The Unconquered City Read online

  Zarrat waved his fingers dismissively, pale eyes twinkling over the top of his brown tagel. More curls were loose now, but this time they were strategic. He’d never seemed to fully get the point of wearing a tagel. “Why mess with a good thing? I got the pattern down. It’s not like the guul are going to suddenly learn how to parry or block. How many were there this time, anyway? I always lose count.”

  Azhar wove her fingers around her mug. “Thirteen. I think that’s a new record.”

  “You’re not wrong,” said Dihya, leaning into Zarrat. “The number of guul has increased over the last few months. We should consider training more cousins.”

  “That’s a problem for another day,” declared Zarrat. “Right now, we’re celebrating. Did you hear? There’s a caravan, finally. They’re setting up the market now. It’ll be up this afternoon. Are you going? I’ll be there tonight, at least.…”

  Illi only half listened to Zarrat as she turned her mug around and around, still as full as it’d been when the server had set it down. She wouldn’t have asked for date wine, but someone from the crowd thronging them had already paid for it. Someone always did. In another moment, there’d be real food, too, more than just the plain rolls that sat untouched in the middle of their table. Just the thought of a bowl of hot porridge filled her with longing. In all the excitement of the morning, it’d been easy to forget to eat. But now that the nerves were a memory, her hunger reminded her she hadn’t had anything since last night.

  She picked at a roll while scanning the crowd for a server. But a flash of bright yellow tagel on a tall figure caught her off guard. She shook her head to clear the confusion. It wasn’t Yaluz. He was with the healers.

  “Has anybody checked on Yaluz?” she asked.

  The mood at the table immediately grew somber and Zarrat’s chatter stumbled and died.

  “He’s sleeping,” said Dihya. “He’ll be all right.”

  Dihya patted Illi’s arm comfortingly, but Illi didn’t feel comforted. She’d lost herself down there on the sands, completely forgotten where and when she was. She stared at the grain of the table’s veneer, tracing her finger along one tight whorl. She swallowed, but she couldn’t get rid of the lump lodged in her throat. It’d been her fault after all. She’d messed up and Yaluz had helped her and that help had nearly got him killed. Illi pressed her finger hard against the center of the whorl, shaped not unlike the eye of a guuli.

  A woman approached from the crowd to thank them. Dihya edged away, eyes downcast, but Zarrat welcomed the attention. He was a former slave, and even though he’d been part of a drum chief’s household and trained in all the right decorum, he occasionally acted like an iluk fresh off the sands. But he’d fought alongside everyone else during the Siege, and when the surviving drum chiefs had formally freed any remaining slaves, he’d chosen to join their makeshift militia of cousins and volunteers.

  Thana called all of the newcomers cousins, but Illi couldn’t. Not yet. Not when they hadn’t bloodied their hands. Maybe not ever.

  “Thirteen guul,” repeated Azhar. She was an iluk, an Azali whose tribe had helped the refugees survive until they could reclaim their city. She had helped rebuild, had fallen for a marabi, and decided to stay. She was proficient with the sword, so when the guul began to arrive from the west, she’d been one of the first to volunteer. “On top of the ten from last week and the eight before that—where are they all coming from?”

  “You know where,” said Dihya darkly. “The Wastes must be full of corpses.”

  “Yes, but why?” said Azhar. “Why do they keep coming here? And more and more each time? What will we do if there’re twenty? Thirty? Fifty of them?”

  “We’ll stop them all,” said Illi.

  “Really? Us against fifty?” pressed Azhar. “We’ll die.”

  “Then we’ll die protecting Ghadid.” Illi stood, the bread like dust in her mouth. She pocketed a second roll for later. “I’ll see you at training tonight.”

  Zarrat broke away from his growing circle of admirers. “But we take the night off on hunt days.”

  “You might,” said Illi.

  “There’s a market,” whined Zarrat.

  “I’m not stopping you,” said Illi. “Enjoy your night off.”

  She left the table and her still-full mug of date wine. Zarrat would drink it.

