Hero at the Fall

by Alwyn Hamilton

  I wrestled the sand back hastily, and instantly the pain came back with it as I fought for control. I worked until the sandstorm covered the square below in a swirling mass, shielding us from sight. My side still ached. I shifted, trying to ease the pain, and the storm shifted with me unexpectedly. I couldn’t stall giving the signal any longer. I was struggling to hold on already. I turned my head just far enough towards Jin and the twins to be heard over the storm, and said, ‘Now.’

  They didn’t need to be told twice. Maz had been bursting for hours, shifting restlessly from one shape to another, waiting for the order. Now a huge grin spread over his face as he flung aside the cloak he was wearing, sending it tumbling down into the sandstorm below as he jumped from the edge of the roof without a second thought. For an instant he was just a boy in mid-air, at the pinnacle of a leap, before the inevitable fall, the moment when you stopped flying and came crashing back down to earth. And then he stopped being just a boy. His body shifted, arms turning into wings, feet becoming claws, skin exploding into feathers. Izz followed, flinging the bundle on his back around into his mouth as it turned into a beak before he launched himself from the edge. If the crowd below us had been able to see, it might have looked like a pair of Rocs had just burst from the golden dome of the prayer house, like some mystical egg had hatched them. They soared gracefully above the storm that hid them, desperately happy to be moving again.

  Unlike the twins, Jin had barely moved since we got up here. He was good at that – at stillness when everyone around us was restless. But I could read it in him all the same, there below his skin: impatience waiting to burst into action. It’d been there for weeks now. Since the day we saw Imin executed as Ahmed. Since the night we found out we were trapped here, unable to get our people back. Unable to save the family that he had protected for years. Sometimes I caught him with his hand opening and closing over the brass compass compulsively, but that was the only sign he gave that he was as worried as the rest of us. Now he spared me a sideways glance, a heartbeat, just long enough for me to give him a nod, assurance that I was fine. That I could hang on. I wasn’t about to tell him that pain from the old wound was searing through my side and I didn’t know how long I could keep this up.

  Jin gave me a small, wry smile, a ghost of the one he used to have back when things were simpler and there were other people running this rebellion for us. The smile that said we were about to get into trouble. We were already in trouble now.

  And then he stepped into thin air.

  Maz soared below him, catching Jin on his back easily, then shifting direction with one effortless beat of his wings to carry him towards the palace, where Izz waited in all his blue-feathered glory.

  I let out an uneasy breath, fighting the urge to drop one of my hands and press it against my aching side. We needed a way through this impossible wall and out of Izman. We’d already searched the whole perimeter for some kind of gap – a gate, a fissure we could squeeze through, something, anything. But the city was locked up tight as a drum. Which meant we needed to look somewhere else for a way out. Somewhere like the mess of papers strewn across the Sultan’s desk that included everything from supply routes for the army to letters addressed to foreign rulers inviting them to Auranzeb, the celebration of the Sultan’s ascendancy to the throne. I’d rifled through these same papers during my own time in the palace.

  Only we didn’t have a spy in the palace any more. So we needed to get back in if we were going to get information out.

  This was far from our first try at getting in. Sam had made a stab at going through the palace walls first, a few weeks back. His strange Albish magic allowed him to slip through solid stone like it was water. It was a gift no one in Miraji had ever seen, and so nobody knew to guard against it.

  Only we’d shown our hand when the Sultan ambushed us. After our narrow escape, the Sultan knew exactly what extraordinary powers we had up our sleeves. The walls of the palace were now lined on the inside with wooden panels, which were as solid to Sam as to anybody else.

  And more than that, they were expecting us to try that night.

  The bullet would have torn straight through his heart if Sam hadn’t moved at the last second, unable to resist leaning back through the wall to where we waited, cloaked in Hala’s illusion, to toss some offhand sarcastic comment. The gunshot caught him in the shoulder instead. There was a lot of blood. Everywhere. Smeared on the stone of the wall as he stumbled out, with no retreat except into the open. On my hands when I caught him as he lost consciousness. On Jin’s shirt when he heaved him over his shoulder hastily. Soaked into the once-clean linen of the bed when we finally got him back to the Hidden House, still breathing. Barely.

