Hero at the Fall

by Alwyn Hamilton

  She might not fear losing her head. But she would fear losing her mind.

  ‘Is it true?’ Tamid pressed.

  Hala was running the thumb of her three-fingered hand in a slow, thoughtful circle over her golden mouth as she thought. ‘No,’ she admitted finally. ‘What I did to him was worse than you’ve ever heard.’

  *

  When I let myself into her room, Leyla was curled up on her side. She reminded me of my cousin Olia sulking in our shared room back in Dustwalk, when she clearly wanted someone to pay attention to her but wanted it to look like she didn’t.

  ‘Are you here to shoot me again?’ Leyla muttered into her pillow. The way she was lying made the bandages on her arm conspicuous. I guessed Tamid had sewn her up, too. Probably smart; we didn’t want her to bleed out on us. Though I could’ve let her suffer for a bit.

  ‘No.’ I leaned against the door. ‘I’m here to give you one last chance to keep that clever little head of yours screwed on the right way.’ I sat down at the end of her bed. ‘Have you ever seen anyone go sun-mad, Leyla? I have – once – a man named Bazet, back in the town where I grew up. It was like watching someone whose head had been set on fire from the inside and he couldn’t put it out. He went absolutely raving, babbling, screaming, seeing things, and in the end my uncle shot him like a dog in the middle of the street out of mercy.’

  Leyla sat up, her hand pressing hard into the pillow, leaving a small indent next to where her face had been.

  ‘Hala’s power, it’s a bit like sun-madness. She can make you see things for a little while, sure, but if she wants to, she can also rip your mind into such fractured pieces you’ll never again be wholly sure what’s just in your head and what’s really there. And believe me, she really wants to do that to you.’

  Leyla’s mouth had parted slightly, her eyes looking huge and childlike. ‘You wouldn’t do that. You need me.’

  ‘Right now you’re costing us a lot more lives than you’re helping us save,’ I said. ‘And here’s the thing: I don’t think your father can keep this city on lockdown forever. Eventually, I reckon this siege will end and we’ll get out. But, see, I want people to stop dying before that. And if I return you to him without your head screwed on straight, the killings stop, and I don’t think you’ll be much good to him any more either, when you can’t build him little toys for his wars. Do you reckon you’ll still be his favourite daughter when you’ve lost your mind?’

  I could see her churning it over, the cost of telling.

  ‘Where will you go?’ she asked finally. And then, more quietly, ‘Are you going to rescue my brother?’

  The question caught me off guard. I hadn’t thought Leyla gave a damn about Rahim. She’d let him be imprisoned with the rest of the Rebellion. She blamed him as a traitor. But she sounded tentative, almost shy. I supposed he was still her brother, the only one of the Sultan’s many children who shared a mother with her.

  ‘That’s the plan.’

  In fact, the plan was to rescue two of her brothers, but she didn’t need to know Ahmed was still alive, even if she didn’t have any way of getting that information to her father.

  Leyla chewed on her lip thoughtfully for a long moment before finally answering me. ‘There are tunnels. Below the city.’ She started talking quicker, as if she could get all the treasonous words off her tongue at once. ‘I needed a way of feeding the power all the way out to the walls. So my father had tunnels dug from the palace, running wires through them to feed the walls with fire from the machine. His wives and the children of the harem slipped out through one of the tunnels to a waiting ship before the Gallan invaders arrived. But the exits are all bricked up now.’

  Bricked up wasn’t so bad – easier to get through than a wall of fire. I stood. ‘I’m going to get a map of the city, and I’m going to want you to tell me where these tunnels run, every single one of them. And I’ll know if you try to lie to me again.’ I gave the bandage on her wounded arm a pointed glance.

  ‘It won’t matter, you know.’ Leyla interrupted my retreat from the room. She was awfully chatty now that she’d started talking. I ignored her. ‘Even if you can get through this wall, you won’t get through the next.’

  I stopped, my hand resting on the door. She was baiting me, I could tell by the way her words rose at the end mockingly. She wanted me to ask. Which was exactly what made me not want to ask. Except I probably ought to. Pettiness wasn’t the right hill to make my stand on in this war.

