The Seven Keys of Balabad Read online

  To Olivia and Max

  Contents

  1. The Seven Keys of Arachosia

  2. Oliver Finch in Balabad

  3. On Deadline

  4. In Search of Seven Princes

  5. The Sacred Carpet of Agamon

  6. The Pizza Prince of Chicago

  7. A Call in the Dark

  8. In the Shadows

  9. Harried Haji

  10. Hamburg

  11. To Tell a Finch

  12. Left Shoes

  13. The Strangest Game on Earth

  14. Hamid Halabala

  15. Halabala's Tale

  16. The Four Corners of the Earth

  17. The Break-in at Bondi Beach

  18. An Early Wake-up Call

  19. Zee's Gambit

  20. Shutting Up Shop

  21. Out of the Shadows

  22. Bahauddin's Escape

  23. Haji's Secret

  24. Alamai's Offer

  25. A Carpet Worthy of a King

  26. The Thieves Market

  27. The Warlord's Shop

  28. Oliver's Hunch

  29. The Mandabak Hotel

  30. The Rearview Mirror

  31. The Gardens of Paradise

  32. Into the Lion's Mouth

  33. A Thief's Lair

  34. A Knock on the Door

  35. Under Guard

  36. The Longest Wait

  37. A Terrible Choice

  38. Drawing a Map

  39. At the Gates

  40. Saved

  41. A Journey with Friends

  42. The Salt Caverns

  43. King Agamon's Treasure

  44. Heroes of Balabad

  ahauddin Shah stumbled through the darkened passage way, gripping the cold stone wall for balance and keeping his head low to avoid the rocky ceiling. The sound of his footsteps echoed back at him through the gloom, and his heart thumped beneath his loose- fitting shirt.

  The old man wore a heavy iron key chain around his belt, and it weighed down on him in more ways than one.

  There was so little time!

  Bahauddin held a small lantern in his right hand that threw his shadow onto the dark red wall above him, making his face seem impossibly long and his beard even thicker than it really was, which was pretty thick indeed. The shadow would have scared the living daylights out of anyone who'd seen it, except there was no daylight down there, and certainly nobody living to be scared of it.

  The tunnel twisted and turned. Every once in a while smaller passageways veered off at odd angles into the darkness. Sometimes Bahauddin came out into vast open rooms that rose up into shapeless voids. There were even enormous darkened ponds, wretched and foul- smelling, like the stink of rotten eggs.

  Bahauddin covered his nose with a piece of old cloth and tried to stay focused. A man could easily get lost in the Salt Caverns.

  In fact, that was the whole idea.

  But Bahauddin would not get lost. He knew every corner of this underground world, and his old body pulled him toward the exit like a falcon returning to his master's arm.

  Bahauddin had just turned into a wet, narrow passage and was examining some black markings on the wall when the thud of cannon fire above him jolted him to the ground. Debris rained down from the ceiling as he knelt on the floor, catching his breath.

  His hand groped for the key chain, and he smiled when his fingers felt the cold iron.

  They were all there. All seven of them.

  The blast that had knocked Bahauddin to the ground could not have been more than twenty feet above him. He was nearly at the surface.

  For the first time, Bahauddin allowed himself to think what he would find up there, twelve hours after he had set off on the most important mission of his life. What would be left of his city, his family, the palace?

  “It does not matter,” the old man reassured himself, brushing his clothes off in the darkness. “Baladis are survivors. We will rebuild. It just might take some time.”

  The outsiders would eventually lose interest, just like all the other outsiders who had come before them, Bahauddin thought.

  Balabad's great defense was that it was impossible to hold on to, and any rational outsider eventually came to the same conclusion. There were vast deserts in the south, impossibly tall mountain ranges in the east, endless plains in the west, and ten thousand feuding tribes in the north, all angry about some long- ago slight, and all willing to drag a foreigner into their squabbles.

  Of course, it usually took a decade or so before the invaders would see that it was not worth sticking around, for invaders do not easily give up.

