Chapter 17 #3
I yanked my hand free of his. “What sort of fate? What does that even mean ?”
“Amina?” Tinbu called out. “Is everything all right?”
Before I could open my mouth, Raksh clapped a palm over it.
“Say nothing of that door,” he warned. “I’m not unaware you too are holding secrets, wife.”
My heart skipped. Whether Raksh had noticed my reticence among my friends or meant something else, now wasn’t the time to
press. Instead I nodded and he dropped his hand.
“I’m fine,” I called back to Tinbu.
We hastened to rejoin them and ventured through another tunnel, its ceiling decorated with swirling constellations. I searched
the painted stars for Taurus or al-Dabaran but they marked no night sky I knew, and I finally gave up when staring upward
resulted in too many flakes of blue paint dusting my lashes.
“How much farther?” Dalila asked.
“Not much,” Raksh said. “You will know we are close when the ground starts to crunch.”
“ Crunch? ”
“There are a lot of bones. I told you it was a burial pit.”
Indeed it wasn’t long before the rocky ground gave way to a carpet of crumbling bone fragments that grew high enough to reach my knees.
I prayed for forgiveness as I waded through the shattered skulls and broken ribs flickering in the torchlight.
Raksh appeared to have literally hacked a hole through a catacomb of long-decayed corpses; rotten shrouds and remains lay all around us.
We clambered over a hill of skeletons, and he held a finger to his lips before pointing up to a grimy marble slab suspended over the packed crypt like the opening of a makeshift hatch.
“Just past that is the treasure chamber,” he whispered. “I can move the slab, but we’ll need to be quiet. We are getting close
to the cave’s mouth, where Falco and his men spend the night.”
I nodded and he silently edged aside the slab. We slipped through. The so-called treasure chamber was a mess, digging tools
and overturned buckets of earth scattered among shattered pottery, inscribed headstones, and tattered clothing. Coins and
broken strands of pearls littered the ground, but nothing much else of monetary value was left—perhaps Falco’s men had completed
their sack. Here and there crudely dug pits revealed more bones, and in the nearest, the remnants of two skeletons were still
half buried, seemingly where they died, curled protectively around each other.
Revulsion swept me. I will be honest: I have looted the long dead. Like others of my criminal class, I have traded in baubles
and jewelry said to be recovered from the tombs of priests and emperors. I rarely gave doing so much thought; if I had few
qualms about stealing from the living rich, I had fewer stealing from the deceased. But there was something about seeing these
bodies ripped from their rest, left scattered and discarded, that galled.
Excellent time to gain a conscience about grave-robbing, al-Sirafi . I studied what else I could of the chamber. Just ahead what appeared to be a bricked-over entrance had been reopened.
“Is Dunya that way?” I asked.
“She should be,” Raksh replied in a hush.
It sounded like he was get ting jittery.
In the distance, there was faraway laughter, and the air beyond the chamber was fresher, lightly scented by the sea.
We followed him into another, more natural opening in the cave.
Creeping forward like a roach, Raksh reached for a ragged curtain strung between two stalactites like a poor effort at a door. He carefully pulled it back...
To reveal nothing but an empty niche.
Raksh swore and I shoved past his hand, raising my lamp to illuminate a small sleeping space. A small, completely ransacked sleeping space. Cushions were slashed apart, their feather stuffing ripped out, and wooden chests smashed open. Clothes and
blankets were strewn everywhere, along with ripped pages of parchment and shattered stone icons. Here and there were abandoned
personal effects: bits of jewelry, a broken shell comb, and bizarrely, fine embroidered house slippers in bright pink silk.
“Raksh,” I said through my teeth, “care to explain?”
My useless spouse seemed taken aback. “Dunya was here when I left,” he insisted. “I swear!”
Dalila knelt to examine the torn cushions. “It looks like whoever did this was searching for something. Do you think Dunya
might have stolen from the treasure chamber?”
“Perhaps.” I rummaged through the abandoned pages littering the ground. A few were in Arabic, but the language was archaic,
the seemingly astrological material impossible to comprehend. Beneath one page was a broken clay tablet with the same wedge-like
characters as the tablets back in Dunya’s library.
