The Diviner

made my enemies his enemies so many years ago.” And still Azzad had taken his vengeance, and still he gloried in it, and still he trusted to the Shagara to keep him and his safe. Had Jemilha been right after all?

No. Acuyib had allowed him to live, that horrible night long ago, and to know what had happened to the al- Ma’aliq. How could any man worthy of being called a man live out his life without exacting payment for such evil?

“You are not just ‘any man,’ Azzad,” said his wife’s voice in his mind.

Fadhil was pacing again, back and forth along the precipice. “The hazziri we once used against the invading barbarians—”

“—are old,” Haffiz finished for him. “And the men they were made for are dead these hundred years and more.”

Azzad clenched his fists. “I don’t want the people of this land to suffer, Fadhil.”

“A noble sentiment,” said Haffiz. “And I am reminded that when I reported all this to Abb Shagara, he gave me things for you.” From his sash he produced a fistful of gold, silver, and jewels: necklace, armbands, rings. The late sunlight glossed the finery in red-gold. “Not to replace the ones you wear now, but to add to their protections.”

“Abb Shagara is generous and wise,” Azzad said. He accepted the gifts, and had put on the two rings and one armband when Fadhil suddenly leaped toward him and snatched the necklace from his fingers.

“What is this?” he gasped. “Azzad, get rid of those—hurry!” His fingers scrabbled at the armband. “Haffiz, what have you done?”

“Righted a great wrong,” said Haffiz—and in a movement too swift for eyes to follow in the dimness, he stabbed a long, dark, needle-thin knife into Azzad’s arm.

Azzad grunted, more with surprise than pain. The knife slid from his flesh, leaving only a single drop of blood to stain his sleeve. Haffiz stood immobile, the knife shining clean now in his hand, watching as Fadhil emptied his satchel of medicines onto the ground.

“Traitor!” Fadhil spat, searching frantically through the chaos of vials and packets and small glass bottles.

“You are the traitor,” Haffiz replied calmly. “You dishonored yourself and the Shagara by selling your heritage to this gharribeh. He so corrupted you that you used your healing skills to help him mutilate—”

“They were his enemies, and thus my enemies.” Fadhil squinted at the label on a bottle, then discarded it for another. “Tell me what you used on him. Tell me!”

“No.”

Azzad regarded all this with a frown. It was but a pinprick, not even painful.

And then he realized that it should have been painful.

“He deserves to die,” Haffiz stated.

“For what reason?” Fadhil cried. He grabbed for a little silk pouch, opened it, ripped Azzad’s sleeve, and sprinkled whitish powder on the wound. Azzad could not believe that any pinprick so tiny could kill him—but he also knew how skilled were the Shagara.

“He brought new ways,” Haffiz said, as if that were the sum and substance of it. “With his horses for riding and his enemies that are nothing to do with us, he is as deadly as a disease. But he will die, and when I am known to be his killer, I will become Abb Shagara and lead our people back to the true path.”

“How did Meryem fail to discover your madness?” Azzad asked, and his voice to his own hearing was as an echo coming up from the valley far below.

“Madness?” His words came from blackening shadow. “Is it madness to kill you before the army of Sheyqa Nizzira comes—so that with you already dead, the land and the people will not suffer?”

Fadhil had chosen a vial from the litter on the ground, and forced it to Azzad’s lips. “Drink. Quickly.”

He gulped, and coughed at the sour taste. Surely this could not be happening. Not to him. Not now. Not after all he had been through and all he had done—

“As for Challa Meryem—she knew nothing of my thoughts or my plans. None of them did. More fools,” he added with a shrug. “She and Challa Leyliah will be the first to admit their errors and accept me as Abb Shagara, or they will be the first to die.”

Fadhil sprang to his feet and cuffed him across the face.

Haffiz staggered, tripped over the Jemilha’s little castle of pebbles, smashed it beneath his boot heel. He caught his balance, then coughed and spat out blood. “Another perversion. Would you sin against all Shagara by murdering a fellow Haddiyat?”

Azzad was not sure if the world was darkening because of the poisoned knife or the gathering dusk. But when his friend knelt before him and took both his hands, he knew. Even in the darkness he saw his own death in Fadhil’s tear-filled eyes. Numbness had spread up his arm to his shoulder, across his back, and would soon find both his head and his heart. It occurred to him that the Mualeef boy would be finishing his book rather sooner than either of them had expected. Ayia, an interesting ending to an interesting life.

But it was not yet over, and there were things he must say.

“Even if Haffiz is correct,” Azzad said slowly, “and Nizzira’s army spares the people, my wife and children will not be spared. See them safe, Fadhil. Please.”

“I will do it. After I kill Haffiz.”

“No. Do not break your ancient laws. He matters nothing.” He heard Haffiz suck in a breath at this insult. He wondered briefly why Haffiz was content to stand and watch Azzad die, then decided he must truly be mad, to think that killing a single man would solve all his problems, fulfill all his dreams, make him Abb Shagara. Fadhil was safe from him; Shagara tradition would not allow him to kill another Haddiyat.

“Azzad—” Fadhil’s voice was cloudy with tears.

“Take Jemilha and the children away. Now. Tonight. Take all the horses. Leave—” His lips felt cold and stiff. “Leave only fire behind you. Especially the maqtabba. They must not know the names of those I employ in Rimmal Madar.”

“It will be done, al-Ma’aliq. I will make all appear as if everyone died in the fire.”

As his mother and sisters and aunts and cousins had died. Perhaps it would work. If Fadhil left talishann enough, the Qoundi Ammar would believe. He tried to say this, but his mouth was reluctant to form words. It didn’t matter, anyway; Fadhil would know what to do.

But there was more he must say. He struggled, purposely biting his tongue to feel pain, refusing to be frightened when the response was sluggish and muted, and managed, “Children—tell them—”

“I will, Azzad. I will tell them how much you love them.”

A long while seemed to pass. He seemed to hear the shrieking of a hawk somewhere above the trees. He tasted blood, coppery-sweet, flooding away the bitter medicine, and then he could taste nothing at all.

Now, at the last: “Jemilha.”

“Yes, Azzad. I will tell her.”

Ayia, she was never “just any woman,” my Jemilha, he thought, wishing he could smile. The numbness that had claimed his lips reached his heart, and then, through the gathering darkness, his eyes as he looked down at the tiny lights that marked his home, where his children were, and Jemilha. Fadhil would see them safe.

The army of Rimmal Madar invaded, plundering and burning, putting all to the sword. From the coast they marched inland, where the terrified city of Hazganni surrendered rather than be destroyed. When Sheyqir Za’aid, Nizzira’s son and leader of the army, learned that the trees around the city were the trees of Azzad al- Ma’aliq, he ordered them hacked down. With the Qoundi Ammar to control the land with sword and ax and fear, he declared it part of the realm of Rimmal Madar.

Haffiz had not been alone in his disaffection; six young Shagara who thought as he did, and as secretly, had stolen into the house in Sihabbah. Haddiyat all, armed with hazziri to cancel those set by Fadhil—as those made by Haffiz had unworked those worn by Azzad—they slaughtered the family within and set the house afire. When Fadhil, mourning over Azzad’s newly dead body up on the mountainside, looked down to see the blaze, he struck Haffiz a blow that sent him tumbling over the cliff to his death in the night shadows below.