by K A Doore
Ahead, Heru’s bound white camel stood out in the darkness, his own white-clothed form hunched over his work. Thana’s approach was as silent as a snake. Regret flashed through her; Heru was away from the caravan and thoroughly engrossed in his work. This would have been a perfect opportunity to finish her contract. But she’d made her decision.
She was only a few feet away when Heru shifted, looked up. She froze. He couldn’t have possibly heard her. Was she out of practice? Then his camel stepped to the side and she saw the horizon.
A band of clouds glowed, curling and rising into the sky. For a moment, Thana was confused. Hadn’t she been facing west? The sunrise should be behind her. Then the clouds thickened and darkened and began to spread like torch oil across the horizon, the glow inside a hazy red. She was facing west. The world lurched. That wasn’t the sun.
“I suppose you already know what that is,” said Heru.
Thana sucked in a breath, but he was still watching the cloud expand, become many. She closed the distance between them, her throat thick with fear.
“A fire.”
This near Heru, she could smell peppermint and leather. But now the wind also carried the stench of smoke and flames. A paralyzing numbness started in her chest and spread outward.
“Looks like Djet arrived ahead of us,” said Heru. “I was afraid of this. He’ll be able to amass a great army of bound now. Although to what end, I still don’t know.”
“What is it? What’s burning?” asked Thana. She was wrong, she was mistaken, it couldn’t possibly be—
Heru turned to her, his face lit on one side by the orange glow of the rising sun and on the other by the red flames of a burning city.
“Ghadid.”
22
Heru’s tone held neither satisfaction nor amusement. He had stated a fact, one that cut through Thana as easily as a blade. Her city, her home, her family—
“No.” She took a step back. Then another. “No. It’s just a building that’s caught. Poorly stored grain. Or—or a really large bonfire.”
But the words sounded hollow, even to her. There was too much smoke, too much fire, spreading too quickly.
Heru said nothing. He only watched her and that was worse than any insult he could have thrown. An abyss unfurled in her chest and spread its cold, numbing tendrils through her veins. If she stood here much longer, she’d never move again.
“We have to go, we have to help them.”
Thana started to run back to the caravan—nothing but flickers of light from swinging tea braziers now—but not before Heru said, simply, “It’s too late.”
No. No. It wasn’t too late. The fire was big, but not that big. She could still reach them, still help put out the fire. It was a quarter of the city, maybe a third. A small disaster. Not a catastrophe. Ghadid needed her.
The caravan was boiling over with voices and movement. A group had formed in the front and at its center stood Salaz, the caravan’s leader. Although the rising sun and brightening sky had diminished the brilliance of the fire’s far-off glow, the dark smoke had become a night that sprouted and spread from the wrong direction.
Heru passed her on his camel and pulled up just short of Salaz. Mo cut through the crowd and intercepted Thana. Her face was ashen and her lips pressed tight as she took Thana’s elbow and dragged her to a stop.
“They don’t want to go any closer,” said Mo.
“You mean they don’t want to help.”
“What can they do? It looks like the whole city’s on fire. There’s a well a day north where they can replenish their supplies, but they’d have to go now or risk running dry.”
“Are you going with them?”
“Of course not,” said Mo. “That’s my home.”
Thana pulled away from Mo and continued toward the group. Heru stood impassively by while the Azal gestured widely in a rare show of emotion, their voices tinged with fear.
Thana shouldered her way into the cluster and asked loudly, “What about the other crescent cities? Won’t you go to one of them?”
Salaz shook his head. “There’s no guarantee that what happened in this city didn’t also happen to them.”
“And what do you think happened?”
The Azal exchanged a look. A woman responded, “Clearly, the city has been attacked.”
“There’s no evidence of that,” pushed Thana. “A few platforms are on fire, that’s all.”
“That’s not just a few platforms,” said Salaz. “No, come nightfall, there’ll be little left of that city. I won’t risk my people.” His gaze flicked across Thana and the pity in his eyes made her even angrier. “I’m sorry.”
