I suppose it will entertain you sufficiently, and that’s what matters?
Exactly. Now go and haunt someone else.
The blind and unsettled energy he’d felt earlier in the day was returning. Gladly he gave himself over to it. If he waited, and let himself examine the idea, he might find some reason to hold off. Better, far better, to hurl himself into it headlong.
Saleh came to his senses on the floor of the Jinni’s room. His head felt as though someone had scraped it out and used it for a mixing-bowl. He lay there for a moment, trying to remember what had happened. Had he succumbed to one of his fits? No, this felt different, more akin to waking from a nightmare that had already faded, leaving him with only the body’s memory of fear. Wait, no: there’d been a knock at the door—he’d answered it—
In the space of a breath, the entire encounter with the stranger came crashing back. He clambered to his feet, then grabbed at the doorknob as his balance wavered. He could see again! The room was dimly lit by candles; but oh, still! When had mere shadows ever appeared so rich and full of color? The burning flames were saturated in bright oranges and yellows and thin flickering blues, far too bright to look at for long. The cushions he’d slept on, covered with cheap slubbed cotton, were now masterpieces of shape and texture. He stretched out one hand, touched it with the other: it was exactly where he thought it to be. His face was warm and wet: had he injured himself in the fall? No, he was only crying.
And what of his own face, could he see it now? A mirror, he had to find a mirror! He grabbed the largest of the candles and dashed about the room. In the wardrobe he found only a few articles of clothing, a woolen hat, and, bizarrely, a rich man’s silken umbrella, its handle chased in slender silver vines. He admired it for a moment before tossing it back into the wardrobe and resuming his search. What, the creature owned no mirror at all? Didn’t he need to shave?
Something sparkled at him from the writing desk.
He brought the candle closer. Arranged on the corner of the desk was a collection of small metal figurines, perhaps a dozen all told. Before, his vision had been too poor to notice them; but now he saw birds, insects, even a tiny cobra, coiled and rearing. Next to the figurines lay a leather-wrapped set of instruments, thin awls and delicate, curved needles, such as a surgeon or dentist might use. Or, he realized, a metalsmith.
He fetched the rest of the candles and set them around the figurines. Some were finished, and polished to a high sheen; others seemed to be works in progress. The snake was wonderfully done, the patterned scales a miracle of steady patience. He marveled at the intricate tin-scrap insects, which suggested rather than described their likenesses: the long limbs and proboscis of a mantis, a beetle’s round and glossy carapace. An ibis, on the other hand, looked awkward and off balance—something about the beak, perhaps? He picked it up and examined it. One entire side had been smoothed over, like a mistake erased in frustration.
Tears pricked his eyes again. The figurines were beautiful, would’ve been so even if they’d not been among the first images to grace his restored sight. They were works of longing, of lonely diligence. They were nothing he’d thought their arrogant, sarcastic, terrifying maker capable of.
And the old man? What business had he with the figurines’ maker? Saleh had been so taken with his restored senses that he’d nearly forgotten about him, but now he recalled the crushing pain, the man’s obvious distaste at his task. He’d cured Saleh somehow—but not out of kindness or compassion, or even the barest sense of a healer’s duty. Saleh had been little more than a tool to him, the flaw in his mind merely an impediment to his goal. And that goal, apparently, was to find the Jinni. Saleh doubted that the man meant the encounter to be a peaceful one.
He held up the unfinished ibis and watched it glint in the candlelight. A day before, an hour even, he would have gladly told the old man where to find his prey, and wished him godspeed.
He put on his coat, slipped the figurine into his pocket, and blew out the candles. He would take a stroll to the Bowery, he decided, and see the world anew. And if he happened to find the Jinni along the way, then perhaps he might find it in his heart to warn him.
Led by Saleh’s memory, Yehudah Schaalman walked east along the path of the dowsing spell. Now there were no turnings, no rooftop ascents or time-wasting detours: his quarry, it seemed, had set out for the Bowery with an arrow’s unswerving aim.
