Chapter 36
If I thought the palace was in chaos when I left to retrieve Raksh, it was nothing compared to the pandemonium rampaging through its collapsing halls now.
The impressive glass windows were melting and warping as though exposed to an invisible furnace, fine mosaics of sea divinities crumbling to dust, and towering columns tumbling to the ground.
Most of the curtains were ablaze, writhing and whining as though alive.
Smoke choked the air, the acrid smell of burning wool sharp enough to make my eyes sting.
Forget avoiding the queen’s guards—none appeared in a state to pursue me.
Blank-eyed servants wandered in a daze, while those wearing dyed cloaks fought to remove them or stop others from doing the same.
Ahead two scribes screamed as their shrouds spontaneously went up in flames.
Horror ripped through me. “What have I done?”
“This is not you,” Raksh replied curtly.
Dressed in my black captain’s robe and seemingly fully recovered, my husband appeared as though garbed in shadow, a being of night descending to prowl.
He watched the burning scribes with an unsettling and predacious distance as they crumbled, leaving nothing but ashy remnants of cloth.
“How do you know that?” I whispered, aching to believe him.
“I thrive off discord, Amina. Trust that I can distinguish its flavors.” Raksh nodded at the turmoil surrounding us. “This lies at the feet of the one you call Lab. Get rid of her and all this ends.” He jerked me out of the path of a falling column. “And be a bit lighter on your feet, yes?”
“Captain al-Sirafi!”
I turned to see Arno at the other end of the corridor, caught in a scuffle. He sounded frightened, and I didn’t blame him—a cloaked mob had also turned at his voice and was now approaching him as though bewitched.
“Arno!” I cut a path through the scrabbling Khatti Ugalans, shoving them away from the youth.
A few were looking at Arno with disturbing hunger, running their fingers over his bare arms and undyed tunic.
I finally grabbed him, yanking him close.
We ran to an adjoining terrace and Raksh barred the door behind us, putting distance between ourselves and the panicked throng.
Raksh stepped back, the door appearing to shudder and age. “I don’t believe that will hold for long.”
Arno cast bewildered glances between us, his eyes going wide at the blood staining my clothes. “You’re hurt!”
“I’m fine,” I lied. “But you should get out of the palace, boy. Go home to your family.”
“I can’t.” He shivered. “The queen commanded that the bridge crossing the river be destroyed.”
“What?” The news took me aback. Lab might have a twisted way of “protecting” her people, but I could see little reason to trap them in her palace while we battled. “Why?”
“They say there are pirates in the harbor,” Arno explained. “The queen has gone to challenge them, but cut off access to the rest of the city in case she was defeated.”
Pirates? My head spun. “Is there a vantage point close by that would allow me to view the harbor?” I asked urgently.
Arno nodded. “Just through here.”
“Just through here” ended up being a maze of terraces and exterior stairwells I’d be lucky to retrace, but finally we were racing up a squat tower that loomed over the harbor. I rushed to the parapet, leaving both men in the dust.
The scene that greeted me was a familiar nightmare.
The great graveyard of ships I’d spotted my first night in Khatti Ugal had reemerged in all its haunting glory, now painted with pale dawn light rather than shards of lightning.
Decaying carcasses of broken cargo vessels and the shattered remnants of galleys emerged from the choppy water alongside sharp black rocks.
Smashed planks, bobbing barrels, and the frayed remnants of sails littered the water and neighboring beach.
There were no bones, no bodies—maritime predators would have seen to that—but it was impossible not to perceive the deaths of countless sailors in that ghastly vista.
But it wasn’t only ghosts and their ruined boats in the harbor this morning.
A half-dozen skiffs—their slender profile and shallow hulls seemingly designed for such lethal waters—cut through the debris field like knives through crumpled blue-gray cloth.
A handful of men crewed each boat—those who were not paddling standing ready with drawn weapons.
Swords and daggers glittered with damp spray, bows were drawn back, and spears and hammers waited at the ready.
It was a sight that would freeze the blood of any seaside villager, would send fisherfolk racing from nets, watchtowers blazing with warnings, mothers running to hide screaming children.
Raiders from the sea. How many times had those words, that terrible sight, led to death and destruction? To huts set ablaze, livelihoods stolen, people captured and sold?
And yet the sight of these raiders sent my heart soaring.
