The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed

Author:Premee Mohamed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd
Published: 2023-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

THE FABLED

STREETS ALOFT

The park in which they had so miraculously landed was enormous, but otherwise resembled any rich neighbourhood’s park back in Edvor: groomed, cosseted, bland. Dense turf still green despite the lateness of the year, patches of tall ornamental grasses interspersed with flowerbeds tucked in for the winter, pale concrete paths winding between them. A few artful bowers meant for sweet nothings, probably used more often for illicit dealings, swathed in reddened ivy and dormant grapevines. A rock garden filled most of the side closest to the wall, where plants would struggle to grow in the permanent shade. Lucky they hadn’t hit that; one of the boulders must have been twenty feet high. How had they gotten that up here?

Alefret looked up at the wall as they left the park: it wasn’t as high as he’d thought when they had been racing towards it, perhaps twenty yards high, probably half as thick. Really shockingly low, actually, when you thought of the place as a fortress. There were cities in Varkal that had walls higher than that. Even some of the medieval villages, though those were mostly crumbling. The real walls were in the air around it, he supposed. Someone should write a poem about it. And in fact it was concrete, like the paths, not stone as he’d initially thought. He touched it tentatively with the back of his hand: as polished and cold as ice.

It was a night not unlike the night they had just left—the air was dry and cold, though less thin than Alefret had expected. They squelched along the paths and the lamp-posts to an arched iron gate propped open with a couple of triangular boulders that looked as if they had been stolen from the rock garden. Bright orange graffiti marked one, oddly reassuring, the universal human symbol: Behold, I wish you to perceive a sexual organ. Outside, a few pedestrians hurried past in the darkness, heads down.

Alefret tried to move quietly; they were both making noise. He tried to assemble his racing thoughts into a line and came up with nothing. Was he even the same man who had left the prison? He was weakened, broken, depleted in that unpleasantly cryptic way that severe infections were capable of, like a building that looked sound on the outside but whose wooden support struts were all eaten away by termites. He would never know the damage he had sustained within, and he would never know the moment his body would fail him. Yet he had gained something too—undeniably, though he wanted to deny it. Edvor, under siege, did not mean freedom and resistance necessarily; but nor did this strange city.

He did not know enough about it to sabotage Qhudur, or assist him, or one then the other... and at the very least he was alone with the minder again, and this time, Qhudur had no one to back him up. Alefret knew the ways of bullies to a nicety; it had been his subject of specialization since the day of his birth.

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