He muttered the words again; once more the cuff’s torment ceased.
“I will be a stern master,” the wizard said as the Jinni lay boneless on the floor, “but not a cruel one. You will only feel the iron if you deserve its touch. If, however, your attitude merits reward, I’ll allow you to resume your true form from time to time. But don’t think you can escape—your actions are mine to control. You are bound to me, fire to flesh, soul to soul, and sealed in blood for as long as you shall live.” He smiled down at the Jinni. “Oh, my proud slave. We’ll outdo all the stories of old, you and I. Our names shall be sung for generations.”
“I’ll destroy myself,” said the Jinni in a hoarse voice.
The wizard raised an eyebrow. “I see the truth of your position has yet to set in,” he said. “Very well. I’ll make it clear to you.”
The Jinni braced weakly against the expected pain of the iron, but it didn’t come. Instead ibn Malik went to Fadwa and crouched over her. The girl had thrashed free of her cloak. A dribble of saliva ran down one side of her face, and her hands jerked and clawed against their bonds.
“You left a piece of yourself inside this girl,” the wizard said. “I promised her father I would remove it.”
He placed his hands on the girl’s face, slipping his fingers beneath the blindfold. Closing his eyes, the man began to mutter. After a moment, Fadwa went still—and then she screamed, a sound that went on and on, as though her soul was being drawn from her body. The Jinni shuddered, tried to cover his ears, but found he couldn’t move.
At last the screaming ceased and the girl lay motionless. Ibn Malik smiled, though he looked even more tired than before. He slipped off the blindfold, untied the rag that bound her wrists, and backed away.
“Go to her,” ibn Malik told the Jinni. “Wake her.”
He had no strength left, but nevertheless his legs carried him of their own accord to Fadwa’s side. The binding moved his limbs, made him kneel down and gently shake her shoulder. “Fadwa,” he said, struggling against it. Don’t wake, he thought. Don’t see.
The girl stirred, brought one hand up to rub at her eyes, then winced at the ache in her wrists. The last of the twilight was shining through the palace walls, casting a blue aura about her wan and drawn features, turning her hair a deep blue-black. Her eyes opened; she saw the Jinni. “It’s you,” she murmured. “I’m dreaming . . . no, I was dreaming. . . .”
She frowned, confused. Slowly she sat up, and looked around.
“Father!” the girl shrieked.
And then the binding was moving him again, making him crouch above her as ibn Malik had. His hands went around her throat. He felt the delicate bones as they bent and cracked under his fingers, felt her hands as they scratched and slapped at his face. He could not look away from her eyes as they stared back at him, protesting in disbelief before they bulged with panic, and then, finally, dimmed.
At last the Jinni sat back. His hands still moved with the binding’s command, convulsing against air. He watched them until they stopped.
“Now you understand,” said ibn Malik.
And it was true. He understood. He stared at the cold glass walls and tried to feel nothing.
The wizard put a hand on his shoulder. “Enough for today, I think,” he said. “Rest and regain your strength. Tomorrow your true work begins.” He paused to look about at the cavernous hall. “You must prepare yourself for one more disappointment, I fear. Your new quarters are not nearly so elegant.”
From his tattered cloak he extracted a long-necked copper flask, etched with intricate loops and whorls. He tipped the flask toward the Jinni, and muttered another series of harsh and meaningless words.
A bright flash seared the Jinni’s eyes, lighting the chamber to translucence. There was a horrible sense of diminishment as the wizard’s spell gathered and compressed his being, banking his essence to the merest spark. Slowly the flask drew him in—and time slowed to an elongated instant, full of the taste of metal and a wild, searing anguish.
Here the Jinni’s own memories ended.
But these were not the only memories that he regained in that moment, for the lines of the binding stretched both ways. The Jinni saw himself, remembered what he had done—but he also saw the memories of the wizard ibn Malik, felt his triumph as he enslaved the Jinni with Abu Yusuf’s blood and compelled him to kill Fadwa. Like two patterns overlaid, their recollections ran together and diverged, overlapped and intertwined. He was inside the flask, trapped in that endless moment; and he was standing alone in the glass palace, holding a copper flask that was warm to the touch.
