Djinnx'd (The Tamar Black Saga #1)

  The girl was watching him, waiting for his answer; he disappointed her.

  ‘I need to think about this,’ he told her.

  *

  The problem, he decided, was simply this. Where would she actually send him if he agreed, assuming that it would not, in fact, be the past? Would she send him to Tamar? Unlikely, if it was a test, then he would have failed, obviously. And, if not, then they were trying to get rid of him. Although, if that were true, then presumably they were also trying to get rid of Tamar too, which meant he might end up wherever she was. But that might not necessarily be a good thing. They might both end up trapped together somewhere. It did not help that he had no idea where she was. Okay, so this was not so simple as he had thought. In fact, it was giving him a headache.

  Okay, so, if they were trying to get rid of him, why not just leave him here? As far as he knew, there was no way out, was there? Perhaps there was. Actually there must be, if the mirror told the truth, because he had seen…

  Suddenly he knew what to do.

  ~ Chapter Twenty Four ~

  ‘I take it back, I take it back,’ whimpered Tamar. Suddenly, when faced with the reality of hanging upside down fifty feet over a scorpion pit, the Houris did not seem so dreadful after all. She glanced over to the candle that was burning through the rope; she reckoned that she had two minutes at the most left before she fell.

  Now, a scorpion pit should not hold too many terrors to a powerful Djinn, and the fifty foot drop? A mere bagatelle, surely? But when you are no longer a powerful Djinn but only a girl (and Tamar was beginning to fully realise, that that was what she was in this place) a scorpion pit takes on a whole new aspect of dread.

  Even so, she had wasted the last few minutes trying to use her powers to get her out of this mess; some habits are too deeply ingrained. Her mind knew the score, but her instincts had yet to catch up.

  She tried to think through it. What would a normal person do in this situation? She wondered. But of course, normal people did not find themselves in this kind of situation very often, except on Japanese game shows. This line of thought was not terribly helpful.

  What would James Bond do? No, wrong way. The correct question, right now, was what would Denny do? He was the closest thing to a normal person that she knew. She did not know. Well, he would not just hang here; he would try something. ‘Maybe if I could haul myself upwards and climb the rope. Damn, I wish I’d thought of that sooner, it’s going to break any second.’

  She scanned the area. Was there a ledge she could grab? No, the pit was at the bottom of a sheer rock face, the sides of which climbed up far beyond the point at which she was hanging. It was too dark to see just how far. The only light was a dull red glow; she could not see where it came from, but it flickered as if it came from a distant fire. The whole effect was like being trapped in the bottom of a volcano.

  She wondered idly what the point was. Surely the scorpions were surplus to requirements; the drop alone would kill anyone, wouldn’t it? She was about to find out, the rope burned through, and she fell.

  About three feet from the ground she stopped in mid-air, hanging horizontally like a cat burglar above a priceless diamond in a glass case.

  She was trapped there, caught by the wrists and ankles by fine but strong threads that she had not even noticed before. Her first instinct was to try to get down, but since she could not manage it, this gave her time to reflect on the fact that this would probably be a lousy idea given the amount of scorpion activity going on immediately beneath her nose.

  From the spider’s web into the scorpion pit, hmm tough decision. Of course, she knew that the decision was not really hers. Sooner or later she would drop. And then the scorpions would get her.

  She decided to try to get it over with; apart from anything else, just hanging here was humiliating. She tugged her right arm; the thread stretched like elastic and bounced back making her bob up and down like a puppet on a string. She came dangerously close to the scorpions at this point. The scorpions scuttled around her curiously, but she settled just out of reach again. She froze. However, this gave her an idea. It would be dangerous, but since she was going to die anyway…

  She gently pulled her arm back towards her back pocket. The strings twanged and again she bobbed dangerously close to the ground. The scorpions gathered. She tried to ignore them, as she reached slowly but surely into her pocket. She was now hanging at a most peculiar angle with her feet higher than her head and her body twisted in mid –air. But it was working; she very slowly and carefully eased out of her back pocket, a nail file.