“They need our help!”
Salaz stared at the ever-spreading smoke. “There’s nothing we can do.”
Thana clenched her fists. This was her home and all they could do was discuss it as if it were already a corpse. Her city wasn’t lost. Even now, she knew her father would be directing sand and water efforts and her mother would be gathering their cousins. And Amastan—
A terrifying, heedless energy pulsed through her, wiping away the fear and cold. She stalked away from the group. She was going to help and she didn’t care who joined her. She swung up onto her camel with practiced ease. She touched its neck—although whether to reassure the beast or herself, she wasn’t sure—then yanked it away from the grasses and forced it instead to face the distant flames. The camel shuddered beneath her and took two steps back.
Mo appeared beside her, staff in hand. “What’re you doing?”
“We don’t know what happened, but we can still help. My family—” Thana swallowed, shook her head. “Look, while they decide where to flee, people are dying. If you want to dawdle here—”
“Who said I was staying?” Mo snatched the lead of a passing camel, drawing the beast to her. “I was just worried you’d insist on going off alone.” Mo hoisted herself onto its back in one smooth motion. She laid her staff across her lap. “Let’s go.”
Thana spurred her camel forward, then leaned back and took the whip out of its holster. She gave the camel’s rump a solid thwack. The camel grunted, but eased into a loping stride. Another thwack urged it into a full gallop. Thana held tight, digging her knees in to keep from being thrown off by the camel’s rolling gait. She heard the beat of another camel’s stride but didn’t glance back. Mo would be close behind.
The dismal glow bulged and the smoke soon covered half the sky. A westerly wind drove the clouds their direction. Something more substantial than wind or cloud drifted down like freshly plucked feathers. Ahead, the smoke now obscured so much sky that even the sand looked gray. No—that wasn’t right. Thana leaned over and watched her camel’s feet break through the gray to sand beneath.
The gray clung to her mount and clothes now. It neither dissolved nor melted, but accumulated in gradually thickening layers. Thana caught a falling clump on her tongue and tasted bitterness and smoke. Ash. Thana gagged. This was her home floating through the air.
The ash thickened, in the air and on the ground. Her camel’s hesitation shuddered up through its stride and she whipped it on before it could balk. Ghadid reared up and out of the sands, its burning platforms so many warning beacons. Thana didn’t heed them.
The level of destruction became more obvious as they neared, as did the ominous silence. There were no cries or shouts or other sounds of life. Only the fire’s roar suffused the air. But that didn’t mean her city was beyond help. Surely the distance was eating up any other noises.
Ahead, through the falling ash, a gray camel stood near the end of a metal cable. A figure hunched atop the camel, waiting. Thana drew her beast up a dozen yards distant, but the hope that flashed through her was quickly burned away when the glass charms at her waist flushed with warmth.
Then the figure straightened and some of the gray fell away, revealing white beneath. A white tagel, a white wrap, and a once-white camel, now smeared with ash.
“You took your time,�
�� called Heru.
Thana goaded her mount to join his, annoyed. She should’ve noticed when he slipped ahead of them, even with the air so thick with ash. Her camel shied, flared its nostrils, and pinned its ears back, refusing to near the dead camel. Thana pulled the beast away until it had calmed, then leaned back and followed the cable up with her gaze.
Smoke churned the air where the cable met the platform’s edge, but Thana could just make out a carriage still locked in place, intact. Not that it could help them all the way up there; if she signaled for an operator, she doubted one would appear.
Mo pulled her equally skittish mount next to Thana’s and followed her gaze. “How are we going to get up there?”
Thana dismounted and handed her lead to Mo. She rifled through her pack for a moment before finding a rope. Mo looked at her skeptically.
“I’m not very good at climbing.”
“I’m not asking you to,” said Thana. “I’ll climb up and send the carriage down for you. But we’ll have to leave the camels down here. The fire will spook them if we bring them up. They should be all right by themselves for a little while. It’s not like anyone’s around to steal them,” she added bitterly.
