Miri looks me over.
“Am I the only aki here?” I ask her.
“Aliya speaks highly of you,” she replies, not really answering my question. “She says you want change, like all of us.”
“Yeah. I do. And I’m ready to do whatever needs to be done.”
“Good.” She smiles. “In three days’ time, during al-Jabr, we will kidnap King Kolade.”
I was ready to hear some real lahala from these Mages. I was not ready to hear this.
CHAPTER 29
I’M A KID again. A little aki. My eyes have just started to change, and I can feel in my bones that I’m becoming something different. But it still looks like I’m a normal child. And Mama can just call it a “trick of the light.” She has my hand in a soft grip. Light shines through the small windows of the stone temple she and Baba take me to every Blessday morning. The temple is simple. Stone and adobe. Most people can’t tell it apart from the nearby homes in the Khamsa dahia. There’s no room for a balcony, so those who can’t fit inside the sanctuary are forced to stand or sit around it and listen to our temple’s Ozi, who speaks softly but whose voice is amplified by the Unnamed, whose power courses through him, according to Mama.
In these early mornings, she walks me down the aisle between the pews, and other mothers grab at my cheeks and fawn over me and praise Mama for having made such a beautiful, curly haired jewel. And Mama hefts me up into her arms to show me off, as though I’m her blessing. And Baba stands dutifully while the women fuss with my hair, and there’s so much light shining into our tiny space. And even though I’m a child and can’t speak the words, I know I can feel joy pulsing in the air. And I know that were I to ask Mama where it came from, this joy, she’d say it came from the Unnamed, who lives in all things. And I’m standing on the pew, because I’m not yet tall enough to sit down and see over the heads of the adults sitting in front of me. But even as a child, I know I’m supposed to keep quiet. I’m not supposed to ask for my blocks or wail to be picked up or let Mama know how hungry I am, even though we’ve eaten just before leaving and a Blessday meal is waiting for me at home when we finish.
The same light gilds the temple Ozi as the congregation sings the Otuto, the praise song, and there is always one point we reach, when we’re all singing, everybody inside and outside, and I always smile at this part. Always. Because I can’t imagine any other reaction.
Another memory: Mama in her nightgown at her bedside, elbows propped onto sheets, fingers clasped before her face, whispering one half of a conversation I can’t hear. Her head is bowed, and I know not to disturb her, even though I’m a needy child. I know I’m witnessing something special. Her arm is healed, no longer sick and limp with guilt-poison from a sin. When she finishes, she prepares her prayer mat for sitting, and the memory ends.
Then I’m in darkness. Complete and utter darkness.
A bright-white glow. I feel it on my back before I turn around to face it. So bright I have to shield my eyes. The glow dims, and I see someone standing at the center. Not again. Princess Karima. Already, I know to look for the inisisa, silhouetted against the night by the greater thickness of their own murk.
No. Princess.
It’s like the night around me has wrapped itself around my arms and legs. I can’t move. Even as the sin-snake and the lion circle. Even as they prepare to strike.
No.
When I wake up, I’m in a room. Alone. It’s so dark in here that I must still be in the dream. Until I hear footsteps, then see an orb of light getting closer. It’s Aliya. She stands in the doorway to my room, really just a space carved into the side of a tunnel.
There’s that concerned look on her face again.
“Don’t worry. Bad dreams.” I don’t know how much she knows about Princess Karima or how it all ties together. I don’t know if they’re just going to go after Izu or if kidnapping King Kolade is a means to protect Princess Karima. If not, I may have to take care of that myself. Whatever it takes. “What’s going on?” I can’t tell whether the fog in my mind is a remnant of the night terror or confusion as to what exactly I’m doing here. “Why are we kidnapping King Kolade?”
Aliya picks something up off the ground next to the lamp she put down, and I realize, just as she’s handing it to me, that it’s a bowl of pepper soup. “You didn’t break fast with the rest of us. You must be hungry.” Then she hands me a bowl of fufu.
