Chapter Text
Nanda Parbat burned for six hours before the fires had been put out, and by then it hardly mattered.
The mountain kept its own counsel above the smoke–a wall of black rock and old snow that had watched the compound rise stone by stone eight centuries before and would watch it, indifferently, however it ended tonight. Ra's al Ghul had been dead since midnight–a blade between the fourth and fifth ribs, administered by a hand no one had yet identified, though everyone had already begun to guess, and to arm themselves according to their guesses.
The night was cold, the way it always was at that altitude once the sun had gone, and the cold did nothing to slow the fire; if anything the dry mountain air fed it, carrying sparks up past the watchtowers in long orange spirals that caught, here and there, in the cedar shakes of the outbuildings and started new fires of their own. Smoke pooled in the courtyards faster than the wind could clear it, thick and resinous, laced with the particular bitterness of burning paper–a hundred years of correspondence, treaties, genealogies, all of it going up together in the library wing–so that the whole compound smelled, by the second hour, of something being unmade rather than merely burned.
Talia al Ghul stood on the eastern parapet with her son's hand gripped hard enough to bruise and watched the library wing collapse in on itself, its roof caving inward in a slow, almost gentle motion before the whole structure exhaled a column of orange sparks up into a sky. Below them the courtyards had gone to chaos: figures moving between buildings in knots of two and three, some fighting, some only fleeing, their shapes flattened to silhouette by the firelight so that friend and enemy alike were reduced to the same black cutouts against the burning stone.
Damian stood beside her in his sleeping clothes with a weapon he’d taken from his wall on his way out of bed, watching the fire eat the place he had been born in, and his face showed nothing at all. Eleven years old, and he had already perfected the stillness she'd spent a lifetime building. She should have been proud. Mostly she was afraid.
"مِّي," he said, "Teacher Rasheed says the coup began in the eastern chapter house. He says it will move west by dawn."
"Teacher Rasheed is dead," Talia said. "He was one of the first."
Damian only nodded. "Then who told you about the eastern chapter house?"
"No one told me. I know how a coup moves because I have watched three of them, and helped end one." She finally looked down at him. In the firelight his face was her face, and his father's jaw, and none of the softness a boy of ten ought to still have anywhere on him. "We are leaving within the hour. Pack nothing."
"I am not afraid to fight."
"I know you are not." She crouched, which she rarely did, bringing her eyes level with his, close enough that the smoke stung both their throats equally. "That is not the problem. The problem is that you have become, in the span of a single night, an asset worth contesting, and I am not in a position to guarantee your protection for as long as you remain at my side. Every man within these walls presently weighing whether to fight or flee is weighing, simultaneously, a second question–whether your capture, or your death, might serve to secure his own claim to headship of this family. That is a danger that worsens the closer you stand to me."
"I am a solider."
"Tonight you are the heir," she said. She took his chin and turned his face up to hers, so there would be nowhere else for him to look while she said it. "Whether you want it or not. You are the last living child of Ra's al Ghul's bloodline, and that alone makes you the most valuable thing left standing in this compound. It is not a rank you have earned and thus not one you can refuse. That is what makes you a target, Damian."
"Habibi," she said, low, so that only he could hear it over the fire, "you are my heart and my soul. Above all, you are my son. I am not sending you away because you are a burden. I am sending you away because I mean to protect you, and this is the only way I have left to do it."
They left an hour later, as she had said, though not by any of the routes a person watching the front gate would have anticipated. Talia had built three separate exits out of Nanda Parbat over the years, each known to fewer than a handful of people, each maintained at cost and never used. She used one of them now, a narrow cleft behind the old grain stores that widened, after two hundred meters of stooped and silent walking, into a tunnel bored through living rock, cold enough that Damian's breath showed white even with the fire still raging somewhere above them.
The tunnel had no torches, by design–a torch was a light someone could follow, and Talia had spent eleven years teaching her body to move without one, counting the turns instead by feel, by the particular roughness of a certain stretch of wall, by a low lintel exactly one meter past the second bend that she ducked under from memory before her hand had even found it in the dark.
Damian kept pace behind her, one hand trailing the wall the way she had once taught him for exactly this kind of blindness, and if he was frightened of the dark or the closeness of the rock or the muffled, retreating roar of the fire behind them, he gave no sign of it beyond the fact that his breathing, when she paused to listen for it, came a fraction too fast, too controlled, the breathing of someone working very hard to sound like they were not breathing hard at all.
