Sparkers (21 page)

We drive into the plaza and pull up in front of the Assembly Hall. One of our escorts leaps out of the auto and yanks open the back door. “Out.”

I move clumsily after Azariah. His parents are standing together, hands clasped, on the steps of the hall. Banar Rashid's expression is apprehensive, Gadi Faysal's defiant.

Asa oozes up the steps, motioning for us to come. Struggling to swallow, I trudge toward the massive oak doors. Once I pass through them, I don't know if I'll return.

W
e enter a soaring atrium. The green marble floor is so polished it looks icy. Government employees in black suits swish past us wearing harried expressions, stopping now and then to exchange a few clipped words. The army of clerks stationed behind a long counter are in an uproar, crashing into each other as they run back and forth waving memoranda. Asa leads us through the chaos, keeping a close eye on us and his subordinates hemming us in.

For a time, everybody is too wrapped up in their personal sliver of the crisis to notice our presence. Officials sail by, arguing about the necessity of locking down the District Halls and the rumors that several cases of recovery from the dark eyes have been confirmed. A few steps farther, I catch sight of Seventh Councilor Ketsiah Betsalel.

“I'm telling you to recall all police officers assigned to the far suburbs and the rural outposts,” she shouts at somebody. “Those are your orders! Where do you think they're more needed: here or in some godforsaken hamlet?”

Finally, a gaunt, elderly kasir spots the Rashids and me being ushered across the atrium. “Jalal? God of the Maitaf, is it your son Azariah?”

Banar Rashid starts to say something, but Asa cuts him off. “They are not to be spoken to.”

The old man stares in alarm. “What do you know, Jalal? Should we—?”

A woman grabs him by the arm and tries to jerk him away. “What are you doing? Stay away from Rashid, he's in disgrace.”

Heads begin to turn. While some kasiri trip over each other trying to give us a wide berth, others slow in their mad dashes through the Assembly Hall. Asa tenses.

“Guards!” he shouts, loudly enough to punch through the hubbub. Around the atrium, the officers in charge of the hall's security leave their posts and advance toward us. The effect on the government kasiri is immediate; they almost all return to going about their business. Only a brave few try to keep up as Asa hurries us toward a wide staircase ahead.

“Was the notice true?”

“What are we to believe?”

“Why have you been arrested?”

“It's them, it's the children!”

Banar Rashid turns abruptly to face the atrium. “Azariah and Marah printed the truth!”

Asa swears and silences Banar Rashid with a spell as his deputies whirl around, bellowing incantations that force even the most persistent kasiri to scatter. Then the officers hustle us up the steps to a door, where Asa casts a spell. Pasting on a horrible grin, he holds the door open for the Rashids and me. With the other two officers pressing us from behind, there's nowhere to go but in.

No sooner have we entered the room than the door slams shut. In front of us, on a dais, two men and a woman are seated at a stone desk. On either side of us are long benches, empty except for a boy about Melchior's age holding a portable writing desk on his lap.

From the portraits I've seen and the distant views I've had of him in public, I recognize the man seated in the middle of the desk as Yiftach David, First Councilor of the Assembly. He's a small, gray-haired man, not particularly imposing, but his eyes are deep-set and utterly unreadable. A gold watch chain loops across his vest.

The man on Yiftach David's right is taller and heavier set. Like Asa, he wears the diamond insignia of the First Councilor's Corps. His sturdy face gives the impression of indomitable will. The woman on David's left has a sapphire pendant at her throat. Her face, coldly beautiful, shines with detached intelligence. All three are immaculately dressed in black.

Yiftach David rises very slowly. His face is pale and pinched, his eyes dusky. Could he be ill himself? I can't quite discern whether his eyes are black or just naturally dark.

“My dear Rashids,” he says. “Gadin Levi.” Then he gestures to his colleagues. “This is Ehud Tsuriel, the captain of my personal Corps, and Kalanit Hoshea, one of my advisors.”

Gadi Faysal steps forward. “Do you mean to silence us, David?”

Acting as if he hasn't heard her, David looks past us to Asa. “Leave us.”

Asa turns to Banar Rashid and mutters a counterspell. Then he and his men withdraw.

“David, this is absurd,” says Banar Rashid, his voice back. “Just what do you intend to do? No one will support the Assembly in this depravity.”

“Is that what you call it, Rashid?” the First Councilor says, sounding disappointed. Then his tone grows colder. “Come here, Gadin Levi. And you, young man.”

Azariah stiffens, but I obey, and he follows me. Gadi Faysal makes a noise in her throat as David fixes his gaze on us. I can scarcely breathe.

“Where is the cure?” he asks.

Silence. Even the scribe, hunched over the few lines scratched on his paper, holds his breath.

“Where is the cure?” David repeats, his white knuckles grinding into the stone tabletop.

