Jawad slowed his horse to a halt and raised a scorched palm in the air, his other blistered hand reaching for the rifle slung over his shoulder. The soft pads of his manservant’s horse quieted behind him. Jawad strained his ears for a sign of life in the sea of tall grass they treaded, but heard nothing.

And that vexed him.

Bahadur, the manservant, felt it too, the unnatural silence that had befallen them. The willowy grass no longer crooned under the caress of summer’s hot breeze, and the busy hum of birds and insects seemed to have evaporated in the sweltering heat.

“Your Grace,” Bahadur whispered. “We should turn back.”

Jawad considered the advice, but shook his head. Turning back now with his hands in the state they were in meant certain capture. Pressing ahead was the only way to get the Company off their scent.

“No.” He clicked his heels to urge his horse forward. “We take our chances west.”

The grass grew taller the further they rode. Yellower and coarser to the touch. It eventually gave way to an arid plain. A great wall rose from it in the distance, yawning open in a striking gate whose elaborate arch was marked with the image of an upturned hand branded with a blue eye.

The Hand of Fatima. Jawad shuddered, feeling as though he was the evil the hand was meant to ward off.

“Strange,” he frowned. “I should know every city in these parts, but I can’t put a name to this place. What are the odds it’s an ally of ours?”

“Allies are difficult to come by, even in the best of times,” Bahadur scoffed. “As long as the Company’s pressing its heel into our necks, it’s every man for himself.”

Acceding wearily, Jawad steered his horse away. It would be dark soon, and they needed to find a safe place to make camp for the night.

The horses refused to comply, however. They squealed and reared onto their hind legs till the two men were forced to dismount. Wringing their reins free of the men’s grasp, they bounded for the gate.

Jawad and Bahadur chased after them, skidding to a halt as they crossed the gate’s threshold into an arcade. A heavy cloud descended on them, heightening the aches in their muscles, ensconcing them in a cloak of weariness, tempting them with a wicked languor. The horses calmed down, shook out their mane and contentedly trotted ahead, the clip clop of their hooves echoing through the arcade’s vaulted stone arches.

Jawad’s eyes widened as his mind sluggishly registered what he saw: the covered walkway and street beyond it were strewn with bodies. Motionless bodies. Sentries slumped against their posts. Pack animals curled up before the carts they were tethered to, the heads of their drivers drooping. Shopkeepers with their heads laid on their wares by unmoving cats, and patrons sprawled across the flagstone alongside stray dogs.

Dead. Everyone was dead. But the stench of decay had yet to set in.

“What do you reckon?” Jawad gulped. “The Company’s doing?”

“Could be.” Bahadur slapped himself a few times to stay alert. “Those gauras are capable of all kinds of atrocities.” Clicking his tongue, he bent down to examine a cobbler nearby. “But Your Grace! These people are still alive!”

Jawad joined Bahadur in his examination. The cobbler was, indeed, breathing, his eyes flitting behind closed lids. “They’re not all asleep, are they?”

“We must leave, Your Grace. There is an old darkness shrouding this place”

“Yes,” Jawad said, though every muscle in his body protested.

The horses tucked their tails and snorted as the men tried to turn them around. Too exhausted to drag them out, Jawad and Bahadur relented and accompanied them deeper into the city. They had entered by an east-facing gate. If they cut across, they could leave by the city’s western gate, avoiding whatever it was outside that had their horses spooked.

Sleep tugged at them as they wove through the slumbering citizenry. Their horses’ strides grew heavier, and the setting sun’s reddening glow made sleep all the more inviting. At the intersection separating the city’s markets from its public offices, Jawad paused under a marble lattice canopy and blankly stared at the floral shadows it cast on his scarred palm. For the first time in a long time, he smiled.

His horse’s shoe rang out against something metallic with a loud clang. It was a brass disc embedded into the intersection’s flagstone. Looking up from it was an almond-shaped eye, its iris lapis blue. Jawad spotted another such disc a few paces away. Then another, and another, forming a circle under the canopy.

