The Rebellion was going to end the game. As soon as we figured out how the hell to get out of this city.
We were going to get Ahmed back. And Rahim back. And Shazad. And Delila. And all the others who had been captured. And we were going to end this. As soon as we figured out how the hell to get out of this city.
A bead of sweat tracked its way from under my sheema, down my neck and under my kurta.
‘You all right, Bandit?’ Jin asked me, his voice low next to my ear.
I’d have liked to have been able to lie and tell him that I was fit as a fiddle, but since I couldn’t I didn’t answer at all. ‘It’s time.’ I said, spreading my hands out across the city below, sprawling my fingers as far as they would go. ‘Get ready.’
I might not be able to reach the dunes beyond the Sultan’s artificial barricade, but this city was full of desert dust. It was in its bones. Its very soul.
I pulled. The wound in my side twinged with pain like a muscle protesting use. It had been doing that ever since the metal was removed from my skin. The scar on my side pained me like it remembered the iron and was fighting back against my Demdji power. It had only been a twinge at first, but it was getting worse every time. And once or twice I felt like the sand might slip out of my grip altogether.
I ignored it as best I could, as the dust rose out of the streets in a golden haze, like steam rising off a bath. From between cobblestones and where it was trapped in folds of clothes and resting on leaves in roof gardens. Filling the air, swirling up and gathering together. A thousand tiny grains of sand, nothing on their own, scattered across the city, but joining together into a riotous storm.
Somewhere below us in the crowd gathered to watch the Sultim trials was Hala, bundled up to her eyebrows against prying gazes that might notice her golden skin. She was with two other rebels who’d escaped with us, Riad and Karam. I trusted them both to keep her safe – or carry her away if the illusion became too much for her.
It was an illusion on a bigger scale than Hala had ever managed before: the Blessed Sultima come back to life. My cousin Shira, exactly as she looked in my nightmares, her head detached, her eyes full of accusations, projected into thousands of people’s minds at once to deliver a message designed to spark doubt over the Sultan and stall the Sultim trials.
It was a desperate, risky thing to do, stretching Hala’s powers to their limit. But we had to do something. The last thing we needed was the country falling in line behind a new prince while we were trying to rescue the old one. But stalling the Sultim trials was only our second purpose.
Hala was the distraction. I was the cover.
What we really needed was to get into the palace.
Things can be a distraction and serve the cause at the same time.
Shazad had told me that once, when she’d first tried to rescue me from the harem, with pamphlets raining from the sky. But then Shazad made everything seem easy.
Two targets. One bullet. That I could understand. Two purposes. One plan.
I heard a shout from below as Hala’s illusion crept into the minds around her, and for a moment my own focus faltered, my power slipping out of my grip. I felt the burning pain in my side start to ease. It was such a relief that for just a second it made me want to let go, to drop the storm and stop the pain. To just let everything go and rest.
I wrestled the sand back hastily, and instantly the pain came back with it as I fought for control. I worked until the sandstorm covered the square below in a swirling mass, shielding us from sight. My side still ached. I shifted, trying to ease the pain, and the storm shifted with me unexpectedly. I couldn’t stall giving the signal any longer. I was struggling to hold on already. I turned my head just far enough towards Jin and the twins to be heard over the storm, and said, ‘Now.’
They didn’t need to be told twice. Maz had been bursting for hours, shifting restlessly from one shape to another, waiting for the order. Now a huge grin spread over his face as he flung aside the cloak he was wearing, sending it tumbling down into the sandstorm below as he jumped from the edge of the roof without a second thought. For an instant he was just a boy in mid-air, at the pinnacle of a leap, before the inevitable fall, the moment when you stopped flying and came crashing back down to earth. And then he stopped being just a boy. His body shifted, arms turning into wings, feet becoming claws, skin exploding into feathers. Izz followed, flinging the bundle on his back around into his mouth as it turned into a beak before he launched himself from the edge. If the crowd below us had been able to see, it might have looked like a pair of Rocs had just burst from the golden dome of the prayer house, like some mystical egg had hatched them. They soared gracefully above the storm that hid them, desperately happy to be moving again.
Unlike the twins, Jin had barely moved since we got up here. He was good at that – at stillness when everyone around us was restless. But I could read it in him all the same, there below his skin: impatience waiting to burst into action. It’d been there for weeks now. Since the day we saw Imin executed as Ahmed. Since the night we found out we were trapped here, unable to get our people back. Unable to save the family that he had protected for years. Sometimes I caught him with his hand opening and closing over the brass compass compulsively, but that was the only sign he gave that he was as worried as the rest of us. Now he spared me a sideways glance, a heartbeat, just long enough for me to give him a nod, assurance that I was fine. That I could hang on. I wasn’t about to tell him that pain from the old wound was searing through my side and I didn’t know how long I could keep this up.
Jin gave me a small, wry smile, a ghost of the one he used to have back when things were simpler and there were other people running this rebellion for us. The smile that said we were about to get into trouble. We were already in trouble now.
And then he stepped into thin air.
Maz soared below him, catching Jin on his back easily, then shifting direction with one effortless beat of his wings to carry him towards the palace, where Izz waited in all his blue-feathered glory.
I let out an uneasy breath, fighting the urge to drop one of my hands and press it against my aching side. We needed a way through this impossible wall and out of Izman. We’d already searched the whole perimeter for some kind of gap – a gate, a fissure we could squeeze through, something, anything. But the city was locked up tight as a drum. Which meant we needed to look somewhere else for a way out. Somewhere like the mess of papers strewn across the Sultan’s desk that included everything from supply routes for the army to letters addressed to foreign rulers inviting them to Auranzeb, the celebration of the Sultan’s ascendancy to the throne. I’d rifled through these same papers during my own time in the palace.
Only we didn’t have a spy in the palace any more. So we needed to get back in if we were going to get information out.
This was far from our first try at getting in. Sam had made a stab at going through the palace walls first, a few weeks back. His strange Albish magic allowed him to slip through solid stone like it was water. It was a gift no one in Miraji had ever seen, and so nobody knew to guard against it.
Only we’d shown our hand when the Sultan ambushed us. After our narrow escape, the Sultan knew exactly what extraordinary powers we had up our sleeves. The walls of the palace were now lined on the inside with wooden panels, which were as solid to Sam as to anybody else.