“Stop, al-Nazari!”
She reached down to pick it up.
Mazen collided with her headfirst, knocking the thing from her hands and tackling her to the ground. He gasped as she drove a knee into his stomach, but forced himself to hold tightly to her wrists as he gritted his teeth against the pain. He pinned her to the ground. “Snap out of it!”
The merchant dug her fingernails into his skin. Mazen pulled back with a yell, and she used the opening to slash at him with her dagger. He flinched away from the flaming blade, eyes closed—and felt only heat on his skin. When he eased his eyes open, the dagger’s blue flame danced before his eyes, bright but harmless. The merchant gave him no time to ponder why he hadn’t been scorched.
She punched him in the face. Stars danced before his eyes as she rose. Mazen blinked to clear his vision. The darkness receded enough he could see the smudge of Loulie’s brown robes as she turned away. Instinctively, he stretched out a leg and tripped her. She fell, hard.
They struggled against each other until they were nothing but an entangled mesh of bodies and blades and curses. The next time Mazen saw the merchant’s face with clarity, she was looming over him with the flaming blade angled at his face.
Desperation took over. Mazen just barely rolled away from her incoming strike and drove his dagger down into her hand. Loulie fell off him with a raw, animal cry. His stomach clenched with guilt when he saw the gaping wound—the deep, weeping gash he had left.
“Prince!” Mazen turned and saw Aisha standing behind them, covered in white dust. Her eyes flickered to Loulie’s wound and then back to Mazen. “We have to leave. Where is the jinn?” Her eyes snagged on the collar before he could respond. A perplexed frown tugged at her lips. “It’s… a relic?”
No! Before he could reach for it, Aisha grabbed it and tucked it into her satchel.
The moment it vanished, the room shuddered and groaned as if in danger of giving way beneath some gargantuan weight. The remaining ghouls bled to sand, and the flames on the merchant’s blade died into smoke. Above them, the ceiling began to crack, and sand rushed in through the gaps.
No one said anything. Aisha ripped off a part of her shawl, wrapped it around the merchant’s hand to stanch the bleeding, then grabbed her by her good arm and hauled her up and off the ground. The three of them ran—the merchant stumbling behind them with blood dripping between her fingers.
They made it down the crumbling staircase and onto the ground floor before a wall collapsed and a torrent of sand crashed down through the fissure. The force of the impact knocked Mazen off his feet. He fell hard on his hands and knees, hissing in pain. When he regained his footing, the corridor was dark with a dense layer of falling dust. The walls creaked, the mosaics bled colorful dirt, and the floor trembled.
Someone shoved him forward. Aisha, already hurrying ahead with Loulie.
There came a terrible groan. An ear-piercing screech as stone scraped together. And then the ceiling above them shattered, and sand engulfed the world, rushing toward them in a wave.
Mazen fled.
He chased after Aisha and Loulie, sprinting through sinking halls and weaving past falling rubble until the labyrinth narrowed into a single hall and light—glorious, gods-sent light—poured in from the exit at the end.
The ruins, as if aware of this fact, began to fall faster. The walls pressed closer; the ceilings loomed. A tremor ran through the building, strong enough to send a jolt through Mazen’s body and cause him to lose his balance. He stumbled into a wall, knees shaking.
Pressure built on his shoulders and weighed down his limbs as the building groaned and tipped. There was sand, sand everywhere. In his eyes, his ears, his lungs.
He couldn’t breathe. Could barely run. But—
Almost there.
He lurched to his feet. The floor slanted sideways. He slid. Quickly regained his footing.
Almost there, almost there.
He sprinted until the light was no longer distant, until it overwhelmed his senses and he was stumbling blindly, madly through the exit after Aisha and Loulie. There was a curtain of dust. A gasp of fresh air. And a whisper, quavering with excitement.
Finally, the Queen of Dunes said. I am free.
25
LOULIE
Loulie dreamed of fire.
In her dream, the sand was ash and the sky was filled with crackling embers. Her tribe’s campsite burned in the distance, engulfed in so much smoke it was impossible to tell victim from killer. When Loulie attempted to approach the slaughter, the embers in the sky blew harder, and the ground beneath her feet began to burn.