Ibn Malik replaced the flask inside the pocket of his cloak. Then he staggered to the nearest wall and sank to the floor, breathing in shallow gasps.
The day’s exertions had drained him more deeply than expected. He hadn’t meant to put the Jinni in the flask so quickly, but it would have done little for his authority to allow the Jinni to see him panting with fatigue. And still, what a day, what an unparalleled accomplishment! He only regretted the death of the girl. It seemed wasteful to kill one so young and beautiful when she might have served as a menial in his future palace, or a tempting motivation for the Jinni’s good behavior. He should have anticipated that, like any powerful animal, his new acquisition would require a certain amount of breaking.
His breathing began to even and slow. He would, he decided, take a small, well-deserved rest, and then return home. The Bedouins’ mounts were hobbled safely outside the palace, and it was a clear, warm night with no windstorms. The mounts could wait a little longer. Or perhaps he would leave them behind and command the Jinni to carry him across the valley. He smiled at the thought, and sank into a deep and grateful sleep.
Ibn Malik did not usually dream, but within moments his slumbering mind brought him visions of a city on an island, an impossible city that reached far into the sky. Perhaps it was the city that he would build, he and the Jinni? Yes: a monumental undertaking, but was it not within his reach? For now that he had captured one jinni, who was to say that he could not capture another, and another? He would bind the entire race, and make them build him a kingdom to rival Sulayman’s. . . .
The city blurred, coalesced, and became a man, a wrinkled old man with skin pale as milk, carrying a stack of singed parchments. Ibn Malik had never encountered such a man before, and yet he felt he knew him, felt both kinship and a dreadful fear. He wanted to warn the man—but of what? And now the man was reaching out toward ibn Malik, his face full of warning as well—
Pain, sudden and horrible, cut through the dream. The pale man’s face disintegrated as ibn Malik woke with his own knife in his stomach, and Abu Yusuf’s hand on the hilt.
Either Abu Yusuf had been biding his time, or he’d been revived by his daughter’s screams. In either case, he wasn’t nearly as dead as he’d appeared. A wide trail of blood showed his slow progress to ibn Malik’s side; now he lay next to the wizard, twisting the knife with the last of his strength. Ibn Malik roared and backhanded the man, but it was too late, the damage was done: Abu Yusuf had pulled the knife away with him.
Ibn Malik’s vision blurred. Blood filled his mouth. He spat it out and hauled himself to standing. Abu Yusuf lay at his feet, weakly smiling. The wizard pressed a foot to his neck until there could be no question the man was dead.
Beneath the taste of blood ibn Malik could smell the meaty stink of his own intestines. Grimacing, he ripped a length of cloth from his cloak and stuffed it into the hole in his belly. Stomach wounds corrupted quickly—he would need herbs and fire, needle and thread. . . . He thought of the Jinni, and cursed. Weakened and wounded like this, he had no strength to conjure his servant from the flask. The effort alone might kill him.
The horse. He had to get to Abu Yusuf’s horse.
He staggered to the palace gate and struggled to lift the bar away, ignoring the feel of his insides shifting. At last the gate was open. He found the stallion and untied it, leaving the pony behind. He hauled h
imself onto the horse’s back, smearing its side with his blood. He tried to kick it into a gallop; the horse, feeling only a gentle nudge, began a slow and jarring trot. Go, you stinking bag of bones, thought ibn Malik, but it was all he could do to lace his fingers into the mane and hang weakly on.
He’d made it halfway across the valley when the jackals descended.
Frenzied by the smell of blood, they ignored the horse’s kicks and pulled ibn Malik screaming from its side. With the last dregs of his energy he fought a few of them off; the rest, sensing his exhaustion, vaulted the charred bodies of their pack mates and tore out his throat.
For all the wizard’s strength and power, the jackals found he made rather a small meal.
The desert is a vast and empty place, and travelers are few and far between.