At first, I’m slow to eat. I scoop up a fistful of fufu, dip and scoop into the pepper soup, but once the mashed yams and soup touch my tongue, then slide down my throat, I can’t stop. Before I know it, I’m using the last of the fufu to scrape up the bottom of the bowl. I get my fist up to my mouth just in time to stifle the burp.
Uhlah, that felt good.
“In one day’s time, we’ll be ready to enter the palace.” Even crouched, she straightens her back, and it looks like she’s turning from scholar to soldier. Back when I last saw her, she had the look of a military commander, marking positions on a map and dictating troop movements. She’d sounded like a warrior straight out of the ancient stories. “The movements of the Palace guards have been easy enough to track.”
“How?”
“We’ve had scouts monitor the movement of Palace guards along the Wall.”
I suddenly remember the aki who would climb trees during breaks in their training, seeing how high they could get. I remember climbing up to watch the Palace guards myself. Had the aki been told to do the same?
“Yes,” Aliya answers, as though I’d spoken the question out loud. “The problem is that once we move, the other Mages will have to reveal themselves. All of them. Right now, we are fairly certain of our number among the rebels. But there are too many whose allegiances we don’t yet know, and for this reason, we’ve had to keep them at a distance.”
“I still don’t know what I’m here for.”
Someone darkens my doorway. It’s Miri. “You will be our shield. If we should need to call forth a sin-beast, you will keep us safe.”
“What? By waving my hands and distracting it?”
Miri is unfazed. “No. By commanding it. Like you did with the sin-dragon.”
What? I look to Aliya. “I’ve only done it once,” I hiss. “And after the dragon, I could barely stand.” The way my limbs randomly go numb, I can barely stand even now.
Before Aliya can reply, Miri speaks again. “What we’re going to do is very important. You must understand that. Izu intends to have King Kolade appoint him as chief advisor. We’ve learned that the announcement is planned for al-Jabr. The opening ceremony is when it will most likely be made. We will capture the king and force him to denounce Izu and his agenda before all of Kos.”
“But why would King Kolade agree to appoint Izu as his advisor?”
It’s Miri who finally breaks the silence. “He is threatening to unleash an army of inisisa on the city unless Kolade continues to keep him in power. This allows him to strengthen his agenda of moral purity and tighten his grip on Kos.” She frowns. “That means uncleansed sins will be subject to greater punishments. Aki will be run ragged. It will be impossible to train them fast enough. Ultimately, you all may be eliminated. And Izu will silently rule over Kos.”
Aliya jumps in. “Unleashing the inisisa in such great numbers would attract the arashi. They are drawn to uncleansed sins, and if there are enough of them, they will come and burn all of Kos to the ground. That is how the dahia were made. Before the aki were made into servants of the Mages’ kanselo, the dahia would fill with uncleansed sins, and it would draw the arashi. During al-Jabr, all of Kos will be out in the streets. If there is an arashi attack, all of Kos will be killed. No one will be left standing. That’s why the threat is so powerful.”
It’s finally coming together. Some parts of it I’m hearing for the first time, but even though I have heard parts of it before, it all still stuns me into sile
nce. If any of this were spoken inside the Wall, everyone in the room would be hanged. A Mage threatening to unleash sins and destroy Kos. Aki as tools to keep Kos safe and not untouchables and slaves. I keep expecting someone to speak up and denounce the plan. But no one does. They’re serious.
“You want me to help you kidnap the king,” I say again. It comes out like a question, but it’s really just me trying to get used to the idea. Maybe if I say it enough times, it’ll sink in.
I want to ask about Princess Karima. Aliya told me in the camps that Karima was in danger, but I don’t see her role in all of this. And no one brings her up. So maybe it’s best I keep quiet. If whatever plans they have don’t include keeping her safe, then I’ll have to figure things out on my own. Best if the Mages in front of me aren’t able to get in my way.
“You should rest,” Miri tells me. Her voice is deep with authority. “We will be moving soon, and we need you at full strength.” With a flourish of her robes, she’s gone, and it’s just me and Aliya left.