“We should leave,” Raksh warned in a low voice. “This girl was his prize. If something happened between them...”
“We are not leaving. Not yet.”
“Amina, you do not know this man. Nothing enrages him like disloyalty.”
“ We are not leaving ,” I repeated more firmly. “Is there anywhere else Dunya could be?”
Raksh let out an aggravated sigh. “Falco might have locked her up with the villagers. He keeps them closer to the cave entrance. The entrance, you may recall, where twenty armed, violent sellswords with irrational tempers will be waiting.”
Tinbu, Dalila, and I looked at one another.
“We could investigate,” Dalila suggested. “Get close enough to see if Dunya is among them. It’s dark, and most people will
likely be sleeping. If we extinguish the lamps, we might pass undetected.”
“Since when have you all lost your sense of self-preservation?” Raksh groaned. “I thought you were pirates!”
“We are reformed.” I snuffed my lamp and set it down on the ground so we could retrieve it when—if—we left. My companions
did the same, leaving us in darkness save Raksh’s pale blue glow.
With a contemptuous sneer that was louder than our whispers, Raksh stalked forward. He didn’t make it easy to follow him,
and more than once we stumbled and crashed into rocky protrusions. Without warning, he shifted back to his human form.
“Hush,” he breathed. In the distance was the bare radiance of a bonfire, its light sending wild shadows dancing across the
cave’s craggy interior. I could hear drunken boasts and smell the aroma of roasting meat.
But from closer, there was soft weeping. The odor of decay, of spilled organs and old blood—the same smells that had clung
to the village’s murdered elders. Raksh led us in the direction of the weeping, weaving through towering, twisting stone formations.
A luminescent stream bubbled underfoot, thick clusters of purple moss covering the limestone walls. The increasingly foul
smell made it feel like we were stepping into a fetid wound, the warmly moist brush of the moss against my skin causing me
to shudder. Just ahead was a dim glow, as if lamps had been lit and left in the chamber beyond. I stepped inside. And then...
And then...
—Ah... give me a moment if you would, Jamal. I know this is difficult for the both of us. Truthfully, the horror of that night was just beginning, though I could not know it at that moment.
—The chamber, though; what I saw there is seared in my memory. And should I be cursed to live a thousand years, I will never
forget it.
The place was a slaughterhouse. A butcher shop of human souls. Vivisected corpses were laid out and decaying on stone slabs,
while more hung from the stalactites, their bodies crudely hacked apart and left to drip blood and entrails into collection
dishes. Skulls and finger bones had been boiled free of flesh, fat and hair overflowing stinking bowls, and the bones arranged
in bizarre shapes surrounding piles of seashells, gull feathers, and lumps of red carnelian. It took several shocking moments
of staring for my mind to process that these indeed had been people, that the grisly parts I was looking at had belonged to
humans , before looking became abominable and I cast my gaze to the ground.
Tinbu fell to his knees and threw up. Dalila—who could steel her reaction like no one I had ever met—let out a low cry before
clamping a hand to her mouth and making the sign of the cross.
I was too numb to make a sound. I have seen a great amount of violence in my life. Parents murdered in front of their children,
sobbing girls younger than Marjana sold into slavery, elderly divers worked until their brains burst under the water. Things
I would never tell my family. People do not take to the seas if the land offers better, and the kind of men lured to a life
of smuggling and raiding are not gentle.
But I had never seen anything like this chamber.
“The Frank dies for this.” It was Dalila, her whispered voice fierce. “They all do.” I could only nod.
A muffled whimper pulled my attention from the ghastly tableau. We were not alone.
A band of about a dozen people were huddled on the other side of the chamber, as far from the bodies as their chains would allow, watching us with open fear.
They were filthy and shackled together, dressed in rags and covered in bruises and bleeding wounds.
I stepped forward and several of the prisoners cringed back.
One woman had her hand clamped over the mouth of a weeping boy, her eyes bright with fear.
“Let me.” Dalila swept past, carefully motioning to her cross and then kneeling before the imprisoned villagers. She said
something softly that I couldn’t make out, and when a man at the front gave a small nod, she gestured for me to join them.
