A Whole New World (Disney Twisted Tales) - Liz Braswell Page 0,27
up onto his right. They set off as casually as they could down the empty road.
As the three kept going deeper into the city, the streets remained silent. The desert wind blew mournfully through abandoned stalls, houses, and squares. Far off there was the sound of something that he couldn’t quite make out. Like the distant whisper of a hot breeze before a storm. Other than that, nothing.
Agrabah wasn’t usually a quiet city. There was always someone shouting: a merchant selling his wares, a rag collector begging for people’s refuse, mothers yelling at children, men screaming at each other. Very rarely was it in anger; that was just the way the people in his land communicated.
Aladdin scratched the back of his head. In his experience, creepy things that didn’t make much sense usually added up to something bad. Like that day years ago when all of the doves and sparrows in the city flew up into the air at once. It had been an amazing sight—and then there had been an earthquake right after.
He resisted the urge to whistle, to fill the air with some sort of sound.
He jumped when a lone cat meowed from the top of a wall.
It wasn’t until he was practically in the city center that he began to see signs of human life. People—stragglers, it seemed like—were running. Toward the main square. Toward the palace.
“Hey, friend,” Aladdin said, grabbing one man by the shoulder. A little harder than a friend might. “Where’s the fire?”
The man looked at him with confused black eyes. “Have you not heard? There’s going to be a great parade for the new sultan! Let me go, I don’t want to miss it.”
“The old one is gone! Long live Jafar!” the man called out, and pumped his hand in the air in a strange, almost military salute. He broke out of Aladdin’s grip and went scampering down the road to the palace.
“Gone?” Aladdin repeated in wonder. Just a week ago he wouldn’t really have cared one way or the other what happened to the sultan—or maybe he would have cheered a little for the regime change. Things couldn’t have gotten much worse under someone new.
But then he had met Princess Jasmine.
The sultan might have been a bad joke at best, but he was still her father. She never had anyone else.
And, not irrelevantly, there was the little question of what happened to Jasmine now that her father was no longer the sultan.
Aladdin began to run in the same direction as the man. There would be answers to at least some of his questions at the parade, or at least more people to ask.
Worry for Jasmine and curiosity did not deter him, of course, from zipping through a couple of hastily abandoned stalls and helping himself to a quick kabob, a square of flatbread, and a half dozen apricots. It had been at least three days since he had eaten and it wasn’t just riding the carpet that was making him lightheaded.
The noise that he thought was the wind eventually resolved itself into the murmurs of a crowd. And then…music? Someone…a whole chorus…was singing.
He crept quietly up to the side of a building and slunk around the corner. But he needn’t have worried about being seen; no one was looking at him.
Down the very road that seemed to begin at Aladdin’s hideout and end at the palace, the biggest, strangest parade in the history of Agrabah was taking place.
The music was deafeningly loud and everywhere at once. There were drums and horns and people in colorful clothes belting out the usual sort of praises for the sultan, with extraordinary claims and lists of unlikely feats thrown in.
But…it looked like at least some of the people in the crowd were singing along. As if they already knew the words somehow. That was more than passing strange.
When the singers in the parade passed they were followed by a dozen fire-eaters and acrobats. These leapt and capered about with manic grins on their faces and flames in their eyes. The crowd oohed and aahed as they swallowed blazing swords and blew puffs of smoke.
But…Aladdin had often seen fire-eaters in the market, and knew many of their tricks. These looked like they were actually…breathing fire.…
Behind them a hundred men in shining ceremonial black armor marched like beetles in perfect tip-tap synchronized time. Instead of swords they shook silver sistra, ringing like all the angelic warriors of heaven were coming through.