Be good, or the monster in the mountain will get you.
Noorsham extended the shard of the nachseen towards me. ‘Look into the Eye, Amani. Let it see you.’
From the crowd above us a rhythmic noise started to pick up: hands pounding against the mountain rock. Just a few at first and then, gradually, more, picking up the cadence. ‘Eye,’ someone chanted, more quietly this time, as their hands slapped the ground like a drumbeat. ‘Eye, Eye, Eye.’ And soon the chant had spread again, everyone speaking softly, but their voices mingling together into a loud rhythm along with the beating of their hands.
We were surrounded. I had walked us all into a trap with a ticking bomb, one I had to defuse now, or we all died.
If Noorsham saw everything that I had done … I didn’t know that I would be seen as being sinless. But also I didn’t see that I had any choice in baring my soul to him either. I did as I was told. I looked down into the glass.
It was as if a tumble of images fell out of my mind, on to the surface of the mirror, and I was watching them all play in quick succession: Shifting desert sands and walls of fire. Execution after execution. Death after death. Djinn trapped under the palace. The Sultan at gunpoint. And then one final glaring image. The thing we were really here for: the man in the mountain.
I tore my head up, breathing hard. It felt like coming up for air underneath the White Fish, except it was as if my mind was what needed to breathe. Jin was next to me, even though I didn’t see where he came from, steadying me with strong arms around my middle. I leaned against him gratefully as Noorsham carefully held the shard of mirror in his hands, inspecting the contents of my mind in it for a very long moment.
‘If we need to run …’ Jin said, low in my ear.
‘You dodge left, I go right, split them up,’ I agreed. It was the only chance we might have of getting out of here in one piece.
Taking his sweet time, Noorsham placed the Eye back on the makeshift altar before turning to the crowd.
I caught Izz’s gaze. He gave me a slight nod, saying he understood; if we bolted he and Maz were ready to shift into something that could outfly the people of Sazi.
‘I have seen her sins.’ My brother finally spoke. ‘I have passed judgement.’ He spread his arms as he faced his disciples, all of them hanging on his every word, leaning forwards with wide zealous eyes. ‘They do not need to burn!’ he declared loudly. And suddenly the crowd was screaming again. This time with joy.
Though the funny thing was, I didn’t find it any less unsettling than when they were baying for my blood.
Chapter 21
I was keenly aware of the stars watching me as I turned over in my bedroll. I hadn’t bothered to pitch one of our tents. It was warm enough this far south, even at night.
Most of Noorsham’s people slept out in the open air. After all, what did they have to hide from the eyes of God? Only, for me, it wasn’t the eyes of God I was worried about but the eyes of the other women, asleep around me.
Unmarried men and women were separated, according to Noorsham’s rules.
‘It’s a sin for that boy to even look at you the way he does if you’re not wedded to him,’ one of the disciples hissed below her breath, casting a glance over her shoulder at Jin, who was watching me as they led me away to an area of Sazi that sat below a shallow dip of the rocks, just below where the mines used to be. That was where the women slept. I caught sight of my cousin Olia settling herself in under the last of the light. She caught my gaze and just shrugged. As if to ask me if I’d really expected anything to change in the Last County. I supposed I was the only thing that had, really.
I wanted to talk to Jin. I needed to talk to someone now we’d reached this godforsaken dead end to a hunt for some impossible story. We’d lost another day of searching thanks to me. Used to be I’d go looking for Shazad in the long dark nights full of doubt. But she was gone. I was stuck separated from the boys. And I wouldn’t put it past one of these women to sell me out if I snuck off in the dead of night.
I’d seen it happen already once today. After evening prayers, where the entire camp had gathered around Noorsham to be blessed by the same hands he’d used to burn people alive. Then his disciples had lined up in front of him eagerly. We looked on curiously from the side as two of his disciples appeared, hauling two huge sacks that they set down next to him. I watched as he reached inside the first and pulled out a loaf of fresh-looking bread and handed it to the first person. They moved aside quickly. I didn’t realise how hungry I was until we saw the food. The next person shuffled along; the man after him got another identical loaf. A little girl stepped up next, hands extended eagerly. But before Noorsham could feed her, the woman behind her spoke up loudly.
