Range of Ghosts (27 page)

Al-Sepehr knew the name he wanted; he knew the book that name resided in. But it harmed nothing to be extra careful when one was dealing with djinn.

He took the book from the shelf, its bound pages heavy in their limp leather covering. It fell open to the page he wanted; the parchment was stained with strange chemicals and—perhaps—tea around the margins.

He knew better than to summon a spirit of fire and wind to a library, and so he copied the name he needed onto a scrap of eastern paper, taking pains over the vowels. He blew it dry and folded it into his sleeve before putting the volume away. Then he climbed the seventy steps from that white-pillared room to the tower’s flat roof.

Al-Sepehr kept a brazier here, for convenience. As he kindled it, he turned the name over and over in his mind, considering stresses and how he would use his breath.

At last there was flame. Al-Sepehr stood over it, the scrap of paper in his hand, and cast the djinn’s name into the fire an instant before he pronounced it, all seventeen syllables in a fluid roll like the lines of a poem.

And then he raised up his arms and said, “Come.”

It was an unnecessary bit of theater, and there was no one to observe it, but he felt the sorcery deserved a little pomp. And indeed, by the time he lowered his hands again, he had an audience. A flash of heat stung al-Sepehr’s face where the veil did not cover it. A hot wind fluttered his loose garments like banners.

Sparks rose about the djinn’s sinewy feet where they rested on the brazier’s deep cherry coals. It was smaller than al-Sepehr had expected, having taken the form of a slight man with indigo hair and lapis lazuli skin that caught flashes of gold in the sun. Its eyes blazed in their sockets like orange-yellow embers, though its hands were thrust insouciantly into the pockets of white pantaloons. It wore nothing else.

It lifted its chin, straightening from a curve-backed slouch, and pulled its shoulders back. “So you’re the new al-Sepehr.”

“These twenty years gone by,” al-Sepehr said, conscious, as he was usually not, of the gray streaks in his hair and beard. He tugged his veil down to show his face. “I suppose that might be
new
to a djinn.”

“Barely born,” the djinn said. It drew hands overlarge for its frame from its pockets, spreading them as if for balance as it stepped down from the brazier. Its feet left soot smudges. Pressing its palms together, it performed the mockery of a bow. “Shall we dispense with the pleasantries and get right down to the haggling, then?”

“I did not call you because I wanted to haggle,” al-Sepehr said.

The djinn looked around, craning its neck this way and that. The stone smoked under its feet. “Well, I don’t see a binding circle, and there’s a distinct lack of bottles and lamps. So you don’t intend to imprison me. I don’t hand out wishes to just anybody who can say my name. That leaves haggling.”

It smiled and spread outsized hands again. The face it wore was youthful, diamond-shaped, crooked-nosed, under curly hair that swept up into the kind of appealing tousle one might expect in an indulged bed-slave. The eyes might even have looked sultry if they had not blazed like fire opals. Al-Sepehr wondered from whom the djinn had borrowed the face.

Al-Sepehr smiled back and bowed low. “What could I offer one so great as yourself, O djinn? For surely, your mastery of fire and air, your powers of transformation and your cunning are so immense that I—a small one, a mere mortal, all of whose ability has amounted only to the leadership of one small, all-but-forgotten sect—have nothing you could want. Moreover, there is nothing I could obtain that you would want, O great power of the desert wind and sun. For is not the very desert itself in essence that wind and sun? You are eternal, O djinn. Whereas I am only a man, a brief thing that will flicker out before you even notice my existence.”

The djinn looked at him, one eyebrow rising, head cocked to the side. It had folded its arms in irritation when al-Sepehr began speaking, but now they swung relaxed.

“It is true,” the djinn said. “That I am powerful.”

“You are powerful!” al-Sepehr said. “Truly I believe there is almost no task you could not complete, you are so great.”

The djinn scowled, and sparks flew from the corners of its eyes. “Almost none?”

“I should not ask you to wrestle gods,” al-Sepehr said. “For that would be blasphemy. But short of that—”

“Gods?” the djinn said. Now it smiled, seeming to believe he had misstepped, and pressed its advantage. “I believed your religion admitted of but one, and that one omnipotent.”

