The Fire Wish (29 page)

I took one of the vials and held it up to the light. “What is in this?”

“It’s an acid,” Delia said. She took the vial, placed it back in the box, and shut the lid. “Can you really do this?”

“I
believe
so,” I said, eyeing Faisal. His mouth twitched, and he pulled me into an embrace.

“I am glad to have gotten a chance to meet Mariam’s other daughter,” he said into my ear. “Go, and watch for your sister.”

I hadn’t gotten used to the idea of having a sister yet, much less the idea that an entire race was depending on me to save it.

Atish came to me then, and held my elbow. “I will come as soon as I can. Be careful.”

“All you have to do is touch the flame with your fingers and ask it to take you to the other Lamp,” Faisal said, pulling me away from Atish. “When you arrive, you will be in the very heart of the palace. Make your
shahtabi
wish as soon as you arrive. With luck, no one will see you first.”

I tucked the box under one arm and the rolled-up map under the other, and touched the flame. It tickled my fingertips, and then it
pulled
and I was sucked into the fire.

I RAN DOWN the corridor, jumping out of the way of anyone who happened to be there. No one saw me, but they could feel me brushing past, and some surprised shouts trailed behind me. I kept running until I came to a door I recognized. The room would be empty, because the man it belonged to was still in the Court of Honor.

I flung open the door, ran in, and shut it behind me.

The room gleamed. Light streamed in from a wall of windows and illuminated a series of bookshelves stuffed with books and scrolls. The tops of the bookshelves were heavy with large hunks of uncut rock, shattered geodes, and molded metals of various kinds, and spheres dangled from above. Six barrels lined the left wall, and in the center was the long, narrow table the selenite orb had sat upon.

This was the laboratory where I had seen Kamal playing his oud on that first day. The doorway to the garden with Janna’s roses was at the back, in the wall of windows, but this time, it was closed.

The orb was missing from its cushion, but the rest of the table was covered in charts, and I raced to it, scanning the sheets of paper. The charts were spread open and weighted down by brass spheres. Half the charts were of the stars and planets, but the other half were the ones that caught my eye. They laid out, in clear detail, everything Kamal knew about the jinn, including the effects of moonstone powder.

This was the sort of chart the Eyes of Iblis Corps needed to see. I stood back so that I could see all of it at once. Then I pressed on my mark, sure that something here would alert the Corps to what the humans were planning to do.

I turned to the row of barrels and lifted the lids. Half of them were filled with an acrid black powder. The others held a luminescent white powder. I squeezed the drop of moonstone that hung from the silver pendant around my neck, and compared the sparkling powder and the stone. They had the same color, the same sheen.

Moonstone. He had jars and jars of powdered moonstone.

That was what the selenite sphere was for. It was hollowed out, leaving room for the powder. He was going to fill it with moonstone … and then what?

I looked at another chart that had a diagram of the sphere on it, titled “The Pomegranate.” Scratched in thin ink was a description of how much black powder to mix with the moonstone for the “pomegranate” to explode.

I thought of how many soldiers the caliphate must have, and what it would be like if they each had an exploding sphere filled with moonstone powder. Our tunnel guards wouldn’t stand a chance against them. Then, armed with enough powder
to poison the entire Cavern, the caliph’s army would force its way in.

I took image after image, until my body was weak from exhaustion. How was I going to tell the Corps what this meant? What if they couldn’t read the faded scratching on the paper?

I thought, then grabbed a sheet of blank paper and one of the many quills. I dipped it in the bottle of ink and wrote, in my own alphabet, “The sphere is a type of weapon, and will be filled with moonstone powder. They will use it—”

The door flung open and slammed against the wall, but I was still invisible. Quickly, I pressed the owl-eye mark on my skin to send what I had written. I turned as three armored guards, with swords drawn, ran into the room.

Hashim followed, just two steps behind them. He scanned the room while I willed myself to be still. But it was the quill that betrayed me. It slipped off the table and fluttered to the floor.

“There,” he said, pointing straight at me. “Surround her, and make sure she can’t slip past you. In another minute, you will be able to see her again.” While he said this, he unwound a braided rope and made his way over to where I stood, unable to move.

My skin was tingling, and I knew I was trapped. The
shahtabi
wish was fading, and soon they would capture me. I wasn’t a match for three guards and a man who seemed to understand jinn better than I did.

I waited, unable to slip between the three guards, and watched a bit of moonstone dust float in a ray of light. By the time it slipped out of the sunbeam, the wish was gone, and the guards grabbed me by the wrists.

I WAS A red cloud. My breath was pulled from my lungs and I doubled over, aching for air. But I
was
air. I was also a flame, soaring through the crystals, through the hundreds of layers of rock and dirt, flickering, flickering, and then I was there.

