Parviz turned to me and eyed me up against Jin. “He’s your brother?”
“We had different mothers.” Our charade was rickety as an old henhouse, but it was the only thing we had that was likely to get us hired and across the desert without being picked apart by buzzards two days out. “We’ll work for half of what the others are asking for,” I said instead of answering the question. We’d been turned down twice already tonight, maybe on account of Jin’s foreignness or my size. But the Camel’s Knees clan had a reputation for being cheapskates.
“I’ve been trading since I was high as a camel’s knee.” Parviz chuckled at his own joke. “I can count well enough to know that with two of you it works out the same fee as a single man, and then there’s an extra mouth to feed. I don’t need dead weight, Alidad.” He called me by the fake name I’d given. “Even if you don’t hardly weigh nothing.”
Parviz turned away, and already my heckler was stepping out to meet him. “You’ve a fine eye for business, my friend. Now I could take any of these fellows any time of the day.” He gestured in a wide arc with a glass of dark liquor dangling from his fingers.
My gun was in my hand in a flash, ready to execute some half-formed plan.
I squeezed the trigger.
The glass in the heckler’s hand shattered before the bullet sank into the wall behind him.
The pit fell silent. The heckler stared dumbly at his handful of glass, blood, and liquor. Someone in the crowd burst out laughing, and then the roar of conversation went up again.
“You son of a bitch!” The heckler had a piece of glass sticking out from his thumb. “You shot me!”
“No, I shot your glass. Don’t worry, the liquor’ll wash the blood off.” I holstered my pistol, hoping I wasn’t about to get shot back. “Like I was about to say before getting interrupted, it’s a modern age. I don’t need a lot of muscle to pull a trigger.”
Parviz’s eyes swept the heckler, then me. Traders knew the worth of things. And they knew when they were getting a bargain, too. “We’re leaving from the West Gate at dawn. Don’t be late.”
Jin was at my side, pulling his shirt on over his head, as Parviz disappeared. “Did you just shoot someone?”
“I got us hired, if that’s what you’re asking.” I scratched the back of my head and tried to look sheepish. I was sure I wasn’t successful judging by the look Jin was giving me. “And I only shot his glass.”
Jin hooked one arm around my shoulder, leaning on me. “I knew I liked you, Bandit.”
And then came that grin. I might have traitor eyes, but Jin had the sort of smile that would turn over whole empires to the enemy—that made me feel like suddenly I understood him exactly, even though I knew nothing about him. The kind that made me feel like if I was on the right side of it, we could do anything together. I had the next six weeks to find out if that was true.
twelve
We left at dawn with the Camel’s Knees as promised. I thought I knew the desert, but as I watched the sun rise in a perfect clear sky over an unbroken stretch of gold, I knew this was something else. The Sand Sea was huge and restless. The Camel’s Knees treated it like something between a beast to be broken and a tyrant to cower in front of. I felt at home instantly.
The landscape shifted from one moment to the next, the moving sands dragging me irresistibly down a dune one moment and trapping me in place the next. Some of the dunes seemed infinite—no matter how long we walked we never seemed to crest them. The wind sliced its path through the land, scattering sand like shrapnel into my eyes and my mouth, in spite of my sheema. In the middle of the day the whole desert shifted and a huge wooden structure appeared out of the sand, red and blue paint flaking off of it with the wind.
“What’s that?” I asked Jin, shielding my eyes from the sun.
“It’s a shipwreck,” Jin told me. And just as quickly as it had appeared, the sand swallowed it up again.
When we pitched camp on the first evening, my skin was raw, my whole body ached from walking, and I was happy.
There were sixty-odd people in the Camel’s Knees, plus two dozen camels heavy with supplies and goods for trade. The years of travel between them were obvious; they moved as one when they made camp.
“Is this what the real sea is like?” I asked Jin, taking my food to sit next to him on a darkened dune just away from the fire. Jin had started a rumor that I was in a fire as a kid so I was ashamed to show my face. I loosened my sheema enough to eat without taking it off.
“You don’t have to walk across the sea.” He stabbed at his food with a piece of burned flatbread.
“So what do sailors do all day? Lounge around growing soft?” I poked him in the stomach, which was all muscle. I was stupidly pleased when he laughed. Before he could reply, Old Daud spoke up from beside the fire.
“Settle, children, and I will tell you a story.” The storyteller had a voice deep like the desert night and quick like the fire. It was a good voice for stories.
“I wonder if he could set you straight on the moral of Atiyah and Sakhr,” Jin whispered to me teasingly. I knew he was getting it wrong to annoy me.
“Maybe he ought to tell the one of the Foreign Man who pushed his luck,” I whispered back.
“In the new days of the world, God looked down on the earth and decided to fill it. From his own body of fire he made immortal life. First the clever Djinn were crafted, then giant Rocs who soared through the skies from one mountaintop to the next, and wild Buraqi who raced from one side of the desert to the other, until the whole earth was full.”
“I wonder if God could save me from having to hear this story again.” A girl startled me, dropping down in the sand between me and Jin without warning. I already knew her: Yasmin, Parviz’s daughter, the princess of the caravan.
Isra, her grandmother, walked past and reached over me to smack her on the back of the head, making Yasmin’s braid flip over her shoulder. “You will be quiet and listen, Princess Big Mouth.” That name worked, too, I supposed.
Yasmin stuck her tongue out at her grandmother’s retreating back before leaning toward me. “Old Daud is telling the story for your benefit, you know.” She lowered her voice. “It’s a warning for the hired muscle about the dangers that creep in the dark.” She waggled her fingers comically, which made the tin plate she was balancing on her knees almost tip over. She caught it before it could, rolling her eyes as she stuffed food in her mouth and talked around it. “The ones you’re supposed to be keeping us safe from. Though it’s been years since we saw a ghoul out here.” Same as Dustwalk, I thought. I’d last seen a Nightmare when I was eight years old. “It’s mortal men that cause the most trouble these days.”