Chapter 222: Once-Broad Shoulders

The weight was wrong.

It was too light, and it swung against his wrist.

Real heads were heavy; he had carried enough of them off enough battlefields to know it in his bones, that dull, stubborn drag that never quite felt like an object. This one felt like a thing that had never had a mind inside it.

The skin was cold.

Dead skin was cold, but this was a different kind of cold, faintly waxy, with none of the slow stiffness of a body that had once been warm.

He ran his thumb along the cheek.

It left a pale streak in the grime.

Then he looked at the eyebrows.

A good brow, as brows go.

Somebody had copied it down to the length of a grain of rice.

But still, it was...

’Sloppy.’

He thought it with annoyance.

If they were going to steal his face, they could at least have gotten it better.

There was no Soul in it, either.

He reached for one out of habit and found only a thin film of Rukh sitting on the surface.

This was the kind of trick a faction could buy in a back-alley shop.

It would fool a crowd from ten paces... or a broken little sister.

It would not fool the man whose face it was.

"Put it down."

A man of the Guard had found his voice.

He took a step forward, with his sword half raised.

"I said, put it down. That is the Sultan’s head. You will not touch it."

Malik did not look up.

"It’s fake."

He said it quietly.

It did not sound dramatic but rather quite monotone.

The words fell into the stillness of the camp and lay there.

For a heartbeat, nobody seemed to understand that they had been spoken.

"What?"

"It’s fake..."

Malik lifted the head a little, to give everyone a better look.

"Clay and horsehair. A mold, perhaps, taken from a painting. They glued glass in the sockets and ran a bit of Rukh over it so it would smell right."

He turned it in the light.

"The weight is wrong."

He sighed.

"I would say that it is a decent job. But it is not."

Nobody spoke.

Mouths had fallen open, while many looked up with dazed but hopeful expressions, men and women who had been pulled out of a river called despair.

Safira had not moved.

She was staring at the one-armed man with an expression that Malik could not read.

Malik met her gaze and...

Crack!

Crushed the head.

Without even looking at it, he closed his fingers, and the head came apart in his hand.

There was a puff of pale dust and a clatter of glass beads as the hair drifted across the ground.

A fine gray powder sifted between his knuckles and fell onto the stones.

The golden eyes rolled once and lay still.

They were cheap amber, sold for pennies in any market.

One of them landed beside his boot, and he moved it with the toe of his foot.

"Did you lot truly think that the Sultan was dead? Killed by men like this? I am disappointed."

Following his words, a sound came from the post.

"...no."

It was a very cracked sound.

Malik heard it before anyone else, because he had been listening for it from the moment he stepped into the camp.

He did not turn around and instead kept his eyes on the powder in his palm, even as every muscle in his back went rigid, and he thought, with a clear and terrible calm, ’do not look yet.’

The sound came again.

"Ha... a-ah."

It was a breath.

A shuddering breath, drawn in by a body that had forgotten how.

Huda had moved.

She had not meant to.

It was visible even from behind, in the shape of her shoulders.

Her pink eyes had slid off the spear, and they were turning, slowly, towards the center of the camp.

They found the ground.

A scatter of pale dust, two small amber beads, and a lock of dark hair lying across the stones.

They found a face.

It had rolled out of the wreckage a few moments ago.

Her mind only processed that fact now... the fact that her big brother’s head was gone.

Crushed in the hand of a cripple. Yes, she had seen those half-open golden eyes in the instant before the stranger’s fingers closed.

That single glimpse had struck her hard, and her mind, starved for what felt like an eternity, had caught it before it could fall.

"...Brother."

It was barely a whisper.

"BROTHER!"

Then her voice cracked wide open.

"BROTHER, BROTHER, BROTHER!"

She threw herself forward.

The iron cuffs bit into her ankles, and she fell flat on her face in the dirt, but she did not feel it.

Huda clawed at the ground with both bound hands and dragged herself across the stones on her elbows, screaming one word, over and over, until it stopped sounding like a word at all.

The rope on the post pulled her up short.

She twisted against it.

Her wrists tore.

Fresh blood ran down her fingers, and she reached out towards the crushed powder with every ounce of her strength, her hands stretched as far as they would go, grasping at the air a body’s length too short.

"Please, please, please, please. Don’t take him. Don’t hurt him. Give him back."

It was a child’s voice.

The voice of someone who had stopped being a woman at some point in the last, however long, and had gone back to the size she had been in a cellar bed, with a blanket pulled over her head.

It broke on every word.

"Please, just let me hold him. I’ll be good. I’ll do anything. Please..."

The camp listened.

No one moved.

Their minds had been sent to Hell and back in mere moments; it was a miracle they were even standing.

Safira had it the worst, seeing her Teacher’s head become dust and now Huda, her closest friend, a little sister in all but blood, go insane with grief.

Malik stood with his back to Huda.

He had gone very still.

Turning around, seeing her, would’ve made him hesitate; he could not afford that.

Even then, he could hear every breath she took; he could hear the chains scrape on the stones, and for the first time in a long while, he had no clever voice to tell him what to do.

He had spent his entire life learning how to bear a great many things.

His once-broad shoulders were proof of that.

This was not one of them.