Your Wish Is His Command (2 page)

He slipped the vial from the hollow in his
cheek where he’d been storing it ever since that night to beneath
his tongue. Didn’t need Faruq’s men accidentally breaking it before
he was ready to use it. But he
would
use it because he no
longer had anything to lose.

The footsteps came closer, the flap of sandals
against the worn dirt as loud as a swarm of locusts over the
plains. The keys jangled. Archaic things, keys, but when magically
enhanced, as effective against djinn as they were to mortals. Kal
braced himself. His time of reckoning was at hand.

“
Stand back, dog!”

Kal smiled and stepped to the back of the
cell. As if insults hurt him after what he’d endured. The jailer
needed to come up with a new repertoire, but Kal wasn’t about to
tell him that. Let the poor misguided eunuch think he had something
over Kal—other than that damn poker, that was.

Six of the guards trooped in and gripped him
by the armpits, yanking a
shudra
over his restraints. Now
that
hurt. But Kal didn’t let them see his pain. No need to
fire their bloodlust now. The gods knew, it’d be fired enough when
he refused to open his mouth. Mostly he did that to protect the
vial, but when he’d realize that silence made Faruq angrier… well,
hey, he had to get what he could out of the situation and saying
nothing worked better than saying something.

Until he hadn’t.

“
Your luck has finally run out,”
another said with a sneer. “The vizier is putting you on trial
before the High Master.”

The High Master. They were taking him into the
court of the man he’d worked so diligently to serve—until Faruq had
stolen it all from him. Maybe his luck was finally starting to
turn
.

This was it. He was finally going to be free.
After two hundred years of captivity at the hands—and sadistic
imagination—of his old nemesis, Kal was finally going to outsmart
Faruq and use Iman’s vial to lose himself in the vast desert
surrounding Al-Jannah, the capital of the djinn world.

They dragged him from the tiny cell and
paraded him through the corridors of the High Master’s palace like
the dog they’d called him, but Kal kept his head held high, his
anger in check, and the all-important vial of potion tucked
securely beneath his tongue.

“
Move along, traitor,” another of
the eunuch guards taunted, poking him in the back with the recently
sharpened point of his scimitar.

Kind of hard to get mad at a eunuch really.
The most Kal could muster for him was pity because, personally,
he’d rather be dead than sentenced to that hell on
earth.

The corridor opened into the main hall where a
serving girl was pouring ambrosia into a set of glasses beside the
High Master’s throne. Before it, in the middle of the room, stood a
dais three times the size of Kal’s cell and draped in blue silk
shot through with gold.

The irony wasn’t lost on him as he glanced
down at the blue
shudra
he’d been given to wear. Everyone
knew the High Master favored blue; it was the gold that was ironic;
it matched the cuffs Kal had figured out how to remove, which was
his crime and the reason he was here.

Two other prisoners were already seated on the
dais, with cushions for four more. Kal wondered what their
transgressions were. Surely none of them could compete with the
horror he’d committed; no djinn had ever removed the cuffs of
Servitude, a badge of honor among those in The Service.

Kal ran his tongue over the vial. Once he put
the plan in motion he’d have to return to Iman’s to find his
lantern. As long as it lay unclaimed, he could belong to no man.
But the minute someone picked it up, he was back in The Service and
he hadn’t gone through all of this to find himself right back where
he’d started, not without the hope of the promotion that had
started all of this. The promotion Faruq had stolen.

“
Move along.” The eunuch prodded
him again.

Kal stopped and spun around. He’d had enough
of being sword practice, of being at Faruq’s mercy, of having all
his hard work and dreams tossed aside as if his life were
meaningless. He was just
itching
for a fight. “Go ahead,
walad
. Stab me. Let’s see if you’ve got the balls to do
it.”

A stricken look crossed the eunuch’s face as
Kal realized what he’d said. The guy
didn’t
have the balls,
actually.

The big, muscular guard behind the first one
growled. “Get up the steps now, traitor, or you won’t
either.”

Newly snipped, probably. And not happy about
it.

And definitely not worth it with freedom so
close at hand.

Kal climbed the steps, wanting to get through
this trial so he could be out of here faster than a flying
carpet.

If only he
could
use his powers on a
carpet, but no. He’d have to lay low on magic because Faruq would
be able to track him through the Glimmer magic left behind—unless
he could come up with some way to disguise it.

A door opened on the far side of the room and
three women were brought in, two in shackles and the last one with
such a disgruntled look on her face, Kal wanted to laugh. She was
pissed and, yeah, he could relate.

“
Sit.” Newly-Snipped knocked the
back of Kal’s knees and shoved down on his shoulders, leaving him
no choice but to do as he was ordered. Story of his
life.

The shackled women stumbled up the steps on
the far side of the dais, their chains catching under their feet.
The other woman added Disgust to Disgruntled and huffed over to the
steps he’d just climbed, marching up them and plopping on the
cushion next to him.

“
What are you in for?” she asked,
her eyes a surprising blue against an olive complexion.

“
Quiet!” Newly-Snipped shoved his
knee into Kal’s back as if Kal had been the one talking. Ah well,
the guy had to muscle his testosterone around while he still had
it.

Blue Eyes rolled those striking eyes, then
turned her face forward and arranged her tiny feet beneath her
knees. No lotus position for her. Faruq wasn’t going to be pleased
about that. Faruq was all about the pomp and circumstance—and
torture and starvation—of his position.

A cloud of blue mist wafted into the room,
dissipating when the High Master emerged with Faruq following a
half pace behind—the closest he could get without overstepping his
bounds, but Kal knew how much that half step killed the
power-hungry vizier.