For it was my crew! Not all of them, but the best fighters; my brawlers, my bowmen, the sailors I’d had to pull from knife bouts.
They were all below, led by Majed in the first skiff.
My builders and carpenters, the men who could row for hours but barely throw a punch—not to mention Tinbu, the only person capable of repairing the Marawati—were nowhere to be seen, and I prayed it was because they were being kept safe somewhere else.
Relief and apprehension warred within me. My people were alive—and here! Maybe the boundaries had finally fallen, maybe they’d been waiting, but clearly Dalila and I had not been forgotten. I searched the beach, trying to see if any had landed yet.
I froze. There was one small figure on the beach, but it wasn’t one of my sailors.
It was Queen Lab, wearing my best friend’s body like a cloak.
Dalila’s familiar form stood on the sand, carefully out of reach of the dancing waves.
In the clinging, sleeveless Khatti Ugalan clothes, she looked even slighter than usual.
The wind whipped through her chestnut hair, the sun catching the reddish hues and turning them to flame as she watched the approaching boats.
I could only imagine how my crew’s grim determination, their purpose and their weapons, would appear to Queen Lab, the sorceress who had made plain her hatred of pirates.
Raksh and Arno finally joined me.
“Ah, the crew!” Raksh said with a merry cheer entirely inappropriate to the circumstances. “Good to see them again.”
Arno gaped. “Is that Majed?” He jerked back, looking baffled and betrayed. “But why would your people attack us? We welcomed them!”
“We never meant to hurt anyone.” But the words felt like ash in my mouth; our arrival in Khatti Ugal had very much led to harm.
Perhaps a level of justified harm, but .
. . I inhaled, shoving all that away for right now.
“Listen, boy. I know you’ve no reason to trust me, but you’re not safe here.
” I paused, thinking fast. “Go to the Chamber of Mysteries,” I decided, hoping that a place surrounded by shipwrecked items, not woven illusions, might be soundest as the enchantments that held Khatti Ugal together unraveled. “You and anyone else you can convince.”
Indecision played across Arno’s face. “You’re going to confront my queen.”
Yes. And I prayed this young man who I quite liked didn’t try to stop me. I had enough blood on my hands.
But whether Arno had come to trust me or had already been entertaining his own quiet doubts about his world, he stepped back.
“The Chamber of Mysteries,” he repeated, sounding ill.
“That is where I shall look for you, I promise.”
Arno bit his lip, looking so uncertain and anguished that he’d gone pale. But then he pointed to an entrance on the other side of the tower, one barely visible beneath overgrown vines. “That way to the harbor is fastest. Go left and you’ll emerge just above the beach.”
Gratitude and guilt flooded through me; I suspected that choice had cost him greatly. “Thank you.”
Arno raced off, and Raksh warned, “He could be lying.”
“He could be.” But I needed a glimmer of faith. Tugging my husband along, I headed for the entrance Arno had indicated.
The young man had been telling the truth; at a split in the stone conduit, the leftmost path took us down a set of steps that crumbled to ruins beneath our feet. By the time we arrived at the decaying seawall, it had petered out to little more than a pattering of weedy stones.
But we were at the harbor, my people now even closer to shore.
“They can’t land on the beach,” I realized aloud.
“It’s not safe.” I didn’t know how Lab’s magic worked—there were at least no nearby trees whose roots she could charm into weapons—but I’d experienced firsthand how strong her grip could be and witnessed her bewitch three bandits into sipping a potion that turned them into livestock.
Better that a stretch of water—the domain of the marid, Lab’s hated enemies—stayed between the queen and my crew. “I need to stop them.”
Raksh’s black eyes narrowed, taking in the scene.
There was not a hint of his usual swagger or devil-may-care attitude.
He watched Lab like the tiger whose stripes his bestial form sported.
“Nor can I oppose her from this distance,” he added.
“We’ll have to get closer. That way you can snatch the spindle off her. ”
“And then what?”
“You give it to me.”
“What? Why?” I demanded, suspicious. Raksh had been cagey regarding how he was going to defeat Lab, and I suddenly wondered if that was because he hoped to claim the spindle for himself.
“Because I need to unravel its magic before you break it.” I must have still looked guarded, for exasperation lit his features.
“We just fled a burning palace of crumbling illusions and enslaved souls, and you want to question how I intend to bring down the creature who desires nothing more than destroying us?”