“I don’t think it’s safe to go up there,” said Heru. “Nor is there any reason. We have supplies enough to see us to the next well. There’s more than fire and ash in your city—I can feel blood, too.”
Thana looped the rope around her waist, ignoring him. She knotted it around the cable, then yanked on the knot to test it; it held.
“All right.” Thana rubbed sand between her hands for a better grip. “If you don’t hear from me a few minutes after I reach the top, you should probably run. Or come up and save me.”
“The first option is more prudent,” said Heru.
Mo put a hand on Thana’s shoulder, then leaned in and kissed her cheek. “Be careful.”
Heru made a strange, choking noise as Thana reached above her head to grab the cable. Then she jumped and swung her leg up, hooking it around the cable in one motion. Her shoulder protested, the weeks’-old wound not yet a memory, and she dimly realized she’d never gone back to the healer to get it repacked, and likely never would. She gritted her teeth and started climbing. Hand over hand, she pulled herself up and up. Within too few minutes, her arms were burning, her shoulder pounding, she was out of breath—and she was only a quarter of the way. She’d been too slack with her training while gone.
The mind is everything. Her mother’s favorite saying. Thana pushed on despite the pain. Her arms obeyed. She inched ever upward, focusing on the cable just ahead.
Then she was over the lip of the platform, the metal carriage just out of reach. She unhooked her legs and swung down, the ground blissfully solid, her arms little more than jelly. Keeping the rope around her waist, she peered over the platform’s edge. She tried to wave at the small figures below, but all she managed was a limp wiggle.
She untied the rope and examined the cable, which connected to the top of a tall metal pole. The carriage hung next to it. It was a simple construction: a flat square wide enough to hold several people and their bags, surrounded by a waist-high railing with a section that could be removed entirely to let people on and off. Blunt hooks curled at even intervals from both the railing and the floor. These secured the baskets and sacks and people and helped stop them from sliding off.
Thana had never operated a carriage herself, but she’d watched them carry goods and people up and down enough times to know how they worked. The operator would unlatch the carriage from the pole—like this—then take off the block that kept it from rolling down the cable—like this. Once the carriage was unlocked, the operator would undo the large knot at the end of a rope that kept the whole thing from careening, at great speed, to a sandy demise.
Although the operators were almost always large, bulky men, Thana had no trouble keeping the carriage under control as she let out the rope and guided it over the edge of the platform. With the help of multiple pulleys, the carriage was as light as dust.
The carriage settled with a poof of ash on the sand. Mo and Heru clambered on, leaving the camels and their belongings below. Thanks to the pulleys, the carriage ascended with slippery ease, but Thana still had to lean back and dig her heels in to keep it moving. By the time the carriage crossed over the platform’s edge, her arms were about ready to give.
She heaved one last time on the rope, then looped it around the hook and tied a knot. Before she’d finished securing the carriage, Heru and Mo had stepped onto firm ground. Mo looked relieved. Heru looked around.
“The fire has barely touched this place,” he announced.
Thana had avoided looking too close earlier, afraid of what she’d see, but a glance told her that Heru was right. Although the nearby buildings were gray with ash, they were otherwise untouched. While the roar of fire was louder up here, so was the silence where there should’ve been the clatter and hum of a living city. Instead of thrumming with life, the area around them echoed with abandonment.
The only thing out of place was the debris at the mouth of the road, shoved up against the walls of the buildings on either side. Chairs and metal tables and broken doors were all heaped on top of each other, as if someone had hastily cleared out their home of all its furniture and then some. Perhaps they’d thought they could save their things from the fire. Foolish.
Thana started down the road that would lead them to the platform’s center. There might be no one at the carriage station, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t find someone further on, someone who could tell them what had happened. A watchman, perhaps, or even a drum chief, walking their neighborhood to show support and maintain calm.
