She hurried in the opposite direction, finding a small alcove created in the angle of space between three of the massive houses. Sunlight slanted within the confines of tan stone just so, illuminating an arch set into one of the walls and built of dazzling glazed tiles in hues of blue and red and gold, like a doorway to a hidden world. She stepped close, only to find it wasn’t a door but a fountain, a pool of glittering green water rippling beneath it.
It was beauty that felt delicate, a moment suspended out of time. Beauty she couldn’t appreciate.
“I don’t know why I listen to you,” she hissed.
The Jawarat didn’t answer, and Zafira pressed herself against the wall to collect her breath. A sand qit rose from its perch near the fountain, eyeing her with distrust.
It is truth. We are not mortal.
Perspiration trickled down the back of Zafira’s neck as the sun ratcheted up the heat.
We are immortal.
“And suddenly I am, too?” she asked angrily.
We are bound, you and us. The span of our life is yours.
“That … that isn’t how it works.”
Can pith made papyrus speak to a witless girl?
She gritted her teeth, ready to fling the Jawarat into the fountain. “What do you want from me?”
There had to be a reason it spoke to her, goaded her. She wasn’t like the Lion or the darkness in which the Jawarat had festered. She was powerless, as Seif continuously repeated. Perhaps it was time to entrust Aya with the book and—
A hiss reverberated in her ears, and she dropped the Jawarat in her fright. It fell open on the dusty stone. She looked about sharply, but only the fountain gurgled softly, dust dancing in the slanting sunlight.
Then the book slammed itself shut.
Bint Iskandar.
The words were a terrible moan. Fear crept into her veins.
Let us show you what you can do.
The alcove faded away, ebbing light giving shape to the snowy stretch of a village and a cloaked woman in its center. The sooq looked familiar, as did the scant, spindly trees. Demenhur. Yet Zafira herself wasn’t in the caliphate. It was as if she were looking through a spyglass into another world, an observer.
The green leather of the Jawarat was clutched in the woman’s left hand, the fingers of her right twisting to the skies, and words Zafira couldn’t understand slipping from her tongue. An incantation, almost. A spell.
Shouts rang out as people ran from the sooq in fear, fleeing from her—the woman—as she brought her fist down suddenly.
And the ground surged upward.
The circular jumu’a meant for gatherings erupted. Stone and debris hurtled toward the surrounding stalls and struck down screaming villagers. Several men ran toward the woman, some with tabars and swords, others hefting bricks and whatever makeshift weapons they could find.
Even as they neared, the woman did not move. The biting chill stirred her cloak.
She merely flipped to another page of the Jawarat, and after a few breathless moments, Zafira watched as she arced her hand down.
Rending
the men
in half.
Screams broke out anew, bodies fell to the ground with sickening thuds. No, Zafira tried to shout, to stop this senseless violence, but her mouth was sewn shut. She struggled to breathe, bound to this terrible vision, laa, nightmare. For that was what it was.
A nightmare.
The men fell, one after the other. Halved by her terrible power. By the Jawarat’s power. The grisly image seared itself into Zafira’s skin. More men dropped to their knees, their own swords through their guts. The ruined sooq turned crimson as blood flowed freely, pooling around the woman’s feet.
Silence fell, and with a satisfied hum, she turned, knocking back her hood with a bloody hand.
And Zafira stared at herself.
It was her, down to the ice in her eyes and the angry set of her brows. Exactly her, except for one thing.
Her hair was the color of splintered bone.
A silver vial filled with something thick and crimson hung around her neck, and when the white-haired version of herself slid the Jawarat beneath her cloak, Zafira saw a fresh gash across her palm, nestled in a sea of scars, flesh knitted back. Dum sihr. She strode to a black steed, boots slicing snow before she mounted and disappeared into the streets.
Leaving behind a tomb.
The lavender door of Bakdash hung on its hinges. Araby’s colorful sweet shop was a pile of rubble. She saw men, boys, children—dead. All of them. Struck with stone, cut in half, innards and organs spilling out, bleeding, bleeding, bleeding.
Because of her.
“Please,” she begged. She didn’t know to whom she begged; she merely repeated the word until her surroundings blurred and she lost her balance.
And then, nothing.
Zafira dug the heels of her palms into the stone and lifted her head with a wheeze. The alcove surrounded her. The Jawarat was by her knees.
Do you see, bint Iskandar?
She only saw something far more sinister than the Lion of the Night. Something small and unassuming, with centuries of memories from Arawiya’s most powerful beings, and nearly another with far worse: the evil that had seeped within Sharr.
And it had controlled her.
“Why?” she whispered. “Why me?”
The purest of hearts will always triumph the darkest of souls.
Footsteps hastened just around the bend. Zafira closed her eyes and gathered both her breath and the Jawarat before rising on shaky legs. Three figures drew near, their cloaks coruscating silver. The Sultan’s Guard. Khara. She flattened herself against the wall, but they hurried past the alcove without so much as a glance, their low murmurs urgent, hands gripping the simple black hilts of their scimitars.
“Show me something useful,” she hissed at the Jawarat. “Show me what the Lion can do with a single si’lah heart.”
Nothing.
Laa, peevish silence.
With a growl, Zafira willed the Jawarat’s vision away and crept after the guards as a chanting began, snippets of shouts and demands carrying along the errant breeze. The Jawarat’s insistent voice broke through them.
We will be seen.
“Now you can talk?” Zafira asked. She darted from the shadows of one building to the next, but she didn’t have to live here to discern this emptiness as unusual. It was the sultan’s city. It was meant to be bustling at all times, not eerily quiet here and noisy there. Before an alley, she paused, squinting at the square up ahead.
Dread halted her breath. Chants met her ears.
Taxes kill. Break the till.
Protests. People were protesting, marching—running in the direction of the palace. Toward her.
Her heart leaped to her throat, and her fingers slickened around the Jawarat as she turned and made for Aya’s house, the heated stones scorching her bare feet. She stumbled on a pebble with a curse. Don’t fall, don’t fall. She thought of the Arz and her hunts, when not even her prey heard her agile footfalls.
The distance between her and the crowd grew, and she allowed herself a moment to pause. A terrible mistake.
An explosion shook the earth, and Zafira fell to her knees as a stampede of people charged toward her.
CHAPTER 14
Underground. That was where Nasir was now, in a room barricaded and reinforced to muffle all else. After he’d dragged his gaze from the double doors for the umpteenth time, shadows wreathing from his hands like an oil lamp just snuffed, Aya had suggested they train.