The last sound she heard before she was trapped in silence was the thief’s footsteps echoing through distant, empty halls.
42
MAZEN
Mazen traversed decrepit corridors that were fortunately empty and unfortunately dark. He tripped over rocks, lost his footing in sunken patches of sand, and stumbled into ghouls moments after learning of their existence. The creatures could not see him beneath his shadow cloak, but they could smell the magic on him when he was nearby, and Mazen was beginning to realize they had very good noses.
And yet for as useless as his shadow was, he could not bring himself to shed it. While it did not offer the same security as Omar’s body, it was an invigorating illusion all the same. He had always felt most confident in disguise—no matter if that camouflage was a name, a body, or a magic shadow.
Thankfully, the skirmishes were quiet, and the prison he wandered was empty of humans. Still, he was extremely suspicious of how easy it was for him to stay alive. So much so that by the time he reached the doors marked Makhraj, he was certain it was a trap.
Please don’t let there be ghouls on the other side of this door, he thought.
Unsurprisingly, there were ghouls on the other side of the door.
Mazen sprang forward before they could react, shoving one to the ground and plunging his blade through the second’s throat. It toppled, but before Mazen could pull out his sword, the other ghoul recovered and swung its blade at him. Mazen ducked with a yelp. He landed on his knees, scrambled backward toward the second corpse, and yanked his sword out with a gag. When the first ghoul came at him again, he attacked its legs and tackled it to the ground. He ran the blade through its chest. Once, twice. A third time, just to be sure.
By the time he silenced the two guards, his body was shaking with adrenaline.
He took a deep breath, steadied his trembling hands, and forced himself down a corridor thankfully brighter than the one he’d come from. As he walked, he became aware of the wind whistling through cracks in the ceiling. Eventually, those cracks widened into holes large enough for him to make out the sky, the moon. And then the ceilings vanished altogether, revealing an endless expanse of star-speckled black.
Mazen glanced at the walls: the only stretch of color in the ruin’s otherwise plain interior. There was one wall so spectacularly detailed it forced him to a stop. This mosaic depicted the seven jinn kings he’d seen in the Queen of Dunes’ ruin. There was the shapeshifting jinn in the form of a flaming bird, and beneath it was the jinn with the dara’a cut into two halves. He spotted the fish jinn with the luminescent scales, the jinn made of wood and flowers, the jinn crafted from mist, and—there, a jinn leading an army of ghouls. The Queen of Dunes. He glanced at the last figure, who in the dune had been a shadow with gleaming eyes.
He had assumed this last king was the shadow jinn, but the figure in this much clearer depiction made it evident he’d been mistaken. Here, the jinn king was a cloaked figure with a jeweled turban who stood stoically amidst the chaos, hand raised toward the fiery sky. The color reminded Mazen of the color Qadir’s eyes had flashed during the ghoul attack.
At least now he knew he wasn’t crazy. The man’s—jinn’s—eyes really had been on fire. The thought sobered him. If he wasn’t careful, Imad would kill him too. Mazen did not think the thief would make the mistake of underestimating him twice.
He resumed walking, following the corridor around a bend and into a dead end. No… an open end? Sure enough, he found himself at a hole in the wall, one large enough to climb through. He carefully slid through and abruptly found himself on the threshold of the desert. He inhaled sharply as sand crunched beneath his boots. It was real. He was outside.
But his joy was short lived, for he realized he had not truly escaped. He had been in only one of many ruins; the crumbling landscape stretched on for miles, a labyrinth of broken walls and winding stone roads that led to a barely standing palace. Farther out, Mazen spotted the telltale shapes of ghouls, and beyond that…
Oh gods.
The dunes surrounding the ruins were shifting. No, not so much shifting as falling. There was no base—the sand simply spiraled into an endlessly churning void that surrounded the ruins like a river of quicksand.
Somehow, these ruins stood in the center of the Sandsea. Not the Western Sandsea, where they were headed, but an unplotted segment of the sea Mazen didn’t remember seeing on Hakim’s map.
Mazen took many panicked, stilted breaths. And then, in an effort to calm himself, he took a few slightly less panicked deep breaths. Imad can leave this place. There must be an exit.