Chapter 226 True Sultan

Malik read Cyrus’s Diary a second time.

He read it slowly, with his thumb pressed against the edge of the sack.

The writing had the same impatient rhythm as all the others. It was the voice of a man who had never in his life stopped to wonder whether anyone would be hurt by what he said.

Mold him one last time.

He had heard that phrase before, in a different mouth.

It had a long shadow.

I don’t care that he doesn’t want this.

’No...’

Malik scoffed.

’I wouldn’t think you did.’

He leaned his head against the stone wall behind him and looked up at the dark ceiling of the alcove.

There was a time he would have spat on the page. There had been a good many months in which he would have burned it, and the book, and the pile of barley sacks beside

Reading that smug, tired, arrogant old voice tell him he was a prize to be collected, a thing to be fetched and finished, had always made him want to put his fist through something.

It did not do that now.

It was the second part that stayed.

A tide. An unending wave. Black, swallowing the world.

He had seen that tide. He had stood on a hill with a sword in his hand and watched it come, rank on rank of Demons. He had seen the same with the Order, their banners hanging in the dead air, and a ceiling of ships blotting out two Suns.

He had fought it.

It had broken his arm off at the shoulder, and it had taken his father in the dirt.

Cyrus had seen it in a dream.

He had seen it decades ago.

The old bastard had written it down and gone back to counting his concubines and his taxes, and then he had gone out and done something about it, in his way, by raising a child he could use, bestowing on him a final lesson, his own death.

It was a vile way.

But it was the only way he had found.

And he had not been wrong about the nightmare.

I was too late.

’You were.’

The old man had not lived to see it. But somebody had. A boy in a cave, with a cane made of withered wood, had grown up into the thing the dream was afraid of.

I need to die.

Malik closed the diary.

He did not feel any particular satisfaction; he did not feel pity either.

Instead, he felt a... careful sort of understanding. It reminded him that the war he was fighting was far older than he was.

The people who had built him had been losing it for a very long time.

He rubbed his face with his one hand.

’Fine.’

It was the word he used for everything now.

’Then I will finish it.’

The air changed.

It happened without a sound.

One moment he was sitting in a niche in the rock with a sack of barley under him, smelling lantern oil. The next, a pressure fell over the alcove from every side, both soft and heavy.

’Wait.’

The barley sacks went out.

Blink.

Malik was standing.

He had not stood up.

His boots were planted on bare earth, gray and fine as ash, as a warm wind was moving through his hair.

The cold of Eden had gone.

The sky had gone too; in its place hung a silent dusk, deep violet at the top and bleeding to a dull copper at the rim, with no Sun and no moon to give it light.

Malik knew this place.

He had never seen it before in his life, and he knew it.

His Soul went quiet as his new, enormous Rukh, which had been surging against the walls of his body for days, sank down in his chest.

Before him rose a tree.

It was colossal.

He had seen the sapling in Hell, a withered twig clinging to a broken root, and he had seen the black branch that hung above it like a ceiling.

This was what the twig had once been.

A trunk wider than a city wall climbed out of the earth in a slow spiral, bark black as iron and veined with a dull, patient crimson, and its roots coiled across the plain in great arching knots.

Far above, a crown of black leaves spread across the whole width of the dusk, and every leaf was moving, though no wind touched them.

A Tree of Death.

Devil’s Maw’s own, in the days before it was cut and left to wither.

Before the Spine Splitter... before the rot... ITs interference and gift.

He was standing in a memory of a time when it was whole, and it was huge enough to hold up the sky.

His breath came out thin.

There was a figure at its roots.

Malik had not seen him at first.

The tree was so vast that anything beneath it shrank to a speck, and the man sat very still, on a low gray stone between two of the great roots, with his back against the bark.

He wore a robe of undyed black wool, frayed at the hem. His head was bent. A long hand rested on his knee, and the other held a single leaf, turning it slowly between two fingers.

There was no doubt about it.

Beneath that tree sat the Former Sultan.

It had to be; it couldn’t be anyone else.

Malik walked toward him through the ash, each footfall making no sound.

He stopped a few paces from the stone and stared at the bowed head, the tired line of the shoulders.

Indeed, he had read that handwriting a moment ago.

"Cyrus?"

The man looked up.

His face was older than Malik had imagined, lined and strangely gentle, with a mouth that sat easily in a smile.

His eyes were pink.

The same eyes as Huda and Sinbad.

The Former Sultan chuckled, tilted his head, looking like a man who had been waiting a very long time for a guest to arrive and was now delighted that the guest had finally remembered the way.

"No, I’m only the True Sultan~."