For a heartbeat, he was back at the East India Company’s garrison. At its artillery shed, pungent black smoke flooding his airways, hungry flames vaulting for his hands. Only this time he couldn’t snatch them away. Couldn’t stop the flames from engulfing him whole.

He stumbled out from under the canopy, disoriented, out of breath and, above all, afraid.

Making matters worse, the city’s western gate opened out to a river. One they couldn’t hope to cross without the aid of a practiced boatman.

You’re different from my other dreams.

Jawad whipped his head over his shoulder. “Who said that?”

You’re usually just a shadow. A figure without any distinct features, said a woman’s voice. You’ve never been this tall and handsome.

It was the first sound Jawad had heard since the grass sea that wasn’t his or Bahadur’s making. Like a moth drawn to a flame, he followed it up the river bank.

“W-who?” Bahadur repeated, waddling after him. “Who said what, Your Grace? We are the only ones here.” He struggled to keep up with his master’s lengthening strides. “Your Grace, you’re probably tired. Perhaps, we should be—”

“I know what I heard!” Shutting his eyes, Jawad listened harder.

Are you the one who’ll set me free? asked the skeptical voice, leading him to a stone wall crowned with a voluptuous hedgerow of jasmine. Another blue eye stared out at him from the stone’s craggy surface. I have eyes everywhere, but beware. So does she.

Ignoring Bahadur’s remonstrations, Jawad scaled the wall and burrowed his way through the hedge. On the other side, he found a woman sprawled out on the lawn, her face drained of all color, eyes wide open and vacant. Crusted vomit clung to her slack mouth, and dried blood streaked her ankle, which had swollen to twice its size.

“My prince!” Bahadur called from the other side, alarmed. “My prince, are you all right?” After some scraping and rustling, he stuck his head through the hedge himself, and gasped.

“She’s dead,” Jawad declared, closing her eyes and wiping her mouth.

It’s my fault, came the woman’s voice. I’d wanted company as I tended to my flowers.

In the dimming light, Jawad made out a pair of pruning shears in the grass, likely hurled at the snake responsible for this. Across the garden, another woman lay collapsed on top of a rosebush.

A flash of metal caught Jawad’s eye as he untangled her long, fragrant and thick tresses from the thorns—a long nail of some sort, jutting out of the earth underneath the bush. It seemed to have sliced a shallow gash across the lady’s palm when she broke her fall.

Thankfully, there were no signs of snakebite. She was still warm and breathing.

Are you the one?

A drunken haze seized him as he laid her out on the grass. His knotted muscles relaxed, and he felt weightless… as if his soul had left his body and arrived at paradise.

Are you the one who’ll to set me free?

Ghosting his fingertips down her neck, he grazed the evil eye limned onto the slight cavity between her collar bones. Something inside him stirred. Something that made him want to lower his head to her lips and—

He snatched his head and hands back and scrambled away from her, bewildered by his sudden loss of self-control.

“Bahadur, the dead woman,” he cleared his throat. “We must bury her.”

Depositing both women inside the palace adjoining the garden, he and Bahadur collected their horses from the river bank and searched the grounds for a mosque where they could perform the dead woman’s final rites. By the time they found one, neither of them had much energy left to spare. They reluctantly agreed to take refuge at the mosque for the night, hoping the praises of Allah adorning its walls might protect them against whatever darkness had befallen the city (not that they’d been much help to the mosque’s imam, who slept soundly on his prayer mat).

They tried their hardest to stay awake. Lighting a small fire, Bahadur clumsily warmed up some leftover meat from the deer Jawad had hunted a few days ago. Bahadur had deftly cleaned the creature’s pelt, and strapped it to his saddle. It was sure to fetch him a pretty sum.

If they made it through the night and home alive.