It came out four kilometers south, in a dry wash lined with pale boulders that in another two months would be running with snowmelt off the peaks, and there was a vehicle waiting there that had been waiting for eleven days, its engine block wrapped in blankets against the cold, its driver so still against the rock that Damian did not see him until he moved.
They drove without headlights for the first forty minutes.
Without the headlights the world outside the windows was only shape and shadow–the wash narrowing and widening around them, the black cutout of the mountains against a sky just beginning, very faintly, to lighten at its eastern seam.
Talia watched the mirrors more than the road, and somewhere in the second of those forty minutes she became aware that Damian, in the back seat, had gone very quiet in a way that had nothing to do with training–the silence of a child working very hard not to look back at a mountain he could no longer see and could still, somehow, feel burning behind him.
"You suspected this," Damian said, somewhere in the dark, in the tone of an accusation, though whether the accusation was that she had known and not told him, or that she had known and not stopped it, she genuinely could not say, and did not ask.
"I suspected my father would die eventually. He was seven hundred years old."
"You knew it would be now."
"I knew someone had begun positioning for it. I did not know who, or when." She found his eyes in the mirror and held them there. "This is the last lesson of your childhood, Damian, and I would rather you learn it from me than from someone holding a knife to your throat. Are you listening?"
"I am always listening."
"Good." She let the silence stretch a moment. "The Council will not see a ten-year-old. They will see the only child of Ra's al Ghul's daughter, born of a bloodline he spent sixty years cultivating for exactly this. Whoever takes the Council next month will either need you dead, so no one can rally behind you, or need you possessed, so they can rally behind you themselves."
"Then I will fight whoever comes for me."
"You are ten."
"I am the best in my age cohort. Teacher Rasheed said–"
"Teacher Rasheed is dead, Damian. He was thirty-four and had killed eleven men with his hands, and it did not save him. A ten-year-old boy, however excellent, is not a faction. You would not be fighting one assassin. You would be fighting whoever wanted you, and however many people they were willing to spend to get you." She heard her own voice sharpen and made herself stop. "I am not telling you this to frighten you. I am telling you because I would rather you hate me for the truth than trust me for a lie that gets you killed."
Damian was quiet for a long moment. "Where are we going, then. If not to fight."
"I am not going anywhere, in the sense you mean. I am going back–to the Council, to the chapter houses that still answer to me–and I am going to spend however long it takes making certain whoever emerges from this is someone I can work with, or someone I remove." She said it without heat, the way she might describe a schedule. "You are not coming with me."
"You said–"
"I said I cannot protect you and fight for the throne simultaneously. That is not the same as saying no one can protect you. It is the same as saying I am not the one who should." She reached over and stopped the car at the shoulder of the road, just long enough to turn and take his face in both hands. "Look at me. Sending you away does not mean I am giving up on you, Damian. It is the only way left for me to keep you alive."
She did not tell him, that dawn, where he was going, only that it had been decided, and that whatever it had cost her to arrange it, she had judged it worth the cost. There would be a telephone call before the sun came up–brief, low-voiced, conducted in a register Damian had never heard his mother use before–and then a route, laid out on a single index card in her hand and burned in the ashtray of the car before they had gone ten kilometers, each stop on it a small, deliberate discontinuity meant to break whatever line of sight anyone might still be trying to hold on the al Ghul heir.
Nanda Parbat to Srinagar by road. Srinagar to Jammu by rail. Jammu to Delhi, second train, different name on the ticket. Delhi to Istanbul, commercial flight, economy class, a boy travelling with a guardian who was not his mother and would not speak to him beyond what the role required. Istanbul to Vienna, second flight, different passport. Vienna to a private airfield outside Gotham City, on an aircraft that belonged, on paper, to no one at all.
Laid out on the card like that, in her small, exact hand, the route looked almost administrative–a schedule, nothing more, the kind of thing that might have described a diplomat's tour or a merchant's circuit. It did not look, on paper, like the dismantling of a childhood. Damian would think of that card often in the weeks that followed.