She sits down and doesn’t seem to mind dirtying her robes. It’s as though, with Miri gone, she’s back to being the excited scholar. She slouches, lets her hands lie in her lap, fiddles with a small stone she picked up from the ground.
“What are you thinking about?” I ask her.
For a long time, she doesn’t look up. “Since I was a child, I’ve dreamed of joining the Scriptors.” At the question in my eyes, she clarifies: “They’re scholars, a special class of Mage that studies with the algebraists. They immerse themselves in the Proofing. Their entire lives are spent learning the applications of algebraic geometry and trigonometric functions. They use math to study the stars. They use it to discover new medicine. Together, they carry knowledge of the entire history of Kos. In the Ulo Amamihe, the Great House of Ideas, they . . .” She doesn’t finish.
I think of the books Mama used to collect from her sisters. Any time they would visit, they would bring whole crates with them. I have no idea what was in those books, never did. But Mama would glow at the sight of them. I think of the look of joy and peace on Baba’s face when he saw Mama like that. Mama and Aliya would’ve gotten along well.
“In my village, we held contests. All the surrounding villages took part. And they would gather the schoolchildren who had begun to study rudimentary mathematics. Poetry contests, but what we were supposed to do was write proofs. Each dahia puts forward the children who will try to write out the most elegant mathematical proof they can. If you’re a child who shows promise, your parents will spend an entire year grooming you for the poetry contest. That’s your ticket to the Palace competition. Do well enough at home and you just may get to meet the Kaya family. My baba, he once saw me after I came home with a mark of 98 on my assignment. He told me to go out and find the other two points, then come back home.”
That makes me chuckle, and Aliya chuckles too, although hers holds a tremble.
“You remember the poetry contest Princess Karima held in the Palace? It’s a way for the Palace and the algebraists to spot early talent. And if you’re chosen, your family is afforded a lot of prestige. It’s a very high honor. And you’re celebrated in the whole entire dahia. You represent them now.”
“Did you win during your year?”
She snorts, but I hear sorrow in it. “I would have. I should have. But they said I had skipped too many steps in my proof. One of the judges said I had lost points because what he saw was intuition and not real work, as though the Word from the Unnamed is supposed to come to us in sentences we can understand. As though the Unnamed doesn’t force us to intuit its message. Idiots.” She takes a second to calm herself. “It was beautiful, that proof. And I keep a copy of it in my notebook. But I wasn’t chosen by the algebraists that year.”
“And you can’t do that anymore? Join the Scriptors?”
She laughs, and there’s nothing but sadness in it. “I’m a rebel. They would never let me become a Scriptor. Learning the art of reunification, really studying the meaning of al-Jabr, piecing together the entire grand philosophy.” She uncouples her glasses and pushes the lenses back into her hair so that she can wipe the tears from her eyes. “All because I decided I needed to do what was right.”
“If you’re saving Kos, you’re saving the Great House of Ideas too. Right?”
She snorts. “Sure.” She sniffs, wipes her sleeve across her nose, her face. “What does it matter? Seeing all of this, how the aki truly live, the way the kanselo rules everything . . . I’d spent so long apart from the real lives of the people of Kos. I don’t know if I can go back.” Another chuckle. “Early on in my training, Izu would take me through the catacombs, past the prison cells. I was so immersed in my studies and my notes that I didn’t even hear the young aki whimper all around me. The children who had been captured in the last Baptism? I’d walk right past them, because I was too busy memorizing sura.”
Silence falls between us.
With the stone, she etches patterns into the dirt.
“That doesn’t mean you have to give it up,” I say at last.
She looks up.
“I don’t know. Maybe knowing how people live their lives will make you a better scholar, you know? You will know what it all looks like when you read the texts. You can put faces and names to it all. It all becomes fuller. Myths and legends, they all come from people. You’ll know better than most what it all looks like. I don’t know—I’m probably not making any sense.”