Staring at his burning, blistered, perhaps forever disfigured hands, Jawad wondered if attacking the East India Company’s garrison had been at all worth the trouble. Its foothold in the native kingdoms— “princedoms,” the gauras so insolently called them—ran insidiously deep. How could he have been so naïve to think a single explosion would drive them out of his father’s territory?

“Maybe Father’s right, Bahadur. Maybe resistance is futile. Just look where it’s brought us. Maybe the Company’s conditions are the best bargain we can hope for.”

Bahadur shook his head vigorously. “Give the devil a hair and he’ll take the whole head,” he said, the words slurred. “Only so much land we can give, so much tribute we can pay. And when it’s all run out, then what? Where do we go? Who do we become?”

“You mustn’t give up, Your Grace. Every act of defiance, every act of duty, of compassion, every one’s a spark that might light the great cleansing fire.”

“How well you speak, Bahadur,” Jawad yawned, his surroundings swaying out of focus. “I almost believe you.”

Bahadur snorted. Jawad heard a heavy thud. Then he, too, fell to the floor.

He dreamed he was on the run again, a posse of khaki-uniformed infantry men hard on his heels. His boot struck metal—a disc bearing a lapis blue eye. He was under the marble lattice canopy at the intersection.

A gaura Company officer cut through the infantry men on a white mount, and charged at him. The ground lurched as Jawad attempted to flee. The blue in the eyes around him disintegrated into a molten white before great columns of luminous blue fire shot up into the air, merging together to form a protective barrier around him.

The Company officer’s glower on Jawad didn’t waver, even as the fire spread, pushing him and his infantry men farther and farther away.

“Are you the one?” he spoke in a strange but familiar woman’s voice, his expression mocking. “Are you the one who’ll set me free?”

“I… no, I don’t know how.”

The Company officer’s mouth curled in a derisive smirk as the blinding blaze swept over him and his men.

Jawad blinked awake. The early morning sun shined bright outside. Bahadur was already up and about, his senses alert and unscathed.

Relief washed over Jawad. They had survived the city’s affliction.

Reinvigorated by a full night’s sleep, they dug a grave for the dead woman behind the mosque before setting out to retrieve her body. On entering the chamber where they’d left the two women, Bahadur abruptly shoved Jawad aside and drew his dagger. Jawad reflexively took his rifle in hand.

A serpent-like form slithered over the sleeping woman. Girthy and devoid of any flesh or vertebrae, it was see-through, the pattern of its dry scales bending light in extraordinary ways. Though it didn’t seem to have any organs, if this was the creature that killed the woman, Jawad suspected it must have had functioning venom glands underneath its fanged skull.

Flaking bits of scale, it slid off the sleeping woman and dragged itself towards the river bank, nudging its head for the two of them to follow. Jawad ignored Bahadur’s silent objection and trailed after it.

Down the river bank, it led them deep into virgin territory, to a cave concealed by a curtain of ivy. Inside, snake molts hung from the ceiling over heaps of precious metal ewers, goblets, snuff- and paan-boxes. A blood-caked axe stood propped against the wall, and earthen pots and silk purses brimmed with coins, strings of pearls, silver, gold and precious jewels.

Their serpentine guide slithered under some bunched up cloth and leather. Collapsed into an inanimate molt as the materials bloated, taking the shape of a saggy-skinned hag in a grey saree. Like the molts hanging from the ceiling, like the molt that had lured them to the cave, the leather was human skin that had been stripped of its owner’s flesh.

Bile rose up Jawad’s throat as he watched the thing stretch out her limbs and smack her flabby lips. “What are you?”

“Why, I am the royal minister,” the hag said. “Whether their majesties extend me the title or not.”

“From the look of things, you’re nothing but a thief. And a murderer. Or am I to believe you had nothing to do with the snakebite that killed that poor woman?”

“Listen here, boy,” the hag’s neck snapped at an awkward angle. “I’m the one protecting this city. You’re the ones who shouldn’t be here. Who’s to say you two won’t bring those gauras with you?”