  All women carry nail files whether they need them or not. Not many women ever think they are going to need them to escape from a deadly trap in a sorceress’s castle, however…

  She allowed herself to settle into position again, forcing herself to wait until she was still and out of reach. No point in rushing it or taking risks; there was plenty of time.

  She noticed a scorpion on her arm and thrashed suddenly to get it off, sending her into a frantic spin, which removed the offending arachnid, but put her in a position to be assailed by two more. Okay, don’t do that again, she froze. Once she had stopped moving she concentrated on trying to use the nail file to free her legs, ignoring the feeling on her head, that told her that there was definitely a third one nestling in her hair, urrrgh.

  It was extraordinarily difficult to reach her own ankles, while tied up by the wrists. Eventually, she flipped herself over, so that she was facing upwards, twisting the threads around her legs as she did so. She immediately found that she did not like being in this position at all. Not being able to see the ground was far worse than being able to see it, considering what was scurrying about on it. She tried not to think about it and eased herself, by means of pulling herself along her trouser legs, into a sitting position. This took a tedious amount of time, because the slightest movement, sent her bouncing and spinning around. But she stuck at it. Now she could reach her ankles to cut them free. A nail file is not the sharpest tool; even a pair of nail scissors would have been better, but she stuck at it, sawing away diligently, until eventually, her right foot came free with a twang. What the hell she thought she was going to do once she got all of her free is anybody’s guess. She was not thinking that far ahead. She pulled her dangling foot up out of reach, hanging grimly on to her tethered left foot to stop herself from being pulled backwards by the threads still attached to her wrists. She then gingerly lifted her right foot and rested it on top of her left one. When she managed to free her left foot, both legs dropped to the ground; she was standing, tethered by her wrists. Within seconds, scorpions swarmed up her legs.

  Without even thinking about it, Tamar grabbed the threads around her wrists and hauled herself up as far as she could. She swarmed up the thread with difficulty since she was still attached to it, and managed to pull herself out of just reach, before she could not get any further without being hopelessly tangled up. Worse, in her scramble, she had dropped the nail file.

  Still, she was safe for now, and was pretending, quite convincingly, to herself, that this was what she had intended to do all along. And was trying, fairly successfully, to ignore the fact that she was, in fact, no better off than she had been before all the aerial gymnastics. If anything, the situation was worse, she was now hanging from only two threads instead of four, and was, therefore, likely to fall that much sooner. The threads gave a creak as if to reinforce this detail.

  After the longest minute and a half of her life (and that is saying something when you are talking about a person who has had to sit through one of Denny’s songs) she decided to try and get down. Maybe if she landed with a thump, and started kicking, the scorpions would scatter and give her chance to find a way out. She would head toward the fiery glow. Animals did not like fire she seemed to remember.

  This was patently the most ludicrous plan since some fool said, “pet crocodiles,
what a marvellous idea”. And, deep down, she was aware of this fact, but she chose to ignore it. After all, what else was there to do?

  The only problem was how to get down. Of course, Sir Isaac Newton had solved this particular problem for her. If she just waited long enough, it would come into operation; problem solved. As if to remind her of this, the thread creaked threateningly again.

  Then she fell. The scorpions scattered; this was a heartening development. She leapt to her feet and started kicking, but there were too many of them, and now she was making them angry.

  She ran. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a small, shiny object on the ground. Denny’s lighter. One of the many things he carried about with him (but never used) on the principle that it “might come in handy”. It would never come in handier than now, she thought, if she could only get hold of it.

  She kicked and stomped her way to it, then took a deep breath and plunged her hand into the fray of outraged creatures and grabbed it.

  The floor was littered, rather chillingly, with large bones; she grabbed one of these and tore her shirt off to wrap around the end to make an impromptu torch. Fuel, what did she have for fuel? She patted her pockets frantically and found nothing but a small bottle of hugely expensive and rather pungent perfume. Well, it was better than nothing – a can of lighter fluid was probably too much to ask for.