  I turned around and gave her what she wanted. ‘What do you mean, the next wall?’

  ‘The one around the prison where the traitors have been sent.’ She looked all too pleased with herself now she had regained the upper hand, knees pulled up to her chin. There was an annoying singsong quality to her words when she asked, ‘Where do you think my father got the idea to protect our city this way?’

  Ashra’s Wall. The story had leaped into my mind the moment I’d seen the great barrier of fire. And I wasn’t alone in that. Everyone had been whispering Ashra’s name around the city since we saw the wall of fire. It was impossible not to think of the legend from the Holy Books. But there was no way Leyla was talking about that. Because that would mean Ahmed and the others were being kept prisoner in …

  ‘Eremot.’ Dark satisfaction was scrawled all over Leyla’s face. ‘They’ve been sent to Eremot.’

  The ancient name sent a feeling of wrongness through me, an unease that went deeper than my skin and bones and seemed to churn even my soul into unrest. Half of me was immortal. Half of me had been there, at Eremot, in the ancient days. Half of me remembered.

  Eremot was a name that belonged in the Holy Books. It was the place where the Destroyer of Worlds had emerged, leading her army of ghouls, and the place she had been imprisoned again at the end of the First War. Behind Ashra’s Wall, a great barrier of fire to keep the dark at bay.

  ‘Eremot is …’ not real. Only that wouldn’t get past my lips.

  ‘The stuff of legends,’ Leyla finished for me, with a pinched, self-satisfied look on her face. ‘Past the end of civilisation where no one can find it. But I found it.’

  She meant to intimidate me. But I’d grown up past the end of civilisation and Jin had found me just fine. ‘We’ve got our own ways of finding it.’ Jin’s compass would lead us to wherever the prisoners were being held. Whether that was Eremot or not.

  ‘Well.’ Leyla shrugged. ‘Even if you do find it, do you really think you can cross a great and impenetrable barrier against evil, risen from the trueness of sacrifice and which—’

  ‘And which will stand un-breached until such time as humanity’s courage fails,’ I finished for her. ‘I can quote the Holy Books, too, when I want to.’

  Ashra had been a carpet weaver’s daughter born when the First War was coming to an end. The ghouls were being driven into hiding and darkness, skulking the desert alone at night instead of swarming in armies. The Destroyer of Worlds’ greatest monsters were dead, slain by the First Hero and all the heroes that came after him: Attallah, the Grey Prince, Sultan Soroush, and the Champion of Bashib. The Destroyer of Worlds was being beaten back to the darkness of the earth from whence she came.

  But she could not be held back permanently. Each time, she burst free from her prison again to roam and terrorise the desert. And the Djinn looked on in despair at the humans who had defended them for so long and feared that they would not be able to accomplish this final task. So they made it known among the humans that they would grant immortality to whichever man could imprison the Destroyer of Worlds forevermore. Many a hero died trying.

  Ashra was not a hero. She was just a girl from a small village in the mountains, the eldest of twelve children, who spent her days helping her father dye wool and her evenings helping her mother cook meals for her eleven brothers and sisters.

  Until the day the Destroyer of Worlds came to her village.

  The villagers had no weapons, and they lit torches against the Destroyer of World
s, placing them in a circle as they huddled together, trying to stay alive until dawn, when they would be able to flee.

  The Destroyer of Worlds stalked through the dark in one great circle around the village, around their torches. And then she laughed, and with her breath she extinguished all the torches. All except one, which stood by Ashra and her family.

  Before the Destroyer of Worlds could attack, Ashra seized the last torch and set herself on fire with it. A body does not burn much, but it was said that she swallowed a spark, just enough to light her soul as well as her body. And her soul burned much brighter than her body ever could. And when the burning girl took a step towards the Destroyer of Worlds, the Destroyer of Worlds took a step back. So Ashra took another step, then another, and another, and slowly the Destroyer of Worlds retreated.