  Not that saving him did us much good in the long run.

  But that was how we learned our lesson. We had to wait for a cleaner shot. Even if every second we waited meant the prisoners were getting further away from us. Meant they might be getting tortured. Might be killed. We had to wait.

  The Sultim trials was the shot we’d been waiting for. So we had to take it. No matter how desperate it was.

  Below me Izz spread his immense blue wings, riding an updraught from the sandstorm I was creating, letting it carry him over the palace, his huge shadow skimming easily over the walls and the gardens of the harem, then over the glass dome that crowned the Sultan’s chambers.

  We couldn’t get in through the walls. Fine. We’d try something less subtle.

  Izz dropped the explosives he was carrying, sending them careening down towards the glass. The dome exploded, shattering into a rain of shards that caught the sun like stars falling from the heavens. Jin and Maz plunged through the new entrance to the palace, straight into the Sultan’s rooms, even as Izz circled back for me.

  He soared below me, and I took a deep breath, fighting to keep the sandstorm under my control even as I split my attention. The pain was distracting, but I had to trust that if I jumped Izz would catch me. So, bending my knees just a little, spreading my body flat, I leaped into nothingness. I landed on Izz’s back, and the impact knocked the air out of my lungs, turning my vision black. But I didn’t let go. I fought to hold on both to his back and to the desert as he soared upwards.

  We didn’t have much time.

  Hala’s illusions ought to work on the people of Izman, get them to believe Shira really had come back from the dead, but the Sultan would guess it was us easily enough. And it wouldn’t take him long to figure out that we were doing more than just whipping his people into a frenzy against him and his sons. He would come looking for us. I was going to have to buy Jin some more time.

  Izz looped us around in the air until we were over the shattered dome. Jin and Maz had disappeared from sight, retreating to the Sultan’s study. I could just make out the edge of the table where the Sultan and I had once sat, eating a duck I had killed in his gardens while he needled at my mind, making me doubt Ahmed.

  It was covered in shards of glass now.

  Ignoring the shooting pain in my side, I pushed away from Izz’s back, so I could see the sand. I fought to keep my balance, even as the wind whipped through my hair, lashing it around my face, tugging at my clothes. I gathered the sand back towards us, tightening my grip. I lifted my arms like I would if I were clearing the sandstorm. But instead of letting it scatter through the streets of Izman, I whipped it in a great swirling vacuum towards us.

  The sand shot past me, narrowly missing Izz’s wing, the force buffeting him upwards. I didn’t lose my grip as he beat his wings, frantically trying to regain his balance. I plunged every grain of sand I’d drawn from Izman’s streets down through the broken glass dome in a tightly controlled cascade, ignoring the twisting agony. I focused the sand towards the hallway that led into the Sultan’s chambers, flooding it, blocking the entrance like a stopper in a bottle, cutting off any access the soldiers might have to Jin.

  I let go. The pain finally eased, going from a sharp stab to a dull ache as it retreated. I slumped on
to Izz’s back as I looked down on my work. It wouldn’t last forever. It was sand; they would dig through it eventually. But it ought to be long enough for Jin to find what we needed. If it was even there.

  With a few powerful beats of his wings, Izz carried us up and out of reach of gunfire from the ground. The palace spread out below us like a little toy model. Soldiers were already running towards the Sultan’s chambers. Men and women in the square dropped to their knees as the vision of Shira dissipated from their minds. The twelve princes stood in shock, one standing, sword drawn, with nothing to fight. Others fled the sandstorm and the sound of the explosion nearby and the sudden appearance of a giant Roc hovering above them.

  And then I spotted a lone figure in the gardens of the harem, staring up at us. It was her stillness that caught my eye. I knew her on sight, even this far away, from the way she tied her hair and the slope of her shoulders. She was like a statue, as motionless as one of her Abdals before they moved in for the kill.