“It's gone,” I say in a brittle voice.

“A likely story,” snaps his advisor Hoshea.

“It's true,” Azariah says. “It's all gone.”

My hand strays to my cloak pocket where the glass bottle lies hidden. Panicking, I clasp my hands behind my back.

David doesn't seem to notice. “Who are your accomplices?” he asks.

“There was no one but us,” I lie, my whole body trembling. I pray Mother has given away the rest of the cure by now.

“No matter,” says the First Councilor. “We will find them.”

His attention returns to Azariah's parents, but his advisor isn't done with us. “Do you know how many laws you've broken?” she demands. “Breaking into the newspaper office, attacking the night watchman, printing that notice, which, by the way, was bald sedition—”

“But we told the truth!” I say.

David looks at me and laughs. There's a manic, almost feverish, gleam in his eyes.

“Enough!” Banar Rashid strides forward and pulls me and Azariah behind him. “Your renegade minority will never succeed in this mad plot. Healing the kasiri and leaving the halani to die? The public will demand the cure and make no distinction between kasir and halan.”

Now David's advisor laughs. “Who do you think will be called renegades when this is over, Rashid?” She nods toward the police captain, who is still sitting there as though made of stone, his face empty of emotion. “The Corps has surrounded the Assembly Hall. We will paint you as subversives who sought to incite the citizenry to overthrow the government. There is no known cure for the dark eyes yet. Your allegations are lies, a ruse designed to topple the Assembly, all the crueler for having raised false hopes.”

“Peace, Hoshea!” the First Councilor says, raising one hand. “It may not come to that.”

“It's too late anyway,” protests Banar Rashid. “The people are convinced.”

“The people are easily swayed,” David says. “In one direction as in another. Do you believe we would have any difficulty discrediting a nobody halan girl and a Xanite family with known radical leanings? Soon the Assembly will quietly begin making the cure and healing those stricken with the dark eyes. That is, those kasiri . . .”

The emphasis on the word
kasiri
is delicate but unmistakable. Banar Rashid walks up to the dais, Gadi Faysal at his side.

“You cannot do this,” he tells David.

Azariah rushes to join his parents, and I follow him. As I squeeze past Azariah's shoulder, the First Councilor turns. From this close, I can see his eyes
are
black, the pupils gone. My heart skips a beat.

“But we
can
,” David says, his face glowing with excitement. “All in anticipation of the day when Ashara boasts a pure citizenry of ka—”

“We're all of us Ashari!” I shout, hot rage rushing up through me. “This isn't just your city. And the plague is because of
you
, because of kasir magic!”

“Marah's right,” Banar Rashid says. “The fault is ours. The halani are innocent victims. How can you abandon them to suffer the consequences of our mistakes?” His voice is passionate, almost pleading.

David peers down at him, his eyes like onyx. “You misunderstand. We are not taking advantage of a chance occurrence. On the contrary.”

My arms prickle with foreboding. The Rashids' silence seems to encourage David.

“This plague,” he says, slightly breathless, “has been almost two hundred years in the making. It was designed precisely to purify Ashara, to build a city of kasiri where magical bloodlines would never be diluted or die out.”

God of the Maitaf. This can't be real.

The Assembly created the dark eyes.

T
he wind howls across two centuries, rushing past my ears. David's face is rapt, and deathly pale.

How is it possible? Two hundred years in the making? Somehow they must have convinced kasiri to stop casting the neutralizing spells, so that the harmful magic began to accumulate . . .

The police captain makes a sudden movement as if to rise, and I realize with a jolt of terror that because of the knowledge we now possess, we might never leave this chamber alive.

“I don't believe you!” I blurt out. The captain goes still. “If you created the dark eyes, you'd have the cure.”

“We did,” David says, looking not at me but at the still speechless Rashids. “The Assembly guarded the book containing the cure very carefully and outlawed the study or possession of Hagramet texts so knowledge of the language would be lost. However, all four copies of the Hagramet book were believed burned in the fire that destroyed the Assembly Hall seventy years ago. It now seems they were not
all
burned.”

I look at Azariah in astonishment, but he's staring at the First Councilor, his expression a mixture of disbelief and revulsion.

“You—you knew all along,” he splutters, “but you pretended not to—you acted like you were doing all you could, closing the schools—”

“The danger of contagion proved an excellent pretext for that,” David says with delight. “Shutting down the schools allowed us to reassure the public we were taking the illness seriously while simultaneously hampering the spread of subversive ideas among students.”

I remember standing in the schoolyard with my friends on that day that now seems so long ago, arguing about underground meetings and the intuition as our power. I want to tell David he was right to fear Ashara's students.

“But Yiftach, why?” Banar Rashid struggles for words, looking ill. “Why are you bent on . . . on
purifying
Ashara?”

