“No one knows for certain. The common theory is that a paranoid shah wanted to ensure he always had an escape route.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. “Paranoid or clever?”
“Perhaps a little of both. But either way, I suppose I owe him my thanks. I would be confined to my room otherwise.”
Azad gestured to the door. “Is that the way to the dungeon?”
Soraya nodded. “I asked my mother once why that door was locked, and she told me it was probably so no prisoners could escape.”
Azad went to examine the locked door. After an experimental try at the handle, he backed away and threw his shoulder against the door. The wood didn’t even budge, and so he tried again, and again, but ended up unsuccessful and breathless—and probably bruised, Soraya thought. It had been foolish to think they could break through a door that was meant to deter prisoners.
But Azad was still standing in front of the door, head tilting to one side. “I wonder…” he murmured.
He fell silent until finally, Soraya couldn’t help asking, “What are you thinking?”
“If I were a paranoid yet clever shah with a network of secret tunnels at my disposal,” he said, “I wouldn’t keep a secret dungeon key on my person, where it could be stolen. I would hide it somewhere no one would think to look for it, but where I could easily find it.”
“You think the key might be somewhere here?”
Azad shrugged. “That doesn’t help us much. It could be buried or inside the walls. It would take anyone ages to find it, if it’s even here at all.”
But Soraya stopped listening when he said “inside the walls,” because at hearing those words, an image flashed in her mind. Azad was right—it would take anyone ages to find the hidden key. But Soraya had grown up in these tunnels. She knew all their secrets, all their hidden grooves and notches, which meant that if there were any mysteries here, she would remember them.
Without saying a word to Azad, she went back toward the opening of the chamber and knelt on the ground. The colder months had always been difficult for her. Her golestan would wither away, and she would grow bored of her books, and so she had little else to do but explore the passages that belonged to her. When she was a child, she had noticed that one of the bricks here had an X carved into it. It would have been easily missed by anyone else, but at that age, the brick had been at her eye level. Now, on her knees, she found it again, running her fingers over the carved lines. A mystery she had never solved—until today.
The brick gave way under her hands, and she pulled it out. Inside the gap was a small silver key.
When she brought it back to Azad, he looked at her with something between awe and admiration. “How did you know it was there?”
She didn’t answer, but only smiled and fit the key into the lock. Let him still have some sense of wonder about the mysterious shahzadeh.
Azad carried the torch behind her as Soraya led the way into the unfamiliar passage. There were no stairs or side passages here, which she hoped meant that this tunnel would lead them straight to the dungeon. She noticed, too, that the ground was inclined downward, taking them lower and lower beneath Golvahar.
Finally, they reached what appeared to be a dead end, but Soraya quickly found the edge of the stone slab in front of her and tried to push it to the side. It only budged a little, after years of disuse, and so Azad placed the torch in an empty sconce on the wall and came to help her. Soraya’s breath caught in her throat as his arms reached around her, his hands on either side of hers against the stone. The slab moved more easily now, but Soraya was too worried about his proximity to her to feel any kind of excitement.
“That’s enough,” she whispered, her voice a rasp, when they had created a gap large enough for them both to pass through. She waited until he had moved away from her before she let herself breathe freely again.
“Let me go first,” he whispered back to her, and she agreed, not for her own safety, but in case any passing guard collided with her as she emerged from the wall.
With fluid grace, Azad passed through the wall, and a few moments later, he reached his hand through the gap for her. She took it and stepped out into a dimly lit corridor that smelled of sweat and stale air and something else that Soraya couldn’t quite detect.
After replacing the stone slab in the wall behind them, Azad gestured to the left and said, “This way.”
Soraya looked from right to left, both paths indistinguishable to her. “How do you know?”
“The ground.”
Soraya looked down and saw that the ground continued to incline downward to their left, upward to their right. She nodded and they continued down the corridor.
The strange smell grew stronger as they walked, until Soraya finally recognized it. “Esfand,” she murmured to Azad. The pungent smoke of burning wild rue seeds weakened divs, sapping their unnatural strength and making them lethargic. In a confined space like a dungeon cell, the smoke would be strong enough to manage a div in captivity. “If we follow the smell, we’ll find the div.”
The smell of the esfand acted as a beacon, and Soraya was thankful for it, because as they moved deeper into the dungeon, it became a labyrinth, full of twists and turns and dark hallways lined with doors that Soraya tried not to wonder about.
When the smell grew even stronger, and wisps of smoke became visible in the dim torchlight, Soraya knew they were close. “There,” Azad said, pointing ahead to a set of stairs heading downward. The smoke was clearly coming from below.
They had to duck their heads in the narrow stairway, and as they neared the bottom, Soraya saw the glow of a torch. Accessing the dungeon had been her main concern, but now that she was here, Soraya remembered that there was a monster in that cell, and she was heading straight toward it.
The stairs opened into a chamber hewn out of the rock. Halfway into the chamber, iron bars stretched from the top of the curved roof to the ground, creating a cave-like dungeon cell. Hanging from a hook in the wall near the stairs was a brazier, where the thick scented smoke was emanating from, as well as a torch. The torch created a circle of light, but half of the cell was still in shadow, and from those shadows, Soraya felt something watching them.
Soraya took a breath of stale air before stepping forward. What would she find inside that cell? According to the priests, divs were pieces of the Destroyer sent out into the world, given monstrous form by the Creator so that people could recognize evil when they saw it. Soraya had seen illustrations of divs in the library, but they all took different shapes. Some were enormous, with horns and fangs and sharp claws; some were scaled and reptilian with skin like armor; some were deathly pale, while others had mottled fur.
Soraya peered into the cell, adjusting to the dim light until she saw the amber glow of the div’s eyes. She watched as the figure slowly stood and stepped forward into the light. She braced herself for the monster’s hideous appearance, and then she saw it—
It was a girl.
6
At first sight of the young woman, Soraya thought they had made a mistake, and this wasn’t the div’s cell at all. But then the young woman walked all the way up to the bars, her long black hair falling away from her face, and Soraya knew there was no mistake.