‘She wasn’t at prayers today.’
Noorsham drew away from the little girl as sharply as if she were a snake. ‘Mira, is this true?’ It sounded more like an accusation than a question. The little girl went silent. ‘Tell me the truth, Mira,’ he was saying. ‘I’ll know if you lie.’
‘I lost track of the sun,’ she admitted finally.
As he raised his hand towards her I was suddenly worried I was about to see the little girl burn alive. I started to draw forwards, and I could feel Jin shifting next to me, too, neither of us sure what we were going to do. But he only rested a hand on her cheek. ‘If you want to eat in the morning, you will join us at worship instead of playing in the mountains.’ The girl was pushed out of the line without food.
Noorsham saw me watching him. I’d taken a step forwards without realising it. He reached into the bag and held out his closed hands towards me. I didn’t move straightaway, but Noorsham didn’t move on. Didn’t turn back to the woman who had sold out young Mira and was shifting restlessly. Waiting to reclaim her leader’s attention. Finally I extended my hands towards my brother. And he dropped an orange in my palms.
I stared at it, disbelieving, even as Noorsham’s attention shifted back to the disciples in his line. I hadn’t seen a fresh orange for the first sixteen years of my life. Not until I got to the rebel camp, far from this dusty dead-earthed part of the desert where nothing could grow. Fruit around these parts came stewed in cans so that it could survive the long desert journey to us.
It was impossible that I was holding a fresh orange. Except it was real. When I peeled it, the rind caked under my fingernails, and the intoxicating smell of fresh citrus filled the dusty desert air. And there was no mistaking the burst of sweet flavour when I ate it.
It was unsettling. Out of place. The whole thing, this whole camp. It worried me in a way I couldn’t wholly put my finger on.
I turned over restlessly in my bedroll. I hated being alone with my thoughts. They churned through my head like a desert storm, dust scattering every which way, too quick to catch. I needed to talk to Jin. I didn’t care that it was against whatever rules they seemed to have here. I slipped out of my bedroll as quietly as I could, casting around to make sure there were no wakeful eyes watching me sneak away as I wove my way through the rest of the bodies of sleeping women.
I was almost out when a flicker of light above us caught my eye. I stopped, ducking quickly so I was low to the ground. Too low for the light to find me among the rocks and sleeping bodies. And I waited, for whatever night-time patrol this was to pass.
A few moments later, Noorsham appeared above me on the slope. He was moving through the dark by a dim light emanating from his hands, a dulled version of his destructive power. He was walking a few paces above me.
I hesitated. Of all the people to get caught by, Noorsham would be the worst, that was for damn sure. I ought to go back, lie down, close my eyes, pretend to be asleep until dawn and then we could all leave in the morning with no one getting turned to ashes. But I already knew I wasn’t fooling myself, pretending I might do the smart thing for once in my life. I waited a few heartbeats, until he was a safe distance ahead of me, and then I moved to follow him.
He led me past the edge of his makeshif
t civilisation, to where the ground started to slope upwards above the camp. I moved as gingerly as I could, careful to stay far out of the circle of light cast by his hands, trying to remember where to step on the uneven ground by watching the light ahead of me as we climbed further and further up the mountain slope. Until, finally, we reached the entrance to the mines. Noorsham pressed forwards without hesitating, entering the dark mouth of the mountains, his hands spilling a sea of light across the rough stone walls.
I hesitated where I was crouched just below him on the slope, moving on all fours to avoid sliding rocks that would give me away. If I entered that tunnel, there was nowhere to hide.
But I’d come this far.
I moved up the last few feet to the entrance, following him into the mountain.
Ahead of me, Noorsham moved with the confidence of someone who had taken this route a thousand times before. When the path forked, he took the left tunnel without hesitation. He passed the debris abandoned by miners without so much as glancing down. He did not slow when we wove through places where the mountain had collapsed into hideous charred and melted rock. A result of the moment he had unleashed his power inside this mountain, killing most of the people in it.
