It had been five suns’ circle since I’d seen that steel.

The elite mizaran forces of the Shayfahan army glinted in their armor, shifting with the light like liquid.

My hand darted to the penknife in my pocket, and I pushed Huda away from the path.

Huda stumbled and cried out, and I heard Nanu Salima’s voice through the tunnel that had closed in upon me: “Rahena?”

But the line of Shayfahan passed along, heading towards the entrance out to the square.

Begum Salima pulled Huda to her. “That’s alright, baccha, she did not do it on purpose,” she murmured to the child. But she eyed the penknife in my hand. “Is that necessary, Begum Rahena?”

‘Begum.’ She had never called me that before.

I looked at my hands. Now that the mizaran soldiers had left, passersby around us stared at me. I knew what I looked like in their eyes: a crazed woman with a knife in the midst of the bazaar. I let out a shuddering breath and lowered my hand, hiding the knife away in the folds of my robes.

Nanu Salima handed me the pomegranates gingerly. “That will be ten silvers, please,” she said. Her voice had changed, her amicable nature gone. She averted her eyes from me. I took the bag and stalked away from the stall.

The mizaran-armored man at the front held up a mizaran-steel long weapon in his hands. “This is deemed a gathering spreading sedition against the realm. If you do not disperse,” the metal voice emerged. “You must face the consequences.”

I could see an old man emerging from the back of the protesters, pushing his way through. “Adnan son of Sakina will revenge upon you one day, mark my words,” the old man declared.

Someone in the back of the crowd shouted, “Sakina!” Others began to chant the name, hurling it like a weapon against the metal and the batons.

I had only vaguely heard of Sakina al-Khatri, the al-kimiya woman who found the cure to the Wraithknife disease. But she was a legendary figure among the Ifsharani.

As I headed towards the commotion, the chants halted. Shouting filled the air, and then came an inhuman scream.

I rushed through the borders of the crowd.

Shayfahan soldiers circled someone. Their faces gleaming from behind their steel, they held the mizaran long-weapon against the chest of a figure on the ground. Lightning fire surged through the metal, the old man on the ground screaming, his mouth open in a gaping horror.

Amidst them all, there was Sahan, in her red tunic and her braids. She was trying to pull the man away from the mizaran rod.

“Sahan!” I screamed, the pomegranates falling from my hands as I rushed through the crowd, pushing myself through them all. “Sahan!”

She had pulled up the man when I reached her. I was surrounded by Shayfahan steel, the cold dead steel. For a fragment of a moment, I saw flames mirrored in the steel, empty eyes.

I winded through them, ducking my head beneath their arms, and grabbed Sahan, pulling her away.

The old man had gotten his footing now, and some of the other gatherers trying to help him, others clamoring away from the mizaran weapon.

I could not breath as I emerged from the crowd, gripping Sahan’s arm tightly and heading towards the fountain.

“Let me go!” Sahan pulled away from me.

“What were you thinking?” I shouted.

There was red seeping across the side of her forehead, and her fingers were singed. “You’re bleeding, damnit.” I quickly ripped off the hem of my linen robes, sitting her down at the edge of the fountain.

Cleaning off the blood, I wrapped the linen around her fingers. “You can’t interfere in the middle of murderous Shayfahan soldiers,” I said. “We need to get you to physician Ibrahim, come.”

“They were torturing him,” Sahan muttered, her eyes blank. “He was barely capable of walking properly, and they were torturing him, Rahena apa! Her hair was awry, strands of hair escaping her braids, and there was a bright light in her eyes. She reminded me so much of Qamarah in that moment that it hurt my chest.

“I know,” I murmured. I could not tell her I had faced them before, I could not tell her I knew. I’d seen all of it before. But I had never told her the truth about myself, and I couldn’t now.

“A servant girl from the mountain village of Marwan, defending an old man from the Shayfahan,” I murmured instead, wiping her hands now with my shawl. “You are brave, Sahan,” I looked her in the eyes. “But you could have died.”

She pulled her hand away. “What else was I supposed to do?” she said.

But something distracted me as she spoke. In the fountain beside us, I felt the surface of the flowing water stirring.

As I looked, it writhed before my very eyes with regret and grief; the coins at its faded blue cracked bottom were gone, caved in with no sight of an end to be seen, as dark as if it reached the depths of an ocean, unknown and unexplored, and it carried within it the sorrows of hundreds of thousands. Their whispers grew more insistent, clashing against each other inside my head.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

With an effort, I pulled myself away from it, standing up.

“Rahena apa, are you alright?” Sahan’s voice came as if from afar.

On the other side of the square, the farmers were running and screaming, away from the steel of the Shayfahan.

“Yes, yes, damnit Sahan, let’s go.” I pulled her up, heading for the eastern entrance.

“You are quite the foul-mouthed one for a woman writing holy calligraphy, do you know that?” Sahan muttered.

As we walked away from the fountain, the whispers inside my head quieted.

________________________________________________________________

There was a black hole on the ceiling above my rooms. It was unshapely, the edges not quite decipherable as if they were always shifting. Uncle Faizul had promised several times to repair it; but after all these years it remained, and I didn’t have the heart to ask him about it again.

It was so dark that I could have sworn it had torn straight through the ceiling, emerging from the great blackness of the vast space beyond the Ardth itself.

Inside that black hole, at night I would see the White Rider’s steel mask, liquid light.

Some nights I felt I would never be able to tear my eyes away from the hole in the ceiling, my body shriveling away even as my eyes remained there; until the dust of the earth itself settled upon me. The ceiling would spin above me, but the dark hole — it would remain fixed, nothing was as constant and unrelenting as that damned hole in the ceiling.