The High Master clapped his hands and the
eunuchs stepped behind the prisoners and slammed the tips of their
scimitars into the wooden dais. The room grew quiet as the High
Master scanned the line of prisoners. Then he began giving those at
the far end his Evil Eye—the one that rendered them either dead or
unconscious for transportation to their bottles and
lanterns.

Kal knew which would be his fate; there was
only one outcome for removing the cuffs.

The manacled women fell back in tandem, the
eunuchs catching them before they hit the floor.

The High Master approached the next victim,
er, prisoner, and Faruq read the man’s list of transgressions from
a papyrus scroll.

He hadn’t finished before the High Master
passed judgment.

Kal jiggled his knees with nervous energy and
tongued the vial. He should have enough time to swallow the
evidence before he, too, would keel over, looking for all intents
and purposes as if the Evil Eye had worked its deadly magic on
him.

The High Master moved closer and Kal saw a
slimy smile slide across Faruq’s face when the vizier’s gaze landed
on him, gloating, because he, alone, would know the secret of the
cuffs once Kal was gone.

Kal couldn’t have that. He couldn’t give Faruq
that kind of power. He ought to tell someone in case the potion
didn’t work as Iman said it would, or if Faruq caught on and
managed to kill him. The secret die shouldn’t die with
him.

The man next to him fell back, the eunuch
behind him catching him and laying him down softly.

“
Diamonds,” Kal muttered to Blue
Eyes.

Of course, telling her would be a loss if she
was sentenced to death, too. The chances were fifty-fifty for her.
For him? One hundred percent dead.

Or so they’d think.

The High Master now stood before him. Kal
worked the vial onto his back teeth and closed his jaw, waiting for
the right moment.

“
High Master, you remember Khaled,”
Faruq said, not even trying to keep the gloating from his voice.
“The one who destroyed your most magnificent cuffs. The one who
dared to try to release himself from his pledge of Service, and
then hide like the dog he is. The one who is unworthy of even the
slightest mercy on your part.”

Kal snorted and rolled his eyes. He couldn’t
help it. The vizier was laying it on thick.

The High Master glanced over to study Blue
Eyes when Kal returned his gaze. Was that a look of regret on the
chubby old guy’s face?

Hmm… Maybe her odds were
eighty-twenty.

“
Sire?” Faruq was nothing if not
diligent.

The High Master shook his head and grabbed the
sides of his
shudra
, pulling them across his belly where
eight inches still separated them.

“
He freed himself?” the High Master
asked Faruq, one eyebrow arching into his bald head. “You corrected
this oversight, I presume.”

“
I have, Sire.”

“
Good.” The High Master bent down
and stared into Kal’s eyes. The High Master’s irises started to
swirl.

Kal crunched the glass vial between his teeth,
uncaring that he’d cut his tongue. This had better work.

The swirling in the High Master’s irises
increased and Kal could swear bolts of lightning flashed across his
pupils, but he remembered to close his eyes so the magic wouldn’t
have any effect.

And then the potion hit. Kal could feel it
slam through his veins, and he had time for only one thought before
he fell back into the potion-induced coma.

Damn it all—Newly-Snipped didn’t catch
him.

The Middle

The stink was going to kill
him.

Kal sucked in a breath, figuring the stench
was a good thing since it showed he was alive enough to
be
killed.

But where was he?

He clamped down on his breathing, listening
for clues to tell him where he was.

Something round and hard poked him in the
small of his back. The muted sound of something crackled nearby. A
soft, cool breeze which didn’t help much with the stench, drifted
along his nose—and the smell of smoke suddenly wafted over
him.

That did not bode well.

He cracked open an eye, praying he wouldn’t
see a wall of flames. Luckily, it was either night and he was safe,
or he was in a box.

Given the thing poking him the back, he was
going with the former.

Okay, so he had a shot at freedom.

He tightened his hands ever so slightly. The
cuffs were still gone from his wrists. A plus. Now all he had to do
was get away from wherever he was.

He opened his eye a little more. No box,
but…

He was in the dump.

The
dump
.

Faruq had
actually
had him tossed away
like a piece of garbage. If it weren’t so funny—and he didn’t care
what Faruq thought—he might be a bit put out not to have gotten
even some small concession to a funeral, but, hey, at least he
didn’t have to dig himself out of the ground. Or worse—

The smell of smoke grew stronger.

He opened his other eye, blinking against the
fine grains of sand drifting across his face, and caught the
flickering of fire to his right.

Fire
.

Faruq, the bastard, was going to burn him
alive. Well, okay, Faruq didn’t know he was alive, but still…
Didn’t
anyone
at the palace have
any
sense of
propriety? Any sense of common decency when it came to a burial? At
the very least he ought to be able to expect a nice pyre, not a
pile
of rotting trash.

He blew out a breath. The sadly ironic thing
was, he was where he was because he’d wanted the vizier position.
He’d wanted to help the very people who’d abandoned him to this
fate. Well, not Faruq. He’d never liked the weasel and the
walad’s
actions in stealing his thesis and usurping the
position for himself were confirmation of exactly what type of
person he was.

The type to burn a person on a pile of
garbage.

Kal had had big plans if he’d become vizier.
Things to make djinn life easier, and improve mortal-djinn
relations to balance the scales a little more in the djinn favor.
It wasn’t that he was opposed to the master/servant relationship,
but cultures were changing. The djinn world had to change with them
or they’d become like other species who couldn’t adapt: extinct.
The route Faruq had kept them on was a path straight to extinction.
Not that the jackass would see it; Faruq was all about absolute
power.