We were deep into the mountain now. I could feel the weight of it pressing in all around us, as if the stone was trying to reclaim this chamber. Like it knew the cave was out of place, hadn’t been formed by nature. But I could tell it wasn’t made by human hands, either. Not something this size, this perfectly made.
In the center of the cave sat a huge stone chest, large enough to fit a person. I ran my hand along the narrow fissure of the entrance. There was no way something that size came through this gap. As Noorsham approached it, I saw that there was no break between the chest’s sides and the floor of the cave. The chest was carved out of the mountain itself. Like the whole cavern had been hollowed out around it. The light danced across its uneven surface, casting into relief the images that adorned the side. Elegantly twisting vines were chiseled into the stone, hanging heavy with etched figs and dates and grapes and oranges and pomegranates and dozens of other fruits I’d never seen in the desert. Some I didn’t even recognise now. There were scrapes of colour, too, as if the carved fruits had been brightly painted once upon a time.
And then Noorsham’s hands dashed light across the far wall of the cave. And I forgot all about the stone chest.
The sight was gone as quickly as it had come, plunged back into darkness as my brother dropped to his knees, prostrating himself in prayer, pressing his hands into the ground so that the only lights left in the cave were two glowing embers trapped between his palms and the stone ground. I could see his lips moving in silent supplication, his features seeming to melt into the gloom as he raised his head, slowly. Then, as he raised his hands, the wall came into view again, one inch at a time, like the dawn revealing the landscape hidden by the night.
And I knew I hadn’t been hallucinating.
The wall was every colour we never saw in the Last County painted in intricate patterns. It was as bright as the Sultan’s gardens, decorated with scenes of a great battle, of the Destroyer of Worlds emerging from Eremot, of the First Hero being made by the hands of the Djinn, of beasts never seen in the desert or the mountains. The wall looked like a twin to the one that led into our lost sanctuary in the Dev’s Valley.
And just like at the rebel camp, in the middle of it all, under a long string of words in the first language, crowning it like an arch, was a painted door. Our door had led into the rebel camp, a valley abandoned by a Djinni and claimed as our home. Where did this one lead?
‘I’ve come here to pray about what to do about you, you know.’ Noorsham’s voice in the silence made me jump. He wasn’t looking at me, but he must’ve seen me. There was no point hiding. I stepped fully into the cave, moving towards the light.
‘What is this place?’ I asked.
Noorsham shifted so that he was facing me, sitting cross-legged on the floor, palms turned upwards. ‘I thought I was dead when the mountain fell on me,’ Noorsham said. He meant when he had first discovered his power, and the mines had collapsed around him in the fire he made. ‘Even though it hadn’t crushed me, I was sure I would starve or suffocate, down here in the dark. And then, wandering, fleeing the fire and the death that I didn’t yet understand, I found this.’ He rested one hand against the chest in the middle of the room, though he never took his gaze off me, his eyes more unsettling now that we were alone than they had been out in Sazi. ‘What do you most crave to eat at this very moment, sister?’
I didn’t answer, but all the same an image of a peach came into my mind. I wasn’t sure why. They had been in abundance at the palace – we could pick them straight off the trees in the harem.
Noorsham pushed against the lid of the chest. It slid free with a teeth-grinding screech of stone against stone.
It was filled with peaches. Hundreds of them. They were as fresh as if displayed at a market stall in Izman, as if they’d just been picked. And yet they were under a mountain far from any peach tree.
I moved forwards, next to my brother, and picked one up hesitantly. I was half expecting an illusion. But the flesh was soft and downy, and when I took a bite, juice dribbled down my hands. It tasted like another world, not of this dusty desert mountain but of far-off gardens and brighter days. If it was an illusion, it was a damn good one. It seemed more like magic. Not the kind that the Gamanix invented, but the kind that came from creatures more powerful than us, left over from stories and legends and great and terrible times.
Real magic, that was how he was feeding his hungry disciples.
Noorsham watched me as I devoured the peach, right down to the stone in the middle. ‘I know why you’re really here, you know,’ he said calmly. ‘You came looking for war and destruction. I saw it in the Eye. And yet I deceived my people for your sake.’
‘You know that Eye of yours isn’t some God-sent tool, don’t you?’ I picked my words carefully; I was on unsteady ground here. ‘It’s an invention, and you killed the people who brought it here.’ Noorsham just smiled placidly back at that, like he felt sorry for me being so naive. ‘How many more people have you killed because of that thing, Noorsham?’
‘Only those I needed to, in order to protect my people.’ If he felt any remorse for what he’d done, it didn’t show. ‘I am meant to do something great in this life, Amani.’ From another man, that might sound like pretension. But the way Noorsham said it, it was just certainty. And he was a Demdji – he couldn’t lie. ‘My mother always said so,’ Noorsham said simply. ‘She had been promised it.’
By our father, I realised. Shira had told me, in the palace prison, that Fereshteh had granted her a gift for their son: an untainted wish, freely given, so that it wouldn’t turn against her as most did in the stories. Shira, trapped in an endless cycle of political machinations, had wished that her son would be Sultan one day. Hala’s mother, poor and greedy, had wished for gold. And Noorsham’s mother, caught in a small life in a small mountain town, had wished for greatness for her son.
I wondered, not for the first time, what my mother had wished. For me to get the hell out of Dustwalk, since she never could? For me to know a bigger world? I glanced down at the peach stone in my hand. I doubted even she could have anticipated that the world was this big.
‘When the mountain fell on me,’ Noorsham went on, ‘after I was given my gift, I thought I might die before I could fulfil my destiny. And then I was rescued. I was told that I was indeed destined to do great things.’ He had a faraway look in his eyes. ‘I thought at first it was to drive the foreigners out of our desert. But then I failed. And I came back here, back home. I found this desert dying. Deadshot was tearing itself apart. Dustwalk was starving. Sazi was despairing. And I understood. It was my duty to save them. I must save as many of our people as I had killed.’
That would be a whole lot of people. He had flattened Dassama, an oasis city in the northern desert. He had burned men from Sazi alive in the same mines we were in now. Bahi. Bilal’s men.
‘You’re still killing people,’ I said.
‘Only the ones who come to me with harm in their hearts.’ Noorsham didn’t blink. ‘Ones like you. Ashra’s Wall is a sacred barrier, you know.’ So he had seen that in the Eye, too. Damn.
‘I know,’ I said. And I did. More than anyone I understood what stories could mean when they were true. ‘But there are people on the other side … I need to get them out, Noorsham. I can’t leave them there.’
‘Ashra’s Wall is—’
‘I know, I know.’ I raised my voice without meaning to. ‘But, Noorsham, this country is being ripped apart. You have only seen some of it. That’s why the Last County was in trouble. That’s why you had to save them. And there are people on the other side of that wall who can save a whole lot more people than this – who could change the whole country. For good.’