“What is this place?” Jawad demanded, ignoring the sharp pang of fear her accusation sparked. She was right. What if the gauras followed them here? What would become of all the city’s defenseless people? “What happened to everyone?”

“Their majesties forgot their manners,” the hag tutted. “Their insolence drew the evil eye’s glare upon their precious daughter, which they tried to ward against, of course, but it was no use. The girl cut her hand on the tip of a spindle, dooming herself and the rest of the city to eternal sleep.”

Jawad gawked at her. Then remembered the nail poking out from the earth in the palace garden… the gash across the sleeping princess’s palm. An outrageous story, yes. But he’d yet to come across a more plausible explanation for the city’s extraordinary circumstances. “Well, there must be a way to wake everyone. The Company could discover this place any day.”

“Your Grace, if I may,” Bahadur said. “I’ve heard of such curses. Not on this scale, of course, but I’ve heard they can be lifted by an—ahem—intimate embrace.”

Jawad gave him a blank look.

“A kiss, Your Grace.”

“Oh.” Jawad frowned and turned to the hag. “Well?”

She glowered at Bahadur a moment. Then shrugged. “You’re welcome to try.”

“Right, well, surely the princess has a suitor we can get a hold of.”

“Oh,” the hag snickered, “but she’s been asleep so long, I doubt he’s still alive.”

“Your Grace,” Bahadur whispered, “I was saying that perhaps you might be the one to lift the curse.”

Baffling as the suggestion was, Jawad remembered the inexplicable and overwhelming impulse that had seized him in the palace garden. To cradle the sleeping woman’s head in his palm. Press his lips to hers.

Are you the one who’ll set me free?

What if Bahadur was right? What if he was the one meant to lift the curse? What if the voice in his head was a sign? But—

“Don’t be ridiculous, Bahadur,” he said. “I can’t force myself on an unconscious woman.”

“No. No, you can’t,” the hag said gleefully. “An honorable man wouldn’t dream of such a thing.”

“Don’t listen to her, Your Grace.”

Jawad waved him off. “Is there nothing else that can be done?”

The hag tapped her cheek with a flaccid finger as she thought. “I suppose there’s something I can do. But it will cost you.”

“You just called yourself a royal minister. Are you not bound by duty to protect your realm?”

“Look around you, boy.” The hag gestured at her glittering wares. “I don’t do anything for free.”

“Don’t entertain her, Your Grace,” Bahadur said gruffly. “Give the devil a hair and he’ll claim the whole head.”

“But what else can we do?”

“Nothing! We can go home.”

“Bahadur, we can’t just leave these people unprotected. You said it yourself: every act of compassion counts.”

“The tired ramblings of an old fool,” Bahadur retorted.

“Name your price,” Jawad said to the hag.

Flashing Bahadur an unsettlingly smug smirk, the hag handed Jawad a drawstring purse. “There’s a ship leaving from Surat. It’s carrying all the riches the gauras have looted from your lands. Bring me this bag stuffed with those riches, and I’ll see this city is protected from them.”

︎

Jawad and Bahadur buried the dead woman before setting out for Surat. At the port city, they snuck aboard the Company-chartered ship heading to London disguised as cargo bearers. Set a crate of textiles on fire in the hold as a diversion, then slipped into the captain’s cabin where the chests of precious wares were loaded.

The hag’s small drawstring purse swallowed everything—jewelry, precious stones, vials of perfume, ornamental weaponry, busts and statuettes, goblets, platters and ewers—Jawad and Bahadur dropped into its mouth. Jawad felt sicker the more he shoveled, not because the hag’s demands had made thieves of them and put them in certain danger, but because everything in these chests was stolen to begin with. Priceless heirlooms stolen from families like his.

How long, he shuddered to think, before his own family suffered the same fate? What could he possibly do to protect his people from the Company’s sticky, ever-spreading web?

He didn’t know.