I had thought that proximity to the heart of the emir’s reign would bring me closer to seeking the White Rider. I had searched through the texts in the libraries and listened to the courtroom proceedings below, of elders and scholars and the Chief of Ifsharan himself. But the White Rider came up only as a figure of great heroism, still behind the veil of anonymity.

He was in such shadows that not even the highest orders knew his identity.

I rose from the bed, throwing off my covers.

Even though it was the middle of the night, all I wanted to do was dive back into my work, bury my head inside my ink, inside its curves and arches like the embrace of a lover.

I did not want to remember the sickness in my stomach that rose at the sight of the shimmering mizaran armor, the tremble in my hands before I managed to pull out my penknife.

I would not bow to them, as I had not before.

No, I’d faced them before, and I would again.

I inhaled, stood before the basin and doused my face in cold water. It was ice, shocking me into feeling and numbing all at the same time. It was the present, the stone beneath my feet.

***

Murmurs of curiosity and speculation hovered around every corner the next morning, drifting through the scholars’ halls.

What would he be like, this Highmaster? He was renowned to be a respectable, towering figure of a man. It was said even his own son, who was a Light Scholar at our Tower, could not match his stature.

“Maybe he’ll put down these traitors,” Yusuf said, absent-mindedly tapping the end of his penknife on the table. “They should be herded and arrested in masses.”

I gripped my pen in my hands, willing myself to swallow my words. They all thought like him, I knew, all the noble bastards.

“What is wrong with voicing their concerns?” Sulayman murmured.

I studied Sulayman. Perhaps I was wrong.

Yusuf scoffed. “This is why it would be good if the White Rider returns. Ideas like yours have gotten too rampant even among us.”

“Why, are you the great White Rider, Yusuf?” Sulayman laughed, shaking his head. “But he was clever, I will say. Never once answering for his crimes while being rewarded by the Emir. Ingenious, I will admit.”

“His crimes? You mean heroic feats,” Yusuf said.

“They say that the White Rider is the reincarnation of the great Hisham the Second from the early ages, battling the invaders,” Mahmud piped up from the back of the hall. “I heard he roams the wilds now, seeking out the evil of the rebellion.”

Bilal twirled his pen in his hands. “My father says the White Rider protected the realm from Imraan the Traitor. With the Purges.”

“Precisely!” Yusuf cried. “A Purging is necessary to root out the problem.”

“We have heard the word “rebel” for over a decade,” Sulayman said, dipping his pen into an ink bottle, muttering, “Ensuring power by weeding out anyone who questions them.”

I was beginning to fear for Sulayman myself, the way he was talking.

“It should be weeded out.” Yusuf leaned in towards Sulayman. “You certainly seem to reek of skepticism yourself,” he sniffed.

Bilal began speaking over them, and soon all of them were throwing in their opinions.

“You speak as if you know,” I said into the din. They halted, turning to me. “You have not lived on the ground, brothers; you have become used to breathing the air up here, in immaculate spotlessness immune to the muck of the earth.” And you’ve never witnessed a land of death before your eyes.

“Does that mean you do, sister Suryan?” Yusuf said, raising a brow.

“Tell me, did you live through one of the Purging, Yusuf?” I said, my voice cold. “Did you see the cost of this ‘necessity?’”

Why was I venturing into this territory? Why could I not silence myself as I had for years?

But the truth was, I had never needed to speak about these things. They simply never talked of it— it had been invisible to them.

“What does a woman from Sakkar know of the Purging?” Yusuf said slowly, his eyes roving over my features. “You know, I have been wondering about that accent of yours.”

“I never noticed an accent in Sister Suryan’s voice,” Bilal chimed in. “Perhaps a honey-like voice, I admit.”

“Oh, stop goading her on, Bilal,” Yusuf said.

“Yusuf, you cannot even tell the difference between the lies of the emir,” I said, and Sulayman nodded.

Yusuf’s eyes darkened. “You all speak like the Traitor himself. Why don’t you join up with the monster —”

The sound of a carriage in the distant gates broke his words. It was accompanied by a flurry of men.

Sulayman rose to peer out the east window from where we could just glimpse the entrance.

“What is it? If he here?” Bilal asked, following Sulayman.

“Highmaster Ardashir,” Sulayman murmured. I rushed next to him.

From the window, we glimpsed a tall figure in furs stepping out of a carriage. His face shaded, he headed inside the Tower and the carriage trundled its way out of view.

“I should get on with him,” Bilal said, nodding sagely. “His son Zakariyyah is a friend of mine, you know.”

“Yes, yes, you’ve told us numerous times,” Sulayman said.

***

The next afternoon, I was pacing in the hall when I saw him.

Below in the courtyard, the tall man reclined on a cushion spread beneath a date-palm tree. His son Zakariyyah poured golden black tea on a saucer and handed it to him, and a servant-boy brought a tray of sliced mangoes and a bowl of pomegranates.

Even from this distance, I could see that Highmaster Ardashir held a commanding manner. Wide, tough shoulders almost like that of a fighter. Dark hair and beard cropped neatly against the strong cut of his jaw. He wore dark silvery robes that accentuated his stature.

His upper arms were encircled with three gold bands, which I now recognized must be tiraz bands embroidered with the Emir’s name and insignia in threaded calligraphy. Wars had been waged by the deceptions of tiraz bands, I’d heard, forging claims of royalty and status, until they became rigidly controlled. A man never forgot his first tiraz band, it was said.

Ardashir leaned back, studying his son. They seemed unlike blood relations: Zakariyyah was leaner, sinewy, with a thinner face, shoulders hunched, eyes cast down. Ardashir said something, motioning to him; and Zakariyyah raised his shoulders, but they did not quite seem natural for him.

Suddenly, Ardashir’s eyes drew up to the balcony towards me. My heart stammered, and I moved away. But he must have seen me, even if it was a mere blur for a moment.