  Leyla.

  Our traitor princess.

  Chapter 4

  She looked tiny from up here. Like a mouse staring up at a falcon, too foolish to run from it.

  I leaned down to Izz’s head, pointing past him towards her. He might be in an animal shape, but he could understand me just fine. I wanted him to take me down to her.

  I felt him hesitate below me for a few huge ponderous wing beats. He didn’t want to enter the harem. It wasn’t part of our plan. I could almost hear Shazad’s voice in my mind. No, by all means, Amani, we only spent months trying to get you out of the harem. But go ahead, go straight back in when I’m not there to bail you out. If it were Ahmed, he would listen to her good counsel, like he always did. He would be cautious.

  But Shazad and Ahmed had been captured. Because of Leyla. And that left me in charge of this rebellion, with no good counsel to listen to.

  I voiced the command. ‘Izz, take me to the ground.’

  This time he obeyed. I tightened my grip on his back as he plunged, diving straight towards the gardens of the harem.

  Leyla realised she was our target far too late. We were on her as she tried to look for cover, the force of the air from Izz’s wings knocking her down. As she scrambled backwards clumsily, I slid off Izz’s feathered back, my feet landing in the harem for the first time since I’d escaped. Izz took the shape of a blue lion, springing for her before she could find her footing, front paws pinning her to the ground. She didn’t scream as he flattened her out on her back, razor teeth inches from her face, she just squeezed her eyes shut. Like she thought she was ready to die.

  She was trying to be brave. She was good at it, too. She had spent several days with us, her enemies, pretending to be on our side, without so much as flinching. I might admire her if she weren’t our enemy.

  ‘Izz,’ I ordered, ‘let her up.’ He did what I said, pulling back his snarling face and slowly removing his weighty paw from her chest. As soon as she was released Leyla scrambled backwards, her shoulders bumping into the wall behind her, halting any further retreat. We were both silent for a long moment, Leyla breathing hard as she watched me. I pulled out my gun, deciding exactly what I wanted to do with her. I hadn’t thought that far when I’d plunged us down here.

  ‘So.’ I’d better start us off. ‘My guess is that we have your brilliant mind to thank for this –’ I glanced up at the dome of fire in the sky, looking for the right word, even as I pulled out my gun – ‘this whole mess.’ I opened the chamber of the pistol and checked how many bullets I had. Six whole shots. Good.

  ‘My father’s guards—’ Leyla started, a slight tremor in her voice.

  ‘My guess would be that your father’s guards are going to get sent to check on his paperwork before his daughter.’ The whole of the harem was strangely quiet around us. There was only the sound of Leyla’s panicked gasps and the loud click as the chamber of the gun snapped back into place.

  She winced at the sound. Or maybe it was at hearing the truth so plainly laid out.

  ‘You’re not going to kill me.’ But her eyes flicked to the gun all the same, like she wasn’t sure. I only had a year or two on her, but she seemed a whole lot younger. I’d grown up fast in the desert. She was a child from the palace. I searched myself for some sympathy, but I didn’t have any left for this girl who had betrayed me. Who had cost us so much because of my carelessness in believing she was as innocent as she looked.

  ‘Want to bet your life on that?’ I pointed the gun at her head, and Leyla cringed away, like she could make herself too small a target to hit. She was underestimating what a good shot I was. But I didn’t fire. ‘Here’s how this is going to go.’ I tried to sound sure of what I was doing, like this was a real plan and not some stupid idea I’d thought up halfway through doing it. Like I wasn’t just a girl from Dustwalk with a gun, pretending I could get information out of the brilliant little head of a girl born so far above me she shouldn’t even be able to see me if she deigned to look down. ‘I’m going to ask you a question and pull this trigger. And if you answer me truthfully, the bullet will hit that wall behind you. If you lie to me, the bullet is going to draw blood. Is that clear?’