They returned to the river bank on the outskirts of the sleeping kingdom without incident. The hag was most pleased with their haul. Flip-flopping out of her cave, she raised an impenetrable dome of thorns and roses around the city’s outer walls with a flick of her flaccid wrists.

“No, wait, what’re you—?” Jawad cried. “You’re trapping them inside!”

“I’m keeping the gauras out. Just as we agreed.”

“No, that’s not– The people inside—they should be waking up!”

“Oh.” The hag pouted mockingly. “Well, if you wanted that, you should’ve listened to your manservant and kissed the girl.”

“Why, you—”

He lunged for her throat. A deafening cackle rang through the air as her neck shriveled in his grip along with the rest of her. Her muggy, putrid spirit spiraled around him and Bahadur like a tornado before dissipating, her cackle fading.

Jawad fell to his knees in despair. “Bahadur…”

He knelt there in a stupor as Bahadur burned the hag’s skin.

“Up you come, Your Grace,” the manservant finally said, helping Jawad onto his horse. “What’s done is done. Let’s get you home.”

As they rode away, Jawad’s heart lurched at the sound of a strange but familiar voice in his ear:

Free me. Please, don’t go.   Come back!          Come back!           Come back!            Come back!

︎

Back home, Jawad’s father gave him a severe tongue-lashing for jeopardizing already tenuous ties with the Company. He had managed to throw the gauras off Jawad’s scent for the time being by implicating a rival kingdom, but his son’s foolish attack on the garrison had prompted the Company to ratchet up its military presence along their kingdom’s borders.

“We must be on our best behavior, understand?” he said to Jawad, harried. “Pay them their tributes, cultivate the crops they want, stand and sit as they say. Disobedience will lose us their good opinion. Their protection. It’ll lose us what power we have left.”

Meanwhile, hushed celebrations pervaded the kingdom. Its subjects rejoiced at the Company garrison’s destruction, hailed Jawad a hero, anointed him their savior. His rebellion inspired them to rebel in their own small ways, all doomed to be brutally quashed. In the years that ensued, they appealed to his legendary valor as more and more of their land was relinquished to the Company, begged him for mercy as his father raised taxes to pay the Company’s tributes.

But Jawad was too powerless to do anything of consequence. Too powerless to do anything but hang his head in shame.

He wasn’t good for anything, even in his dreams. Perpetually on the run, he always wound up under the marble lattice canopy at the sleeping city’s intersection, surrounded by a ring of fire, his eyes locked with a Company officer’s on the other side.

“Are you the one?” they always mocked in a woman’s voice. “Are you the one who’ll set me free?”

“I told you, I’m not,” he’d cry, waking up in a cold sweat. “I don’t know how.”

Eventually, his father’s treasury ran dry. The Company seized the entirety of their kingdom on grounds that he and his father were too incompetent to govern, and they were exiled east to the congested, mosquito-infested suburbs of Calcutta.

Jawad released Bahadur from service before leaving, saving the loyal manservant and his family the indignity of dispossession. Remembering Bahadur’s talent for cleaning animal hides, Jawad left him with enough money to start his own tannery.

Out east, he assimilated to the life of a hostage. Kept up appearances as the Company’s lapdog, answering to its summons whenever it needed him to mediate with the natives while secretly meeting with other exiles like himself, students, thinkers, and political leaders to chart a course for liberation.

But the resistance’s primary objective… indeed the very concepts of freedom and sovereignty grew murkier, more tangled and distorted as time simultaneously sped up and dragged on, sowing resentment in Jawad’s heart. Against the gauras, yes, but also against his own people. He resented those who valued their own gain over the collective’s, those who curried favor with the gauras for power. He resented his fellow collaborators for their hubris, their idle chatter, their lack of pragmatism and foresight, their petty squabbles over caste, creed, pedigree and political ideologies, and their refusal to so much as try to present a united front. He resented the supposedly wise elders for retreating to a life of meditation and prayer in exile. He resented the masses for their gaiety during festivals honoring gods that had forsaken them, and their futile hand-wringing when the gauras invariably threw a wrench in their celebrations. He resented couples for marrying, and bearing children who’d live out their lives in servitude. He resented everyone for their preoccupation with the drudgeries of daily life. Everything prolonged their captivity, drew energy and attention away from the resistance. Everything fueled the Company, made it stronger. Yet no one seemed to care.