And what a quarry! A man called Ahmad, with a face that shone bright as a gas lamp. What was he? Some sort of demon? A victim of the same possession that had afflicted Saleh—or perhaps its perpetrator?
Fatigue was warring with Schaalman’s excitement, reminding him that on any other night he would be back at the Sheltering House by now, claiming his much-needed hours of rest. But how could he stop now, and let the trail go cold? Ignoring his tired and burning feet, he quickened his pace.
He turned onto the Bowery proper and found it cluttered with men, despite the late hour. The path was so strong now it seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. He scanned the crowd, feeling a sudden panic: what if they should pass each other, without Schaalman noticing?
A familiar sign peered down at him from the storefronts. He read the name CONROY, saw the repeated motif of sun and moon. He paused in the doorway, peered inside. No, his quarry hadn’t been here; there were only a few men buying tobacco, and the prim, bespectacled dealer in stolen goods.
He turned from the doorway, to continue his search before Conroy could notice him, and nearly ran straight into a tall, handsome man with a brightly glowing face.
“I beg your pardon,” the Jinni said, stepping around the slack-mouthed old man who stood rooted to the pavement. He opened Conroy’s door, ringing the small bell above the doorway. Behind the register, Conroy gave him a bland smile and looked meaningfully at the other customers before returning to his well-thumbed newspaper. The Jinni busied himself pretending to scan the shelves of tobacco. It would be no challenge, he’d decided, to wait until Conroy locked up, and then break the lock; far more of an accomplishment to rob the man from under his very nose. He planned to purchase some small piece of silver, and then accept the fence’s customary offer of a room upstairs. He’d seen enough of the shop’s comings and goings to know that there were numerous passageways from the bordello to the storefront to the alley where Conroy’s men liked to congregate. He would linger in the upstairs room—and if he must take advantage of his company in the meantime, well then, he would bear it—and wait until Conroy had retired for the night. If he was careful, the toughs would be easy enough to evade. Perhaps he could create some sort of disturbance. . . .
The bell rang again above the door. It was the old man from the street, the one who’d nearly collided with him. The man was staring at him fixedly, with an almost unhinged intensity.
The Jinni frowned at him. “Yes?”
“Ahmad?” the man asked.
The Jinni cursed silently. The other customers had paid and were leaving the tiny shop; since this man, whoever he was, somehow knew his name, the Jinni would have to wait for him to leave as well. “Do I know you?” he asked in English, but the man shook his head—less an answer than an injunction against speaking, as though the Jinni would ruin the moment.
Conroy traded a glance with the Jinni, folded his paper away. “Can I help you?” Conroy asked.
The old man waved Conroy away, as one would an irritating fly. Then he smiled at the Jinni; and it was a smile both sly and triumphant, the smile of an imp with a secret to tell. He raised a hand, and with two fingers beckoned him closer.
Growing intrigued despite himself, the Jinni took a step toward the man. It was then that he began to feel it: a stirring along the backs of his arms and the nape of his neck. A strange buzzing began inside his mind. One of his hands began to shake. It was the cuff. It was vibrating.
He paused. Something here was very, very wrong.
With a clawlike hand, the old man reached out and grabbed the Jinni around
the wrist.
What William Conroy saw, in the moment before every pane of glass in the shop shattered, including his own spectacles, was something that he would never tell anyone—not the police, nor the men in his employ, nor even the priest to whom he made his confession every Thursday. In that bare instant, he saw the two figures transformed. Where the thin old man had been, there stood another, naked, with a sun-blasted face beneath filthy wisps of hair. And where the man he knew as Ahmad had been, there stood something that was no man, nor earthly creature at all, but a kind of shimmering vision—like the air above the pavement on a scorching summer day, or a candle flame whipped by the wind.
25.
At the instant of contact, a hidden lake of memory burst its banks. It flooded their minds and overwhelmed them both, drowning them in images, sensations, impressions.