We were deep into the old mines when he turned right and walked through what looked like a solid wall. I stopped sharply behind him as he vanished, then quickly rushed forwards, already afraid of losing him. As I got closer I realised it wasn’t solid rock. It was a tiny side passage in the mountain, so much narrower than the tunnels made by man, I likely would’ve mistaken it for a fissure in the rocks if I was walking by. The light of Noorsham’s hands was still just leaking out around my feet. If I waited any longer I would lose it. I would be left alone in the dark.
I plunged after him.
It wasn’t a long tunnel. I’d maybe walked a dozen paces when it ended suddenly. I staggered to an abrupt stop as the narrow tunnel opened into a cave. Noorsham was ahead of me, moving deeper into the cavern. In the light cast by his hands I could see a perfectly formed domed ceiling above us, and smooth even walls.
We were deep into the mountain now. I could feel the weight of it pressing in all around us, as if the stone was trying to reclaim this chamber. Like it knew the cave was out of place, hadn’t been formed by nature. But I could tell it wasn’t made by human hands, either. Not something this size, this perfectly made.
In the center of the cave sat a huge stone chest, large enough to fit a person. I ran my hand along the narrow fissure of the entrance. There was no way something that size came through this gap. As Noorsham approached it, I saw that there was no break between the chest’s sides and the floor of the cave. The chest was carved out of the mountain itself. Like the whole cavern had been hollowed out around it. The light danced across its uneven surface, casting into relief the images that adorned the side. Elegantly twisting vines were chiseled into the stone, hanging heavy with etched figs and dates and grapes and oranges and pomegranates and dozens of other fruits I’d never seen in the desert. Some I didn’t even recognise now. There were scrapes of colour, too, as if the carved fruits had been brightly painted once upon a time.
And then Noorsham’s hands dashed light across the far wall of the cave. And I forgot all about the stone chest.
The sight was gone as quickly as it had come, plunged back into darkness as my brother dropped to his knees, prostrating himself in prayer, pressing his hands into the ground so that the only lights left in the cave were two glowing embers trapped between his palms and the stone ground. I could see his lips moving in silent supplication, his features seeming to melt into the gloom as he raised his head, slowly. Then, as he raised his hands, the wall came into view again, one inch at a time, like the dawn revealing the landscape hidden by the night.
And I knew I hadn’t been hallucinating.
The wall was every colour we never saw in the Last County painted in intricate patterns. It was as bright as the Sultan’s gardens, decorated with scenes of a great battle, of the Destroyer of Worlds emerging from Eremot, of the First Hero being made by the hands of the Djinn, of beasts never seen in the desert or the mountains. The wall looked like a twin to the one that led into our lost sanctuary in the Dev’s Valley.
And just like at the rebel camp, in the middle of it all, under a long string of words in the first language, crowning it like an arch, was a painted door. Our door had led into the rebel camp, a valley abandoned by a Djinni and claimed as our home. Where did this one lead?
‘I’ve come here to pray about what to do about you, you know.’ Noorsham’s voice in the silence made me jump. He wasn’t looking at me, but he must’ve seen me. There was no point hiding. I stepped fully into the cave, moving towards the light.
‘What is this place?’ I asked.
Noorsham shifted so that he was facing me, sitting cross-legged on the floor, palms turned upwards. ‘I thought I was dead when the mountain fell on me,’ Noorsham said. He meant when he had first discovered his power, and the mines had collapsed around him in the fire he made. ‘Even though it hadn’t crushed me, I was sure I would starve or suffocate, down here in the dark. And then, wandering, fleeing the fire and the death that I didn’t yet understand, I found this.’ He rested one hand against the chest in the middle of the room, though he never took his gaze off me, his eyes more unsettling now that we were alone than they had been out in Sazi. ‘What do you most crave to eat at this very moment, sister?’
