Chapter 4
With a hastily scribbled note informing Salima I would meet her in Aden after...
—Wait, is that a map ? What are you doing with a map? I already told you I wasn’t sharing the name of my next port of call.
—“For a better understanding of geography”? Have you lost your wits, Jamal? You want to risk coming to the attention of our
world’s most notorious criminal gang for a better understanding of geography ? Fool, no one is listening to sailors’ yarns about pirates and wizards to learn about fucking topography. Put that damn map
away and let’s try this again.
An unspecified amount of time after Sayyida Salima intruded upon my home, I stood before a skinny shop in a forgotten town between Salalah and Aden, sweat
stinging my eyes. The sun was high overhead, that most sweltering point of the day when anyone with sense is resting in the
coolest spot of shade they can find. The building was purposely innocuous, surrounded by foul-smelling tanneries, dye shops,
and barbers who must have specialized in bloodletting and flesh-branding, judging by the stench. Greasy mats of tightly braided
reeds covered the shop’s windows, and the battered door was devoid of any markings that might have indicated the building’s
purpose.
“We are friends,” I reminded myself under my breath, working up some courage. “And friends do not murder each other without
warning.” With a whispered prayer, I knocked on the door.
It swung inward on a pair of rusty hinges, revealing a yawning black hole.
“Hello?” I called out. “Is anyone here?”
There was no response. My heart racing, I stepped inside. The room was exceedingly small and bare, the only furniture a low
wooden bench. Just beside the bench was another doorway. A patterned red curtain had been drawn across it and a ceramic plate
inscribed with religious verses hung above.
“Nakhudha?”
I jumped and spun around with a curse. A small woman now stood between the outer door and me, having appeared seemingly out
of thin air. Dressed in an ash-covered blue tunic rolled to her elbows, she was so short that she barely rose to my chest,
the dim light casting a greenish hue across her golden-brown skin and making her face look delicate.
“Dalila!” I greeted brightly. “Well... look who has gotten more beautiful with retirement!” This was a lie. Dalila has
always possessed a kind of alarming beauty, but right now her dark chestnut hair was so snarled it resembled a bird’s nest,
one of her eyebrows appeared to have been recently singed off, and she was squinting, giving her expression a more manic edge
than usual.
“Amina al-Sirafi.” Without warning, Dalila lunged forward to wrap me in a tight hug. “My friend, you have finally come to
visit!” She grabbed my face, her nails digging into the back of my skull as she kissed my cheeks. “My goodness, I was beginning
to fear you’d forgotten all about me! It was beginning to hurt my feelings!”
Fear galloped through me. I glanced down to see if the linen cap covering her head was her infamous one—the one whose ribbons
are festooned with poison tablets and glass vials of death fashioned to look like pretty baubles.
I couldn’t tell. Damn. “No. No, of course not,” I replied, forcing a laugh. “How could I forget my closest friend?”
“Tinbu is your closest friend. He got your ship.”
“Tinbu did not get my ship. He sails under my leave. Because he is a sailor and not someone who refused to learn anything about boats.”
Dalila straightened, bringing all her petite form up to bear. “I could have learned.”
I tried to change the subject. “So your trade nowadays...” I glanced around the bare interior. “It is what exactly?”
She smiled for the first time, a devilish gleam in the dark. Closer now, I could see silver streaks in her hair and a few
fine lines tracing out from her eyes and lips. “Pharmaceuticals.”
Pharmaceuticals . I choked. “I did not think you had any... training in that.”
“Oh, I don’t. But it is largely the same principle as poisoning, no? Just in reverse.” Dalila winked. “The ladies here love
me. So many terrible husbands dying in their sleep. It must be something in the water.”
God preserve me. “I am, ah, happy you are finding your place in the world.”
“One has little choice when they have been abandoned by those they considered their closest comrades.”
“I literally paid you off. Generously.”
Dalila took my arm, and I tried not to tense. “Generosity is a matter of opinion, my dear nakhudha. Come, I will show you
my work.”
Somehow she made that sound not quite like a threat, and we swept through the curtained entrance into a room four times bigger than the false entry that made immediately clear—no matter her griping—that Dalila had invested her final payoff well.
Repurposed shelves and sturdy tables were covered in stoneware dishes and clay jars.