The First Councilor draws himself up, his face blazing. “When the cold times came, it was the magicians who ensured the survival of the northlanders, was it not? Without our kind, the remnants of Erezai would have perished, and the city-states would not exist. At its founding, Ashara was half kasir and half halan. Yet over time, the kasir population began to decline while the halan population slowly rose.”

“What of it?” Gadi Faysal says icily. “These are historical facts—”

“So you agree they are true!” David leans forward, staring intensely at Azariah's parents. “But they are not mere statistics. You are foreign-born. Your family does not remember how the number of children born with magic dwindled over the decades or how intermarriage, before it was outlawed, diluted kasir blood. A hundred years after the cold times began, the Assembly decided to act. It had to.

“As Xanite immigrants, you may not feel our history as keenly as we do. But as kasiri, surely you can understand what a catastrophe, what a
tragedy
it would have been for Ashara's magicians to disappear while the common sparkers, who would not even be here today were it not for us, endured.”

Contempt flares inside me. Of course. Fate threatened to wrong his poor, precious kasiri while we ungrateful halani had all the luck.

“But why didn't the Assembly call off the plan when the cure was lost?” says Banar Rashid. “Surely the councilors must have realized how reckless it would be to continue!”

Reckless? How about evil? But David, triumphant, takes the question to mean he has persuaded Banar Rashid of the rightness of the Assembly's original intent, if not the wisdom of how they proceeded.

“We had already dedicated too many years to our purpose,” he explains, his forehead gleaming. “We could not give up.” He speaks as though he were one of those councilors, though the fire happened before he was born. “The Assembly remained confident that when the illness emerged, the city's best scientists and magicians would be able to rediscover the cure.”

“But they failed,” says Gadi Faysal. She gestures at me and Azariah. “Two children did better, so you went after them.” She darts forward, like a falcon swooping down on David. “Because of you, my daughter is dead.”

David flinches. “As a kasir, she should not have died. I sincerely regret—”

“How
dare
you?” Gadi Faysal's voice is so terrible it should be deadly. “Her life meant nothing to you. And she didn't deserve to live because she was a kasir. She deserved to live because she was a human being. She was just a child!”

Yiftach David says nothing.

“You'll never succeed anyway,” says Gadi Faysal. “Not all kasiri's children are born magicians.”

“Such children will be . . . dealt with,” David says.

Does he mean killed? The ordinary kasiri will never let it happen. There'll be a revolution. Or will there be?
The Corps has surrounded the Assembly Hall
 . . . David's ready. The kasiri will be living in the city he envisions before they understand what's happening. And then, in a generation or two, they'll forget there ever were sparkers. We'll become nothing but a story.

Banar Rashid's face is rigid with horror, but all he says is, “David, this scheme is impossible. Today, the halani represent two-thirds of Ashara's populace. Take them away, and you guarantee the collapse of the city.”

“I assure you, we have detailed transition plans in place,” David says. “It is true the sparker population has continued to grow most unfortunately since the Assembly first conceived of unleashing the dark eyes. But this merely proves how prescient those councilors were! They foresaw the need to protect us from becoming an ever-shrinking minority overwhelmed by the ungifted masses. Don't you see? Ashara
must
become a city of kasiri!”

Gadi Faysal makes a sound of disgust. “You feared extinction, so you turned around and condemned the halani to extinction instead? That is truly vile.”

“We will never stand with you in this,” her husband adds.

All of David's eagerness evaporates. His eyes flash like polished jet.

“I gave you more credit than you deserved,” he says, his voice hard. “Now I see how it is. I should have known your radicalism would blind you. Magicians who put sparkers before—”

A tremor shudders through his body, and his legs buckle. His advisor leaps up to catch him, and he collapses into his chair. My heart thuds.

“You've as good as killed yourself,” Gadi Faysal tells him, still livid. “Now are you satisfied?”

“I may die before we prepare the cure again,” the First Councilor says, his black eyes glassy with fever. “It is a sacrifice for a better future, as your daughter was.”

“Sarah was not a sacrifice!” I burst out as Azariah gives a wordless cry of rage beside me.

David doesn't even glance at me. “Enough,” he rasps. “I must address the city. It's time.”

I watch in despair as he grips the edge of the stone desk and, with great effort, rises again. In a moment, he will stand on the steps of the Assembly Hall and tell all of Ashara that our cure is a lie while, imprisoned in this chamber, we await our death. The truth will die with us, and the halani will never be healed. Caleb will die, and then Mother, all my friends, Tsipporah and Aradi Imael . . . until the dark eyes has destroyed all the halani.

“Wait!” I cry. This can't be the end. There must be some way I can stop David in his tracks and make him change his mind. Somehow I have to make him see.

In a moment of clarity, I decide what I must do.