Chapter 187: The Order Arrived

Malik arrived in the South with the first dust of the evacuation still hanging in the air.

He landed on a road that had been a trade route only days ago.

Now it was a river of people.

Carts piled with bedding and pots, old men on the backs of their sons, mothers with infants strapped to their chests, and children holding the hems of strangers because their own families had been swallowed by the crowd.

The riverfarms stretched out on both sides, green, golden, and utterly unprepared for what was coming.

Beside him, Hakim landed with a little less grace.

“Your teleport is rougher than mine.”

His father muttered, brushing ash from his sleeve.

“You are old.”

“I am a perfectly respectable age!”

“Old people talk too much.”

Hakim closed his mouth.

It was the most they had said to each other in days.

Malik had made it clear back in the throne room that he wasn’t ready to forgive anything, and Hakim had accepted that with a quiet nod, as if accepting a debt he knew he could never fully repay.

But when Malik announced he was going to delay the enemy, Hakim had stepped forward and said he was coming too, needing no request for approval.

Malik hadn’t told him to leave.

That was as close to an invitation as either of them could manage.

“Sultan!”

A woman in a faded blue shawl spotted him first, and the word rippled backward through the crowd.

Heads turned.

Carts slowed.

A few people dropped to their knees right there in the dust, and Malik felt his jaw tighten.

“Get up and keep moving. If you kneel, you’re blocking the road, and if you block the road, someone behind you dies.”

The woman scrambled to her feet with wide eyes.

Nobody argued back, because, well, nobody was offended… not that they ever would.

If anything, the blunt order seemed to steady them, the way a firm hand steadies a trembling child.

They hurried onward, and Malik pushed through the current towards the front of the column.

“You could have said it nicer.”

Hakim murmured at his shoulder.

“They are alive, are they not?”

His father had no reply to that.

The first teleportation circle sat in the center of what had once been a harvest square.

Malik saw it from a hundred paces away, a massive ring of silver lines etched into the packed earth, glowing a steady blue.

Arcanists in gray robes knelt around its edge with their palms pressed flat against the ground, sweat rolling down their faces.

Every few seconds the circle flared, and a hundred people vanished at once, leaving nothing behind but a gust of warm air.

Arcanist work. Expensive work.

Scheherazade’s people had built half of these lines, and the other half had been carved in the dead of night by exhausted hands while Malik was still floating above the clouds shouting about the end of the world.

Towering over the circle, arms folded, stood a woman, Zayna.

The same Zayna he helped not so long ago, ending an insurrection.

She watched the line of civilians feed into the circle with unblinking focus.

When she noticed Malik approaching, she quickly bowed her head.

“My Sultan.”

“You have returned to my service, it seems.”

Surprised he knew of her, the woman nearly jumped with joy, barely able to contain herself at the thought that the Sultan of Devil’s Maw stood right in front of her.

“I-I live to serve you!”

“You serve well. Now, report.”

“Yes! Eleven circles are active in the South. This is the largest. Each one moves roughly six hundred every five or so seconds. We are currently ahead of schedule by thirty minutes. We will not remain ahead of it for long.”

“Why?”

“Because the roads feeding the circles are clogging. Panic is slower than any army.”

Malik nodded.

He could see it already.

A cart had lost a wheel near the north gate, and the road behind it had backed up into a wall of bodies.

Soldiers were trying to shove the cart aside, but the crowd kept pressing forward, and every push made it worse.

He turned his head.

“Faraja.”

A man in dark wrappings stepped out from the shadows of a nearby stable.

His face was hidden behind cloth, leaving only his eyes visible.

They were a little tired, and very familiar.

Malik remembered eyes like those.

He remembered them above a desert of yellow sand, ten figures stepping out of a storm to drag him away for the crime of killing slavers.

The man bowed low.

“Sultan. How may the Faraja serve?”

Malik held his gaze for exactly one second longer than necessary.

“Clear the north gate. Whatever you can’t cut, go ahead and burn if you have to. Then set up more corridor, ropes on both sides, soldiers every ten paces, and nobody enters the circle unless they enter through the corridor.”

“At once.”

The officer vanished into the crowd, shouting orders in a voice that rolled over the square.

Within seconds, the knot at the north gate began to loosen.

Hakim watched it happen.

“Strange, to see them working so readily.”

“They know what is at stake.”

“Hm. That never happened with me. Are you sure that’s the only reason?”

Malik didn’t answer.

It was an annoyingly accurate observation, and he had no intention of rewarding it.

The two worked fast.

Malik walked the length of the South’s evacuation lines on foot, never stopping.

Flying would have drawn eyes and fear, and fear spread faster than any plague.

He cut a rope tangled around a mule’s neck.

He carried a crying toddler across a flooded ditch.

He lifted an overturned wagon with one hand so a family could drag their grandmother out from under it.

Every few steps someone grabbed at his sleeve, weeping, thanking him, calling him by a hundred different names.

Malik let them, and he never stopped walking.

Hakim did the same on the opposite side of the land.

Once Malik glanced across and saw his father kneeling in the dust beside a little girl, tying a bandage around her scraped knee with clumsy, careful fingers.

The man who had forced a mortal woman and abandoned the child she bore.

The same hands.

Malik looked away before the thought could finish.

Some things needed more time than a single war could give.

“Sultan.”

A hoarse voice interrupted him.

An old woman sat on the edge of the road, a single reed basket in her lap.

Her hair was white as chalk, her back bent nearly in half, and she stared at the circle in the distance with a face like carved wood.

“I won’t go.”

Malik crouched in front of her.

“Why?”

“My husband is buried in that field.”

She pointed with one trembling finger at a distant slope.

“Forty years I’ve tended his grave. If I leave, who will?”

Malik looked at the slope, then back at her.

“The Order will burn it.”

She flinched.

“They’ll burn the field, the grave, and the house. They’ll also burn you, if you’re sitting here when they arrive.”

He kept his voice flat.

“Your husband is dead, but you aren’t. He wouldn’t want you to prove otherwise.”

Her eyes filled with tears, and for a second he wondered if he’d said too much.

Then she gave a short, startled laugh.

“He would have said exactly that.”

“Then he was a sensible man.”

“He was a terrible one.”

She wiped her face.

“But sensible, yes.”

Malik stood and offered his hand.

She took it, and he lifted her to her feet as easily as lifting a feather.

A young soldier hurried over to guide her towards the corridor, and she let herself be led, looking back only once.

Hakim had been watching from across the road.

“You were harsh with her.”

“She is walking, is she not?”

“She is.”

“Then what I did was right; now stop questioning me.”

His father said nothing, but his weathered face softened, and Malik found himself, annoyingly, almost able to see why people had once followed this man.

Above them, the sky began to change.

Malik felt it before he saw it.

A pressure in the air, like the moment before a storm, but colder, with no rain behind it.

The wind died, the birds fell silent, and every soldier along the corridor lifted their heads at the same moment, as if some invisible hand had tugged them upward.

Far in the west, a line had appeared on the horizon.

Thin at first.

A trembling seam where sky met land.

It widened slowly, one banner and one spear at a time.

Hakim stepped up beside him.

“How many?”

Malik narrowed his golden eyes.

He counted the first thousand, then the second, only to stop.

The line kept growing, and beneath it the earth itself seemed to hum, trembling under the weight of an army that had not yet reached the border.

“Too many.”

The crowd behind them surged.

Malik rested a palm on Spine Splitter’s hilt and stared at the trembling horizon.

Somewhere above it, a faint shadow began to cross the face of the first Sun.

The Order had arrived.