I didn’t answer, but all the same an image of a peach came into my mind. I wasn’t sure why. They had been in abundance at the palace – we could pick them straight off the trees in the harem.
Noorsham pushed against the lid of the chest. It slid free with a teeth-grinding screech of stone against stone.
It was filled with peaches. Hundreds of them. They were as fresh as if displayed at a market stall in Izman, as if they’d just been picked. And yet they were under a mountain far from any peach tree.
I moved forwards, next to my brother, and picked one up hesitantly. I was half expecting an illusion. But the flesh was soft and downy, and when I took a bite, juice dribbled down my hands. It tasted like another world, not of this dusty desert mountain but of far-off gardens and brighter days. If it was an illusion, it was a damn good one. It seemed more like magic. Not the kind that the Gamanix invented, but the kind that came from creatures more powerful than us, left over from stories and legends and great and terrible times.
Real magic, that was how he was feeding his hungry disciples.
Noorsham watched me as I devoured the peach, right down to the stone in the middle. ‘I know why you’re really here, you know,’ he said calmly. ‘You came looking for war and destruction. I saw it in the Eye. And yet I deceived my people for your sake.’
‘You know that Eye of yours isn’t some God-sent tool, don’t you?’ I picked my words carefully; I was on unsteady ground here. ‘It’s an invention, and you killed the people who brought it here.’ Noorsham just smiled placidly back at that, like he felt sorry for me being so naive. ‘How many more people have you killed because of that thing, Noorsham?’
‘Only those I needed to, in order to protect my people.’ If he felt any remorse for what he’d done, it didn’t show. ‘I am meant to do something great in this life, Amani.’ From another man, that might sound like pretension. But the way Noorsham said it, it was just certainty. And he was a Demdji – he couldn’t lie. ‘My mother always said so,’ Noorsham said simply. ‘She had been promised it.’
By our father, I realised. Shira had told me, in the palace prison, that Fereshteh had granted her a gift for their son: an untainted wish, freely given, so that it wouldn’t turn against her as most did in the stories. Shira, trapped in an endless cycle of political machinations, had wished that her son would be Sultan one day. Hala’s mother, poor and greedy, had wished for gold. And Noorsham’s mother, caught in a small life in a small mountain town, had wished for greatness for her son.
I wondered, not for the
first time, what my mother had wished. For me to get the hell out of Dustwalk, since she never could? For me to know a bigger world? I glanced down at the peach stone in my hand. I doubted even she could have anticipated that the world was this big.
‘When the mountain fell on me,’ Noorsham went on, ‘after I was given my gift, I thought I might die before I could fulfil my destiny. And then I was rescued. I was told that I was indeed destined to do great things.’ He had a faraway look in his eyes. ‘I thought at first it was to drive the foreigners out of our desert. But then I failed. And I came back here, back home. I found this desert dying. Deadshot was tearing itself apart. Dustwalk was starving. Sazi was despairing. And I understood. It was my duty to save them. I must save as many of our people as I had killed.’
That would be a whole lot of people. He had flattened Dassama, an oasis city in the northern desert. He had burned men from Sazi alive in the same mines we were in now. Bahi. Bilal’s men.
‘You’re still killing people,’ I said.
‘Only the ones who come to me with harm in their hearts.’ Noorsham didn’t blink. ‘Ones like you. Ashra’s Wall is a sacred barrier, you know.’ So he had seen that in the Eye, too. Damn.
‘I know,’ I said. And I did. More than anyone I understood what stories could mean when they were true. ‘But there are people on the other side … I need to get them out, Noorsham. I can’t leave them there.’
‘Ashra’s Wall is—’
‘I know, I know.’ I raised my voice without meaning to. ‘But, Noorsham, this country is being ripped apart. You have only seen some of it. That’s why the Last County was in trouble. That’s why you had to save them. And there are people on the other side of that wall who can save a whole lot more people than this – who could change the whole country. For good.’
Noorsham looked unmoved. ‘I believe that if God had wanted them to save people, he would have given them a gift like mine—’
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