Freedom became a distant dream. And Jawad, as always, was too powerless to do anything about it.

︎

Jawad was dreaming of facing off with a Company officer at the sleeping city again when he felt something brush his neck and shoulders.

“Bring me a gauri’s skin.”

Jawad jumped awake, swatting a snake molt from his person. “You! How– how did you find me?”

The hag’s shrill cackle sounded from the creature’s fanged skull. “Oh, I keep an eye on everyone with pending dues.”

“I don’t owe you anything. We paid what you asked in full.”

The hag tutted. “And I’ve been hiding the city from the gauras for the past few years. But I can’t possibly extend my protection forever. That is, without proper compensation. A gauri’s skin is all I ask. It shouldn’t be too hard to secure. They have overrun the land, after all.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Listen, boy, you’ll bring me a gauri’s skin, pale and fair. Bring me her skin so I can shed my lowly lair. Bring me the skin so I can shine by those who reign. Bring me a skin or your precious princess will be slain.”

Another cackle. The molt flattened as a burst of muggy fumes swept through his room and out his window. Jawad crushed the molt’s skull, and tossed everything into the fire.

Give the devil a hair and he’ll take the whole head, Bahadur used to say. Well, Jawad was done making deals with the devil incarnate. He might have been powerless against the Company, but he most certainly wasn’t going to become a murderer to appease the hag.

Without giving the Company due notice, he returned north to find Bahadur. Overjoyed at first to see his young master again, the loyal tanner’s face darkened when Jawad told him about the hag’s ultimatum.

Jawad didn’t dare share his plan out loud for fear the hag might be nearby, listening. “I intend to keep all my luscious locks,” he said instead, combing his fingers through his hair with a wink. “But I’ll be needing that special remedy only you can make.”

Bahadur caught his drift. “Give me a few days.”

︎

The Company scoured occupied and free lands for the missing prince. Captain Harding of the Bombay Presidency Army had grown weary of alleged sightings of a strapping young man, traipsing about the Deccan Plateau, playing Good Samaritan wherever he went, showering the poor with gold, replenishing dry wells, curing the sick and all manner of hogwash. Orders from headquarters demanded he stay on the road until the lad was found, but after almost a month of dead ends, he had half a mind to tell them his men had recovered Jawad’s corpse in the Narmada River and request permission to return to civil company.

He was ending another tiresome day with a glass of the local spirit, tharra. Beastly stuff. He would’ve much preferred a proper scotch. Outside his tent, the local infantry men conversed like hyenas. A loud crash stunned them into silence before inciting an excited chorus. “Thief! Thief! Thief!”

A barrel of gunpowder was reported missing. Harding ordered two men to get off their ruddy asses and go after the culprits. An hour later, they returned with an old peasant, but no gunpowder. Harding ordered the man be executed by firing squad despite not having a lick of proof connecting him to the theft.

“Sahib, wait, please!” the peasant dove for his feet. “I don’t know anything about any gunpowder. I was on my way here to tell you of a great treasure. Please, sahib, it might have been misplaced, or– or– stolen from the Company. Please, sahib, allow me to show you where it is so you might return it to its rightful owner.”

Harding narrowed his eyes at the old man. Doubts notwithstanding, a lucrative discovery could potentially help him secure a more comfortable post off the road.  “Alright, old chap”—he yanked the old man to his feet by his sweat-stained collar—“let’s see what you’ve found. The treasure for your freedom. But if this turns out to be some devious plot against the Company, rest assured that you won’t be given the benefit of a quick death.”

︎

Bahadur led the gaura captain and his men up the river to the outskirts of the sleeping city. The thorny terrain and sickeningly sweet scent of roses had the infantry men quaking in their boots.