Where before there had been a gap in the Jinni’s memory—describing the bare moment between the sight of a hawk wheeling about in a bloodred sunset, and coming to on Arbeely’s dusty workshop floor—now there lay weeks, months full of time. He watched a young Bedouin girl as she glimpsed his palace shining in the valley; and then he watched himself enter her dreams. He saw himself visit the girl again and again, noticed his own growing fascination with her. He saw, as he never could have before, how the days between their visits passed so quickly for himself, and so slowly for her; saw the signs that the girl’s perceptions of dream and reality were sliding perilously into each other.
He watched, unable to look away, as he entered her mind one last time. He felt her draw him eagerly down (and how little he’d protested!) into her imagined wedding, felt the lust that blinded him to the danger; and then the panic of her waking, and the jagged, terrifying pain as he ripped himself from her mind.
He saw himself hovering near obliteration. He watched as he turned away from the cries of her family, and ran to the safe haven of his own glass palace.
And then he saw what followed.
The day was fading little by little, reaching toward sunset. Above the parapets of his glass palace, the Jinni noted the changing angle of the sun with irritation.
It was nearly a week since his last, catastrophic visit to the Bedouin girl, and still he was not healed. He’d spent his daytime hours since then hanging motionless in the sunlight, allowing the heat to knit him back together. But at night, he retreated back inside, where the glass would protect him. The nights irked him now: his tattered wounds itched, turned him impatient and bad-tempered. A few more days of healing and he would be strong enough for his long-delayed trip to his fellow jinn, and the habitations of his birth. Why, why had he not gone earlier? He’d grown far too fascinated with humans, allowing himself to be lured into complacency and danger. He couldn’t think of Fadwa now without cringing at his own innocence.
Not that he blamed the girl for what had happened! No, the fault lay entirely with himself. He’d been far too taken with her, too impressed by the tenacity with which she and her people clung to the desert, fighting for every stalk of grain and drop of milk. He’d mistaken fortitude for wisdom and failed to see that she lacked a certain maturity of intellect. Well, his lesson had been learned. Possibly he’d allow himself to observe an occasional caravan from afar; but as for the rest of it, he was finished. No more dallying with humans. The jinn elders had been right: the two peoples were not meant to interact. No matter how fascinating, how sensual, the cost of these encounters was too high for comfort.
From the safety of his palace, the Jinni watched as the fading light bred shadows across the walls. Perhaps, he thought, he would wait a few extra days before setting out on his journey. He wanted no wounds or scars to remain of his misadventure. No one would know how close he’d come to his own destruction.
Help!
He turned, startled. A voice, from far away, drifted through the glass wall. . . .
Jinni, help! We are at battle with a band of ifrits, and are injured—we need shelter!
Up he flew to the highest tower, and looked out over the valley. Sure enough, three jinn were approaching from the west, riding the wind. At this distance he couldn’t recognize them, but they were unmistakably his own kind. There was no sight of their pursuers, but that was unsurprising; many ifrits liked to travel beneath the desert’s surface, outdistancing their enemies and then bursting forth in front of them. One of the jinn, he saw, seemed to be carrying another, who indeed looked less than whole.
You are welcome here, he called to them. Enter quickly, and take your shelter. He felt a pang that they would see him in this weakened state—but then, they themselves were no better. Perhaps they could all keep each other’s secrets.
The gateway to the palace was shielded by a door of thick glass that hung on silver hinges. To open or close it, the Jinni had to be in human form; it had been a conceit of his to pretend he was a human ruler of old, coming home to his seat of power. As he removed the bar that locked the door and swung it open, he reflected that perhaps it was time to modify the gateway. What had once seemed an amusing fancy now felt, in the presence of his own kind, faintly embarrassing.
A hot wind caressed him at the gateway; and the three jinn flew past him and into the palace, one of them—a female, he saw now, a jinniyeh of some beauty—supported by another of her fellows. He smiled to himself. The evening had just grown slightly more promising. He closed the door, and then hefted the bar back into place.
A clawlike human hand clamped a metal cuff over his wrist.
Shocked, he tried to pull away—but his arm had turned to frozen fire. The pain was blinding. Desperately he tried to change shape, to get away from the freezing iron, but to no effect. He could feel the cuff holding his body in place, blocking every attempt to transform.