She smiles but doesn’t look up at me. Almost like she’s become shy. “You know, in the Before, the Prophets could speak directly to the inisisa. I mean, they weren’t sin-beasts, because this was the time before sin. But they could talk to them. The Unnamed would use them as messengers. It was a way of communicating with the natural world. To be able to do that, to speak directly to the Unnamed, to hear its voice! They must have been truly holy.”
“So you’re saying I’m supposed to be a Prophet?”
She starts. “What? Oh, no. Not that. Just. I don’t know, really. We’ll see.”
“I gotta stay alive, right?”
A wry smirk from her. “That helps. Yes.”
“You think the Prophets ever flirted with gear-heads?”
“What?”
“Just asking.” I raise my hands in defense. “In case, well, in case I ever want to use that line. About me being a Prophet.”
“I don’t think there were gear-heads back then.” She glares.
I laugh, and before long, she’s laughing too. It feels good to see her happy like this. Warm. If I ever see Omar again, I’ll tell him about this. About what it feels like to care for someone.
“Why do they call you Sky-Fist?” she asks.
No one’s ever asked me that question. Everyone just accepted it as fact. All the new aki would hear it, and it would stick. “Some stupid poem. A song, really. You kill enough inisisa and live, then people start saying all sorts of things about you. You’re an untouchable in the streets, but you get this power. And they make you into a legend.” I relax against the wall of my room. “Sin-beasts are shadows, beasts made of night. And an aki is like a ray of sunlight that comes down from the sky and shatters the sin, kills the shadows.”
I’m using my hands to gesture, to imitate light falling from the sky like a fist. “Aki are like that fist coming down from the sky, and that’s how you get rid of the darkness. Or some stupid thing like that. I forget how the song goes exactly.” But I can hear the song in my head. Clearly. Jameelah is singing it. Dilif is humming the melody. “Somebody’s father might’ve been a poet or a crier; maybe he wrote the song.” Maybe no one did, and it just came to them. Came to us. I can see them singing it. Right in this room.
I notice Aliya staring at me. Smiling. She gets to her feet, and I rise with her.
She sticks her hand out, palm up. “To you and your people, Sky-Fist.” The way she says it, s
he’s halfway between rebel commander and friend. A friend . . .
I step close to her and slide my palm onto hers. I bring my lips to her ears. “To you and yours, Aliya.”
Her hair brushes my cheek, my ears. I close my eyes, flushed from the feel of her against me. I could stay like this forever.
She steps away. “We should get some sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be an important day for us. For Kos.”
“Yes,” I say quietly. And I watch her go. I can tell from the way she hurries away that she doesn’t want to risk looking back.
I can’t fault her for that.
CHAPTER 30
THEY TELL ME it’s morning, but I have no way of telling underground.
Arzu’s with us again. With Aliya, we head into the tunnels. They’re supposed to lead us into the catacombs, and from there, to the Palace grounds. My legs are still working.
Miri warns us, before we leave, that recent reports suggest the Palace guards have increased their patrols in advance of al-Jabr. We’ll have to use a different route than initially planned.
So it’s not long before the underground cavern starts to echo with the sound of footsteps that aren’t ours. I try to keep up and step gingerly at the same time. Arzu and Aliya had elected not to use a lamp, for obvious reasons, but it turns out they know these tunnels way better than I do. The way the sound bounces off the walls once we get to the dank catacombs makes it more and more difficult to find them. But then we reach a part of the tunnels where lamps cast golden light.
I miss Bo. I wish he could see all of this. I wish he knew. Sometimes, I hate the way he seems automatically like some authority figure, how his word often goes unchallenged, how people automatically defer to him even though I’m the more skilled aki. Bo’s sins fade with time, just like everyone else’s. I realize now that Zainab and I had that in common. She was covered head-to-toe in sin-spots, and all of them looked deep and new. They had all stuck with her, and she’d been driven mad by it. The others, if they don’t Eat too often, can walk around like any other Forum-dweller. Maybe this is why the aki in the shanties revered me but always felt more comfortable around Bo. He was more like them than I could ever be.
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