“Oh, I know that rhyme from childhood!” Yara exclaims.
“Me too,” Marjan says, nodding together with Khawla.
Even Walid joins in as the girls recite the rest: “Rabia tends the earth, and Rasha draws the tide. With the sun, Noor dances, and on the wind, Iman rides. Earth, flame, water, air. We remember their names, our Lallat fair.”
Shay waits for the pillars to blaze again with light. To explode or disintegrate, revealing the women trapped inside, their bodies preserved from the ravages of time. Instead, they slowly go dim. Within beakers, the entire cavern is doused in black pitch, broken only by the lesser glow of the hjabats. The sound of their worried breaths mixes with the plaintiveplunkof waterdrops.
In the absence of their glow, the markings along the bases of the crystals become apparent. Long strips have been crudely shaved off. Chunks have been gouged out, leaving behind round divots like a wounded tree trunk.
Shay recognizes the dizziness early this time. She looks down at the ring, the black spot spreading from its center like rot across the rind of a fruit.
“We should all sit down,” she tells the other girls. She thinks it better to avoid falling around so many sharp rocks.
The leaching darkness grabs hold.
The Lallat sought shelter in the cave, not from Al-Mukhtar, but from the citizens of Mekchaouen. The men seeking to overthrow the sister-rulers had poisoned the public against them. They invented chemicals and toxins and used these to manufacture illnesses, destroy crops, and even induce destructive weather patterns. They falsely blamed these ailments on the Lallat, telling the citizens it was proof the women had fallen from His grace.
That He had appointed the men as His new leadership.
They'd incited a mob. The Lallat needed a safe place to strategize how they should respond—how might they convince people of the truth. But it wasn't long before their secret meeting place was discovered, and they found themselves face-to-face with twelve men.
“Alright.” Noor glared hotly at her three sister-rulers. “Which one of you didn't understand the part where we weren't supposed to tell anyone our secret meeting location?”
“Lallat.” Jawad Lazar stepped forward as the men's spokesman, while the other eleven watched the proceedings from an elevated ledge far up the cavern wall. “It is our hope that we can convince you to resign from your posts without struggle. Let us show the citizens of Mekchaouen that we can broach a new age in peace, leaving behind the dark days of magic and superstition.”
Iman stepped forward, meeting him, her chin upturned. “You call anything you don't understand, anything you can't control, superstition. Anyone with the capacity to reason will see through your deception.”
“You don't seem to understand,” Jawad said, his calm tone at odds with the rictus smile strapped to his face. “People have enough to contend with trying to survive. They don't want to reason, not if they don't have to. They need only the assurance of food and shelter, the safety of their family. To believe they are righteous, that they have chosen the side that opposes evil. At the end of the day, most will not let something as indulgent as reasoning prevent them from a good night's sleep.”
“You assume people are lazy,” Iman replied with disgust. “That is a dangerous assumption.”
“Not at all.” Jawad waved his hands dismissively, making ripples in his long white robe. “I think most people are willing to work very hard to avoid this exercise you call ‘reason.’“
While the two exchanged words, the temperature in the cave was rapidly dropping. Iman realized she was shivering, despite the thick wool of her djellaba. She glanced back at her sister-rulers, the fog of their breaths clinging on the air.
She turned back to Jawad. “What's going on?”
“This is exactly why reasoning is dangerous,” Jawad jeered, his smile becoming narrower, meaner, like his mouth was squinting. “While you are busy reasoning, someone else is acting.”
The hair on the back of Iman's neck teased to attention. A familiar figure materialized from the shadows.
Zubeda. Her closest friend. Someone with the potential to be more than a friend, she'd sometimes thought. Had she read those signs all wrong?
“I knew it!” Noor exclaimed, pointing a finger at Iman. “You told her!”
Iman gasped around the painful clenching in her throat. “I didn't want her to worry. I thought …”
“We were friends?” Zubeda finished, blue ribbons of Shawafa streaming from her fingertips. “Where was your friendship when my husband was engaging in dalliances and you could have read his thoughts but said it was an invasion of his privacy? When he left me, and you could have changed his heart to love me again, but you said it infringed on his free will? What good is magic if it has so many restrictions?”
While Zubeda spoke, a layer of ice formed along the inner walls of the cave. It became cold enough that soon, the Lallat would have to funnel all their available energy to staying physically alive. Accessing their Shawafas would be increasingly difficult. With twelve men and four women, their magic was the only thing keeping them from being overpowered.
The men on the ledge made no move to apprehend them. If they had weapons, they kept them hidden.
“We must drive them away while we can,” Rasha said, as though Iman had telegraphed her thoughts. Maybe she had? Her mind was already feeling wobbly.
Zubeda raised her hands. There was an unnatural tinge to the vapors pouring off her fingers, the blue casting a darker pall. Iman's first thought was that the woman had imbibed. Strong drink was known to make a woman's Shawafa both more powerful and erratic. But her speech didn't slur. Her eyes weren't bloodshot.
Her pupils, however, were abnormally dilated.