  Dihya caught up to her just outside. “Hey—are you okay?” She put her hand on Illi’s shoulder. “I know Zarrat can be … dense. But you’ve got to give him some slack. He’s not like us.”

  Illi bit her tongue. Zarrat wasn’t just not like them, he wasn’t them. He wasn’t a cousin, he hadn’t been there when they’d lost Ziri, when the Serpent had given her life, when Dihya had put an ax through her best friend’s neck. He’d never understand and he never could. But Dihya knew all that just as well as Illi did; after all, it was exactly that innocence that had drawn Dihya to him.

  “It’s not that.” Illi forced a smile. “I’m okay.”

  Dihya’s frown only deepened, her eyes searching Illi’s. “In case you forgot, I was there, too.”

  Illi didn’t know which Dihya meant: that she’d been on the sands when Illi broke down or that she’d been beside Illi during the Siege. It didn’t matter.

  “It’s okay not to be okay,” said Dihya. “You don’t have to be strong all the time, Illi. No one is, trust me.”

  “I’m okay,” repeated Illi. “I just—panicked. But that’s in the past. Everything’s in the past. We have to be prepared for the future.”

  But Dihya still wasn’t leaving her alone. “You’re not yourself. Really, if you want to talk about it—”

  “I’m fine,” snapped Illi. She took a deep breath and let it out. Smiled. “Really. I’ve gotta get those skulls to Heru before he gets cranky, okay? I’ll see you tonight.”

  “We’re taking tonight off,” said Dihya. “We all need the break. You should, too. You’re not invincible, you know.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Illi didn’t stay for any further protests. How could any of them think about rest or celebration? Yaluz had nearly died. And it had been Illi’s fault. She needed to be faster. More resilient. She needed to train harder.

  She had to be prepared in case the Siege happened again.

  * * *

  The sack over her shoulder clattered with each step, like a bag full of awkwardly shaped, overly large dice. Inside were the skulls of the guul they’d felled today. Illi had to keep shifting her grip. The sack was more awkward than heavy; empty skulls didn’t weigh much, even thirteen of them. But she’d already brought them all the way up from the sands and now she had to carry them across the city and even the light weight began to drag on her.

  Around her, a market was being set up and the crowd was already dense. Offers to help with the sack were flung at her almost as frequently as offers of food, but Illi shrugged them all off, kept her sight on the ground, and walked faster. Somebody patted her arm and praised G-d for her bravery on the sands. Illi muttered something that she hoped sounded like thanks but didn’t look up.

  Zarrat might drink in the praise and adoration, but Illi couldn’t stand it. They were cousins. This was just a part of who they were.

  The city withdrew and empty echoes replaced the cries from the market as Illi crossed more bridges and pressed farther west, into its heart. Or what used to be its heart. The Siege had taken more than half Ghadid’s population and even with the freed slaves and the influx of iluk it would be many generations before they could breathe life into these platforms. The drum chiefs had unanimously decided to focus their rebuilding efforts on just those platforms they needed. That focus had meant abandoning the western half of Ghadid. That it was also the side closest to the Wastes and the guul invasions probably had leant weight to that choice.

  But just because they’d been abandoned didn’t mean they were empty. Those who needed space, those who needed solitude, and those who had simply lost too much cultivated their
existence in the burned-out shells of buildings and homes here. Illi knew many of them because she’d lived here, too, at first. After the Siege, it’d been the only place she’d felt safe. But she’d grown tired of the silence and the cold and eventually accepted Thana and Mo’s standing invitation to share their home.

  The wind blew through open doorways and across vacant streets. Even though she’d once made her home here, the emptiness now sent a shiver up her spine. She touched the soft leather of her charm, but it remained only as warm as her skin. On the sands, the emptiness and quiet were natural, expected. But up here, the hollow echoes were a vivid reminder of all that had been—and all that had been lost.

  Yet even in this desolate place, Illi still found hope. The abandoned platforms were more than the homes of the broken and the lost—they were also the perfect place for a reclusive and cantankerous en-marabi to set up his lab.

