The Bird King(75)

“Fa,” he whispered. “She’s got blue skin. And very sharp teeth.”

Azalel grinned. There was a small, terrible sound, like something sharp dragging against a wall, and one of the little blades fell ringing to the ground. Fatima fought the urge to gag. Hassan only moaned, rocking once on his knees.

“That’s right,” soothed Azalel. “Quiet and still and brave. They’ll feel much better on the way out than they did on the way in.” Another blade fell.

“Why did you let her do this to you? Why didn’t you just tell her what she wanted to hear?” said Fatima through her teeth.

“Because it wasn’t true,” said Hassan, too loudly. He looked awake now, his eyes bright and wild. “Because I couldn’t stand the little smile she had when she told me that I was loved, that she hated my sin, not me. I told her I’ve never seen the Devil. I told her I’m more certain of the truth and oneness of God than I am of my own miserable existence. And it made her angry.” He gave a strangled shriek as the last of the blades fell to the ground. They made a bright pile there, blood gleaming upon polished metal. Fatima looked at them as the light danced. There was despair in them somehow: despair in the knowledge that man could make something so beautiful, so precisely conceived, for the purpose of inflicting pain.

“There was a spot,” said Hassan. He was limp as Azalel took his wrists and cut the wire that bound them. “In her eye. Like a speck of dirt or a fleck of ash from a fire, only a thousand times more awful.”

“I’ve seen it,” said Fatima. “It’s helping her, whatever it is. Telling her things. She thinks it’s her own spotless merit.” She got to her feet and forced herself to take deep breaths. She could smell salt as the air shifted to accommodate the rising sun: the tide would be going out soon.

“If we don’t leave now, we’ll never leave,” she said.

“I don’t think I can keep up, Fa,” said Hassan. He sounded drunk, though whether it was from the pain or the mead, Fatima couldn’t tell. “I don’t have the energy for anything besides agony. I can’t summon any more.”

Fatima put her shoulder beneath his and helped him slowly to his feet.

“You’re damn well going to try,” she said.

It was nearly bright enough to read outside. Fatima watched as crisp avenues of light formed between the rows of tents, illuminating churned-up mud and the detritus of war. They would surely be seen: a redheaded, bleeding scribe and a girl as tall as a man could not escape notice, even with a jinn escort to shield them. So Fatima looked straight ahead, ignoring the shouts and curses that disturbed the limpid air as the men around them woke up. She could see their cog beyond the pigsties and washhouses and tents, its little sails askew and unkempt among the larger ships docked at the wharf.

“You can’t be serious,” said Hassan when he saw where she was looking. “Back to the ship? My God, Fatima—where do you suppose we’re going?”

“To Qaf,” said Fatima, clenching her jaw. “To the king of the birds.”

“Don’t you mean Antillia? Avalon? Shambhala? I wish to God I’d never made that map.” Hassan was swaying as he walked and paused to suck on his bleeding fingers as though insensible of danger. Watching him, Fatima felt a thrum of real fear. Even if they escaped, they would not escape intact: the act of saving themselves would leave scars, had left scars. The greatest danger was not that they would be caught, but that Hassan’s own life was less precious to him than it had been the previous morning.

“Hsst.” Azalel halted in front of them and held out her arm. A row of men, all still half asleep, was coming toward them, each pair of legs moving in the same rhythm, so that the clack of armor echoed across the camp, giving an impression less of men than of some machine. Fatima pulled Hassan between two tents. Azalel followed, ushering them over tent pegs and ropes and glancing with deep disgust at the sun struggling to free itself from the mountains behind them.

“Too much daylight,” she murmured to Fatima. “Soon I will be of no help to you.”

“It doesn’t matter. We’re nearly there.”

“Are we?”

Fatima stopped and stood straight. They were surrounded on all sides by identical canvas peaks. The pigsties and the muddy foreshore had disappeared, and the masts of the ships at the wharf along with them.

“Damn it all to hell,” she breathed.

Azalel gave a little chiding sigh. She gathered herself, her bells and beads and swaths of velvet, into a pillar of delirium, retreating, or so it seemed to Fatima, behind some invisible screen, so that looking at her was like looking through a lattice at a world into which she couldn’t venture.

“If you had listened to me, you could’ve been aboard your ship by now,” she said. “Instead, you wasted time on this sentimental errand. What a shame! So pretty, so lovely …” She walked away through the maze of canvas, her feet suspended above the ground. Fatima stared after her in speechless fury.

“That ship can’t be crewed by one person,” she shouted.

Tittering bells answered her. Fatima wanted to throw something, to rend her clothes or pull her hair, but the light was emphatic now, and Hassan was standing beside her looking less and less inclined to move.

“Damn all the jinn,” she moaned, grinding the heels of her palms against her eyes.