I did so, crouching at her side and trying to block as much of the awful scene behind me as possible. “We mean you no harm,”
I promised. “Can you understand me?”
The man hesitated but with a glance at the others, replied in accented Arabic, “Yes, I can understand you.”
“Is there anyone else here?” I asked. “Other prisoners hidden away?”
“No,” the Socotran man choked out, his voice hoarse. “They have killed everyone else.”
They have killed everyone else . Dalila swore, and with even greater horror, I stared at the small group before me. Had they been here for those murders? Shackled in an abattoir while their loved ones were tortured and killed before their eyes?
I shook my head, trying to keep away the awful buzzing threatening to overwhelm me. Falling apart would not help these people.
“We’re going to get you out of here, God willing. Dalila, start on their shackles. Tinbu, help me with the ropes.”
Raksh groused. “We do not have time for this.”
Cutting through the ropes binding the man’s legs, I said, “This is the only thing worthy of our time.”
The Socotran villager jerked back upon spotting Raksh. “This man belongs to them. He is the servant of their leader.”
“I am not his servant —”
I shushed them both. “He is with us for now and knows an escape route through the tunnels. The way is arduous, but we will get your people out. I hope you can help me in return.”
“How?” the man asked warily.
“I am looking for a young woman who came here from Aden.”
The man nodded in recognition. “Their leader’s scribe. But she is gone.”
Gone . The breath went out of me. All this and Dunya was gone ? “Where?” I asked urgently. “Where did she go?”
“I am sorry, but I can tell you nothing more. She ran off about two days ago. We only learned when the rest of them did.”
The Socotran man shuddered, fresh tears rolling down his cheeks. “Their leader... he has been in a rage ever since. It
is when he began slaughtering my people.”
More inebriated laughter rang out from the direction of the cave’s mouth, and I made a swift decision.
Get them out of here. I would be trusting the word of a stranger, yes, but the Socotran man’s account struck me as the truth. And they were locals;
they might be able to help us figure out where Dunya had fled.
We worked swiftly to free the surviving villagers, but it was slow going once we started walking. The Socotrans were frail
and sick, many sporting injuries, and it took twice as long to return to the treasure chamber. Raksh lifted the marble slab,
setting it on an overturned funerary urn, and Dalila and Tinbu slipped through. We worked to gently lower down the villagers
one by one until only Raksh and the man who had spoken were left.
There was a shout in the distance.
“They are gone! The prisoners have escaped!”
I shoved the last man through. “ Go .”
“Amina, come on.” Through the narrow gap in the bone-encrusted burial pit, Tinbu waved me forward. “Hurry!”
But I knew we would not be fast enough. The villagers were injured and weak. It would take hours for them to escape through
Raksh’s tunnel and that was before they were hoisted up the ropes. They needed more time.
And I needed to know about Dunya.
Coming to a regrettable decision, I freed my grandfather’s khanjar and reached through the gap to shove it in Tinbu’s belt.
“Give me two days.”
He looked confused. “Two days?”
“If I am not at the beach where we landed in two days, you signal the Marawati and get the hell off this island.”
“Amina, no—”
But I was already whirling around. I grabbed Raksh by the collar and shoved him through the gap. “If you abandon them and
I live, you lose your ride out,” I snarled. “And if you abandon them and I die , I will haunt you for the rest of eternity.”
Then before I could think better of it, before I could entertain a moment of doubt, I let the marble slab fall.
The block smashed into the ground with a resounding thud, plunging me into darkness, and setting off a new round of cries
from Falco’s swiftly approaching men. I kicked over a great tower of bones to cover the slab, swinging my sword around to
ensure as much chaos and debris as possible, and then I slipped out.
A dozen tunnels snaked away from where I stood, offering hiding spots or the chance to wander until I got lost and was devoured
by a giant white snake.
But I didn’t flee. Instead, I followed the shouts and ran directly for Falco’s men. I found them, arguing and cursing at one
another around the next bend.
“Peace be upon you, gentlemen!” I greeted diplomatically, sheathing my sword. “My name is Amina al-Sirafi.
“And I am the nakhudha your boss has been looking for.”