Chapter 220: Painfully Untied Hair

Malik could see it from all that distance.

Her eyes were wide open, and they were fixed only on that spear, at its metal, never once looking away. The camp could have burned down around her, and she would have kept looking at the same spear.

Huda.

The fire rose in him again.

It rose all at once this time and his hand jerked on the reins so hard the mule threw up its head.

It came from somewhere beneath thought, a hot white pulse that wanted nothing but to cross a mile of desert and set the camp aflame.

’Not yet.’

He said it so very slowly.

’Not yet. Wait.’

He held it.

It took a long time.

The Suns were just beginning to show as a thin gold line along the horizon, and he was dimly aware of the first horn sounding somewhere down the road.

The wagons had reached the checkpoint. Loud voices carried across the flat ground, the old comedy of merchants arguing with guards.

He kept his eyes on his sister.

’I am here.’

It was a stupid thing to think.

She could not hear it. But he thought it anyway, once, very carefully, as if the words might travel across the dry air and find her.

Down in the riverbed, a guard raised an arm.

Somewhere on the south cliff, a soldier jumped.

The arrows were about to be let loose.

’I am here, little sister.’

Smoke burst across the checkpoint in a single thick gray cloud, rolling out across the road and down the bank into the riverbed.

Somebody shouted. A horse screamed. The invaders who had been arguing about not wanting cumin a moment ago went silent, and the false bottoms of two wagons slid open.

Malik watched it from the seat of the third wagon with the reins loose in his hand.

It went fast.

On the north ridge, six shapes in dark cloaks rose out of the rocks behind a dozen sentries who were looking the wrong way.

There was no shout.

The sentries folded all at once.

By the time the sixth had understood that his friends were lying on the ground, a hand had closed over his mouth and a blade had gone in under his ribs.

Nobody on the ridge had lifted a bow.

’Good.’

Safira had built something clean.

Down at the checkpoint, the two wagons were already rolling forward through the smoke.

The Faraja drivers had thrown off their merchant caps, the guards who had come to inspect the loads were lying on the ground, dead.

Malik snapped the reins.

The mule did not move.

"Come on."

The mule looked at him.

"I said I would do as I was told. I was told to drive back the way we came, and I am doing just that... after this."

He slapped the reins again, and the animal, with a tired and deeply insulted sigh, leaned into the harness.

The wagon creaked down the slope into the riverbed.

...

The south cliff was a good deal taller than the scouts had said...

Though it didn’t seem to matter at all.

While the cohort mimicked the strength of Magi closer to mortals than to Angels, they were mostly comprised of those far beyond mortals.

Needing no rope, they dropped all the way down.

Eleven figures slid with their cloaks tucked under their belts and their boots braced against the wall.

Safira came last.

She went down without any visible effort.

A tent stood ten paces from her, nobody inside it had noticed a thing.

She raised two fingers.

The eleven moved.

They spread through the rows of tents in pairs, and they did not stop to fight.

A man stumbled out of a flap, rubbing his eyes, and one of the Faraja caught him under the chin with the pommel of a sword.

A second came running with a spear, and a thin figure slid beneath the point and cut his throat from behind.

A third drew breath to yell.

Safira turned her head, and a small flick of her wrist sent a single pulse of force across the dirt, and he went down with his mouth still open.

It was not much.

One hundreth of her strength, perhaps less.

The camp woke slowly.

That was the real trick.

A hundred men do not rise as one. They come up in clumps, tangled in blankets, looking for their boots.

"Pole."

She did not need to say it again.

Malik left the wagon where the slope flattened out.

He climbed down one-handed, and tied the reins to a spoke, prompting the mule glanced at him over its shoulder.

He gave it a pat on the neck and a small, apologetic look, then he walked into the camp.

Nobody stopped him.

The smoke had settled to knee height, and the whole riverbed was a swirl of gray and orange, with shapes darting through it, and voices crying out in the confusion.

Malik moved through it with his hood pulled up, his pace steady unlike all that was around him, following a strange rule.

He did not use any more of his strength than a thin one-armed cargo-handler had any business having. He stepped around bodies and let the fire in him sit.

Ahead of him, the red tent stood in the haze.

He saw the guards at its flap, two broad men in yellow leather. They had drawn their swords and were staring into the smoke with stiff looks.

They were not going to run, too well paid for that.

He saw the post, the girl at the foot of it.

Huda had not moved.

She sat exactly as she had sat when he first saw her from the hill, with her legs stretched out and her chained hands lying open in her lap.

Nothing could have turned her head.

A line of dried blood ran along each wrist where the cuffs had cut, and the skin around it had gone gray.

Malik could not bear to see his little sister in that state.

Thankfully, he wasn’t going to.