He saw indeed. Where once Za’aba Izim and townsfolk had been almost strangers to each other, and the only bonds between them had been of language and trade, now they had begun to think of themselves as a single people, and all this land as theirs, together. It had not happened when the Qarrik invaded, nor the Hrumman, nor the northern barbarians from beyond the Ga’af Shammal. It had taken twenty years of Sheyqir Za’aid’s rule to make it happen—and, Alessid knew without vainglory, the presence of one man strong enough to unite tribes and townsfolk against a common enemy. One man who taught them how to make war in a new and terrifyingly effective way.
He would win. He knew it as surely as he knew his father had not been capable of this. Victory was a honey-sweet thing, and the people had discovered its taste and liked it—but what happened when the enemy was gone? Proficient in war, the tribes might fall upon each other—definitely a thing to be avoided. But without practice, the skills of war would wither, and anyone with an army could invade this land again. The Qarrik had done it, and the Hrumman, and the northern barbarians, and the al-Ammarizzad.
“It will not happen again,” he vowed quietly. “We will be strong.”
After Hazganni was taken and Sheyqir Za’aid was dead, there would be a tense time while everyone waited for Sheyqa Nizzira’s vengeance. Yet after that—? An army was necessary, but it was necessary to give an army something to do.
The first of the al-Ammarizzad had found a solution in Rimmal Madar. Deeply as Alessid despised the thought of borrowing ideas from his family’s enemies, he had to admit it made sense. The majority of men who fought to protect their homeland did so because they wished their lives to be what they had been: settled, serene. These men would sheathe their swords without regret and go home. But those who had a real talent for armed conflict—ayia, these were the men that had been formed into the Qoundi Ammar. Azzad al-Ma’aliq’s youthful ambition had been membership in this elite corps, and his reminiscences flooded Alessid’s mind.
Neither time nor contemplation would reveal any other solution. Those of Alessid’s army who wanted only to have done with war and go home, they would do so with his blessing and the gratitude of the Za’aba Izim. But those who enjoyed war—those who, he suddenly realized, found laughter in contemplation of battle, just as he did—those men he would keep.
He would ask Razhid to watch and listen and give him a list of names. And he looked at the map drawn in the dirt, and especially at the Ga’af Shammal and the rich lands to the north. Odd names they had: Granidiya, Trastemar, Qaysh. He wondered if he had not found something for his soldiers to do.
“Soldiers of the Qoundi Ammar! Tonight one wall of Hazganni will collapse! Tomorrow night, another wall—and then another, and another, until the towers are rubble and the city lies in ruins! You people of Hazganni who despise the Sheyqir, I do not ask you to rise up against him, for fighting is the work of warriors. My words are for the Qoundi Ammar. Those who do not wish to die, come out by dawn light and throw down your swords. By Acuyib’s Glory, you have the word of Alessid al-Ma’aliq that you will not be harmed. All those who refuse this offer of life, prepare yourselves to die!”
“Ah-less-eed! Ah-less-eed! Ah-less-eed!”
That night he went with his sons to the walls of the city. Clothed in black—and careful not to be seen, for the hazziri were theirs, not his—he walked beside them down a ravine and out on the flatland. Once there had been green crops here, graceful palm trees, sturdy pines. Now: scrub grasses, dry and yellow amid the stumps and charred corpses of trees. What had Za’aid al-Ammarad been thinking? Alessid shook his head. The man was a fool, and deserved to die as a consequence of his folly.
He saw no glint of swords. A light burned in each tower, but he was willing to wager that Shagara magic had everyone in Hazganni busy shoring up walls. As they neared the city, sounds echoing off the buildings confirmed it: shouted orders, clattering wood beams, the hollow ring of hammered nails. He very nearly laughed aloud.
A disembodied whisper and a hand on his arm slowed his steps. The hazziri truly were remarkable; he could see Kemmal only as a vague shadow against the starlit hills. “Ditch,” was all the young man said. Alessid nodded, and followed him cautiously downward, giving grudging acknowledgment to the cleverness of the Qoundi Ammar. At the bottom of the ditch were short, sharp stakes—made of wood, not steel that would gleam even by night, their angle and the dark smear of poison on their tips fatal to charging men and horses.
A brief climb, and they were at the wall. Alessid crouched low, watching as twin shadows drifted back and forth, back and forth. They had begged him to stay in the camp, but they needed a guard just in case, and who better than their own father, their commander? This reasoning had fooled neither of his sons. He wanted to be there, he wanted to witness this magic being conjured at his pleasure.
He knew they were drawing griffins and vultures in their own blood: retribution and death. He wasn’t certain which other symbols they used, but he did know dozens of bloodstones were being wedged into the cracks between bricks. Collected from hazziri worn by Shagara and Harirri and Tallib, Ammal and Tariq and Azwadh and Tabbor, they had previously been worked for beneficial purposes: to stop bleeding, to protect against scorpions, to purify the blood, to assuage grief. Over the past days Kemmal and Kammil had changed them, charged them with new purpose.
Kemmal had told him, “Were there clouds, we could persuade them through the bloodstones, and there would be a tempest. The same with wind, which also responds to this stone. But because there are no clouds and no wind . . .”
“One does not mock Acuyib by attempting to raise storms in late summer,” Kammil had added. “There is a balance to magic, a rhythm that intertwines with the world of which it is a part.”
“All I require is the toppling of a wall,” Alessid had assured them. “Nothing so gaudy as a storm.”
He listened to the frantic midnight noise from within the city and watched the dark and silent suggestions of men move back and forth nearby. Not fifty feet from him was an iron door in the wall. He looked at it longingly, wondering if he should have sent someone to steal inside and poison the Sheyqir’s well, or open the main gates for the army, or scatter hazziri around the barracks to unman the Qoundi Ammar, or—
No. It was better done this way, done with demonstrable magic. Everyone in the city would see that the wall had toppled without any visible attack.
At length he began to hear a low, silken hum. Frowning, he concentrated—and gave a start when he realized it was coming from his sons. Rising, falling, a tuneless song and a wordless chant, the sound soothed and stimulated all at once, and he was so intent upon it that the first he knew of the magic’s effect was when the wall at his back quivered.
Alessid scrambled to his feet as dust-dry mortar sifted down on him. The twins had done their work too well—the wall was not supposed to topple until tomorrow. Again he felt a hand on his arm, and the shadow before him murmured, “It begins—but it will be slow.”
“You’re finished?”
“Yes, Ab’ya.” Kammil’s voice was distant, exhausted. Alessid put his hands where he thought his son’s arm must be and held only empty air. The shadow had moved on.
They were back down at the bottom of the ditch, weaving their way through the wooden stakes, when they heard the footsteps. Kemmal and Kammil had not reported any patrols on the other nights of their working—another stupidity of a complacent, arrogant al-Ammarizzad. But footsteps there were, and Alessid froze, his sleeve a finger’s breadth from poison. He was trapped here in the lethal forest, hideously exposed and utterly helpless.