My body twisted back together, and I inhaled all the flame and air that I had been. I was whole now, but my fingers still burned. Confused, I looked down and saw they were in the flames coming out of the Lamp. I pulled them out, worried I hadn’t gone anywhere at all.

But this wasn’t the Cavern. I was alone, and this Lamp stood on a marble plinth inscribed in Arabic that twisted down into the marble floor. This was the twin. Faisal’s Lamp had gotten me into the palace. I was whole. And people could see me.

I took in a long deep breath.
“Shahtabi.”

I had about two seconds before the wish would be tested, because a throng of guards came running into the hall from a corridor and turned down another. I had barely enough time
to crouch down beside the Lamp. They stirred the air around me, and I had to resist the urge to reach out and trip them.

No one noticed the girl hunkered down by the plinth, so I opened the map to figure out where to go first. Three circles highlighted where the wards should be, and each was as far from the Lamp as the others.

One circle was near the front entrance to the palace. The corridor to my back would take me straight there, so I took in another deep breath and stood up. I tucked the map back under my arm and held the box with both hands. Then I strode down the blue-painted corridor, ready for the first ward.

A few minutes later, after several jumps to the side to avoid getting touched by the palace staff, I reached a wide, high-ceilinged entry ending in intricately carved wooden doors. The doors were guarded by six men dressed in the red-and-green colors of Zab. I stared, shocked to see men from my home, until I remembered that my father—my uncle—had sent men as part of my dowry. But now, knowing who my real parents were, I wasn’t sure why he’d given up so many soldiers. Unless Hashim had something to do with it.

I pushed the thought aside and scanned the walls and doors for any sign of a copper cylinder. There, hanging on a hook beside one of the doors, was a small metallic cylinder. It was so close to the doorframe it would have been hidden if the door had been open. Skirting around the guards, I inched my way to the wall.

They weren’t paying attention to the wall behind them. They were facing into the hall, as if they were trying to keep someone in. I pulled the cylindrical case off the hook.

This was one of the jinni wards. The cylinder was inscribed in calligraphy I could barely read, but I didn’t bother. I flipped open the cap and pulled out a scrolled piece of paper. Something powerful must have been written on it, and I thought about not reading it. But I couldn’t resist. I pulled it open and found the first and last letters of the Arabic alphabet written across the paper.

That was it? Just
alef
and
ya
? How could two insignificant letters prevent anyone, much less a jinni, from entering the palace?

I didn’t have time to think about it. Carefully, I set the box on the floor and pulled out one of the vials of acid. Instead of pouring the acid over the scroll, and probably my hands, I slipped the paper into the vial and stopped it back up.

Then I closed the box, looked at the map, and took off past the guards. As I ran, I thought of how this palace would have been my home. I wouldn’t have known about my parents, or my sister. I wouldn’t have seen the Cavern, or hidden behind its waterfall. Or met Atish.

The second ward was outside the caliph’s rooms. Or at least that was what the map said. I found a wide golden door in a hallway that was blindingly white, and tucked just above it was another ward. This time, I didn’t bother to read it and just stuffed it into a vial of acid.

The last ward was inside the House of Wisdom, but the map didn’t say where. I blew through the opened doors, skirted around a handful of men who were shouting at each other, and scanned the stacks and stacks of books. There must have been a book for every person in the caliphate!

There, in the very center of the room, on a pedestal and encased in a glass dome, was the last ward. It was larger than the other two, but I knew without any doubt that it was a jinni ward. There was a plaque beneath it declaring it so.

I suppressed a snort and looked over my shoulder. I didn’t want the men to see the glass dome lifting in the air all by itself. They were still talking excitedly, shaking their heads at each other, so I took the chance and slipped the ward out from its protective case. After I tucked it into the acid vial, I tossed the cylinder onto the nearest rug, closed the box, and snuck past the men, grateful they were too busy to have noticed what I’d just taken.

Now I ran back to the Lamp. By the time I got there, I was breathing hard and my fingers were shaking. I slipped the sheets of paper out of the vials, carefully using the wrist of my gown to keep the acid from touching me, and dropped them into the flame.

The paper caught on fire and erupted in a ball of flame. I fell backward, landing hard on the ground, and climbed back up. While I waited for the flame to return to normal, the
shahtabi
wish fell away, leaving me exposed at the Lamp. Quickly, I dropped a stone Faisal had given me into the flame. The stone turned into smoke and slipped into the Lamp.

Then someone clapped a hand on my shoulder.

HASHIM WRAPPED THE rope around my wrists, then took my chin in his fingers.

“You’ve got the mark of Iblis,” he said. His eyes were wide and wild, and in them I could see nothing but the end of me. His fingers pressed hard into my chin. “How did Sergewaz—your
uncle
—not know of this? When did this happen?”

“I thought you said I wasn’t Zayele.” I bit my tongue while I said it, and my mouth flooded with the taste of blood.