A boiling mass of black-violet clouds swathed the sky. Below them was a crimson sea of sand so bloody red that Nyx had a moment of dissonance. Some raging, nameless feeling of dread overcame her, and she thought, My God, this is what hell looks like. I’ve been sent to hell. Had she been dead all this time, just locked in some death-dream?

Towering, funnel-shaped structures swelled from the bloody desert, mountainous features so high that their bulbous tops pierced the oppressive cloud cover. Far below, at the base of them, the wind whipped up eddies of red sand, obscuring whatever lived or grew or preyed on the ground. She wondered if the seven gates of hell were down there, or if this was just one of the seven in the Wall. It wasn’t impossible, was it?

Safiyah grinned. “Looking for the angels? Guardians of hellfire? Oh, I assure you they are there. Perhaps not as dangerous as they once were, but potent enough. The Aadhya rule this hell. We are just travelers.”

At Nyx’s feet, a long tier of stairs dug into the face of the Wall terraced gently downwards, into the spitting sand.

“Before we go, I advise you all to cover any wounds you may have,” Safiyah said. “The sand here feeds on blood.”

“All of it?” Eshe said.

“All of it,” Safiyah said. She opened her arms to the sky. “You will learn to love it. Or it will destroy you. Neither is unpleasant. Are you coming, or shall we gawk at the gate all day?”

She started down the steps.

“Safiyah?” Nyx called after her. “Why is this cave up here? What for?”

Safiyah laughed her hack-hack-snort laugh that made Nyx cringe. “The Aadhya of course. How do you think they escaped from this hell in the first place?”

“Why were those people walled up here?” Khatijah asked.

“Truthfully? They walled themselves in with this contagion, millennia ago.” Safiyah regarded the bloody, swirling landscape and shrugged. “I suppose it worked. The world could have been much worse, you see. It could have all been like this.”

“How did they… do this?” Eshe asked.

“There have been bursts that ensure that nothing bred in a place will ever come out straight again,” Safiyah said. “Chemicals that twist blood codes out of shape. You don’t see them much anymore, but they exist. I wouldn’t have put it past the early magicians to cook up something like that, something that mutated far beyond their control.” Her stare got distant then, like she wanted to sit there at the table with those same magicians and see what they were cooking up. Nyx had seen the same expression on bel dames thinking about some boy they hadn’t killed yet.

Ahmed turned to Nyx. “Why would anyone take a political prisoner out here?”

Nyx gazed into the abyss. “Because they could do anything they wanted to him here. Question is, what the fuck was it?”

33.