  It sure looked like it was clear from the sudden fearful understanding on her face. I was a Demdji. I could only speak the truth, and now I wasn’t the one deciding whether that bullet would hit her, she was. From where he was sitting, still wearing the shape of a lion, I thought I saw Izz shift uneasily. I knew what he was thinking. I was getting myself into awfully deep waters here. But it was too late to go back now.

  ‘Now –’ I took aim – ‘how do we bring it down? This little wall of fire you’ve got around the city?’

  Leyla looked me in the eyes. ‘You can’t.’

  I pulled the trigger before she’d even finished speaking and before I could think twice about what I was doing. The bullet hit her in the arm. The scream that tore through her was all the confession I needed. I swept my gaze over the garden behind us quickly. That wasn’t going to have gone unheard. Not even in the harem, where the women were practised at ignoring the terrible things happening around them.

  ‘Remember how much that hurts when you answer that again,’ I said as I turned my gaze back on a now-bleeding Leyla, trying to hide my nerves while I pulled back the hammer, letting the next bullet slide into place. ‘Tell me how, or this bullet is hitting your knee, and if you ever want to walk again, you’ll have to get yourself a metal leg like the one you got Tamid. You remember Tamid, don’t you? A friend of mine? The one you convinced me you had a soft spot for so you could use him to lure your father to us?’

  Leyla was breathing through her nose, pain written all over her, but muddling with rage now. Getting shot would do that to you. ‘You can’t bring the wall down,’ she spat back. But before I could fire again she kept babbling quickly. ‘Because I haven’t built the way yet. Until I do, the only way to get rid of the wall is to disable the machine.’ She meant the great contraption she had built under the palace that had killed and trapped the Djinni Fereshteh, turning him into energy to feed her unholy machines, like the Abdals. And now the contraption was powering this great dome of fire surrounding the city. ‘And for that you’d need the right words.’

  We needed the words that would free the Djinn from the trap I had summoned them to. With those we could free the living Djinn as well as Fereshteh’s energy, which was powering the machine that fed life into all of Leyla’s little inventions.

  Tamid had found the right words to summon and trap the Djinn. Just words unless they were spoken by a Demdji and suddenly they became an all-powerful truth. That was how I had trapped them all in the palace, when the Sultan had forced me to summon them while I was his prisoner. Tamid had been searching for the words that would free the Djinn for the past month. But so far we had nothing.

  I pulled the trigger again. This time the bullet buried itself in the wall behind her. Damn, she was telling the truth.

  ‘Do you know the words to r
elease a Djinni?’ I asked. She’d told us she didn’t. But that was back when she’d been play-acting as a teary-eyed lost little princess and I’d been too trusting to question her about it.

  ‘No.’ The third bullet buried itself in the wall, sending stone spraying violently as it did, making her flinch out of the way. Well, at least she had been honest about one thing when she was lying about being on our side.

  Leyla started to cry, her sobs echoing loudly around the walls of the garden.

  That was the third gunshot inside the harem. Someone ought to have reached us by now. Something was wrong. I listened carefully under the sound of Leyla crying. Far off I thought I could hear the screams of excited birds. Probably the ones trapped in the menagerie, startled by the loud noise and unable to get away. But there were no other screams to go with them – no women calling out for help or panicking at the sound of gunshots so near them. Just the bubbling of fountains and, far off in the distance, the noises of the city.

  ‘Why is it so quiet?’ My question hadn’t actually been for Leyla, but she answered it all the same.

  ‘There’s no one else here,’ she said through a sob. ‘My father sent them all far away, to safety out of the city.’ She didn’t say it, but I almost heard the so there that she was longing to tack on to the end. Like she wanted me to think I was wrong for judging her father the villain of this story. That he was a man who cared about his wives and his sons and had hurried them off to safety. But I didn’t care what she wanted me to think about her father. What I did care about was the way she had said that. He sent them all far away.

  I’d asked the wrong question. We needed to get out of the city. But we didn’t need a way to bring down the magical barrier keeping us in. We needed a way around it. ‘So you’re saying there’s a way out of the city.’