‘At least fight back,’ he laughs, enjoying this. He spins, and the heel of his maximum iron-bone foot smacks into my chest so hard I findmyself against the other side of the amphitheatre, crumbling the entire wall in a human-shaped crater. He gives me no time to recover, whooshing high in the air at an inconceivable speed, both hands clasped to hammer on to my face.
‘Run!’I hear Yabghu screaming at me from the other side of the Veil.
I will myself to push away, knowing Fayez’s move will crush my entire skull.
Use your environment, I remember, feeling the sand still clutched in my fist.
When he is a split second away, I throw the pebbles and dirt into his eyes and roll. It slows him for a breath that saves my life. My arms go up and suddenly he’s behind me, scoring his khanjar across my shoulder blades. He tears it deeper and deeper, cutting through sinews, and I finally scream.
He laughs, and with all my strength, and sheer instinct, I swing around on my right heel. His eyes flash like ivory flames again and his ankles wedge in, flipping me on to my torn back. He slams his longer charay blade down, but with another rock flicked into his eye, I manage to shove my knifed hands into anXto parry his thrust.
My weaker wrist snaps. With a cry, I gather my bonds under my hand and brace the khanjar against his blade even as my muscles splinter from his mount.
‘Your affinity fails at critical moments,’ he says, not with a sneer, but a solemn look. His eyes grow almost completely white. My knife wanes while he leans harder.
My head turns sideways, lungs contracting. The crowd bends forward, sensing my end. Yahya buries his face in Arezu’s chest.
The humiliation crests with the despair. Searching inside, the anger is there, holding out her arms, and I cling to her with the fervour of an abandoned soul tracing light to the mouth of a cave.If only I had mastered the Third-Stratum. If only this battle would tide in my favour—
Fayez’s knife tickles the thin linen of my battered tunic, death breathing down the nape of my neck. This is inevitable, is it not: the hare clenched at last in the jaws of the leopard. But the thought breaks off, refusing to accept its finality.
Hovering behind him, No-Name reaches out a hand. Our eyes lock.‘Heavens, please acknowledge me!’I scream.
The metaphysical world claims me.
In the tales of old warriors, even the strongest found themselves backed into corners. But Eajiz, the first monk and apprentice of the Heavenly Birds, had simply prayed.
I am cross-legged, breathing through the attar in a space of the psychospiritual world. My lips beg in prayer.
‘O, Divine, I ask you, throughout the Heavens, to grant me the power I was born with to defeat my enemies. For I am a daughter born from an alchemy of blood. I am the vengeance of every wronged clan, and I am the reddest storm sweating the warriors facing its wrath. Bestow this mercy.’
I know not victory, but I do know pain. I am war. And its anger will shrivel the sharpest fighters at my feet.
In the present, my hand reaches from the immaterial into the material world, the answer from the Heavens appearing in my head.
As Fayez’s blade punctures my neck, my left fist buries through the dirt, feeling the Heavenly Energy pulsing through Brother-Nature throughout – a lesson from my girlhood where I meditated on the harmony of the Heavenly Crane.
Every bond in both of my legs are disabled, so my left-hand bonds absorb the energy from the natural world, evoking a ribbon of nur to slither beneath my sweat-slicked body. Like a gold wire, it wraps around a chunk of boulder from the crumbling amphitheatre wall.
Use the environment.My fingers, grasping the dirt, clench into a fist. The ribbon of nur answers the call, smashing the engulfed boulder into the back of Fayez’s head. His eyes flicker from white to black, his scaled body slackening for a valuable second.
I imagine the Qabl monastery. If I believe my body is light, not weighed down by my injuries, this can work. I breathe:I am the bone of a light Heaven-bound corpse. My left hand pushes off the dirt, the force sending me soaring above Fayez before he overwhelms me again.
I twist in mid-air, condensing my last conserved power. I send all of my Heavenly Energy from my body into my hands, pouring like water off a cliff. The spiral in the core of my soul alights.
The Third-Stratum of summoning rushes into me at once, unlocked. Upturned in the air, I cry,‘Seventy-seven Binding Art,’to the back of Fayez’s head. My fingers pinch into a snap.
The cosmic light protrudes into seventy-seven glowing arms.
Fayez whirls around. ‘What is this?’
‘Gambling.’
I release the snap and the immaterial arms surge forward. I land, wobbling on my right knee, watching the sheer force of the nur’s compressed arms wrap him like bandages, sealing him in silver agony. The impact sends him tumbling to the ground, an inhuman cry ripping from his throat.
Blood reverberates in the air and I breathe it in.
I do not wait. I sway upwards, and heave into his trembling body, with No-Name at my back, her palm pressing between my shoulder blades. ‘Finish this,’ she whispers softly into my ear.