  Ashra walked the Destroyer of Worlds all the way back towards Eremot. And as she walked, she did as her father had taught her and wove the fire burning inside her body together, as one would a carpet, until it became an impenetrable wall. By the time they reached Eremot, she had made it so high and wide that it held back even the Destroyer of Worlds. It was wide enough to encircle the entrance to Eremot and keep the Destroyer of Worlds trapped inside the mountain forever.

  The Djinn saw her sacrifice, and they kept their promise. They granted Ashra immortal life so that her soul would burn forever as the great wall she had made. They said that as long as Ashra’s Wall stood, the Destroyer of Worlds would be imprisoned. If it fell, so would a new age of darkness fall on the world.

  So that was why Leyla had asked if we were headed to rescue Rahim. Not because she had had a change of heart about her brother, but because she wanted to know for sure that even if she betrayed her father and let us through this wall, we would still fail. There was another wall between us and our purpose.

  ‘What does your father want to send prisoners to Eremot for?’ Just saying the name made me feel uneasy. ‘If he was going to break his promise to his people of granting the Rebellion mercy, there have got to be easier ways to kill them.’

  Leyla looked at me through dark eyelashes. ‘He doesn’t want them dead. He just doesn’t care if they die. There’s a difference. He’s after something in Eremot. And people who go in there don’t come back out – eventually the hours and hours of digging in the dark will wring all the life out of them. So he sends in expendable lives.’

  But I wasn’t listening to her gloating. There was only one possible thing the Sultan could have his prisoners digging out in Eremot. ‘Your father wants to find the Destroyer of Worlds.’

  I might know better than anyone the distance between legends and the truth, that stories were not always told whole. The monsters in them were less fierce in reality, the heroes less pure, the Djinn more complicated. But there were some things you didn’t prod at to find out if their teeth were really as big as the stories said. Because on the off-chance that the stories were really true, you were about to lose a finger. The Destroyer of Worlds was at the top of the list of things I didn’t want to find out the truth about. ‘I don’t know how close you’ve read the Holy Books, but there are a whole lot of reasons why letting her out of that prison is a bad idea. Starting with the destruction of all of humanity.’

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t want to let her out,’ Leyla said earnestly. ‘He wants her for the same reason he wants the Djinn. My father is a hero. He’s going to end her once and for all. And use what’s left of her for good. Just like Fereshteh.’

  He was going to kill her, turn her immortal life into power that he could use. I remembered something he had said to me once: that the time for immortal things was over. Now was the time for us, time to stop living so attached to our legends and to magic. And sure enough, he was destroying our legends one at a time, dragging Miraji into a new age, whether it wanted to come or not. Whether letting great evils out of the earth was a good idea or not.

  ‘He can’t do it without you, though, can he?’

  Leyla’s satisfaction drifted back to fear. ‘If you kill me, he will find another way. My mother’s homeland is full of people like me, makers of new ideas and new inventions.’ Some who would even be prepared to defy the laws of religion and good sense, too, I was sure.

  I didn’t want to kill her. But we couldn’t keep her either. We might have a way out, but we couldn’t just vanish from the city without doing something about Leyla – not with girls dying every dawn in her name.

  The beginning of a plan had started to form in my mind. Only we were missing someone if we were going to pull it off.

  I needed to get Sam back.

  Chapter 7

  It took me the better part of the day to track Sam down, which didn’t exactly do a whole lot for how angry I was at him. I started imagining creative ways to kill him sometime around midday, when the sweat had soaked into my shirt in earnest and my hair was sticking to my sheema from the heat. By the time I finally ran him to ground just before sunset, I had built a very vivid image of how he’d meet his end at my hands.

  We’d been damn lucky that Sam hadn’t bled to death that day he’d tried to slip into the palace. After he’d got himself shot, it was only thanks to Hala and Jin that we’d got him back to the Hidden House still breathing. The hours that followed had been a frenzy of trying to keep our foreign friend alive, as well as getting everyone ready to flee if we had to. I didn’t know if we’d been followed from the palace. But I’d already led the Sultan to one of our hideouts once. I wasn’t taking chances.