The smoke thickened as they headed away from the edge of the city, obscuring the rising sun and covering them with an edgeless twilight. Thana tied her tagel tight around her mouth to keep out the choking smoke. Her eyes smarted, teared up, blurred her vision. She stopped to rub them clear and that was when she noticed the blood.
It was everywhere. Smeared across the walls, the ground, even the sconces. Most of the blood had dried to a flaking brown crust, but some thicker pools had only just congealed. Thana had stepped in one of these pools. Now she jerked back, but the blood clung thick to the bottom of her sandal. A violent shudder tore through her and she tried desperately to scrape the blood off on the stones.
Mo stared wide-eyed at the mess, her nose and mouth obscured by her tagel. Heru glanced around with a curiosity that verged on appreciation, as if admiring a work of art instead of the scene of a slaughter.
“There must have been a large fight here,” he said.
“But, if so—where are the bodies?” asked Mo.
A shiver touched Thana’s spine despite the oppressive heat. An answer tickled at the back of her thoughts, but she shoved it away, refusing to acknowledge it. There was no evidence. Because that would mean—
No.
“If people died here, they would’ve taken them down to the crypts,” said Thana, sounding more reasonable than she felt. “Everyone’s just … on a different platform.”
Heru raised his eyebrows as if to say, really? But for once he kept his mouth shut. Mo’s expression darkened beneath her tagel.
They continued through emptied streets. Everywhere Thana looked, she saw the same scene: drying blood spattered across stones, bricks, and glass, but no bodies. As they crossed from one platform to the next, the blood gave way to burnt walls, broken glass, and smoldering ruins. The heat and smoke thickened and soon they passed the first fire, still burning through shattered windows. It was not the last.
Thana stopped to search a handful of buildings, pushing through broken or burnt doors to find only empty, echoing rooms. No people, no bodies—nothing. She searched only a half dozen before she gave up, the dread of finding another vacant room heavier than any lingering hope. It was as if the city had been emptied.
But that wasn’t possible. Couldn’t be possible. Ghadid wasn’t a sm
all village, easily overrun by bandits or sand. The city should have been—was—unconquerable. Even if an invading force had managed to cross the sands, even if an army had found a way to climb the cables, even if they hadn’t been rebuffed by the citizens above, even if they’d somehow made it onto Ghadid’s streets, there were still the watchmen, there were still the drum chiefs, there were still her cousins, nimble and able and deadly.
No one could conquer Ghadid. Yet clearly, someone had.
Despite the overwhelming evidence, Thana still expected to find someone, anyone, around the next corner. So she pressed on, leading Mo and Heru deeper into the city, trusting they’d follow her, knowing they had no choice. Heru’s role had finally been reversed with hers. If he wanted to keep Mo with him, he couldn’t let Thana go.
What does Heru want with Mo? asked Amastan, and not for the first time.
Thana pushed the question away as she came to a bridge between platforms. Or at least, what had been a bridge. Nothing remained now but the metal wires that had once supported wooden boards. One of two metal poles had been knocked down on their side of the gap, its wires dangling over the edge of the platform. But the other wires were still taut, one spanning the gap at ground level, the other at chest.
“Oh dust,” moaned Mo.
“It’s all right.” Thana shifted her pack so its weight rested evenly across her back, then tested the bottom wire. “As long as you hold on, you won’t fall. Just don’t look down.” The wire stayed firm under her foot. “I’ll go first.”
Heru waved a hand. “By all means.”
Thana gauged the distance, then took a breath and stepped onto the wire. It gave a little under her weight, but held. She gripped the top wire, then began sidestepping across the gap. Thana made the mistake of glancing down only once. In the overcast gloom from the clouds and smoke, the sands far below were an indistinct blur. The distance made her stomach lurch. She kept her gaze fixed on the far side after that.
A thrum in the wire made her glance back. Heru had one hand on the top wire and was staring at her with an unnerving intensity. She misstepped, but caught herself. She met Heru’s gaze. Despite his tagel, she could read his thoughts almost as he had them.