The gnawed bones of Wahab ibn Malik bleached and cracked in the sun. His cloak dissolved into scattered shreds. The copper flask lay tipped on its side. It gathered a light covering of dust, but it did not tarnish. Animals sniffed at it, then left it alone.
In faraway cities, caliphs rose and were overthrown. Waves of invading armies fell upon the deserts, made their brief mark, and were conquered in their turn.
One day, long after the last traces of ibn Malik had vanished from the desert, a caravan outrider stopped by a sheltering rock to relieve himself. The caravan was twenty days out from Ramadi, and bound for ash-Sham. The outrider was tasked with ensuring there would be no surprises along the way, no raiders or mercenaries demanding payment for safe passage. He took a drink from his waterskin and was about to mount his horse again when a glint of metal caught his eye.
In a small depression in the ground lay a copper flask, half-buried in dust and scrub.
He picked up the flask and brushed the dirt away. It was well made and handsome, with an interesting pattern of scrollwork around its base. Perhaps it had been lost from an earlier caravan. He thought it was the sort of thing his mother might like. He placed the flask in his saddlebag, and rode on.
Over the years the flask passed from hand to hand, from son to mother to niece to daughter to daughter-in-law. It was used to hold oil, or frankincense, or simply for decoration. It accumulated a few small dents but was never seriously damaged, even when it should have been. Once in a while its owner would notice that it always seemed warm to the touch; but then the thought would pass, as such idle thoughts always do. Down the generations the flask went until at last it was placed in the luggage of a young woman bound from Beirut to New York—a gift from her mother, to remember her by.
And as for ibn Malik?
You are bound to me, fire to flesh, soul to soul, and sealed in blood for as long as you shall live.
The wizard had been canny and devious in life, but in death he’d outsmarted even himself. Soul to soul they were bound, as long as the Jinni should live: and there the Jinni sat, trapped in his flask, living out a millennium in one eternal moment.
Which meant that death was not the end for Wahab ibn Malik al-Hadid.
The morning after the jackals devoured the wizard’s carcass down to the bones, a child was born in a faraway eastern land, in a city called Chang’an. His parents named him Gao. From the beginning Gao was a clever boy. As he grew, he soon outpaced his tutors, who began fretting that perhaps the boy was too clever: by thirteen he had written several treatises on inconsistencies in the most beloved Confucian teachings, declaring them bankrupt and meaningless. By twenty Gao had become a brilliant, embittered outcast. He apprenticed himself to an herbalist and grew obsessed with developing a medicinal formula for immortality. He died at thirty-eight, by accident, from one of his self-administered experiments.
The day after his death, a baby was born to joyful parents in the floating Byzantine city of Venexia. Tommaso, as he was called, proved so interested in the Holy Church and its mysteries that he was quickly set on the path to priesthood. He took orders at a young age and soon immersed himself in politics, rising to spiritual adviser to the Doge. It was clear to all that Tommaso would be satisfied with nothing less than the papal robes—until he was observed one evening in one of the city’s catacombs, conducting what appeared to be dark and pagan rites. Tommaso was excommunicated, tried for sorcery, and burned at the stake.
Tommaso’s ashes were still glowing in Venexia when, in Varanasi, a boy named Jayatun was born within sight of the River Ganga. Jayatun loved the stories and legends that he learned as a child, particularly that of the Cintamani, a fabulous jewel that would grant its owner any wish—and could even hold back death. When he grew older, what had been a youthful fascination became an obsession, and he set about collecting every mention he could find of the Cintamani, be the source Buddhist or Hindu or mere storyteller’s fancy. The search devoured all else, and he’d long since become a friendless pauper when one day, under the influence of a high fever, he waded into the Ganga and drowned, convinced that the river goddess had left the Cintamani there for him to find.