  Bahauddin reached the end of the narrow passageway and held his lantern above his head. A small shaft ran straight up from the stone ceiling, about the size of a chimney and just big enough for a man to climb through. You would never have seen it had you not known where to look.

  A deep smile creased Bahauddin's face. He clamped his teeth around the lantern's metal handle and jumped as high as he could. His fingers barely gripped a thick iron rung, the first in a series of handles hammered into the red and pink salt rock so long ago they'd become a part of it.

  Bahauddin grunted as he pulled himself up, his strong hands climbing the rungs one after another and his legs dangling below him. He could feel the warmth of the lantern through his beard and hoped it wouldn't catch fire.

  This really was a job for a much younger man, Bahauddin thought, but he would have to do. In any case, a much younger man would not have known the secrets of the Salt Caverns. A much younger man most certainly could not have been trusted to take the king's most prized possession into the bowels of the earth, and then to seal the Royal Vault shut. A much younger man would have valued his life too much to return to the surface and to almost certain death.

  There was more cannon and musket fire from above, and it was louder now, closer. Bahauddin gripped the cold rungs as hard as he could. He could hear the screams of townsfolk above him, the fall of horses’ hooves, and the angry shouts of soldiers. He took a deep breath and continued to climb.

  Waiting somewhere in all that chaos were the king's seven sons, young men whose very lives depended on Bahauddin's success. Each clutched a hand- drawn map of the known world, and each had been assigned one of Agamon's seven fastest stallions. Bahauddin prayed he would not be too late.

  At the top of the shaft was a large iron cover. Bahauddin released the lantern from his teeth and let it fall in a streak of suicidal light—one second, two seconds, three seconds— until it shattered against the passageway below.

  No matter. He would not need it anymore.

  The old man took one hand off the last rung and pushed up on the iron cover. It took all his might to ease it aside.

  Bahauddin Shah, patriarch of the Shah clan, most trusted adviser to King Agamon the Great, and sacred keeper of the Seven Keys of Arachosia, clambered up into the daylight.

  liver Finch turned onto the narrow sandstone street and sucked in a quick breath. It was the smell that hit him first, invading his nose, making his eyes water. Then came the sounds, the shuffling of feet, the buzzing of flies, the back- and- forth of a hundred hagglers.

  “Here we go,” Oliver thought, and he was right.

  Soon one set of eyes swung his way, then another, and another, and another.

  Old men peered out from behind towering piles of red, yellow, and brown spices. Women gazed through gauzy silk veils. After a moment, the entire teeming marketplace was staring at him. Hands reached out to touch him. A gaggle of small boys tugged on his pants, and a few older kids shouted out: “Hello! Hello! English, please. Hello!”

  It was always like this.

  Oliver smiled at the curious crowd
, aware of his battered New York Yankees baseball cap—the one he'd owned since he was seven—his all- too- shiny sneakers, and his ripped- at-the-knees blue jeans.

  “Haven't you ever seen a New Yorker before?” he mumbled to himself.

  But of course they hadn't. Just like none of his friends back at PS. 87 had ever met a Baladi, or even knew there was such a place as Balabad.

  Why would they?

  Oliver wiped the sweat off his brow and squinted into the sun. He looked around for Zee, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  He wasn't in front of the tarpaulin- covered fruit stand where they'd agreed to meet, nor was he milling about the row of stalls that sold fried onion and green chili fritters where they usually had a snack.

  Oliver stood on his tiptoes and peered over the crowd.

  To his left, the bazaar stretched all the way to the gleaming blue- domed mosque, whose massive crown was said to have been made with one million pieces of lapis lazuli, and next to that was Balabad's great square, where President Haroon's government sat. Beyond that, on a hillside overlooking the town, was the abandoned shell of what had once been the Royal Palace. To his right, the road snaked away toward the impossibly narrow streets of the ancient Thieves Market, the one place in Balabad City where Oliver's father had expressly forbidden him to set foot.