The car from the dry wash did not carry them the whole distance to Srinagar. It carried them only as far as a rail junction two hours west, a place with no name Damian ever learned, where a line of freight cars sat coupled and dark under a sky just beginning to gray at its eastern edge–a cargo train, unheated and unlit, its wagons loaded with sacks of grain and machine parts wrapped in oilcloth, the kind of train that crossed the checkpoints without anyone troubling to search it, because no border guard on a night shift wanted to climb into a boxcar at four in the morning
Talia climbed up into the boxcar after him, which he had not expected. He had assumed, without being told otherwise, that she would hand him to whichever guardian waited at the junction and turn back for the mountain at once. Instead she settled across from him on a stack of grain sacks, close enough that their knees nearly touched, and the train shuddered once and began, slowly, to move, the open gap in the sliding door letting in a thin band of cold gray light and the smell of diesel and wet grain.
Neither of them spoke for a long while.
The mountains slid past the gap in the doorway, dark shapes against a lightening sky, and Damian watched them the way he had watched everything that night, cataloguing without comment.
The grain sacks smelled of dust and something faintly sweet underneath it, and the machine parts shifted now and then against their oilcloth wrappings with a soft metallic sigh whenever the train took a curve, the only sound in the boxcar besides the wheels themselves–a steady, iron rhythm that seemed, after the chaos of the night before, almost unbearably ordinary, the sound a train made on any morning, carrying any cargo, indifferent entirely to what it happened to be carrying today.
Damian found himself listening to it the way he might once have listened to a training drum, counting the beats without meaning to, and somewhere in the counting the mountains fell far enough behind that he could no longer make out which of the dark shapes against the sky, if any, was the one still burning.
"Where am I going," he said finally.
"You are going to your father," Talia said.
He turned to look at her fully for the first time since they had boarded. "The civilian?"
"It is where you are safest," she said. "He has no faction. No chapter house. No claim anyone in my father's organization would trouble themselves to contest. To every eye that matters, you will simply have disappeared. No one thinks to search for the heir of Ra's al Ghul at a civilian's dinner table."
The train rattled on through the gray dawn, and she did not let go of his hand until the rail junction gave way, an hour later, to the outer edge of Srinagar, and the guardian who would carry him the rest of the way came into view on the platform ahead.
The city announced itself before it was made visible–first as a smell, woodsmoke and standing water and something frying somewhere, carried in on the same wind that had, twelve hours and a lifetime ago, carried the smell of his home burning; then as a low murmur of sound underneath the wheels, dogs and distant traffic and, once, a muezzin's call rising and falling somewhere beyond the rail yards; and only then, as the freight cars slowed into a wide curve, as an actual skyline–low rooftops crowded close together, the misted grey outline of the lake beyond them, a city built, it seemed, entirely out of water and reflected light.
The first cargo train ended at dawn, at a rail platform in Srinagar wet with overnight rain, the puddles between the tracks throwing back a smeared orange light from the sodium lamps overhead. The air smelled of diesel and wet stone and, faintly, of the lake the city was built around–a green, silty smell entirely unlike the thin mineral cold of the mountain he had left. Vendors were already setting out their carts along the platform edge, the clatter of tin cups and the hiss of a tea urn cutting through the pre-dawn quiet, and a woman Damian had never met–one of his mother's people, though which faction he could not have said, and had been trained specifically not to ask–waited at the base of the boxcar to receive him.
Talia did not linger over the handoff. She pressed her palm once, briefly, to the side of his face, said nothing further, and stepped back onto the train before it could be seen standing too long at a platform it had no business stopping at.
The woman put a ticket in Damian's hand and told him, in Urdu too fast for the two soldiers loitering by the ticket office to follow, to affect boredom. He affected boredom. It was, he would reflect much later, the first genuinely difficult thing he did that week–not the running, not the vigilance, but the manufactured tedium of a child on a wet train platform, a performance so far outside anything he had trained for that he had to build it from nothing, moment to moment, watching other bored children out of the corner of his eye and copying the slouch of their shoulders.
He watched the train his mother had stayed aboard pull away down the wet track until it was only a red light shrinking into the mist, and made himself stop watching before the wanting to keep watching became visible on his face. He suspected that the woman next to him had noticed, but did not comment.
A dog picked its way along the far platform. The ordinary morning went on assembling itself around him, entirely unaware that anything in it was extraordinary at all, and Damian understood, standing there, that this–the sheer, grinding ordinariness of everything now required of him–was going to be the hardest part of the whole journey.
The train to Jammu took nine hours, rattling south out of the mountains through country that changed by the hour–sheer pine slopes giving way to terraced fields, then to the wide brown haze of the plains, farmhouses and power lines strung against a sky gone pale and featureless with heat.
