Hero at the Fall

by Alwyn Hamilton

  When she spotted us in a lull in the fray, her face shifted. She grabbed me, pulling us towards her as we rounded a corner into a small impasse, temporary shelter. ‘You’re alive,’ she said, embracing me even as Jin took up a position watching the streets around us, rifle at the ready.

  ‘I’m alive,’ I agreed. ‘Shazad –’ I drew away from her – ‘Sam didn’t—’

  Jin’s rifle went off suddenly, cutting me off with a bang. A cry came from the street near us as the threat fell.

  ‘We can grieve the dead later.’ Shazad shook her head quickly, guessing what I couldn’t say. But her voice still sounded tight. ‘For now, I need a barricade across the palace road and Golder’s Way to stop the soldiers retreating any further than the river. The streets start to climb up there; we’re lost if they gain higher ground. Can you get me that?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I nodded, glancing quickly up above us. ‘I think I can. But listen, Shazad, you might be able to get reinforcements out on the streets. The people of Izman – we got them to riot once. If you can get them out in the street in Ahmed’s name, then we outnumber the soldiers. I think we can end this.’

  ‘We don’t exactly have time to go door to door,’ Shazad said as something exploded nearby. None of us flinched.

  ‘The Zungvox,’ I said. ‘I reckon it’s still in the great prayer house.’ I remembered seeing it, the wiring of Leyla’s invention curled around the inside of the dome like a snake, designed to allow one man to speak to the whole city. For the Sultan to threaten and control us. But we could use it another way. We could get the fallen Abdals to speak for us.

  Shazad’s eyes darted quickly in that way they did when she was working out a plan faster than any of us could. ‘All right, here’s what we’re going to do: Amani, you get me some barricades so we can keep fighting. And flag down the twins, get them to move as many of the Abdals away from the walls and into the city as we can.’

  ‘Yes, General.’ I saluted her. And for the first time, Shazad didn’t correct me on her title.

  ‘Jin,’ she called on him, ‘how about we get your brother to the great prayer house. It’s about time the city knew he was alive.’

  ‘We can manage that between the two of us.’ He drew back into the shelter of the alley, reloading his gun. ‘Any sign of the Sultan?’

  ‘He’s on the battlements.’ She squinted up at the walls. ‘But I haven’t been able to pin him down. The orders are that if anyone gets the shot with the Sultan in their crosshairs … take it.’

  Jin and Shazad darted out of the shelter of the small street, back towards the fray, even as I turned to the nearest door. It took one burst of sand to shatter the locks, and then I pushed through. The ground floor of the house was empty, but as I pounded up the stairs I could hear voices and small whimpers and cries from behind doors. But I wasn’t here to hurt anyone; I just needed higher ground.

  I burst on to their roof. From up here, I could see the end of Golder’s Way. Shazad had made us all memorise the map of Izman. I could already feel the desert rising below my hands. The sand roared to life, answering my call as it surged in a storm up from the ground and slithered over Izman like some great swarm.

  I brought it crashing down at the place where Golder’s Way met the river, building an immense blockade that no soldier would get past, stopping their escape short.

  I glanced eastwards. I couldn’t make out the palace road from here, the other point of retreat. I needed to move. I would lose precious time running back into the streets and fighting my way through. But it was too far to jump to the next roof.

  A thought struck me, and quickly I gathered a handful of sand towards me. I tightened the grains into a bridge that I arched to the next building. I ran across it without hesitation or fear that it might give out below me. And sure enough, not a grain of sand faltered as I dashed to the next building and then the next after that.

  Finally I could see my target, the end of the road where the ground sloped up. And sure enough, men in gold uniforms were moving towards it in something that looked like retreat. I cut them off, a wall of sand halting their escape.

  A little way off, Izz soared above the city. My heart leaped as I grabbed at the sand, sending it up in a burst in his path, trying to get his attention. Izz veered violently to avoid it, but he saw me standing on the roof, waving my arms at him.