  Oliver pushed through the crowd toward Mr. Haji's carpet shop. Perhaps Zee had gone ahead to escape the heat. The two boys had spent most of their summer vacation sitting against the piles of dark red carpets stacked against the walls of the one- room shop on Aloona Street, listening to the old man tell improbable stories and watching him haggle with customers.

  Mr. Haji was the unofficial historian of Balabad, and the way he told it, his ancestors had played a heroic role in every twist and turn the ill- fated country had taken over the past three thousand years. Oliver didn't believe half the stuff the old man said, but it was fun to listen to him anyway and imagine that it might be true.

  In any case, it helped pass the time. There wasn't really that much else to do in Balabad when the International School was out. No baseball games. No movie theaters. No parties. No nothing. Just endless streets of mud- brick houses, most of them damaged in one war or another.

  If you were a reporter for the New York Courier like Oliver's father, then the place was great. “A story around every corner, and a twist to every story” was how Silas Finch usually described it. Oliver's mother, Scarlett, was probably having the best time of all of them. She had taken a leave of absence from New York University, where she was an art historian, and was working as a volunteer at the National Museum, trying to help Balabad rescue its artistic heritage.

  As far as Oliver could work out, her job involved cataloging every piece in the collection, from the largest Buddhist statue to the smallest porcelain bowl recovered from archaeological sites throughout the country. It seemed super dull to Oliver, but Scarlett didn't seem to mind. She loved her job, along with just about everything else about Balabad.

  She went to parties every weekend with important local artists and eggheaded professors, was learning how to speak Baladi, the country's main language, and had even started studying Baladi music with a spaced- out man known as Sufi Jagit. The Sufi wore his hair dyed bright orange and played an instrument called a rabab, which to Oliver looked like a cross between a guitar and an armadillo.

  “This place is fascinating! Fascinating,” Scarlett would say. “There is so much to learn and experience.”

  Fascinating, maybe, Oliver thought. But not fun.

  If you were twelve years old and had made only one friend in six months, the truth was that Balabad could be downright depressing.

  Except, of course, for Mr. Haji.

  When Oliver got to the shop, the carpet salesman was standing over a tattered rectangular rug, a tall European man at his side. Sure enough, Zee was there, too, slumped against a pile of deep red carpets in the far corner of the room, his eyes partially hidden behind his straight black hair, which he wore long and shaggy. He wore a thin gold chain around his neck, and a pair of sleek black sunglasses rested on his head. He was slurping a bottle of 7UP through a long straw dangling from his lips. He nodded at Oliver.

  “Too hot,” he said, swatting at an enormous fly that was splitting its time between the bottle of 7UP and Zee's nose.

  Flies were a particular feature of Balabad. There must have been several hundred billion of them, each slower and plumper than the next. Baladi flies didn't so much fly as hover, like overloaded helicopters coming in for a bumpy landing. They seemed to be daring you to squish them and make a mess of your clothes. Oliver wondered what Darwin would have said about them.

  “This is my best price! My absolute best price! Only for you because you are my dear friend,” Mr. Haji said, stroking his long gray beard with one hand and pretending to do calculations in the air with the other. Like most traders in Balabad, he spoke excellent English. “One penny lower and I will be losing money, you understand?”

  The European man looked skeptical.

  Oliver had been in Balabad long enough to know that the carpet Mr. Haji was trying to sell—with dull yellow and brown diamond shapes and dirty blue boxes—was about as run- of- the- mill as they come. The stitching was thick and clumsy, the lines were crooked when they should have been straight, and it couldn't have been much older than Oliver himself, which for a carpet was not a good thing at all. The best and most valuable carpets lasted for centuries.

  Oliver suspected Mr. Haji had placed this particular carpet out in the street for a few weeks so that it could be walked on and driven over until it was nice and dusty. It gave the carpet that antique look foreigners liked (one of the oldest tricks in the carpet salesman's trade), but anyone with half a brain could see it wasn't worth five dollars.

  Mr. Haji glanced up at the ceiling and sighed.

