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Today, it was a gift, and one the consul did not have. Hassani was cat
atonic, caught in whatever vision had contorted his face and widened his eyes as I dragged us toward the door. I’d been pulling on his clothes, but the robes were weakened by fire, and the piece I was holding split in my hands. And, as soon as I touched his skin, a sneaky little vision caught me, leaping from him to me like lightning and throwing us both to the ground.
“Nothing to say?”
The speaker was a small man, thin, brown and bald, someone you might have passed in the street and never looked at twice—except for the haughtiness of his face. That much arrogance was reserved for kings and gods, the latter of which he absolutely believed himself to be. The son of Ra . . .
I felt my lips, bone dry as they were, crack into a smile.
“To who?” My voice, usually one of my best qualities, was little more than a dry rasp in my throat. I persisted anyway. “To the child unwanted even by his own parents? What was it they called you? Sokkwi, ‘Little Fool’? They knew what they’d birthed, and nothing ever done to you afterward has changed that. Little Fool you were; Little Fool you remain.”
“You see this, captain?” The fool—and the monster—glanced behind him. “I share secrets with him, and he uses them against me. Trying, in a clumsy fashion, to persuade me to anger, hoping I’ll kill him, no doubt.”
“Yes, Lord.”
The monster smiled gently at me. “It will not be that easy. Not for you. I wondered when those others rebelled, who was behind it. Wondered which of them was smart enough to plot so cunningly and so well. They never told me, did you know? They’re here still, downstairs, dried up like old firewood. Perhaps that is what I’ll use them for, someday.”
He laughed, and the captain of his guard, a huge man with a scarred face, laughed with him.
“Perhaps, one day, I shall afford you the same privilege,” the fool said. “But not yet. And not soon.” He glanced about the room, to where my friends and supporters were chained, suffering as I was. Then he leaned in. “Do they hate you yet? Before I’m done with you, they will.”
He left, but the captain stayed behind. And in a moment, I felt it—the coolness of metal in my palm. I looked down to see a key glimmering there. I looked up—
And found him gone.
Of course; he couldn’t risk so much as a word. Neither could I. But words were not what was needed here.
I started working on the lock to the magical cuffs that held me; not that they needed magic. Not anymore. I had no idea how I would get through the door in my current state, or past the soldiers who would doubtless be guarding it.
But when it came to it, the door was open, and the soldiers gone.
My people looked at me, clear eyed and stalwart, despite all that they had endured. They did not ask any questions. Even in my head their voices were silent, too exhausted to manage a simple connection. But I knew what they wanted to know.
“Someday,” I croaked. “Someday, we will light the biggest bonfire in the world over his corpse. But not today. Today, we live.”
I slammed back into myself with the words still echoing in my brain. Today, we live. Today, we live. Today, we live.
I knew the door to salvation was just ahead, even if I couldn’t see it. Grayish white smoke billowed around the outside of the bubble, blocking my view and threatening to choke me, even through the protection the shield offered. Worse, that protection had become our trap, filling up like a water balloon while I was out, leaving Hassani floating and me rolling uselessly around the floor.
So, I dropped it, heard the water hiss away into steam, felt the heat slam into me like a hundred ovens opened at the same time. The air was hot enough to sear my skin, even without the fire touching me. It didn’t matter.
“Today, we live,” I rasped at Hassani, and crawled toward safety, dragging him behind me. “Today, we live.”
It wasn’t easy going. Mind blind I might be, but the visions coming off the dead god were getting wilder and more numerous. I’d felt them batter me as soon as the shield dropped, in a hurricane of little bits and pieces, like the patches of shed skin burning up in the air all around us. And each of them seemed to have a story to tell, an attempt to drag me back inside a memory and leave me helpless.
One of them succeeded.
A huge palace, surrounded by date palms and sycamore figs, a man-made oasis where none had existed before. Stars overhead, brightening the otherwise solid black of the skies. The dark of the moon: beautiful, but deadly.
With no light, they would never make it out of here.
“I will burn, and light the way.”
It was Zakarriyyah who spoke, he whose master power was to resist flame. I could not see his eyes, but I knew they were burning, too, with the resolve he’d always shown. He had the stoutest heart of all my people; he would gladly die to save us.
And slowly burn to death, over the long journey across the sands.
But I could not let him. “My Child—”