  He soared down towards me, turning into a boy and landing in front of me. ‘You’re alive.’ He grinned gleefully.

  ‘For now,’ I said. I didn’t have time to celebrate. I told him quickly what we needed, and in another moment he was gone again, launching himself from the roof, a boy plunging down into the streets.

  A moment later a huge blue Roc rose back up, talons around one of the dead Abdals, their spark of Djinni fire gone with the release of Fereshteh. But the Zungvox was Gamanix technology, not Mirajin magic. I had to pray it still worked.

  I caught sight of one of the Abdals lying on the street below me. I picked it up in a surge of sand, carrying it as far as I could, like a leaf on the wind, before I lost sight of it.

  Izz returned, plucking another Adbal off the wall, narrowly avoiding a bullet as he did. We worked as quickly as we could, Maz joining us after he noticed what we were doing, dispersing the Abdals as far and wide as we were able. Scattering the Sultan’s mouthpieces across the city.

  All the while, every passing moment that we didn’t hear Ahmed speak, I repeated the same thing under my breath over and over again.

  ‘Jin is alive. Shazad is alive. Ahmed is alive. Jin is alive …’ So long as I could say it out loud, it was true. So long as I could say it out loud, it meant they were still fighting their way through the crowd to the great prayer house.

  And then I heard it on the air. Ahmed’s voice.

  ‘People of Izman!’

  I glanced west towards the prayer house, relief crushing my chest. He had made it to Leyla’s invention.

  ‘People of Miraji –’ Ahmed’s voice carried through the thousands of fallen Abdals – ‘there is fighting on your streets. But we do not come as invaders. Instead, we come as saviours. My father has ruled you with fear and with foreign steel. He has turned you over to enemies and hung your daughters and your sisters from his walls. He has killed his enemies in cold blood. He has killed his own family, his father and his sons alike. He has taken this country from you and enslaved you. We are here to return it to you. And if you would fight with us, for your freedom and for your country, we would welcome you.’

  It was as if the city shifted below me. Not in some cataclysmic moving of the earth, as Zaahir had done in the mountains, but in some way that was purely human. The First Beings might be all-powerful, but they had made us for the one thing that they could not do: to lay down our lives for what we believed in.

  It was the shift of an entire city remembering what we were made for and standing up at once.

  And we stood up and fought.

  I wasn’t conscious of time as the battle for Izman raged on. Once I rejoined the fray, I stopped being one girl and melded with the Rebellion, like they were part of me. Moving obstacles out of the way, cutting a path to our enemy. From time to time I heard Shazad’s voice taking over the Zungvox, giving orders and guidance to a city that would fall to chaos without them.

  The fighting carried on for hours.

  Soldiers belonging to the Sultan clashed with our people.

  Then there came a scream from the sky.

  It was a hideous noise. And when I looked up, I saw a horrifying sight.

  Izz was writhing in the air, high above us, thrashing amid flames. A lit arrow had caught his left wing. It was burning a violent mix of blue and red flames as his feathers ignited.

  He screamed and plummeted his way towards the water to extinguish himself, trailing smoke behind him in a black train.

  Cries went up around me. From somewhere a few streets away, Maz shot into the air after his twin, shifting shapes frantically, from kestrel to Roc to sp
arrow, looking for the place where Izz had landed. For a way to help his brother.

  Suddenly it was as if I were watching it all from far away. As if only half of me was standing on the battlefield and another half of me was standing in a green palace garden on a warm day, a lake full of birds in front of me, pulling back an arrow to strike one down.

  Except that I wasn’t the one holding the bow now.

  I tracked the arc that the arrow must have come from. I was a good shot. I would find it. And sure enough, there he was.

  I saw the Sultan before he saw me. He was standing atop the wall, armoured and dressed in uniform. I drew my gun and took aim. I knew it was impossible that he heard the click of my pistol, but his head turned my way. His gaze was hot, his stance cool. His head tilted ever so slightly as he drew his bow back, aiming for me now. His throat was just a little exposed.

