We Hunt the Flame(13)

Not that Nasir wanted it. He wasn’t ready for such a responsibility; he doubted he would ever be.

Scarcely a year after her announcement of the succession, the sultana was pronounced dead from a grave illness that spurred the people into a panic, for safin were immortal. Their hearts slowed once they reached full maturity, and they didn’t die from mortal ailments.

Safin rarely died without a blade to their throats.

Nasir agreed, for he knew how his mother had breathed her last.

And now more than Arawiya’s crown lay in the sultan’s grasp. A caliphate did, too.

The dungeon lock fell away with an echoing clang, and the door swung into a barren room where a boy of eight huddled against the wall. As Nasir’s eyes adjusted to the bleakness, he wondered if Altair knew of the boy shivering in the damp cold of the dungeons. Nasir hadn’t even known until a few days ago. Then again, Nasir knew very little about the royal agenda.

When he stepped within the clammy confines of the palace dungeons, they fell silent. Despite the dark, they always knew when he entered, and no one breathed a sound.

If he were truly his father’s son, he would have basked in their fear, but he was his mother’s son, too, and it only sickened him.

He stepped into the boy’s cell, clenching his teeth against the stench of rot and feces. “Get up.”

The young Demenhune eyed the lash in Nasir’s hand and stood, teetering on his feet. He had been here for half a moon, no more, but already his bones jutted, his hair lay lackluster, and his skin was duller. He shuffled forward, the grit of sand scraping stone loud in the hushed silence. Nasir threw a dusty cloak around his shoulders.

“Baba?” the boy said.

“You will see him,” Nasir replied softly, and in the harsh darkness, the curve of the boy’s small shoulders relaxed, content with the mere chance of seeing his father.

Beside the door, the guard glanced at the boy’s cloak, then dared to flick his gaze to Nasir, who paused without turning his head.

“Something wrong, guard?” he asked, looking ahead. He made the word sound like a curse.

“N-no, my liege,” the guard murmured.

Nasir cut his gaze to him, and the guard dropped his head. He waited a touch longer, until he caught the flare of the guard’s nostrils, fear reinstated. Then he tightened his grip on the lash and pushed the boy toward the stone stairs.

Yalla, he wanted to snap as the boy’s palm slid along the onyx railing. At the top, Nasir removed the cloak and shoved it behind a cupboard. The boy’s small chest rose with a deep inhale before the door to the sultan’s chambers opened.

The sultan was seated on the black majlis sofa that covered half of the main room. He was barefoot and cross-legged, his sandals a hairbreadth away on the ornate Pelusian rug. He looked less kingly, seated on the floor. A scribe was kneeling before him.

Black scrolls were in the sultan’s hands.

Every week, the scrolls were brought to the sultan, a new record of Arawiya’s dead. Most of the scrolls listed out the men who had perished while mining in the Leil Caves of Sarasin because of a collapsed wall, a beating, or worse—the quiet deaths in which entire groups were attacked by invisible fumes that blocked their lungs, suffocating them until they heaved their last.

Until this day, the scrolls had sat untouched in a basket beside the sultan’s throne, boiling Nasir’s blood. Now, he stilled at the impossible sight before him.

The sultan tapped a finger on a scroll. “I want these fumes harvested.”

“Sultani?” stammered the scribe, stilling his hand across the papyrus. Ink dripped from his reed pen.

“These fumes. The vapors that suffocated these men,” the sultan said thoughtfully.

The scribe nodded, jerky and fervent.

“I want them harvested or replicated and then contained and brought to me.”

Ah. That was more like his father.

“I do not think we know how, Sultani,” the scribe said quietly.

Disgust twisted the sultan’s face. “I know you’re all witless. Have ‘Uday take the coterie of Pelusians to the caves and give them what they need. I want this done quickly.” Nasir doubted the delegation of Pelusians living in Sultan’s Keep enjoyed being ordered about. “Now get out.”

The scribe murmured his respects and hurried from the room, thobe shuffling.

“Fumes,” Nasir said when they were alone. He wanted to pronounce the word as a question, but his pride refused.

“Set the fire,” Ghameq said instead, and met his gaze when Nasir didn’t move at once. Nasir clenched his teeth, wanting to demand an answer, but the little boy was a risk.

So after one lengthy moment, Nasir left him shivering by the door and lit the fire. Coward. Coward. Fool.

There was only one reason for a fire in the midday heat. And the more Nasir played with magic, the more dangerous the line he trod. Rarely a day passed in which the sultan didn’t order Nasir to assist him with its use. Perhaps the magic that once lit the royal minarets was clean and good, but this anomaly was nothing near it. This was a hell of its own.

And he did not know where it came from.

The sultan toyed with the antique circle at his chest. Nasir had touched it once, that medallion. Darkness had seized his mind, whispers and half-crazed screams echoing in his ears when his fingers passed over the inscriptions in the ancient tongue. It was a darkness wrought with pain, a darkness that could never end.