2
Nahri
Something happened to that girl.
Nahri picked through the pastry crumbs of her long-devoured feteer. Her mind spinning after the zar, she’d stopped in a local coffeehouse rather than head home and, hours later, she was still there. She swirled her glass; the red dregs of her hibiscus tea raced across the bottom.
Nothing happened, you idiot. You didn’t hear any voices. She yawned, propping her elbows up on the table and closing her eyes. Between her predawn appointment with the basha and her long walk across the city, she was exhausted.
A small cough caught her attention. She opened her eyes to find a man with a limp beard and a hopeful expression idling by her table.
Nahri drew her dagger before he could speak and slammed the hilt against the wooden surface. The man vanished, and a hush fell across the coffeehouse. Someone’s dominos clattered to the floor.
The owner glared, and she sighed, knowing that she was about to be thrown out. He’d initially refused her service, claiming no honorable woman would dare venture out unaccompanied at night, let alone visit a coffeehouse full of strange men. After repeatedly demanding to know if her menfolk knew where she was, the sight of the coins from the zar had finally shut him up, but she suspected that brief welcome was about to end.
She stood up, dropped some money on the table, and left. The street was dark and unusually deserted; the French curfew had scared even the most nocturnal of Egyptians into staying inside.
Nahri kept her head down as she walked, but it wasn’t long before she realized she was lost. Though the moon was bright, this part of the city was unfamiliar to her, and she circled the same alley twice, looking for the main road without success.
Tired and annoyed, she stopped outside the entrance to a quiet mosque, contemplating the idea of sheltering there for the night. The sight of a distant mausoleum towering over the mosque’s dome caught her eye. She stilled. El Arafa: the City of the Dead.
A sprawling, beloved mass of burial fields and tombs, El Arafa reflected Cairo’s obsession with all things funerary. The cemetery ran along the city’s eastern edge, a spine of crumbling bones and rotting tissue where everyone from Cairo’s founders to its addicts were buried. And until plague had dealt with Cairo’s housing shortage a few years ago, it had even served as shelter for migrants with nowhere else to go.
It was an idea that made her shudder. Nahri didn’t share the comfort most Egyptians felt around the dead, let alone the desire to move in with a pile of decaying bones. She found corpses offensive; their smell, their silence, it was all wrong. From some of the more well-traveled traders, she heard stories of people who burned their dead, foreigners who thought they were being clever in hiding from God’s judgment—geniuses, Nahri thought. Going up in a crackling fire sounded delightful compared to being buried under the smothering sands of El Arafa.
But she also knew that the cemetery was her best hope of getting home. She could follow its border north until she reached more familiar neighborhoods, and it was a good place to hide if she came across any French soldiers looking to enforce the curfew; foreigners usually shared her apprehension toward the City of the Dead.
Once inside the cemetery, Nahri stuck to the outermost lane. It was even more deserted than the street; the only hints of life were the smell of a long-extinguished cooking fire and the shrieks of fighting cats. The spiky crenellations and smooth domes of the tombs cast wild shadows against the sandy ground. The ancient buildings looked neglected; Egypt’s Ottoman rulers had preferred to be buried in their Turkish homeland and therefore hadn’t seen the upkeep of the cemetery as important—one of many insults they’d visited upon her countrymen.
The temperature seemed to have dropped rather suddenly, and Nahri shivered. Her worn leather sandals, threadbare things long overdue for replacement, padded on the soft ground. There was no other sound save the jingling coins in her basket. Already unnerved, Nahri avoided looking at the tombs, instead contemplating the far more pleasant topic of breaking into the basha’s house while he was in Faiyum. Nahri would be damned if she was going to let some consumptive little brother keep her from a lucrative take.
She hadn’t been walking long when there was a hush of breath behind her, followed by a flit of movement she caught out of the corner of her eye.
It could be someone else taking a shortcut, she told herself, her heart racing. Cairo was relatively safe, but Nahri knew there were few good outcomes to a young woman being followed at night.
She kept her pace but moved her hand toward her dagger before making an abrupt turn deeper into the cemetery. She hurried down the lane, startling a sleepy cur, and then ducked behind the entrance to one of the old Fatimid tombs.
The footsteps followed. They stopped. Nahri took a deep breath and raised her blade, getting ready to bluster and threaten whoever was there. She stepped out.
She froze. “Baseema?”
The young girl stood in the middle of the alley about a dozen paces away, her head uncovered, her abaya stained and torn. She smiled at Nahri. Her teeth gleamed in the moonlight as a breeze blew back her hair.
“Speak again,” Baseema demanded in a voice strained and hoarse from disuse.
Nahri gasped. Had she actually helped the girl? And if so, why in God’s name was she wandering around a cemetery in the middle of the night?
She dropped her arm and hurried toward her. “What are you doing out here all alone, child? Your mother will be worried.”
She stopped. Though it was dark, sudden clouds veiling the moon, she could see strange splotches staining Baseema’s hands. Nahri drew in a sharp breath, catching the scent of something smoky and charred and wrong.
“Is that . . . blood? By the Most High, Baseema, what happened?”
Clearly oblivious to Nahri’s worry, Baseema clapped her hands together in delight. “Could it really be you?” She circled Nahri slowly. “About the right age . . . ,” she mused. “And I’d swear that I see that witch in your features, but you otherwise look so human.” Her gaze fell on the knife in Nahri’s hand. “Though I suppose there’s only one real way to tell.”
The words had no sooner left her mouth than she snatched the dagger away, her movements impossibly fast. Nahri stumbled back with a surprised cry, and Baseema laughed. “Don’t worry, little healer. I’m no fool; I’ve no intention of testing your blood myself.” She wagged the dagger in one hand. “Though I think I’ll take this before you get any ideas.”
Nahri was speechless. She took Baseema in with new eyes. Gone was the flapping, tormented child. Her bizarre declarations aside, she stood with a new confidence, the wind whipping through her hair.
Baseema narrowed her eyes, perhaps picking up on Nahri’s confusion. “Surely you know what I am. The marid must have warned you about us.”
“The what?” Nahri held up a hand, trying to protect her eyes from a sandy gust of wind. The weather had worsened. Behind Baseema, dark gray and orange clouds swirled across the sky, obliterating the stars. The wind howled again, like the worst of the khamaseen, but it was not yet the season for Cairo’s spring sandstorms.
Baseema glanced at the sky. Alarm bloomed in her small face. She whirled on Nahri. “That human magic you did . . . who did you call for?”