“It is so,” al-Sepehr said. “But I believe you could do almost anything else.”

“
Almost,
” the djinn said, mocking. It moved in a slow circle around him, considering. He turned to follow it. “
Almost.
You and that
almost
! Set me a task then, mortal man, and I will show you your
almost.
”

Al-Sepehr clapped his hands together, unable to restrain himself, and saw the expression of chagrin cross the djinn’s face a moment too late.

“Damn,” it said. “You’re good at this. All right then, mortal, let’s hear your task.”

“Bring me the Green Ring of Erem, once borne by Danupati of the Dragon Banner—the ring that can command scorpions and storms and lets a man speak in the language of Ghuls. And bring me the skull of that same Danupati.”

The djinn stopped its circling. It folded its arms again across its narrow, muscled chest. Al-Sepehr saw the fingers of its right hand tapping gently against the bulge of its left bicep. He thought it might be sucking its teeth.

It smiled a gloating smile, and he saw fangs.

“As you wish,” it said, and vanished in a curl of smoke and a wind so hot he felt his face redden as if from the sun.

He did not fear the source of the djinn’s cold smirk. He knew what he had asked for. And he knew the price with which those things came.

He was counting on it.

12

Edene prayed as befitted a Qersnyk woman: standing straight, her arms at her sides, her eyes open and raised to the sky above. But it was not the Eternal Sky; it was the featureless sky of the Scholar-God, all textureless shallows and pale, flat sun.

She did not know if the Eternal Sky heard her.

Al-Sepehr—the man who came, the only person she spoke to or saw—had brought her clothes in the Ctesifonin style, and she wore those now because they were clean and soft. And enveloping, protective—wool the buff color of the desert sheep, as light as a veil, woven so fine the breeze passed through it but not the sun. She missed the freedom of her coat and trousers and did not like the way these clothes left her breasts and slowly mounding belly free to sway.

She was standing at her window praying to the alien sky on the day that everything changed.

First, her meal was not brought to her by al-Sepehr, but by a woman veiled in the buff and cream veils that Edene let fall about her neck like scarves when she bothered to wear them at all. Only the veiled woman’s startling hazel eyes set in nut-brown skin showed to show her attention or emotions. There was a dot as black as a spot of ink in the left iris, so dark Edene wanted to touch it and see if it was really a hole.

Fortunately, captivity had not yet driven her so mad that she jabbed the other woman in the eye. Instead, she stepped forward as the new visitor set the tray down, and said—in Qersnyk, it being the only tongue in which she was fluent—“Hello. I am Edene.”

She pointed to her chest as she said her name, in case the other woman did not speak her language. And that might have been the case, because the woman simply stared at her, furrows forming in the slip of forehead Edene could see.

“Edene,” Edene said again, tapping her breastbone again.

“Ah,” the woman said. She touched herself. “Saadet.” She pointed to the food then and said a word that must mean “eat.”

So Edene ate, because food was strength, and she had every intention of someday leaving this place, whether her captors willed it or no. When she had eaten, Saadet touched her arm and tugged her veil up to cover her hair and mouth. Edene would have hooked her fingers behind the cloth and pulled it back down again, but Saadet touched Edene’s wrist and shook her head.

With a sigh, Edene nodded.

Leaving the tray lying on the table, Saadet led Edene to the door and knocked. To Edene’s surprise and amazement—even a little fear—the door swung open. There were two large men beyond, both wearing scimitars, but they averted their eyes as Saadet and Edene moved past. Edene tried to copy Saadet’s way of moving—almost a scurry, with quick short footsteps and head ducked down, watching the corridor before her. Edene would have strode tall, turning her head to take in the architecture and peer out windows, but if this was the way they did things here, Edene did not wish to attract attention. She wasn’t sure if this was an escape or something else—but whatever it was, it was better than sitting in her small room five stories above the clifftop, watching shadows trail across the inhospitable desert below.

Saadet led her through pillared halls and across a wide courtyard to a wall that even Edene could tell must be the exterior curtain of this mountain fastness. They climbed steps then, and guards did not stop them. An acrid, unidentifiable scent reached Edene on the sweltering wind. Evening encroached, the harsh direct light of the sun cut by the walls, and the plaza below began to fill with men wielding swords and staves, ready to practice battle.

