Chapter 218: Saving The Right Path

Voices drifted up through the thornbushes.

The hill was thin, and the cave was shallow, and someone below had a loud laugh.

Malik leaned his head back against the stone and let the sounds come to him.

He had nothing better to do with his mind, and the Soul was settling anyway, one slow breath at a time.

So, he listened.

They were talking about the strike.

He caught a word here and a phrase there.

Wagons. Dawn. A road east. A fork where the caravan would split in two. Somebody was drawing a map in the dirt with a stick, and somebody else was correcting it.

It was not one group.

He worked that out slowly.

There was not just this cohort.

As he thought, there were others, a dozen, maybe more, each one running the same pattern in a different corner of Devil’s Maw.

He heard names.

Azeem’s wing further south. Kabir’s in the western passes. Zafar’s across one of the ten rivers. Dubans, Aladdin’s, all the commanders that he had sent out of the hall in tears had gone to ground and begun, one by one, to bite back.

They were led by his family and his closest people.

Only Sinbad, their strongest, remained at Eden.

He was ordered to be Layla’s guardian.

To be her guardian was to guard her people.

To guard her people was to guard her.

To guard her was to guard Amal.

Sinbad, being a Crimson Owl, could appear anywhere they needed him.

Thus, he was a shared resource, too useful to remain at one place.

Malik had never told them to do this.

He had told them to protect the corridors and then to vanish in Eden.

Instead, they had built a whole second war in the cracks of the first one.

A war with no front line, no banners, and no palace to hold.

That had him feel a thing he had no business feeling, in the middle of all this...

Pride.

But that wasn’t all he felt.

There was another problem.

Most of the land was open country.

There were no cave networks to slip through or tunnels dug by the Guard of the Fifth.

So it seemed that they did something simpler but quite ingenious.

"Is the tea chest ready?"

"Painted awning, double axle, forty crates of cumin on top. The false bottom is clean."

"And the drivers?"

"Merchant papers with the Queen’s seals. We can drive through the checkpoint without issue."

Malik’s eyes opened.

The Queen’s... Layla’s seals.

He thought of her ledgers, the merchant roads she had spent years stitching across the Sultanate, every trading house and every spice dealer who owed her a favor.

He had never paid them much attention.

Gold had always seemed to be a thing that other people counted.

But she had counted it, and now every wheel of that network was turning for him.

Their plan was a caravan, and nothing more.

A slow line of wagons creaking along the road, selling lentils and cooking oil.

They were to hide in plain sight. No one would think them of Devil’s Maw, they would see them as kin, fellow Invaders that took over a small part and now raked in the profits.

The Faraja sat in the driver’s seats.

The false bottoms held swords.

They would drive into the village like any other trader, and when the moment came, the awnings would drop, and the whole thing would burst open.

Before the Invaders realized, they would be gone.

Strike, vanish, strike again.

It was smart yet simple.

’I will have to tell her it was clever... eventually.’

"There you are."

A voice came from behind him, familiarly soft.

His final disciple, Safira.

Malik had felt her coming up the hill for a full minute.

He had been waiting to see whether she would stop.

Safira stood at the edge of the stone with a wooden bowl in one hand and a folded gray cloak over her arm. She looked at him, at the rag on his face, and at the empty sleeve.

No matter her apparent interest, she did not say a word about any of it.

"You didn’t eat."

She held out the bowl.

It was a stew, lentils and a little onion.

The food smelled better than anything he had put in his mouth in a month.

He took it with his left hand and ate slowly, because his stomach was not yet sure it believed in food.

"Thank you."

It was the first thing he had said to her in the cave.

His voice came out rough from disuse, and he was glad of the rag.

Safira only nodded.

She sat down on the stone beside him, a careful arm’s length away, and watched the dark road below.

"We leave before dawn. A supply wagon has an empty seat, if you want it."

He looked at her.

"I’m not a fighter."

"No?"

"I can carry things."

Safira smiled tiredly at that, very slightly.

He found it harder to look at than the army had been.

"Then you can carry things..."

She laid the cloak on his knee.

"It gets cold on the road."

She stood only to pause a moment, as if she wanted to say something else.

Her gaze moved across his face above the cloth; it searched there the way it had in the cave.

Then she shook her head and went back down the hill.

Malik held the cloak in his lap.

It smelled, faintly and impossibly, like her.

They rolled out two hours before the Suns.

The caravan was a line of six wagons with patched awnings and a mule in front.

A cold gray light was seeping into the east, and the road ahead was empty and long.

Malik sat in the back of the third wagon, wrapped in the gray cloak, between a sack of lentils and a crate of cumin.

A Faraja officer in a merchant’s cap snapped the reins and hummed.

Somewhere up ahead, a woman with a ginger braid rode a gray horse at the head of the column.

Malik did not look at her.

He looked at the road instead and at the dust that hung in the cold air.

Out there, a caravan of red and yellow banners was moving toward the same horizon.

There was a girl in chains at the middle of it.

His hand rested on the sack of lentils.

Underneath his fingers, through the coarse cloth, he could feel the hard edge of a sword.

Spine Splitter wasn’t lost; rather, it was in his inventory.

But for now, he would leave it to rest.

These swords would do... if the need for them ever arose.

Now he waited, for the next strike was upon him.

He was to save his Right Path.