Chapter 185: The Giant’s Tear

The Last City was leaving its home.

It started before dawn, in the narrow streets of the lower districts, where the lamplighters had stopped lighting lamps because nobody was sleeping anyway.

Doors opened one after another along the avenues.

Families came out with bundles on their backs and children on their shoulders, and they walked without speaking, as if any loud word might wake the thing they were running from.

An old baker locked his shop and stood for a long moment with the key in his palm.

Then he put it in his pocket, as though he might need it again, and followed the crowd.

Mothers carried infants wrapped in the best blankets they owned.

Little girls clutched dolls with missing eyes.

A boy of seven walked beside his grandfather, holding the old man’s sleeve in both fists, and every few steps he looked back at the rooftops with an expression far too grown for his face.

Soldiers walked among them with ropes and lanterns, calling out the names of districts.

The Faraja officers stood at every crossing in their dark wrappings, pointing the way, and no one argued with them.

At the great circles in the squares, the silver lines flared and faded and flared again.

Each time they flared, a few hundred people stepped into the light and were gone.

The ones who were left behind watched them vanish and shuffled one step closer.

Nobody cheered, nobody wept loudly either.

They only walked, and the quiet of it hung over the city like smoke, and above the highest tower of the Holy Palace the two Suns burned on, uncaring, golden and enormous.

It was the loneliest thing Malik had ever seen.

He watched it from the Sultan’s Hall.

The great doors had been thrown open, and through them the sound of ten thousand footsteps came drifting in, the only splatter of rain in their land of deserts and dunes.

The tables of the banquet were long gone. The benches had been stacked against the walls. The floor where the Eastern Troupe had once danced in pillars of white fire stood empty and strange.

Above it hung a projection.

It was a vast image, wide as the hall itself, and it showed what lay beyond the western border.

Malik had looked at it for an hour.

He knew every line of it by heart now.

A black ceiling of ships. Beneath it, a sea of pale armor spreading across the plains in blocks miles wide, with war-beasts running between them and banners of white fire standing over the ranks like a forest.

It was too large.

He had known it would be.

He had known the moment the Order resumed its attack, and he had known it when Dunya’s slate trembled in her hands.

But again, knowing a number and seeing it were different things, and the projection did not let him pretend otherwise.

There was no wall in Devil’s Maw tall enough to stop that.

There was no Holy Armament left to fire.

If the people stayed, they would die, and if the Holy Palace stayed, it would burn with all of them inside it.

They had to abandon it.

All of it.

The throne, the halls, the gardens, the city.

Every stone his people had built.

Malik turned from the crystal and looked at the ones who had gathered before him.

They were all there.

Layla stood at the front with her hands folded tight against her stomach, her dark eyes already shining.

Beside her stood Amal in a traveling cloak, one hand wrapped around her mother’s sleeve.

Dunya waited just behind them, while Sinbad was perched on a pillar nearby, his pink eyes fixed on him.

Hakim leaned against the doorframe with his arms folded.

Safira and Huda stood together, one calm and one scowling.

Azeem, Aladdin, Zafar, Duban, and Kabir had come in a line, standing as straight as they ever had.

Scheherazade was not there.

For once, Malik was grateful.

If she had been in the room, she would have been the first to complain, quite loudly, about being denied her chance to collect on a certain agreement before the world ended.

Thankfully, she was far too busy with her own Empire to think about it, and the thought was almost funny enough to put a smile on his face.

The smile did not come.

He knew what he was about to ask.

Malik knew very well that they would hate it.

They all looked at him with wet eyes, and none of them were trying to hide it.

He gave them a calm smile anyway, one he used when he wanted to make something sound easy.

It only made things worse.

He saw it land on each of their faces like a blow, many turning their head away.

"You know that I won’t die, right?"

His voice was steady.

"I’ll only delay them."

Nobody answered.

Nobody dared to.

The silence stretched out in the hall, and the only sound was the endless shuffle of the crowd outside.

Malik let it sit for a moment. Then he nodded toward the doors.

"You should move out now. Help protect the evacuation corridors. The people need you more than they need me."

Kabir was the first to move.

The giant crossed the floor in heavy steps and stopped before the throne.

He dropped to one knee, bowing his great head, or so he tried.

Malik stepped forward and caught him by the shoulder.

"No. Don’t."

Kabir looked up.

For all the years Malik had known him, the ever-calm giant had never once lost his composure.

He had stood beside a Sultan through wars, betrayals, and the end of a hundred worlds without so much as a flicker.

Now a single tear rolled down his cheek and fell onto the polished stone, and he did not wipe it away.

He stood, slowly, and said two rough words:

"I’m sorry."

Then he turned and left, and the sound of his footsteps faded down the corridor.

This was the giant’s tear.