  Heru Sametket. He’d traveled to Ghadid to broker their surrender to his Empire. Instead, he’d helped Thana tackle a sajaami and kill his Empress. It should have been enough to earn their trust, but Heru’s insistence on continuing to study and practice the en-marabi art of jaan binding meant that the rest of Ghadid shunned him. Even in changed times, outright blasphemy wasn’t acceptable.

  So here he was. Far from the heart of the city. Alone. Forgotten, until Ghadid needed him again.

  Illi could understand that.

  The difference between Heru’s platform and the others was subtle at first. Elsewhere in Ghadid, and even more so in the abandoned half, unswept sand slipped beneath her sandals, but as she crossed this platform the grains disappeared and the stones were smooth.

  Once she reached the center, the difference became far less subtle. Before Heru had moved in, this platform had been like all the others in Ghadid’s abandoned half: coated with old blood, gray with ash, and smeared with dust. The stones had blended together into one gray and black blur. But now, each stone was scrubbed clean, their mottled browns and faded reds laid bare to the sky.

  Around the circle, all of the doorways were empty, the fabric that used to cover them long burned or repurposed. All—except one. In the center of a row of doorways, a length of white cloth covered one entrance. The cloth was free of dust or stains or dirt, an impossible white that blazed in the morning sun, unavoidable and unmistakable: a signal or a warning, but never an invitation.

  Illi reached the white fabric, but didn’t go in. She paused and knocked on the wall next to it. Then she counted under her breath, listening.

  Something bubbled and clanged inside, but no one appeared at the door. Upon reaching the count of ten, Illi drew the cloth aside. When no reprimand was flung her way, she entered. She let go of the cloth and it fell back into place, weighted on the bottom to keep the wind out.

  Even though she’d been here many times, her first breath of Heru’s lab was overwhelming. Equipment choked the room, but every piece had its place. Glass bowls and glass beakers and glass vials lined shelves along the walls and benches in the center of the room. Every surface was free of fingerprints or smudges, the stone floor swept clear of any specks of sand, and even the air held a slightly sweet, slightly bitter medicinal edge. A fire ran hot in the hearth, its heat kept at bay by a thick pane of glass.

  And at the center of it all hung the orb, snug in a corona of light.

  As it did every time, the orb drew her gaze. As Illi came farther into the room, the glass flask floating in the orb’s center slowly filled with a thick, warm glow. Thin, dark, looping script smothered the flask and flavored its light. Water separated the flask from the orb and kept them both safe. The orb itself hung by a metal chain from the high ceiling, twisting and turning even in the absence of a breeze.

  The light built to a blaze that cut shadows sharp and firm. Across the room, hunched over a bench, his hands occupied with two bowls, Heru looked up. One eye focused first on the flask, then across at Illi. His other eye didn’t move; it was glass. Heru hadn’t bothered trying to match the glass eye to his original, so instead of a mild brown, its iris was a circle of gold with black lines radiating out from the pupil like a miniature sun. His white wrap hung off of him like it might a skeleton, the pale mourning color doing little to improve his already wan complexion. His white tagel barely covered his mouth, an affectation more than an attempt at modesty.

  “You’re late.”

  Heru had specified at the beginning of their association that she get the skulls to him within a half day; longer than that risked failure of the simple binding that kept the guul from escaping and finding new bodies. It was still midafternoon and therefore well within that time frame. But she didn’t correct him. She’d only made that mistake once.

  Heru finished what he was doing, then wiped his hands off on a cloth and walked around his bench. “Bring them here, girl. How many guul were subdued today?”

  Illi heaved the bag onto the bench, the skulls clattering within. “Thirteen.”

  Heru nodded to himself. “As I thought.”

  “You knew?”

  Heru narrowed his eye. “Of course. The number has been increasing, even if at an uneven rate. It appears to jump every few months. The last jump was predicted by the formula I’d devised and now it has been confirmed.”

  “So Azhar is right, the attacks really are increasing.” Illi rested her hands on top of the bench. “Why?”

