Sabaa Tahir - An Ember in the Ashes

‘You and Darin leave through the backyard,’ Nan says, her eyes darting from window to window. ‘They haven’t surrounded the house yet.’

No. No. No . ‘Nan,’ I breathe her name, stumbling when she pushes me towards Pop.

‘Hide in the east end of the Quarter—’ Her sentence ends in a choke, her eyes on the front window. Through the ragged curtains, I catch a flash of a liquid silver face. My stomach clenches.

‘A Mask,’ Nan says. ‘They’ve brought a Mask. Go, Laia. Before he gets inside.’

‘What about you? What about Pop?’

‘We’ll hold them off.’ Pop shoves me gently out the door. ‘Keep your secrets close, love. Listen to Darin. He’ll take care of you. Go.’

Darin’s lean shadow falls over me, and he grabs my hand as the door closes behind us. He slouches to blend into the warm night, moving silently across the loose sand of the backyard with a confidence I wish I felt. Although I am seventeen and old enough to control my fear, I grip his hand like it’s the only solid thing in this world.

I’m not working for them , Darin said . Then whom is he working for? Somehow, he got close enough to the forges of Serra to draw, in detail, the creation process of the Empire’s most precious asset: the unbreakable, curved scims that can cut through three men at once.

Half a millennium ago, the Scholars crumbled beneath the Martial invasion because our blades broke against their superior steel. Since then, we have learned nothing of steelcraft. The Martials hoard their secrets the way a miser hoards gold. Anyone caught near our city’s forges without good reason – Scholar or Martial – risks execution.

If Darin isn’t with the Empire, how did he get near Serra’s forges? How did the Martials find out about his sketchbook?

On the other side of the house, a fist pounds on the front door. Boots shuffle, steel clinks. I look around wildly, expecting to see the silver armour and red capes of Empire legionnaires, but the backyard is still. The fresh night air does nothing to stop the sweat rolling down my neck. Distantly, I hear the thud of drums from Blackcliff, the Mask training school. The sound sharpens my fear into a hard point stabbing at my centre. The Empire doesn’t send those silver-faced monsters on just any raid.

The pounding on the door sounds again.

‘In the name of the Empire,’ an irritated voice says, ‘I demand you open this door.’

As one, Darin and I freeze.

‘Doesn’t sound like a Mask,’ Darin whispers. Masks speak softly with words that cut through you like a scim. In the time it would take a legionnaire to knock and issue an order, a Mask would already be in the house, weapons slicing through anyone in his way.

Darin meets my eyes, and I know we’re both thinking the same thing. If the Mask isn’t with the rest of the soldiers at the front door, then where is he?

‘Don’t be afraid, Laia,’ Darin says. ‘I won’t let anything happen to you.’

I want to believe him, but my fear is a tide tugging at my ankles, pulling me under. I think of the couple that lived next door: raided, imprisoned, and sold into slavery three weeks ago. Book smugglers , the Martials said. Five days after that, one of Pop’s oldest patients, a ninety-three-year-old man who could barely walk, was executed in his own home, his throat slit from ear to ear. Resistance collaborator.

What will the soldiers do to Nan and Pop? Jail them? Enslave them?

Kill them?

We reach the back gate. Darin stands on his toes to unhook the latch when a scrape in the alley beyond stops him short. A breeze sighs past, sending a cloud of dust into the air.

Darin pushes me behind him. His knuckles are white around the knife handle as the gate swings open with a moan. A finger of terror draws a trail up my spine. I peer over my brother’s shoulder into the alley.

There is nothing out there but the quiet shifting of sand. Nothing but the occasional gust of wind and the shuttered windows of our sleeping neighbours.

I sigh in relief and step around Darin.

That’s when the Mask emerges from the darkness and walks through the gate.

The deserter will be dead before dawn.

His tracks zigzag like a struck deer’s in the dust of Serra’s catacombs. The tunnels have done him in. The hot air is too heavy down here, the smells of death and rot too close.

The tracks are more than an hour old by the time I see them. The guards have his scent now, poor bastard. If he’s lucky, he’ll die in the chase. If not …

Don’t think about it. Hide the backpack. Get out of here.

Skulls crunch as I shove a pack loaded with food and water into a wall crypt. Helene would give me hell if she could see how I’m treating the dead. But then, if Helene finds out why I’m down here in the first place, desecration will be the least of her complaints.

She won’t find out. Not until it’s too late. Guilt pricks at me, but I shove it away. Helene’s the strongest person I know. She’ll be fine without me.

For what feels like the hundredth time, I look over my shoulder. The tunnel is quiet. The deserter led the soldiers in the opposite direction. But safety’s an illusion I know never to trust. I work quickly, piling bones back in front of the crypt to cover my trail, my senses primed for anything out of the ordinary.

One more day of this. One more day of paranoia and hiding and lying. One day until graduation. Then I’ll be free.

As I rearrange the crypt’s skulls, the hot air shifts like a bear waking from hibernation. The smells of grass and snow cut through the fetid breath of the tunnel. Two seconds is all I have to step away from the crypt and kneel, examining the ground as if there might be tracks here. Then she is at my back.

‘Elias? What are you doing down here?’

‘Didn’t you hear? There’s a deserter loose.’ I keep my attention fixed on the dusty floor. Beneath the silver mask that covers me from forehead to jaw, my face should be unreadable. But Helene Aquilla and I have been together nearly every day of the fourteen years we’ve been training at Blackcliff Military Academy; she can probably hear me thinking.

She comes around me silently, and I look up into her eyes, as blue and pale as the warm waters of the southern islands. My mask sits atop my face, separate and foreign, hiding my features as well as my emotions. But Hel’s mask clings to her like a silvery second skin, and I can see the slight furrow in her brow as she looks down at me. Relax, Elias , I tell myself . You’re just looking for a deserter.

‘He didn’t come this way,’ Hel says. She runs a hand over her hair, braided, as always, into a tight, silver-blonde crown. ‘Dex took an auxiliary company off the north watchtower and into the East Branch tunnel. You think they’ll catch him?’

Aux soldiers, though not as highly trained as legionnaires and nothing compared to Masks, are still merciless hunters. ‘Of course they’ll catch him.’ I fail to keep the bitterness out of my voice, and Helene gives me a hard look. ‘The cowardly scum,’ I add. ‘Anyway, why are you awake? You weren’t on watch this morning.’ I made sure of it.

‘Those bleeding drums.’ Helene looks around the tunnel. ‘Woke everyone up.’

The drums. Of course. Deserter , they’d thundered in the middle of the graveyard watch. All active units to the walls. Helene must have decided to join the hunt. Dex, my lieutenant, would have told her which direction I’d gone. He’d have thought nothing of it.

‘I thought the deserter might have come this way.’ I turn from my hidden pack to look down another tunnel. ‘Guess I was wrong. I should catch up to Dex.’