He did not sleep. He sat with his back to the wall of the compartment, in the seat that let him see the door, the vinyl bench hot under him even through his trousers, and watched the terraced hillsides slide past the window and turn, gradually, from the sharp gray country he had grown up in to something softer and greener that meant nothing to him at all. Twice, conductors passed through the carriage, their uniforms dark with sweat at the collar; twice, he produced the papers he had been given and answered, in the flat, unaccented Hindi his tutors had drilled into him for exactly this contingency, that he was travelling to see his grandmother, and twice, no one looked at him twice, because he had been trained since before he could properly read to be the kind of person no one looked at twice.
Somewhere around the fifth hour the compartment filled with the smell of someone's lunch, mustard oil and fried lentils unwrapped from a cloth bundle two seats down, and Damian's stomach, which he had not fed since the night before, tightened in a way he refused to acknowledge as hunger, because hunger was a variable and variables were to be managed, not indulged. He watched the woman with the lunch bundle instead, and the small child asleep against her shoulder, and the elderly man across the aisle working a set of prayer beads through his fingers with the same unthinking rhythm the train itself kept against the rails.
In Jammu they changed trains, and papers, in a station so crowded with the midday rush that Damian lost, for nearly four full seconds, the woman from Srinagar in the press of bodies–a lapse that struck him afterward as its own kind of failure, however briefly it lasted–before she peeled away for good into the crowd without a word of farewell, replaced by a man who did not speak to him at all for the six hours to Delhi, and who Damian understood, without being told, was there only to be a body beside his in case a body beside his was needed.
Jammu station in the heat of midday was a wall of noise after the relative hush of the mountains–vendors calling out prices in three languages at once, a loudspeaker announcing arrivals in a voice flattened almost past understanding by static, the press of a thousand people who all seemed, to Damian's eye, to be moving in a dozen contradictory directions simultaneously, and none of them looking at him at all.
All of them far too occupied with their own errands to spare a glance for a boy standing quietly against a pillar with a small bag he did not remember being given. The new man, when he arrived, smelled of cigarettes and gun oil under a layer of cologne clearly chosen to disguise both, and said nothing beyond the two words necessary to confirm he was who Damian was meant to be waiting for, and Damian, cataloguing him the way he had catalogued everyone since the boxcar, decided he did not much like him, and then decided, a moment later, that liking him was not among the variables that mattered.
Delhi was the worst of it. Delhi meant an airport–a wall of glass and noise after two days of quiet country, announcements echoing off polished floors, the smell of jet fuel and fried food and too many strangers' perfume all at once–and an airport meant cameras, and queues, and a uniformed woman at a counter with the authority to ask questions a nine-hour train ride did not require answering. She looked at his papers for four seconds longer than anyone had looked at them yet, four seconds in which the fluorescent light overhead seemed unnaturally loud in his ears, long enough that Damian's pulse, which he had kept level since the library wing came down, spiked once, hard, before he made himself breathe it back to nothing. She stamped the passport. She did not look up again. He did not exhale until he was through the gate and could not be called back.
The departure lounge, once he reached it, was its own kind of assault–banks of screens scrolling city names he had only ever seen on maps, the recycled chill of air conditioning that did nothing to loosen the tightness that had settled behind his ribs somewhere around the passport counter, a thousand strangers arranged in rows of plastic seating, each absorbed in the small, sealed world of a phone screen or a paperback or a sleeping child, none of them sparing so much as a glance for the boy in the corner seat with his hands folded exactly as he'd been taught, watching the gate the way he had once been taught to watch a training-hall door–for the moment it would open, and for what might come through it when it did.
He slept for eleven minutes on the flight to Istanbul, not because he intended to, but because his body, apparently, had limits his training had not fully accounted for, and woke with his hand already closed hard around the armrest, heart going before his eyes had even opened, before any part of him had worked out that the low roar around him was only engine noise, the cabin dim and hushed, and the man beside him only a stranger in a window seat who had not so much as glanced at him.
He did not sleep again after that, though the temptation of it pulled at him for the rest of the flight, a low, insistent undertow beneath the drone of the engines–and he found, turning the eleven minutes over afterward, that what frightened him about them was not the sleep itself but the eleven minutes' worth of the world he had not been watching, the version of the fire, the corridor, the boxcar, the platform that might have arrived to find him unguarded while he wasn't looking. He pressed his palm flat against the cool plastic of the tray table instead, an old drill, a way of tethering the body to something solid when the mind wanted to go elsewhere, and watched the small blue map on the seatback screen crawl its slow, incremental way west, a single dotted line drawing itself across a distance too vast to mean anything at all.