Some were filled with the herbs, oils, resins, and such one would find in a proper apothecary, but there were also stranger, more lethal ingredients hinting at her true profession: blacksmith’s filings and powdered glass, pickled nightshade berries and dried oleander flowers.
The strong stench of chemicals rose from a corner of the room dedicated to simmering liquid-filled metal pots set over a trio of braziers.
Taking great care not to touch anything and casting a wary eye at a complicated apparatus with glass bulbs, copper tubes, and what looked like blood splashed in
its interior, I let out an impressed whistle. “Nice workshop. Certainly appears you’ve kept yourself busy.”
“The quiet life of being ignored by my companions has otherwise done me well, and staying in one place lets me run experiments
longer.” Dalila gave an affectionate tap to a suspended burlap sack dripping purple ichor into a glass flask. “I have been
doing some truly astonishing new things with knockout gas.”
“You’re going to permanently knock yourself out one day with one of these experiments if you’re not careful.” There seemed
distressingly poor ventilation in her cramped workplace.
“What is a little risk compared to the possibility of advancing the poison arts?” Dalila raised her singed eyebrow. “You know
what my sheikh says.”
“‘He who dares does while he who fears fails,’” I said, repeating the mantra of the Banu Sasan. “Not to insult your guild’s
beliefs, but perhaps we could talk somewhere away from knockout gases?”
With a disappointed roll of her eyes, Dalila led me to a small courtyard boxed in by the looming, windowless walls of the
surrounding buildings. Save the deadly experiments, her personal possessions were few. A low rope bed covered in a patchwork
quilt stood in one corner, and an icon of Maryam and baby Isa, peace be upon them both, was set reverently in a niche in the
bricks nearby. Upon a single trunk was her staff, a slender length of polished hardwood I’d seen crack more than one man’s
skull.
It was a far cry from my warm, bustling home filled with family and souvenirs, and upon taking it all in, I did feel a measure of guilt.
Or perhaps Dalila had guided me to such guilt.
Like any youngster, I grew up on tales of the Banu Sasan.
Stories of thieves who break into homes by digging tunnels under the foundation and murderers who can cut a man’s neck so cleanly his head won’t topple off.
Some people say the Banu Sasan are the criminally talented descendants of Persian kings chased into the mountains centuries ago; others claim they’re just con men with clever tricks that make for easily exaggerated gossip.
Either way, they inspire wonderful stories, this brotherhood of terrifying brigands and scoundrels, their tales so audacious they seem impossible to believe.
Then Dalila joined my crew. Or rather she blackmailed my crew into spiriting her out of Basrah by stowing away in the cargo
hold, poisoning my navigator, and withholding the antidote until we had cleared the Persian Gulf. It was a complicated recruitment
process. But becoming the boon companion of an actual devotee of this supposed Sheikh Sasan has not enlightened me as to the
mysteries of the Banu Sasan, or Dalila herself, in the slightest. She is a Christian, a proud one who makes a quiet point
of looking out for her people when she can, but I could tell you nothing more than that. We once had a particularly obnoxious
linguistics scholar turned hostage who tried to wheedle more information out of her, claiming he could tell from her accent
and rituals where her people were from. After he smugly declared her to be an Assyrian from Mosul, Dalila smiled and prayed
Christian invocations in a dozen different languages, changing her inflection, accent, and gestures for each, and we all stopped
bothering her about her origins.
“Sit, sit.” Dalila waved me toward her bed and then busied herself preparing two glass cups, steeping and straining dried
red dates with some sort of chopped root and shards of amber jaggery.
She handed me one of the cups. “My newest creation. Like nothing you will ever drink again.” She sat down on the other side
of the rope bed, and it was as though a spirit had alighted, her weight not shifting the cushions in the slightest.
I regarded the honey-colored concoction and her expectant expression. Surely she was only teasing me. Dalila had always had a disturbing sense of humor. And we were friends, right? At least the closest approximation of friendship I thought Dalila capable of.
I sipped my drink. “It is good,” I said, trying to pretend I could taste anything while she watched me with her cat eyes.
“Not too bitter? You know, you still have a price on your head. A high one.”
I stared at her. If Dalila wanted to kill me, she didn’t need to poison my drink. That would be so obvious it was almost insulting
to her abilities. She had already kissed my cheeks, touched the back of my neck, and taken my arm in hers—more clever, more