Traitor to the Throne (Rebel of the Sands, #2)(37)

‘You’re wondering why,’ the Sultan said. I wished I wasn’t so easy to read. ‘I made the mistake last time of thinking I could control a Demdji. But there are so many loopholes. So many small gaps in my orders you could squeeze through. As a girl you are largely harmless if you do wriggle through those loopholes. As a Demdji … well, the chance of harnessing your power is not worth the price if you disobeyed and turned it against me. It would be like letting you loose in my palace with a gun.’ He mentioned guns in a cast-off comment, but it still made me nervous. He couldn’t know I was the Blue-Eyed Bandit. If he did, he’d know I was part of the Rebellion and I doubted we’d be having such a pleasant conversation. ‘The iron was Tamid’s idea again. He has been very useful since coming to the palace. He is from the Last County, too, you know – where was it, my boy?’

‘Sazi,’ Tamid said. It was a bare-faced lie. Sazi was near enough Dustwalk, but far enough away that I’d never been there until I went with Jin. It was where Noorsham was from. Where Naguib had been encamped before coming to Dustwalk. Tamid was hiding from the Sultan that we were from the same place. He hated me enough to stick iron under my skin but not to put a noose around my neck, it seemed.

I willed Tamid to look at me. But he kept his eyes firmly on the ground. I was so stupid. I’d seen him and for just a second I’d felt like nothing had changed. But I was wrong. I should’ve known that. Last time I was with Tamid I was a girl who left people behind. And he was a boy who’d never have betrayed me.

‘Your part of the desert remembers things that most of the rest of us have forgotten,’ the Sultan was saying.

‘So what good am I to you as a Demdji with no power?’ I carefully turned my attention back to the Sultan.

The Sultan smiled enigmatically. ‘Follow me and find out.’

And against my will, I felt my feet move. I just had time to glance over my shoulder to see Tamid finally look up at me, his face marked with something that looked a lot like worry, before the door closed between us.





Chapter 14

I had to follow him, but I didn’t have to shut up about it. ‘Where are we going?’ Smooth marble echoed my own words mockingly back at me as we wove our way through the palace. ‘Where are you taking me?’

The Sultan didn’t answer any of the questions I shouted at his back as I trailed him. Finally he stopped in the middle of a hallway. I halted a few paces from him. Behind us an archway twice my height opened into a small garden filled with roaming peacocks. Across from it, so as to be framed in the line of sight from the door, was a mosaic of Princess Hawa. She stood on what I guessed were the walls of Saramotai, hands spread wide as the sun rose behind her. Her eyes stared straight ahead. They were blue in this picture, too. Just like they’d been in Saramotai.

The Sultan pressed a hand to Hawa’s. I heard a click, and then the section of the wall that extended from one of Hawa’s hands to the other shifted, swinging out like a door. Behind it a long staircase plunged downward sinto darkness.

We’d passed the last guard a way back now. And there were none here. Whatever was at the bottom of those stairs was truly meant to stay secret. ‘What’s down there?’ My voice bounced eerily down the stone steps.

‘There are some things that are better to do in places where God is blind.’ The Destroyer of Worlds came from the place where God was blind, they said. Deep inside the earth. ‘After you.’

Pressing a hand to the wall for balance, I counted the steps as we descended. Thirty-three was a holy number. It was the number of Djinn who gathered together to forge the First Mortal in their war against the Destroyer of Worlds.

I stumbled in the dark at the bottom. The Sultan was close behind me. He steadied me with a hand on my waist. For a moment I was back in the camp, Jin’s hand on me. I’ve got you. I pulled away quickly.

This wasn’t like the rest of the palace. Instead of smooth marble, the walls were rough-hewn stone. A low ceiling was supported by squat pillars that went on line after line into the shadows, like ancient soldiers standing to attention. The only light came from a hole in the ceiling, casting a bright circle in the dark vaults. As we got closer to the light, I could see the pillars were carved with patterns that had been worn down, like centuries had run them smooth. Maybe longer than centuries. I wasn’t sure how old the world was. But this seemed like a place that was here at the beginning of it. The years had buried this place, but it had survived.

Standing under the light was like being at the bottom of a well. The circle of light was about as wide as my arms stretched out. But the sky above was only the size of a half-louzi piece. My bare toes brushed something cold. Looking down in the lamplight, I realised that there was iron set into the ground in a perfect circle, patterns woven through it. An identical circle glinted off to my left. And another, just beyond that, covered in dust and dirt.

‘What are these?’ I pulled away from the iron instinctively.

‘You’re from the edge of the desert,’ the Sultan said. ‘You are a descendant of the nomads who carried stories across the sands. You must know all the ones of the old days, in the times that the Djinn walked among us openly. When they still loved mortals. Well.’ He gave me a sly glance. ‘You are walking proof that they do still, occasionally. But there was also a time when my ancestors ruled with the help of the Djinn. That was what the Sultim trials were, thousands of years ago. Tasks set by the Djinn to choose the worthiest among the Sultan’s sons. Not a series of foolish tests designed to turn men on each other.’ A series of foolish tests which Ahmed had won outright. ‘In those days, princes would climb mountains and ride Rocs to bring back a single one of their feathers. They drank water under the sleepless eye of the Wanderer. True feats. But though we cling to those traditions, the days of worthy princes are long gone. As are the days when the Djinn used to come here and surrender their power inside these circles in good faith, while the Sultan surrendered his weapons, and they traded counsel.’