Traitor to the Throne (Rebel of the Sands, #2)(99)

A half dozen men in uniform carrying torches were huddled around Fereshteh. He was exactly where I had left him after calling him, trapped inside the iron circle. Only somebody had placed what looked like a cage over him. It was made of brass and iron and gold and glass all interlocking in complicated patterns, jointed in a thousand places, arches of metal curving into each other.

The other captured Djinn looked on curiously from within their own circles, like parents watching something their child had made and they didn’t wholly understand. For a fraction of a second Bahadur’s eyes darted up our way before going back to the other immortals.

Something shifted in the circle of soldiers and the figure who had been working at the machine came into view. I knew Leyla instantly, even from this far away.

So this was why I hadn’t been able to find her in the gardens. She was moving anxiously, hands dancing across complicated-looking pieces of machinery as easily as they ever did with the little toys she made in the harem.

She twisted something, stepping back suddenly. The whole circle of soldiers took a step back with her.

For two heartbeats nothing happened.

And then the machine came alive.

The bars of the cage started to move, slowly at first. Then faster.

Inside the machine, Fereshteh watched curiously as the blades moved. He didn’t look afraid, but panic was starting to rise in my chest. The machine whirred faster and faster, huge blades swinging in evenly paced circles, like each one was a moving horizon across a huge globe. The bronze blades rising like dawn, the dark iron blades cutting across bringing the sunset. Faster and faster. Until it was a blur of machine around the Djinni.

A sense of dread filled my chest. We had to free him. We had to free him now before it was too late. I started to move forward, blind to the danger. And then one of the pieces of the machine, an iron blade, snapped into place. It swung suddenly, arching upwards towards the sky. It froze there for a moment. I saw what was going to happen a second before it did.

It drove straight through Fereshteh’s chest.

Inside, the immortal Djinni, one of God’s First Beings, who was made at the same time as the world, who had seen the birth of humanity, who had watched the first immortals fall and seen the first stars born, who had faced the Destroyer of Worlds, died.





Chapter 37

The Djinn were made from a fire that never went out. An ever-burning smokeless fire that came from God. And in the early days of the world the First Beings lived in an endless day.

Then the Destroyer of Worlds came. And with her she brought the darkness. She brought night. And she brought fear.

And then she brought death.

Wielding iron, she killed the first immortal Djinni. And when he died, he burst into a star. One after another, the Djinn fell that way, filling our sky.

Watching Fereshteh die was like beholding a star on earth. White burned across my eyes, and I was blinded. I heard someone scream. I heard Shazad shout something I couldn’t make out.

Slowly the light retreated from under my eyelids, leaving me blinking but able to see again. Inside the machine, Fereshteh’s body was gone. What was left was burning bright as a star, and the metal of the machine around him was blazing incandescent. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up painfully. I knew where I’d felt this before. The metal door, before the Gallan tried to kill me. Even as we watched, the light whipped up a wire I hadn’t seen before, igniting, racing along the ceiling, darting above us.

There was a shout from below as the flash of light above our heads illuminated us too sharply to miss. The time for subterfuge was over. Sam grabbed us both by the hand, wrenching us up the steps and back through the door so fast I barely had time to take a breath before we plunged through.

Hala staggered back as we stumbled through.

‘Hala.’ I tore my hand out of Sam’s for a moment. He stumbled to a stop, but Shazad didn’t. She was a few paces ahead of us, already running back towards the garden. ‘Leyla – she’s down there. Get her out.’

She didn’t even argue with me. I didn’t give her time. I was running, chasing on Shazad’s heels back towards the gardens. I glanced over my shoulder before we rounded a corner, just in time to see the door in the mosaic open, unsuspecting soldiers spilling out towards a waiting Hala, who grabbed hold of their minds before they’d taken a step. And then Shazad wrenched me around the corner. Hala and Leyla were on their own.

Sam grabbed hold of me as we approached the wall, dragging me towards it.

We burst through the wall, gasping, just as the Sultan’s speech ended. Applause burst around us and for a moment I felt destabilised, plunging away from what we’d just seen, chasing the starlight, back to the normality of the palace.

And then, all around the darkened garden, lights started to come on. Not oil light. Not fire and flickering torchlight. Just light. Fire without heat. And it was coursing out from the machine that had just killed the Djinni, and then getting trapped in the crystal birds that I’d seen earlier, hanging from strings and staying there, flaring to life.

Bottled starlight.

Awed sounds filled the garden as the lights illuminated the amazed faces of the Auranzeb guests.

And then, in the corner of the garden, something moved. I snapped around in time to see one of the statues shift. One of the figures of the Sultan’s dead brothers straightened his head. And then the one next to him. And the one next to him.