The captain pointed his pistol at Bahadur’s head as he uncovered the entrance to the hag’s cave. “No funny business, you hear me, old chap?”

Bahadur had no idea what “funny business” meant, but bobbled his head in the affirmative anyway.

Inside, the captain lost his breath as he laid eyes on all the hag’s riches. “Blimey!”

A gust of foul-smelling wind swirled about the cave before the hag’s limp human skin wobblingly swelled upright before them. “Where’s your master?” she demanded, stumbling towards them. “Where’s my gauri skin?”

“The bloody hell is going on here?” the captain cried, taking cover behind Bahadur. “What is that thing?”

“Where’s my gauri skin?” she shrieked again, her boneless arms twisting behind her to grab the axe propped against the cave wall.

She took aim at Bahadur’s head and missed. The axe’s weight planted her, face-first, onto the ground. Her lower body shriveled as her arms and chest swelled to their limits. Rising only from the waist up this time, she took aim again.

An earsplitting crack stopped her mid-swing. The captain’s dominant hand was on Bahadur’s shoulder, smoke rising from his pistol’s barrel.

The axe clattered to the ground. The hag’s putrid spirit whistled out of the bullet hole in her chest, and her skin crumpled into a lifeless heap.

Before anyone could breathe a sigh of relief, one of the molts hanging from the ceiling sprang for the captain’s neck. Bahadur grabbed it by its tail, held his breath as he wrenched its body to dust and crushed its skull under his boot. The captain and his men followed his example as more and more snake molts leaped to life, attacking them from every direction.

They’d just about dealt with every molt when the captain saw a rather large wine cup falling out of a compact drawstring purse. As he excitedly proceeded to unearth untold bounties from the purse’s depths, neither he nor his men noticed the last intact snake molt slip out of the cave.

“Sahib,” Bahadur said, his hands joined and head bowed in obeisance. “With your permission, I’ll be returning home now.”

“Yes, yes, of course, old chap,” the captain said, positively drunk with glee. “But surely, you’d like some sort of payment for your troubles.”

“I’m just happy to have served you, sahib.”

“Rightly so. But come now, I’ll not have your lot thinking we’re looters like whatever the hell that abomination was. Why, we’re gentlemen! Honest, principled and just servants of His Majesty, the King.” He rifled through the mountain of riches before him, and handed him a silver snuffbox. “That should do it. Off you go, now. His Majesty thanks you for your service.”

︎

Under the marble lattice canopy at the sleeping city’s intersection, Jawad hurriedly drew a circle connecting the discs bearing the lapis blue eyes with the gunpowder he and Bahadur had stolen. His hands stung like hell. The trek through the thorns had ripped his clothes and scratched him bloody all over. Powdering the circle’s inside, he left the rest in its barrel at the its center.  

He patted the satchel carrying the skin Bahadur had prepared. Wondered if Bahadur was still alive. If the Company was torturing his family to unearth his whereabouts. If this plan was doomed to fail miserably like everything else.

“You filthy lowlife,” he heard the hag snarl. The tenor of her voice shot a shiver up his spine.

Jawad couldn’t see where she was. He pulled out the skin, pale like a gauri’s, and held it up for her to see. “I have your skin! Come and claim it!”

A snake molt slithered into view, halting just outside the gunpowder circle. “Hand it over to me.”

Jawad shook his head. “You want it, come get it.”

A piercing, high-pitched shriek rattled the intersection, dislodging the flagstones around them from their sealants. Jawad felt as if his eardrums and blood vessels might explode. He dropped the skin and stumbled out of the circle, pawing inside his satchel for a matchbox.

The heap of porcelain skin swelled off the ground to form, to Bahadur’s credit, a very close approximation of a gauri.

“What…? Cowhide?” The hag burst into spine-chilling laughter as she appraised the deftly crafted fingers and limbs. “Oh, you stupid boy. I’ll make you pay for this in ways you can’t begin to imagine.”