  “The increase was subtle enough at first to be missed by anyone less meticulous, but yes.” Heru reached into the bag and gingerly extracted a skull. He set it with overt care on the bench, as if it were made out of flawed glass instead of bone. “While we might have started out with just one or two errant guul in the beginning, this last year has proven that we should no longer consider that our baseline. All recent, available data indicates we are on a path of exponential growth, which means these skulls are becoming more and more indispensable.”

  Heru laid out each of the thirteen skulls on the metal bench. Blazing eyes tracked Heru as he moved, and when he was done, he basked in their collective, hateful gazes. Illi stood to one side, out of the guul’s immediate line of sight. Still, the hair on the back of her neck rose. Although she’d seen the skulls like this over a dozen times, it never failed to unnerve her. Taking the head off a body should be deadly. Yet the Siege had broken even that rule.

  Thankfully, Heru’s magic—which he called “science” or “research”—sealed these guul within the bodies they’d stolen. He’d done it ostensibly to keep Ghadid safe, but Illi understood him well enough now to know that he never did something unless it benefited him, too. That didn’t matter to her, so long as the end result was the same.

  The first time the guul had attacked, her cousins had met them and met them well. But when they’d separated head from body, a buzzing darkness had rushed out: the guul itself. After all, guul were only jaan that had realized they could build bodies instead of destroying them. They still wanted form, a body to protect them from the elements.

  And there had been so many bodies nearby.

  No one had died or been permanently driven mad that day, but they’d come too close. Heru had been able to extract the guul from the possessed cousins before they’d burned up from within, although his concern had been for the maddened spirits instead of their hosts. Then he’d disappeared for two weeks before reappearing with a solution: the words engraved on their swords.

  Now, instead of spilling into the air, the guul became stuck in their pillaged bodies. Usually the head, but occasionally the odd body part. Illi had once collected a very angry femur. She was the only one who’d been willing to bring back the skulls for Heru. No one else dared venture so deep into the abandoned platforms, or so close to an en-marabi, no matter the good he did.

  But Illi had lived in the emptiness and she knew Heru for what he was: eccentric, driven, but mostly harmless. Out of all the people in Ghadid, she’d never once worried about him. Heru Sametket had always known exactly what he was doing, and even the wounds he sus
tained were intentional. Like every other en-marabi, he strove for immortality, a way to tie the jaani to the body and sustain them both indefinitely. His goal might be blasphemous, but he wasn’t dangerous. At least, no more so than what Illi had already been through.

  Heru’s lab was the only place in Ghadid where Illi felt safe, where she could relax and stop worrying, if only for a moment, that the Siege could happen again. As long as Heru was here, as long as Heru was working, it never would. The more respectable marab who stuck to quieting jaan and performing funerals couldn’t promise her that.

  Heru broke his reverent silence with a sudden breath. Before he could bark his order, Illi had already brought him a knife, a metal bowl, and a folded cloth. Beside the cloth, she set a bread roll she’d grabbed from the inn, now cold; Heru often forgot to eat. He gave her an appreciative nod, then pulled a tray from beneath the bench. Neatly arrayed clay bowls and a rack of stoppered vials filled the tray.

  Each bowl was about the size of Illi’s palm and held finely ground powders. Some Illi had figured out—they were dried herbs or spices, colorful salts, and sand as fine as dust. Some still eluded her and some worried her—the dark red powder that smelled like sweet copper, for one. Heru rarely explained what he was doing, but that didn’t stop Illi from watching closely. She’d learned a lot that way.

  Heru took the metal bowl and splashed water into it from the skin at his hip. Then he took a pinch of this and a scoop of that and swirled it into the water until it had dispersed or dissolved. Finally, he took the knife, rolled back his sleeve, and cut his forearm.

  The slice brimmed red with blood, which he let drip, counting under his breath, into the bowl. Once he had seven drops, he tied a clean white cloth around his arm, tightening its knot with his teeth. The cut would heal, becoming another scar to add to his collection. He shook his arm and his sleeve fell back into place, hiding the pale scar tissue that covered his skin like spiderwebs.