the Hidden House.