Hero at the Fall (Rebel of the Sands #3)(6)

Many were calling it Ahmed’s Wall. Some had even begun praying to it. Ahmed’s Acolytes, so called. Men and women who singed their clothing and smeared their faces in ash and spent their days trying to get as close to the great barrier of fire as they could in order to pray for it to hold against the invaders at our gates. No matter how many times the Sultan’s soldiers turned them away, they kept coming back, dawn after dawn. A few had even died, getting too close to the barrier. Disintegrating like the stone Jin had thrown at it the day it appeared. They preached that Ahmed had saved us all.

I hated to admit it, but it was possible the barrier had saved us. Though I knew it was nothing to do with Ahmed.

From up here on our perch I could see the lines of blue tents encircling our city with military precision. Waiting. Just like they had been for weeks. After the twins saw them on the horizon, it wasn’t long before they got to the city. But that was where their invasion stalled. The couldn’t get through the barrier on their side any more than we could. Their bullets disintegrated against the barrier of fire too. Soon enough the Gallan had gone silent. Even if they hadn’t gone anywhere else. We all knew better than to think they would give up so easy.

The Gallan had occupied our desert for nearly two decades. They had put our Sultan on his throne, helping him usurp his father and brother. And in return he had let them impose their laws on us. Let their twisted beliefs guide them to kill Demdji and First Beings. Force our poorest people into dangerous labour to churn out enough weapons for them to fight their wars. Inflict their violence on us without fear of repercussion from the law. The Sultan had let it happen and waited until the Gallan didn’t serve his purposes any more. Only then had he tried to annihilate them using Noorsham, my brother, a Demdji who could flatten cities. He had turned the thing they hated most, magic, against them. But we’d got in the way before Noorsham could finish them off. I wanted the Gallan out as much as anyone, but he would’ve killed a whole lot of Mirajin citizens on his warpath, too. In the end the only thing the Sultan achieved was making enemies of our occupiers. And now here we were, under siege from the largest empire in the world.

They seemed to think they could wait us out on the other side of that wall of fire. But I knew a thing or two about the Sultan. He didn’t play games he didn’t think he could win.

I wondered how many Mirajin villages and towns the Gallan had stormed through on the way to Izman. How many people had died in their path as the Sultan waited for them to come to him.

The Sultan had claimed to me once that his purpose was to protect his country. That he would make Miraji as a force to be reckoned with, one that no foreign army would occupy ever again. And maybe it would be. But every step towards that looked to me like a little more power in the Sultan’s hands, and bodies being trampled on the way. The people of Miraji had not agreed to be pawns in this game the Sultan was playing against foreign invaders.

The Rebellion was going to end the game. As soon as we figured out how the hell to get out of this city.

We were going to get Ahmed back. And Rahim back. And Shazad. And Delila. And all the others who had been captured. And we were going to end this. As soon as we figured out how the hell to get out of this city.

A bead of sweat tracked its way from under my sheema, down my neck and under my kurta.

‘You all right, Bandit?’ Jin asked me, his voice low next to my ear.

I’d have liked to have been able to lie and tell him that I was fit as a fiddle, but since I couldn’t I didn’t answer at all. ‘It’s time.’ I said, spreading my hands out across the city below, sprawling my fingers as far as they would go. ‘Get ready.’

I might not be able to reach the dunes beyond the Sultan’s artificial barricade, but this city was full of desert dust. It was in its bones. Its very soul.

I pulled. The wound in my side twinged with pain like a muscle protesting use. It had been doing that ever since the metal was removed from my skin. The scar on my side pained me like it remembered the iron and was fighting back against my Demdji power. It had only been a twinge at first, but it was getting worse every time. And once or twice I felt like the sand might slip out of my grip altogether.

I ignored it as best I could, as the dust rose out of the streets in a golden haze, like steam rising off a bath. From between cobblestones and where it was trapped in folds of clothes and resting on leaves in roof gardens. Filling the air, swirling up and gathering together. A thousand tiny grains of sand, nothing on their own, scattered across the city, but joining together into a riotous storm.

Somewhere below us in the crowd gathered to watch the Sultim trials was Hala, bundled up to her eyebrows against prying gazes that might notice her golden skin. She was with two other rebels who’d escaped with us, Riad and Karam. I trusted them both to keep her safe – or carry her away if the illusion became too much for her.

It was an illusion on a bigger scale than Hala had ever managed before: the Blessed Sultima come back to life. My cousin Shira, exactly as she looked in my nightmares, her head detached, her eyes full of accusations, projected into thousands of people’s minds at once to deliver a message designed to spark doubt over the Sultan and stall the Sultim trials.

It was a desperate, risky thing to do, stretching Hala’s powers to their limit. But we had to do something. The last thing we needed was the country falling in line behind a new prince while we were trying to rescue the old one. But stalling the Sultim trials was only our second purpose.