Istanbul to Vienna was a different guardian again, a different passport again, a different boy's name on a different ticket, the Bosphorus a dark ribbon of light glimpsed once through a terminal window before he was moved on, until Damian began to lose track–not of the facts, which he catalogued with perfect, exhausting precision, but of which version of himself he was currently required to be. By the time the last aircraft left Vienna in the deep blue hour before midnight, small and unmarked and crewed by two men who addressed him only as "sir" in a tone that carried the weight of an apology, the cabin lights turned low, the windows showing nothing but black, he had crossed three time zones, worn four names, and not, in any of it, from the moment the library wing collapsed to the moment the wheels left the runway for Gotham, allowed himself to cry.
Istanbul, in the hour he had of it, was reduced to fragments–a call to prayer threading faintly through the terminal's white noise, the specific gold-and-amber light of a departures board reflected in a dark window, the taste of water from a bottle someone pressed into his hand without a word, warm from a jacket pocket. Vienna gave him even less: a private lounge with the curtains drawn, a change of clothes laid out without explanation on a leather bench, a new passport slid across a table by a man whose face he would not remember by morning, bearing a name–Ibrahim, this time, or perhaps it had been the last one that was Ibrahim; he had already begun to lose the order of them–that fit his mouth no better than any of the others had.
Somewhere in the handoff between the two cities he stopped being able to say, with any certainty, how many hours he had been awake, only that the number was large enough that his eyes had begun to ache with a dry, sandy persistence no amount of blinking seemed to fix, and that this too he catalogued, and set aside, because there was nothing to be done about it before Gotham, and nothing before Gotham was, by his mother's own accounting, the only thing that currently mattered.
Hours of dark ocean passed beneath him, the cabin so quiet he could hear his own pulse in his ears, the two men who crewed the aircraft speaking to each other only rarely, and only in the low, clipped shorthand of people who had done this before and did not expect conversation to be wanted. Damian sat with his back straight against a seat built for men twice his size, hands folded in his lap in the posture Teacher Rasheed–dead now, ash now, one name among however many the coup had already claimed–had drilled into him for waiting rooms and transports and any place where stillness was itself a kind of armor, and did not sleep, and did not intend to.
Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, in the dead center of the night, one of the two men came back to check on him and found him sitting exactly as he had left him three hours before, spine straight, hands folded, eyes open and fixed on the black square of the window as though something in it might yet resolve into shape.
The window beside him showed nothing for a long while but black water and a scatter of stars thinner and colder-looking than the ones that hung over Nanda Parbat, and he watched it anyway, because watching was the only occupation his training had ever given him for hours that could not be filled with anything useful, and because closing his eyes, even for a moment, kept returning him to the library wing folding in on itself, to the particular orange of that fire, to a version of the night he did not care to revisit while strapped into a chair six kilometers above an ocean he could not name.
He had been taught, once, that grief was a variable like any other-permitted its due weight and then set firmly aside so that it would not compromise a mission's execution. No one had taught him what to do with grief that simply sat behind the sternum for hour after hour with nowhere to go, and so he did the only thing his training had actually equipped him for, which was to keep watching the window, and keep his hands folded, and wait–the way he had been taught to wait out storms, and interrogations, and long nights on watch.
Somewhere behind him now–an ocean and a continent behind him, receding further with every hour the aircraft ate–his mother would be standing again in the ashes of a library that had once held every book he had ever learned to read from, informing a room full of men who had known her since before she could walk that the al Ghul line was not, whatever they had heard, so easily extinguished. He did not know if that was true. He found, turning it over in the dark of the cabin, that he wanted it to be true more than he had wanted almost anything else in his life, and he did not examine that wanting any further than he could help.
Ahead of him, a city he had never seen was waiting to receive him–or perhaps not waiting at all, perhaps simply going on with its ordinary evenings, unaware that anything was arriving to it–under a name that was not quite his own, handed to him by strangers who might or might not still be there when he landed, alongside a father he had met only in brief, staccato accounts from his mother, and a life he had not chosen and could not yet imagine wanting, and was not at all certain he would recognize as his own once he was standing inside it.
He did not sleep.
He watched the black window, and beneath it the black water.