They attained the battlements, and that moderately unpleasant scent grew eye-watering, ammoniac. Edene pressed her veil across her mouth and nose, grateful suddenly for its faint scent of sandalwood and cedar.

Below her, on a ledge beside the castle, was an enormous nest–trees bigger than the span of her arms piled like twigs, woven together with enormous feathers and scraps of cloth.

Edene recognized the great bird crouched within. It had carried her here, or one like it had. Another, she thought, for this one’s great, brassy wings were clipped. She could see the bright ends of its primaries where they were cut short. She wondered what hand could complete such a task. Smaller birds surrounded it, similar in coloring and outline but no larger than the great eagles of the steppe. Some flew in groups from the cliff, circling like flocks of vultures on the rising heat of the desert below.

The large bird had a long neck—longer than an eagle’s, in proportion—and its savagely hooked beak projected below a snow-white crest as red at the tips as if it had been steeped in blood.

Any one of those crest feathers, Edene thought, was as tall as she.

When it saw her and Saadet on the wall above, it made a piercing noise, sweet and sharp as a falcon’s cry and strong enough to shiver dust in the joins between the stones Edene stood upon. It could have snapped her up in a bite, but instead it stood, unsteadily, and Edene saw the waist-thick chain that ran from its ankle to an enormous bolt in the stone.

“Poor thing,” she said aloud, and was surprised almost to tumbling from the wall by the deep chuckle of someone beside her. She spun, but there was no one there.

And then just as suddenly there was. Her eyes widened as al-Sepehr seemed to appear not an
ayl
away, his form revealed as if cloaking dust fell from it to pool at his feet, then was swept away by a gust of wind.

“Sorcerer!”

“Just a simple priest,” he said, and inclined his head. Today, his veils were pushed back, and she could see the neat gray-streaked beard he wore shaved at both sides, as if he were vain about his strong jawline—and perhaps hiding a weak chin. Once upon a time, she judged, it had been black as ink. His hands were clasped together as if he hid something behind the right one. As he drew them apart, she saw something flash between his fingers. Green-gold, like the most ancient of Messaline coins, then gone.

A ring, she thought, as he slipped the right hand into his pocket and drew it out again, empty. A ring that had hidden him from her view.

A ring that he kept in his pocket.

She swallowed and pretended she had seen nothing of the kind. “Your god grants you great abilities, then.”

“She provides,” he agreed with a pleasant nod. He put his hand into his pocket again, as if casually, and pursed his lips in a sweet, birdy whistle. Once, twice, piping softly. Something appeared among the stones, then—a scorpion, scuttling on many legs, glossy brown in the brilliant sun. Edene stepped back cautiously.

Al-Sepehr thrust out his left hand, resting a crooked finger on the wall, and whistled again. The scorpion crawled to him and ran up his finger, its heavy barb swaying over its back like ripe fruit on the vine.

He lifted it to eye level, while Edene turned her face away and pretended not to watch. When he chirruped, it raised its claws and lowered its head, seeming to curtsy. Al-Sepehr nodded in return and set it down. Quickly, it scuttled away.

Out of the corner of her eye, she studied him—the long rectangular face, the long rectangular hands laced with tattoos or henna the color of dried blood on the palms and sooty ink across the backs. He looked weathered and capable, with broad shoulders under his desert robes.

He said, “How do you like my pretty?”

She followed his gaze back to the bird. “They’re more beautiful in flight,” she said.

It had terrified and frozen her. She had vomited until she had nothing left to bring up except her own intestines and her just-kindled babe. And yet she felt a peculiar loyalty to the terrible bird, especially now that she knew its mate lay chained and crippled under al-Sepehr’s care. She too would do what he wanted, she thought, if he had such a hold over her.

With an effort, she managed not to press her hands to her belly. It was possible he did not yet know she was with child. She must escape while she could still run. And before she gave him something he could use to control her as easily as he controlled his giant birds.

“It’s called the rukh,” he said. “I will have you trained to take over its care. It is time you made yourself useful. Do you understand how little chance you have of surviving an attempt to escape?”