But Jawad had already lit a match and tossed it at the gunpowder circle.

The explosion flung him into the air. The city glowed lapis blue as a great fiery column roared at the intersection, incinerating the cowhide made to look like a gauri, trapping the hag’s wailing spirit in its clutches. The marble lattice canopy contained the flames to its perimeter, preventing them from spreading too far beyond or climbing too high, only allowing thin slivers to pass through its floral perforations, changing their color to a sooty gold.

The lapis glow grew blindingly bright. Violent tremors rocked the city. All around Jawad, structures cracked, groaned and yowled. Rose petals rained down from the thorny dome overhead.

A final hair-raising cry sounded as the fire forced the spirit through the lattice, dicing her into flecks of floral starlight that drifted inert in the air. Jawad winced as a few landed on his singed and bloodied face. The ground stopped quaking. His body grew heavy and his head fell back.

︎

“Him?” A gruff voice asked, booming but muffled as though from another room. “What’s she want with a foreigner like him?”

“Seems to think he’s some kind of a hero,” came a reply.

“’Course she does,” the first voice scoffed. “Bloody northerners have got all our women fooled with those pointy noses and ox-sized shoulders.”

Something blunt jabbed at Jawad’s shoulder. “Hey. Hey, you. Wake up.”

Jawad squinted in the bright morning light. His face smarted at the slight movement. His body ached all over, particularly on the left side. The austere lay of his surroundings, the number of cots and a strong, unpleasant smell of men told him he’d been brought to the city’s barracks.

“On your feet, foreigner. Her Highness is waiting.”

“Huh?”

“Her High-ness,” the soldier repeated, enunciating every syllable. “The princess. Hurry up, now.”

“Oh.”

Rising onto unsteady feet, Jawad allowed himself to be led to a map room heavily flanked by royal guards. A woman waited for him inside. He broke into a smile when he saw the evil eye limned at the base of her neck.

“There you are, stranger,” she said with the same commanding voice, the same wry inflection that had been haunting him in his dreams for years. “Kept me waiting long enough.”

“My apologies, Your Highness. But I didn’t wish to… overstep my bounds.”

“I wouldn’t have minded,” she said, biting back an embarrassed smile. “But I suppose a kiss would’ve only granted us a temporary reprieve from our disgraced minister’s villainy. You rooted her out once and for all, and for that, I’m forever in your debt.”

He’d done it. He’d finally done something that mattered. “Believe me, Your Highness, I’m honored to have been able to help in any way.”

“But I must reward you with something.”

How could he explain to her that he’d stopped having normal, material desires a long time ago? That the things he wanted now—freedom from the Company’s tyranny, to return to the land of his birth—were, perhaps forever out of his reach. And that they might soon be out of hers, too, if—when—the Company discovered her city.

There was no time to waste. He had to prepare her and her subjects for what was coming. “Just grant me your trust.”

“You already have that.” Closing the distance between them, she nervously said, “I was hoping that… you’d ask for something that… you’d perhaps been tempted by, but too honorable to claim.”

Jawad’s heart skittered like a pebble over water.

Yes, there were more sinister and sophisticated evils to root out, but the Company had already stolen his title, his dignity and all his worldly possessions. He shouldn’t allow it to rob him of this moment… of life’s hopes and joys too. Perhaps it was imperative that he stop every now and then to savor the morsels of sweetness life still had to offer.

“Only if you grant it to me willingly,” he said.

Assured by her radiant smile, he tilted her head up by her chin and kissed her, his heart brimming with longing for a gentler future, and resolve to fight another day.

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Refat Fatema Anisa is a self-taught aspiring artist based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has involved herself with art since childhood as a way to deal with her thoughts. Currently, she is studying Media Studies and Journalism at ULAB. She is highly influenced by the works of Aminul Islam, Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, and Zainul Abedin. Her art previously appeared in Small World City: Issue 06. // instagram facebook