She was trying to be brave. She was good at it, too. She had spent several days with us, her enemies, pretending to be on our side, without so much as flinching. I might admire her if she weren’t our enemy.
‘Izz,’ I ordered, ‘let her up.’ He did what I said, pulling back his snarling face and slowly removing his weighty paw from her chest. As soon as she was released Leyla scrambled backwards, her shoulders bumping into the wall behind her, halting any further retreat. We were both silent for a long moment, Leyla breathing hard as she watched me. I pulled out my gun, deciding exactly what I wanted to do with her. I hadn’t thought that far when I’d plunged us down here.
‘So.’ I’d better start us off. ‘My guess is that we have your brilliant mind to thank for this –’ I glanced up at the dome of fire in the sky, looking for the right word, even as I pulled out my gun – ‘this whole mess.’ I opened the chamber of the pistol and checked how many bullets I had. Six whole shots. Good.
‘My father’s guards—’ Leyla started, a slight tremor in her voice.
‘My guess would be that your father’s guards are going to get sent to check on his paperwork before his daughter.’ The whole of the harem was strangely quiet around us. There was only the sound of Leyla’s panicked gasps and the loud click as the chamber of the gun snapped back into place.
She winced at the sound. Or maybe it was at hearing the truth so plainly laid out.
‘You’re not going to kill me.’ But her eyes flicked to the gun all the same, like she wasn’t sure. I only had a year or two on her, but she seemed a whole lot younger. I’d grown up fast in the desert. She was a child from the palace. I searched myself for some sympathy, but I didn’t have any left for this girl who had betrayed me. Who had cost us so much because of my carelessness in believing she was as innocent as she looked.
‘Want to bet your life on that?’ I pointed the gun at her head, and Leyla cringed away, like she could make herself too small a target to hit. She was underestimating what a good shot I was. But I didn’t fire. ‘Here’s how this is going to go.’ I tried to sound sure of what I was doing, like this was a real plan and not some stupid idea I’d thought up halfway through doing it. Like I wasn’t just a girl from Dustwalk with a gun, pretending I could get information out of the brilliant little head of a girl born so far above me she shouldn’t even be able to see me if she deigned to look down. ‘I’m going to ask you a question and pull this trigger. And if you answer me truthfully, the bullet will hit that wall behind you. If you lie to me, the bullet is going to draw blood. Is that clear?’
It sure looked like it was clear from the sudden fearful understanding on her face. I was a Demdji. I could only speak the truth, and now I wasn’t the one deciding whether that bullet would hit her, she was. From where he was sitting, still wearing the shape of a lion, I thought I saw Izz shift uneasily. I knew what he was thinking. I was getting myself into awfully deep waters here. But it was too late to go back now.
‘Now –’ I took aim – ‘how do we bring it down? This little wall of fire you’ve got around the city?’
Leyla looked me in the eyes. ‘You can’t.’
I pulled the trigger before she’d even finished speaking and before I could think twice about what I was doing. The bullet hit her in the arm. The scream that tore through her was all the confession I needed. I swept my gaze over the garden behind us quickly. That wasn’t going to have gone unheard. Not even in the harem, where the women were practised at ignoring the terrible things happening around them.
‘Remember how much that hurts when you answer that again,’ I said as I turned my gaze back on a now-bleeding Leyla, trying to hide my nerves while I pulled back the hammer, letting the next bullet slide into place. ‘Tell me how, or this bullet is hitting your knee, and if you ever want to walk again, you’ll have to get yourself a metal leg like the one you got Tamid. You remember Tamid, don’t you? A friend of mine? The one you convinced me you had a soft spot for so you could use him to lure your father to us?’
Leyla was breathing through her nose, pain written all over her, but muddling with rage now. Getting shot would do that to you. ‘You can’t bring the wall down,’ she spat back. But before I could fire again she kept babbling quickly. ‘Because I haven’t built the way yet. Until I do, the only way to get rid of the wall is to disable the machine.’ She meant the great contraption she had built under the palace that had killed and trapped the Djinni Fereshteh, turning him into energy to feed her unholy machines, like the Abdals. And now the contraption was powering this great dome of fire surrounding the city. ‘And for that you’d need the right words.’
We needed the words that would free the Djinn from the trap I had summoned them to. With those we could free the living Djinn as well as Fereshteh’s energy, which was powering the machine that fed life into all of Leyla’s little inventions.
Tamid had found the right words to summon and trap the Djinn. Just words unless they were spoken by a Demdji and suddenly they became an all-powerful truth. That was how I had trapped them all in the palace, when the Sultan had forced me to summon them while I was his prisoner. Tamid had been searching for the words that would free the Djinn for the past month. But so far we had nothing.
I pulled the trigger again. This time the bullet buried itself in the wall behind her. Damn, she was telling the truth.
‘Do you know the words to release a Djinni?’ I asked. She’d told us she didn’t. But that was back when she’d been play-acting as a teary-eyed lost little princess and I’d been too trusting to question her about it.
‘No.’ The third bullet buried itself in the wall, sending stone spraying violently as it did, making her flinch out of the way. Well, at least she had been honest about one thing when she was lying about being on our side.
Leyla started to cry, her sobs echoing loudly around the walls of the garden.
That was the third gunshot inside the harem. Someone ought to have reached us by now. Something was wrong. I listened carefully under the sound of Leyla crying. Far off I thought I could hear the screams of excited birds. Probably the ones trapped in the menagerie, startled by the loud noise and unable to get away. But there were no other screams to go with them – no women calling out for help or panicking at the sound of gunshots so near them. Just the bubbling of fountains and, far off in the distance, the noises of the city.