  “Ah, but I can't say no to a friend,” he moaned, shaking his head ruefully. “I will take another hundred dollars off if that's what it takes to make this carpet yours.”

  The European man knelt down and ran his fingers over the carpet. He stared at the stitching for a very long time before he stood up again.

  “It really is a beautiful carpet,” Zee drawled, fiddling with the gold chain. His fancy British accent seemed to be just the thing to convince the man that further haggling would not be necessary.

  “Oh, all right,” he said, reaching for his wallet.

  As the man counted out the money, Mr. Haji gave a wink to Oliver and Zee.

  “You won't be sorry,” he said. “It pains me to sell this carpet for so little. This is my problem, sir. I was not cut out to be a businessman.”

  “Hmm,” grumbled the man, handing over the cash and glancing over at Zee. “I think you are a better businessman than you give yourself credit for, Mr. Haji.”

  The carpet salesman's face lit up at the compliment, and he quickly slipped the money into his breast pocket.

  “Sir, that is most kind of you to say. Most kind, indeed,” he shouted, raising both hands in the air. “Come, join me for a tea. I insist. You must!”

  But the man didn't have time for a tea, and he left the shop with the carpet slung over his shoulder. Mr. Haji turned to Oliver and Zee.

  “Not bad, huh?” he said.

  “You could sell anything!” Oliver shouted.

  “A master, indeed,” Zee agreed. “A finer salesman has not yet walked this earth, though I did have to help you out a little bit.”

  Zee was from one of the most prominent families in Balabad, the ul- Hazais, and he was their eldest son. His grandparents and great- grandparents had been important landowners, the kind of people presidents and governors came to for advice. Like tens of thousands of other people, they had been forced to flee at the start of Balabad's last disastrous war—this one an internal affair that pitted tribe against tribe, north against south, brother against brother. Zee had grown up in London since the age of three.

  He had attended—
and been kicked out of—a bunch of fancy British boarding schools. He had learned—and largely ignored—the art of being a young gentleman. His full name was worthy of his stature—Zaheer Mohammed Warzat ul-Hazai—which was as good a reason as any to call yourself Zee.

  All in all, he was the exact opposite of Oliver, which must have been why they made such fast friends.

  Zee took the straw out of the 7UP and held the bottle upside down above his mouth so that the last drops of soda fell onto his tongue. He closed his eyes to perform this operation, and took his time opening them up again.

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” Mr. Haji said with a chuckle. “It is a gift, I admit. Now, how about some tea?”

  Oliver sat down next to Zee, and Mr. Haji poured out three cups of syrupy green tea. The enormous fly that had been pestering Zee landed on the carpet salesman's nose and began to lick its little black feet, but the old man was so happy with his sale he didn't seem to notice.

  “So,” Mr. Haji said after they had all taken a few sips of tea. “What brings you boys to see me today?”

  ilas Finch was a two- fingered typist, but he was one of the fastest two- fingered typists the world had ever seen, particularly when he was trying to finish up a story, as he was now. His trick was to alternately stick his tongue out the side of his mouth and mumble the words as he typed them, with frequent glances down at the keyboard to make sure hands, eyes, and brain were all on the same page, so to speak.

  Silas also was known to jiggle his foot up and down, scratch the back of his head, and emit loud popping noises from his mouth that somewhat resembled the sound a fish makes when it finds itself out of the water. Scientifically speaking, this could not possibly have helped Silas's typing speed, but it didn't seem to get in his way, either.

  When Oliver got home from Mr. Haji's shop, his father was tapping away furiously on his laptop, the white glow of the computer screen reflecting off his glasses.

  “Hey, Ol, how was your afternoon?” Silas said without looking up. “You guys have fun?”

  “I guess so,” Oliver replied. It had been a fun afternoon, most of it spent listening to a long tale about Mr. Haji's great- great- grandfather, who had apparently introduced the best green tea to Balabad, taught people a revolutionary way to cure meat, and written the first lines of what was to become the Baladi national anthem, all in one long weekend— though he was never given credit.