We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya 1)

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.

It was a darkness that despaired in itself.

The medallion was special, and the fact that it was with the sultan at all times made it even more so. And if Ghameq saw the same darkness, he welcomed it.

The fire roared to life, and the sultan stood. Sweat trickled down Nasir’s back when he reached for the poker, his palm slick against the metal. He was very well capable of using it himself, but he passed it to his father.

The poker. Burning flesh. A scream. He squeezed his eyes shut and released a quivering breath. It was a weakness he wished he didn’t have to display, and with it came a lick of shame at his neck.

“You are still weak,” the sultan murmured as he stoked the fire.

Nasir quelled the ire that quaked at the tips of his fingers. “I’m worn out, Sultani.” And there will come a time when I won’t be.

“Hmm,” the sultan said absently, as if he had heard Nasir’s unspoken words. “One day, you will see the flaw in your ways, in your curse of compassion, and understand what I’ve wanted for you from the beginning.”

But his father hadn’t wanted this from the beginning. There was a time when he, too, had valued compassion. Nasir thought he remembered the curve of a smile and a palace flooded with light. He held that flickering memory close, but with each passing day, it only withered further. Was this what Owais had been trying to understand?

The boy crouched and reached a careful hand for a grape in the bowl by the sultan’s sandals, and Nasir waited until he swallowed his stolen prize before handing Ghameq the leather folder.

He stepped back. The farther from this abomination of magic he could be, the better.

Ghameq flipped open the sleeve and tossed a strip of papyrus into the fire, its surface covered in words the near-black of blood.

Dum sihr. Blood magic, punishable by death and forbidden by the Sisters, for it allowed a person to practice magic of their choosing with the price of blood. Without it, the masses were restricted to the one affinity they were born with. But Ghameq was the sultan. He could do as he wished. What Nasir didn’t understand was how he could use magic if it no longer existed.

He knew the Silver Witch was somehow involved—that woman who frequented the palace as if she were a sultana herself. She was the one who provided Ghameq with the strips of papyrus wrought with blood. Blood that somehow played the part of both wielder and vessel itself.

The flames crackled and burst open, fading to the color of Pelusian eggplants. The room exploded in hue and heat as a silhouette rose from the flames, giving shape to a pale face with dark eyes and the stringy beard of a man who was alive and whole in Demenhur: Haytham, wazir to the Caliph of Demenhur.

Rimaal. The Demenhune never failed to spook him; they looked like ghosts—pale, ethereal, and strangely beautiful. Like Altair, they were full of light, but too much light, as if snow flowed through their delicate veins.

“Where is he?” Haytham, unwilling traitor to his caliph, rasped. He darted quick glances behind him, to a room unseen.

“Here,” Nasir said.

“Baba!” the boy whimpered when Nasir guided him closer.