  I could make that shot. I dropped my pistol, gathering the sand to me instead.

  I pulled my power backwards, like a bullet in a gun. Like I had just one bullet left and everything riding on it back in the pistol pit in Dustwalk.

  I saw his hand tense to release the arrow even as the sand flew from my hand, heading for exposed skin, tearing towards my target with all the force of the desert behind it.

  I was a good shot.

  I didn’t tend to miss.

  Chapter 47

  The Rule of the Good Prince Ahmed

  Once, in the desert country of Miraji, there was a prince who took his father’s throne.

  Many people told many stories of that day.

  They said that the Rebel Prince Ahmed fought a glorious battle against a cowardly opponent, his father, who hid behind his walls and let his soldiers fall in waves. They said that such was the Sultan’s cruelty the people turned on him as well. And that when the Sultan fell, his armies laid down their weapons at the prince’s feet and surrendered to their new ruler’s mercy gratefully.

  They said that when the Rebel Prince Ahmed entered Izman, flowers rained from the windows, thrown by jubilant people grateful to be freed. His Demdji sister, Delila, who had begun this fight with her birth, blew kisses to the men as they passed, happy to at last be returning home to the palace she had been forced to flee. And the Blue-Eyed Bandit caught the flowers, weaving them into a crown for her prince as they advanced towards the palace.

  But those were stories. They would never tell the truth of what I remembered of that day.

  I remembered carnage on the streets, not carnations. The confusion after the Sultan fell, as men continued to fight. Good men, not wicked. Men who were just following orders given to them by a dead ruler. Men whose families would pour from their houses later to weep over their bodies. I knew how the Sultan fell, because I killed him, and I would have nightmares about that for months afterwards. And sometimes his face would change to Hala’s. Sometimes to Shira’s. Or Sam’s.

  But the storytellers would never know that. No one would know that except for Jin, who would wake in the night when I did, ready to fight until he realised that the threat was in my mind and he couldn’t defend me from it.

  Even if people had known the truth, they wouldn’t have been interested in telling it. Flowers pouring from windows like falling stars made a better tale.

  The stories would never tell that after the Sultan fell, as we crossed the city, we were reminded of the cost of war with every single body. That as I pushed my way through the streets, I found Samir, a bullet through his chest. A kid from Dustwalk, like me, who’d joined us in Sazi. It didn’t matter how well we had trained him. War took lives and changed the ones that were left behind.

  The stories would remember that Izz survived his fall at the Sultan’s hands but not that his mangled, burned wing would turn to a mangled arm that would never fully heal, no matter what shape he took. He had a limp when he was on all fours, and his wing flapped hopelessly when he tried the shape of a bird. Maz stopped shifting into creatures that could fly altogether, because he didn’t want to go somewhere his brother couldn’t follow.

  I remembered how thick the air was with the smoke from funeral pyres that night. We burned as many bodies as we could. And we burned four empty pyres, too.

  The first one was for Sam. There was nothing left of him to burn, though we tore up the tiles of the palace looking all the same. But it was only ashes and collapsed Abdal bodies down there. If I hadn’t known better I might’ve thought he’d just slipped away through a wall after all, run off to some other adventure. Captain Westcroft told me that in Albis they believed that when you died and were buried, your body blossomed into a tree or a field of flowers. A new life. So we covered Sam’s funeral pyre in flowers, cut from the vines in the harem. The same kind Sam had plucked the first night I met him.

  We set a ring on Hala’s empty pyre, gold for our lost golden girl.

  For our Demdji of a thousand faces, we used one of Shazad’s khalats that Imin had liked to borrow.

  A crown for Shira, our dead Sultima.

  Bodies long lost because they died in the war, not this battle. Other ones. But we finally had the time to mourn them now that it was over.

  *

  We burned the Sultan, too, and his sons stood next to the pyre as they ought to do. Even if they were the reason he was dead. But that was the way. We were mortal. Sons were always meant to replace their fathers.

  The pyres burned until the moon wasn’t visible through the smoke.