The pain moved past his shoulder to envelop his entire being. He collapsed to his knees, looked up with his dimmed human eyes at the jinni that had done this to him. But all three jinn had vanished. Standing before him was a Bedouin tribesman carrying a young girl in his arms. The girl was Fadwa, bound and blindfolded. Next to them stood something that he first took for an animated corpse—but then he saw it was a grotesque old man in a filthy, tattered cloak.
The old man was grinning hideously, showing dark and broken teeth. “It is accomplished!” he said. “Captured, and in human form! The first since the days of Sulayman!”
“Then he’s bound to you?” asked the Bedouin.
“No, not quite yet. For that, I’ll need your assistance.”
The tribesman hesitated for a moment, and then lowered his cloak-covered burden to the floor. The Jinni, unable to move or even to speak against the freezing agony, watched as Fadwa twitched and whispered. The Bedouin noticed his gaze. “Yes, look!” he shouted. “Look at what you’ve done to my daughter! This is your payment, creature. However terrible your suffering, know that you yourself have caused it, and it is nothing compared to hers!”
“Yes, well put,” said the ancient man dryly. “Now come and help me, before the pain unhinges him. I want him fully aware of what’s happening.”
Cautiously the Bedouin approached. “Hold him steady,” the old man said. Fadwa’s father grabbed the Jinni roughly. The Jinni tried to cry out, but nothing came. “Hold still,” the Bedouin hissed, gripping the back of the Jinni’s neck.
The old man had closed his eyes; he was muttering under his breath, as though rehearsing or preparing himself, making ready. Then he knelt down and put one rough and dusty palm on the Jinni’s forehead.
The rasping syllables the old man chanted made no sense—but even through the iron’s torment he could sense the net of glowing lines that spun out from the man’s hand and around his own pain-racked body. He strained against the cuff, panicking, trying desperately to change form as the lines twisted to form a cage. Foolish, careless! Baited and captured like the basest of ghuls! Everything, everything had been stolen from him!
“I am Wahab ibn Malik,” the man growled, “and I bind you to my service!”
An
d the cage of glowing lines sank inside him, flame joining to flame.
The old man staggered; for a moment it seemed he might faint. Then he righted himself, and smiled in triumph.
“Then it’s done?” asked the Bedouin. “You can heal her now?”
“One last thing. The binding must be sealed.” The wizard smiled sadly. “My deepest apologies, Abu Yusuf, but here our agreement ends.”
A knife appeared in the wizard’s other hand. In a swift and powerful motion, he plunged it into Abu Yusuf’s ribs. There was a horrible gasping noise; and then, as the wizard withdrew the knife, a hot spray of blood, and the choking smell of iron. Abu Yusuf collapsed, his hand slipping from the Jinni’s neck.
The wizard took a deep breath. Again he seemed exhausted. His skeletal frame sagged with fatigue, but his eyes were full of a quiet triumph.
“Now,” he said. “Let us talk. Ah, but first . . .” He grabbed the Jinni’s wrist again, and muttered something over the iron cuff. In an instant, the pain vanished. Freed from his paralysis, the Jinni fell, sprawling across the bloodstained glass.
“I’ll give you a moment,” said the old man. He turned his back to check on the girl, who lay bundled on the floor, oblivious to her father’s murder.
The Jinni gathered himself, rose shaking to his feet, and launched himself at the wizard.
“Stop,” ibn Malik said.
And just like that, the Jinni jerked to a halt, a tamed animal at the end of its leash. There was no way to fight it; he might as well stop the sunrise. The wizard whispered a few words, and the iron’s freezing torture roared back to life.
The wizard said, “Do you know that no one, not even the wisest of the seers, has discovered why the touch of iron is so terrible to the jinn?” He paused, as though awaiting a response, but the Jinni was near insensible, curled around his arm. The wizard went on. “Nothing else produces such an effect. But here lies a conundrum, for if I can control you with iron, then so can another. It’s no use to send one’s most powerful slave to kill an enemy, only to see him driven away by an ordinary sword. I pondered this problem long and hard, and this is my solution.”