And so it went. As the Jinni’s flask was passed from hand to hand, so too did ibn Malik’s soul pass from body to body, in one part of the world and then another. He was a Crusader at the Siege of Jerusalem, looking for holy relics to steal. He was a student of Paracelsus, devoted to finding the Philosopher’s Stone. He was a Shinto monk, a Maori shaman, an infamous courtier in the House of Orléans. He never married, never fathered children, never so much as fell in love. Presented with a religious tradition, he was drawn to its darkest, most mystical corners; in politics, he displayed an unwavering taste for power. His lives were usually unhappy, and rarely ended well. But in each and every one he grew consumed with finding the secret to eternal life—not knowing that it was the one thing he already possessed.
Centuries went by in this way, with ibn Malik’s soul unable to pass to the next world, not so long as the Jinni still lived. Until at last, in a Prussian shtetl, a squalling infant named Yehudah was placed in his mother’s arms.
The Jinni saw all of this.
He saw himself, trapped in the flask, howling in anguish.
He saw ibn Malik born again and again.
He saw Yehudah Schaalman, the last of ibn Malik’s incarnations and the most powerful. He watched as the boy grew from student to convict to master of forbidden magic. And he watched as a lonely furniture maker came to Schaalman’s door one day, in search of a golem to make him a wife.
And Schaalman saw all of it as well.
He saw his own lives laid before him, misshapen pearls on an endless string, starting with ibn Malik and ending with himself.
He saw the Jinni’s memories, experienced his capture and defeat. He saw him emerge from the flask in a tinsmith’s shop, a hole in his memory where the Bedouin girl had been. He saw the Jinni learn his way about the city and grow accustomed to his bonds. And he watched as one night the Jinni crossed paths with a strange and astonishing woman, a woman made of clay.
26.
Someone was slapping the Jinni’s face. He opened his eyes and saw Conroy standing over him, blood trickling from his scalp.
So it was real. The truth of it hit him full on, the remorseless knowledge of what he’d done. He turned onto his side and curled around the pain, as he’d done on the bloodstained floor of his palace, a thousand years before.
He heard women screaming. There were shouts for a policeman, a fire engine. “Ahmad,” Conroy was saying urgently. “Come on, boyo. Get up.” Someone else groaned from close nearby. The wizard.
The Jinni lurched to his feet, swaying against Conroy. Fragments of glass slid tinkling from his clothing, joining the shards that carpeted the tiny shop. The old man lay slumped next to a display case, his body dusted with glass and tobacco. The Jinni grabbed him, dragged him up off the floor.
“Release me!” he shouted.
The old man’s head lolled on his neck. It would be so very easy to kill him, only a quick motion, one hand to his bare throat—a fitting end, after what he’d done to Fadwa!
But the binding between th
em would still remain; and tomorrow, in some distant land, another child would be born. . . .
With a cry of anguish and frustration, the Jinni dropped Schaalman to the ground. The old man crumpled to the floorboards, his head knocking the side of the tobacco display.
Conroy’s hand was on his arm. “The police will be here any moment,” he said. If he felt any alarm at the Jinni’s ill treatment of a small and elderly man, he didn’t show it.
The Jinni glanced about at the shattered windows and the crowd that had gathered outside. The prostitutes from upstairs had all run panicked into the street, in various states of undress. Conroy’s men were forming a cordon in front of the door, holding everyone back as they tried to surge forward. “The police,” he said. “Your shop.” Distantly he recalled that he’d gone there intending to rob the man.
“Don’t worry about me,” Conroy said. “The constables and I have a long history together. But what about our friend here? What’s to be done with him?”
The Jinni looked down at the old man sprawled on the floor. Fire to flesh, he thought, soul to soul, for as long as you shall live. . . .
He knew what it was he had to do.
“This man is dangerous, and a murderer,” he said to Conroy. “He killed a girl I once knew. She was only fifteen years old.” He wavered, braced himself against a countertop. “I can’t let the police find me here. There’s something I need to do. To set things right.”
Conroy eyed the Jinni for a moment, considering. Then he leaned down and punched the unconscious Schaalman across the face.
“The constables will deal with him,” said the fence. “And as far as I’m concerned you were never here. Go, now. Out the back.”