  I remembered finally collapsing into a bed that was familiar because I had slept in it when I was a prisoner of the harem. I didn’t know where else to go in the huge empty palace we had conquered. I woke to the noise of the pillow moving under a new weight as Jin came and lay down. I shifted just enough to let his arms curl around me and pull me to him.

  ‘No men allowed in the harem,’ I remembered mumbling half-asleep into his shoulder as he tried to get comfortable. When he laughed, I felt it through my whole body, and the joy at still being alive swelled so quickly through me all at once that I thought I might shatter.

  ‘I think they make an exception for princes,’ he said into my ear before kissing me.

  I remembered noticing that we were both still wearing our weapons and wondering how long it would take for the fight to really leave us, even now that we had won.

  But the stories were not made from our memories; those were of interest only to us. The stories were made to tell a tale people wanted to hear. And people wanted to know that we had won and all was well.

  Ahmed became a legend across the desert within days: the Resurrected Prince, come back from the dead to save the city. The whole country. The stories said that he had burned the foreign invaders in his path before taking on his father.

  But it was the Sultan who had done that. Who had dispelled our would-be occupiers. He had helped us and made Miraji safe from foreign rule. The massacre of the Gallan was the only reason we were able to seize the city at sunset without risk of losing it at dawn.

  But stories liked things to be simple. The Sultan was the villain. We were the heroes. And we had given the people of Miraji a new prince, kinder than his father. A new desert, free of occupation. A new dawn.

  *

  I struggled to clasp the sun-shaped medallion around my neck as I walked, fumbling awkwardly with the chain for a few moments before I finally had to stop moving.

  I was late.

  I leaned against a mosaic of some swans that stretched the length of this hallway through the palace, facing a line of arches that opened on to a placid-looking pond as I fumbled with the tiny hook at the back.

  I’d never owned a piece of jewellery before, and I would’ve happily carried on that way if Ahmed hadn’t given me this medallion. It marked me as one of the new Sultan’s advisors on the temporary council he had formed to untangle the business of making a new country. It was symbolic, which was exactly why I was supposed to wear it.

  I tilted my head forwards, making the hair Shazad had so artfully arranged fall over my
face. It had grown out since it had been shorn in the palace all those months back. It was long enough now to snag in the clasp of the necklace if I didn’t take care. Long enough that I could’ve put it up, but Shazad hadn’t allowed that. Instead she’d run her hands through my dark locks a few times with that knack she had, and a hint of oil on her fingers, until they looked artfully dishevelled to her satisfaction. She’d done my make-up, too, smudging dark kohl hastily around the eyes and red across my mouth so that it matched the khalat I was wearing, which was the colour of a sunrise. Red like the dawn, but edged in gold braiding twisted into the shape of the skyline of Izman along the hem. I looked like I’d come fresh from battle. Which I realised, as she left, was the whole idea. Shazad looked slick and sleek – a leader, a general. I was playing the part of the Blue-Eyed Bandit, roguish and not entirely fit for polite company. We were all half-character now, for the rest of our lives, any time we appeared in public. It was a fair price to pay for victory.

  Finally the clasp closed with a satisfying snick. I tossed my hair back over my shoulders and ran as fast as I could without losing my shoes, heading to the gardens.

  The Shihabian celebrations had begun at dusk. Here and throughout the city, the night was made bright by lanterns. Lit with oil this time, not stolen Djinni fire. There had been talk, though, of replicating what Leyla did without needing to murder First Beings. Of having light without fire. Of making some more Abdals who could defend us if we needed. We were still at war with Gallandie, after all. Though I guessed it would be a long time before they rallied together and came for our country again. There was talk that their empire in the north was crumbling. The marriage alliance and peace with Albis had failed. They were a falling empire surrounded by enemies. Including us. And Albis. Ahmed had forged a tentative peace with the Queen of Albis. Fighting for a different peace than his father had forged with the Gallan. One where we still ruled ourselves. We had allies now. Not occupiers.