Everyone was hanging on Tamid’s words now, even as he hesitated. He knew that whatever he was about to tell us, we would use it, and it would be because of him. But instead of speaking to me, he glanced at Hala. ‘Is it true,’ he asked her, ‘what they say you did to the man who took your fingers?’
Even I’d never dared ask Hala about that. Most of the Demdji didn’t like to talk about their lives before the Rebellion. It was difficult being what we were in an occupied country that wanted to kill us. And even without the Gallan, Demdji tended to get sold, used, killed or worse. We all knew Hala hadn’t had it easy. We all knew that her mother had sold Hala. But the rumour around camp, back when we’d had a camp, was that Hala had gotten her revenge on the man who’d cut off her fingers. That she had used her Demdji gift and torn his mind asunder. That she had driven him so deep into madness that he’d never see the light of sanity again.
And I understood what Tamid meant. Death was one thing, but Leyla’s life without her intellect – well, that was something else. It would make her useless to her father, for one. And she’d seen madness before. Her mother had been driven mad trying to build a version of what Leyla had successfully completed. It was what made Rahim turn on his father. And Leyla had driven her brother Kadir’s wives to madness – Ayet, Mouhna and Uzma, three jealous but harmless girls in the harem whom she had put through her machine as sacrificial test subjects before using the full force of the machine to harness a Djinni’s energy.
She might not fear losing her head. But she would fear losing her mind.
‘Is it true?’ Tamid pressed.
Hala was running the thumb of her three-fingered hand in a slow, thoughtful circle over her golden mouth as she thought. ‘No,’ she admitted finally. ‘What I did to him was worse than you’ve ever heard.’
*
When I let myself into her room, Leyla was curled up on her side. She reminded me of my cousin Olia sulking in our shared room back in Dustwalk, when she clearly wanted someone to pay attention to her but wanted it to look like she didn’t.
‘Are you here to shoot me again?’ Leyla muttered into her pillow. The way she was lying made the bandages on her arm conspicuous. I guessed Tamid had sewn her up, too. Probably smart; we didn’t want her to bleed out on us. Though I could’ve let her suffer for a bit.
‘No.’ I leaned against the door. ‘I’m here to give you one last chance to keep that clever little head of yours screwed on the right way.’ I sat down at the end of her bed. ‘Have you ever seen anyone go sun-mad, Leyla? I have – once – a man named Bazet, back in the town where I grew up. It was like watching someone whose head had been set on fire from the inside and he couldn’t put it out. He went absolutely raving, babbling, screaming, seeing things, and in the end my uncle shot him like a dog in the middle of the street out of mercy.’
Leyla sat up, her hand pressing hard into the pillow, leaving a small indent next to where her face had been.
‘Hala’s power, it’s a bit like sun-madness. She can make you see things for a little while, sure, but if she wants to, she can also rip your mind into such fractured pieces you’ll never again be wholly sure what’s just in your head and what’s really there. And believe me, she really wants to do that to you.’
Leyla’s mouth had parted slightly, her eyes looking huge and childlike. ‘You wouldn’t do that. You need me.’
‘Right now you’re costing us a lot more lives than you’re helping us save,’ I said. ‘And here’s the thing: I don’t think your father can keep this city on lockdown forever. Eventually, I reckon this siege will end and we’ll get out. But, see, I want people to stop dying before that. And if I return you to him without your head screwed on straight, the killings stop, and I don’t think you’ll be much good to him any more either, when you can’t build him little toys for his wars. Do you reckon you’ll still be his favourite daughter when you’ve lost your mind?’
I could see her churning it over, the cost of telling.
‘Where will you go?’ she asked finally. And then, more quietly, ‘Are you going to rescue my brother?’
The question caught me off guard. I hadn’t thought Leyla gave a damn about Rahim. She’d let him be imprisoned with the rest of the Rebellion. She blamed him as a traitor. But she sounded tentative, almost shy. I supposed he was still her brother, the only one of the Sultan’s many children who shared a mother with her.
‘That’s the plan.’
In fact, the plan was to rescue two of her brothers, but she didn’t need to know Ahmed was still alive, even if she didn’t have any way of getting that information to her father.
Leyla chewed on her lip thoughtfully for a long moment before finally answering me. ‘There are tunnels. Below the city.’ She started talking quicker, as if she could get all the treasonous words off her tongue at once. ‘I needed a way of feeding the power all the way out to the walls. So my father had tunnels dug from the palace, running wires through them to feed the walls with fire from the machine. His wives and the children of the harem slipped out through one of the tunnels to a waiting ship before the Gallan invaders arrived. But the exits are all bricked up now.’
Bricked up wasn’t so bad – easier to get through than a wall of fire. I stood. ‘I’m going to get a map of the city, and I’m going to want you to tell me where these tunnels run, every single one of them. And I’ll know if you try to lie to me again.’ I gave the bandage on her wounded arm a pointed glance.
‘It won’t matter, you know.’ Leyla interrupted my retreat from the room. She was awfully chatty now that she’d started talking. I ignored her. ‘Even if you can get through this wall, you won’t get through the next.’
I stopped, my hand resting on the door. She was baiting me, I could tell by the way her words rose at the end mockingly. She wanted me to ask. Which was exactly what made me not want to ask. Except I probably ought to. Pettiness wasn’t the right hill to make my stand on in this war.
I turned around and gave her what she wanted. ‘What do you mean, the next wall?’
‘The one around the prison where the traitors have been sent.’ She looked all too pleased with herself now she had regained the upper hand, knees pulled up to her chin. There was an annoying singsong quality to her words when she asked, ‘Where do you think my father got the idea to protect our city this way?’
Ashra’s Wall. The story had leaped into my mind the moment I’d seen the great barrier of fire. And I wasn’t alone in that. Everyone had been whispering Ashra’s name around the city since we saw the wall of fire. It was impossible not to think of the legend from the Holy Books. But there was no way Leyla was talking about that. Because that would mean Ahmed and the others were being kept prisoner in …
‘Eremot.’ Dark satisfaction was scrawled all over Leyla’s face. ‘They’ve been sent to Eremot.’
The ancient name sent a feeling of wrongness through me, an unease that went deeper than my skin and bones and seemed to churn even my soul into unrest. Half of me was immortal. Half of me had been there, at Eremot, in the ancient days. Half of me remembered.
Eremot was a name that belonged in the Holy Books. It was the place where the Destroyer of Worlds had emerged, leading her army of ghouls, and the place she had been imprisoned again at the end of the First War. Behind Ashra’s Wall, a great barrier of fire to keep the dark at bay.
‘Eremot is …’ not real. Only that wouldn’t get past my lips.
‘The stuff of legends,’ Leyla finished for me, with a pinched, self-satisfied look on her face. ‘Past the end of civilisation where no one can find it. But I found it.’
She meant to intimidate me. But I’d grown up past the end of civilisation and Jin had found me just fine. ‘We’ve got our own ways of finding it.’ Jin’s compass would lead us to wherever the prisoners were being held. Whether that was Eremot or not.