  Finally Sam had stopped bleeding and kept breathing. Though barely on both counts. And no soldiers came knocking at the door of the Hidden House.

  I’d spent the night keeping watch over him while everyone else kept watch over the streets. If we had to flee, I wasn’t sure we’d be able to take Sam with us, wounded as he was. So we’d waited and kept watch. I’d prayed a whole lot.

  Then, three days after Sam got shot, I woke up next to an empty bed. My face had been pressed so hard into the stitching of the blanket that it had left a mark on my cheek. Where Sam had been, there was nothing but tangled sheets faintly stained with blood. My first thought was that Sam had died sometime in the night and Jin had moved the body to spare me. But then I saw the golden cuff set with emeralds, slipped on to my wrist while I slept. It was Shazad’s, one of the pieces of jewellery she’d paid Sam with, back when he was running information between the palace and the Rebellion.

  I read it for what it was, a farewell note. No amount of money is worth dying for, it said. He wasn’t wrong, either. Money was a damn stupid thing to die for. I’d just been figuring Sam was still with us for something more.

  Still, leaving me the bracelet seemed like it was more symbolic than anything, since he took everything else Shazad had paid him, down to the very last of her rings.

  Shazad’s jewellery was how I found him in the end. There was a goldsmith on the corner of Moon Street who was known to trade coin for material without questions. It took a bit of bribery, but he told me Sam had been by. He was on his way to the White Fish, a bar on the docks that normally served sailors of all sorts passing through Izman. It’d become glutted with the same sailors lately, seeing as no one was getting in or out of the city. The barricade of fire even plunged deep into the sea.

  Only there was a rumour going around that there was a man who knew how to get through the barricade, and for the right price he’d give you passage. He was rounding up anyone with the right money at the White Fish.

  I’d heard that rumour, too. I’d ignored it since it was so obviously a scam. Only it seemed Sam was stupid enough to fall for it.

  The heat of a long day of trawling the city streets clung to me as I pushed through the doors of the White Fish. A dozen pairs of men’s eyes joined it. I knew what they were seeing. It didn’t matter that I was dressed in sturdy desert clothes or that I was armed: I was a woman in a place where only men belonged. I half missed the days when I was a scrawny girl from Dustwalk and could still pass for a boy whe
n I needed to. But it had been a year of decent meals, and there was too much of me to hide what I was now.

  Most of the men turned back to their drinks and their gambling, shrugging me off as I pressed further into the bar, searching for a familiar face. But one man stepped square in my path, quickly enough that I had to pull up short to keep from running straight into him.

  ‘How much?’ he asked without preamble.

  ‘For you to get out of my way?’ My hand was already on the gun at my belt. ‘I’ll do you a favour, and until the count of three, I’ll let you move for free. After that, I might start charging you in toes.’ When he looked down, the pistol was pointed at his boot. It was an easy shot to pull off in close quarters.

  I recognised Sam’s laugh a second before his arm draped itself over my shoulder. ‘Don’t mind my lady friend.’ His voice was too bright, like he was trying to cut through the tension, like sun through clouds. ‘She’s too much for you to handle anyway.’ He winked at the man across from me. In a low voice, in Albish, slow enough so I could understand, he said, ‘Put your gun away before he does something stupid and you and I have to do something heroic.’

  I bit my tongue angrily, but he was right. I wasn’t here to draw attention to myself by starting a bar brawl. The man gave us a once-over before taking a step back. Sam pulled me around, turning me towards a table lined with men holding cards, watching us with interest. ‘Sorry about that interruption, boys,’ Sam declared too loudly. ‘Just had to go get my good luck charm.’ He sat back down abruptly, pulling me into his lap so fast I didn’t think about swatting him away until I was already sitting.

  I moved the most painful means of death to the top of the list I’d spent this afternoon constructing.

  Still, I had to admit, the too-interested eyes that had strayed towards us were moving away, a smug, knowing look crossing the faces of the other gamblers at his table. Now they thought they understood what I was and who owned me. Sam knew what he was doing.