When I was dead and gone, burned up by releasing Fereshteh’s fire, and they told the story of the Rebellion, I wondered if they’d forget me as a Demdji, too, and just remember that I was the Blue-Eyed Bandit.
We were almost at Eremot. Somewhere beyond this wall was whatever remained of our rebellion.
‘How do we get through?’ I asked.
‘Oh, it’s no trouble getting in.’ Zaahir knelt down, his movements strange and unnatural, like he was just pretending to use human muscles when he was really bending like a flame in the wind. He peeled a small stone from the floor of the tunnel like it was a blade of grass and tossed it. The pebble passed easily through Ashra’s Wall, landing on the other side with a few bounces. It didn’t even look singed. ‘This wall wasn’t made to keep anything out.’
A gust of unnatural wind rose around us, picking up the stone on the other side of the barrier, shooting it back towards us at full speed, aimed straight for my head. It hit the barrier, but this time, instead of passing through, it turned to dust, incinerating as it met the barrier. Just like the stone Jin had thrown at the wall back in Izman. ‘It’s made to keep things in.’
So that was what the Sultan had done. He had sent his prisoners in, never to come out again. Because it didn’t matter to him if they died down there. He would have killed them himself if he didn’t need disposable bodies.
He feigned mercy to his city, letting the rebels be imprisoned instead of executed. And then he sent them off to the dark to die quietly in a place where nothing could ever leave. Ending any trouble rebellious captives might be.
‘If we go in there,’ I said warily, ‘can you get us back out alive?’
‘Yes,’ Zaahir said cryptically. ‘I can.’ I didn’t trust Zaahir as far as I could throw a horse. But he wasn’t lying to me about this.
‘After you,’ I mimicked his words from earlier.
Our gazes locked for a long moment, a battle of wills passing between us. Zaahir finally nodded. ‘As you wish.’ And he moved forwards. He passed through the wall as if it were nothing but air, and then he was standing on the other side, watching me expectantly.
This was a bad idea. I knew this was a bad idea. But I’d done a lot of things that were bad ideas. Usually they turned out all right. This might be different though. This was a bad idea of mythic proportions. But what else was I supposed to do? I took a deep breath and tried not to think too hard about what I was doing as I stepped through a wall made of light.
It felt like passing through a patch of sunlight in between shady trees, pleasant and warm on my skin. And then I was stumbling through to the other side, next to my dubious Djinni ally.
Beyond Ashra’s Wall, the mountain didn’t look any different from the tunnel that Zaahir had created for us, but I could feel the change instantly. The air was filled with the taste of iron. Even worse than in Sazi. Probably not enough to take away my power, but I could feel my skin itching against it. I caught myself holding my breath for fear it was going to get into my lungs. I could see even Zaahir chafing against it as we moved through the dark tunnel and into the mountain.
It wasn’t long before we lost the last of the light from Ashra’s Wall behind us. The darkness made me nervous. It felt like we were ghouls in the night, stalking somewhere we shouldn’t be. Or like there might be things in here stalking us.
The ground sloped steeply into the belly of the mountain. We quickened our steps as it descended. I kept my eyes on my feet at first, careful of any stone that might trip me up, but the ground was remarkably smooth. At first I thought it had been swept clean; then, as the path narrowed, my hand brushed against the wall. It was smooth, too. Like it had been worn down by something. And suddenly my mind summoned up every image I had ever seen in the Holy Books, of the Destroyer of Worlds’ enormous monstrous snake, released in the early days of the war. And I imagined it down here, roaming through these mountains impatient for escape, wearing the walls smooth and round…. I stopped that thought in its tracks. That monster was dead. The First Hero had killed it.
But that didn’t mean there was nothing else down here.
For the first time in my whole life, I was alone.
I wasn’t crammed into a house with my aunt’s children. I wasn’t with Jin and a caravan crossing the desert. I wasn’t in a tent in the rebel camp with Shazad, there to watch my back if I needed her. I wasn’t surrounded by women in the harem. I wasn’t stacked on top of the remnants of the Rebellion in the Hidden House.
I’d wanted to keep them safe, but now I didn’t have Jin to back me up. I didn’t have the twins to fly me out of this if it all went wrong. I didn’t have Sam to crack a joke to break the silence that was carrying my mind away to fearful places.
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.