  She was backed against the wall of the pit by this time with scores of infuriated scorpions crowding around her ankles. It was something of a miracle, she thought, that she had not been stung yet. But every time she kicked them away, they seemed to lose their minds and turn on each other. There were a number of dead bodies lying around the floor of the pit already. Not the most co-operative of God’s creatures obviously. On the other hand, there were hundreds of them; she could not rely on them killing each other off before at least one of them got her. Hundreds of them, and only one of her, it was just about the arithmetic really.

  She poured a little of the perfume onto the rags of her shirt and held the lighter to it. It went up with a satisfying “whump!”, so far, so good.

  She waved the torch in front of her, low to the ground and cleared a space in front of her and walked cautiously forward crying, ‘back, back!’ like a crazed lion tamer.

  In this way, she managed to get several feet into the centre of the pit. She was trying to edge her way toward the glow, where she guessed, or rather, fervently hoped there was an opening which was letting the light in. The scorpions would not follow her in there she was certain. Probably for the same reason that it would not be a brilliant idea for her to go in either – the fact that the cavern beyond was on fire. Still it was the only way out, so she was disappointed when she was forced to turn back by the intense heat. Disappointed, but not really surprised.

  She gritted her teeth; she had gone too far now to give up. She made her way back to the centre of the cavern and looked up at the threads still hanging there. The ones that had been around her legs still hung low enough to reach, maybe she could climb up to the ledge around the top, and swing herself onto it. It was worth a try surely.

  As she swung herself up with the torch held precariously between her teeth, she did not want to think where it had been, she dropped the bottle of perfume; it smashed spilling a positive flood of perfume onto the ground below. The scorpions scattered. ‘No taste,’ she thought. ‘That’s expensive stuff that is.’ Then she thought, ‘oh what the hell,’ and dropped the torch before the perfume seeped away into the earth. The ground was as dry as tinder and littered with dry sticks and old bones, and it went up like a bonfire immediately. Tamar laughed to see the panicking scorpions flee as the fire spread.

  ‘Die, suckers,’ she crowed. Within seconds, the whole floor of the pit was a raging inferno. ‘Oh hell,’ she began to climb frenetically, as the flames leapt higher.

  Once she was high enough to feel safe she was exultant. She had done it, all by herself, without magic. She had never done anything brave without her magic. She had never, therefore, really done anything brave at all. She felt giddy with triumph. It was a real accomplishment for her. She did not even think about the string of astonishing co-incidences that had allowed her to achieve it.

  She looked up. If there was a roof to which this thread was attached, it was too far up to be seen. She climbed a little further up, and just dangled for a while, watching the flames consume everything in sight.

  Then she started to climb.

  ~ Chapter Twenty Five~

  Denny surveyed his new surroundings with a certain amount of complacency. It had been all too easy in the end. He was sure he could work out the next step. It had been a stroke of pure genius, he smugly felt, to go back to the mirror and see what the future held in regard to his escape from the desert island, and then just make sure that the future he had seen came true.

  This challenge, he felt, would be easy by comparison.

  It had been ludicrously simple in the end. So simple, that he was sure he would have thought of it in the end. Which when you think about it, had to be the case because if he never would have thought of it, then it could not have been in his future. In fact, what he actually did had to do with his decision to look in the mirror again in the first place. When he slowed down the images, he saw himself using the mirror as a portal into the future. So that is what he did. Confused? Denny was. Whenever he tried to work out how it had worked it sent his brain spinning. (But it had worked, that was the main thing.) He had a sneaking suspicion that it really should not have worked. He just could not get his head round it. Surely you could not just step into a future that had not been created yet, without first taking the steps to create that future? If there was a point in the future where he had arrived in this place, then surely there had to have been steps taken in order to arrive at that point. Somehow he had taken a shortcut. This was hard to think about, but it had been easy to do.

  Be that as it may, and he would leave all this conundrum solving to a more convenient moment, he was now standing in a large circular room, with doors all around it. The walls were stone and the doors were typical castle doors, in heavy oak with large black studs hammered into them. Between each door was a large flaming torch in a wall bracket. The floor was made up of large, uneven flags. So, apart from the multiplicity of doors, it was a typical castle room. Denny suspected that this room was the staging area for the rotating hallway trick he and Tamar had been treated to earlier. The hub of the whole operation. He was getting close; he could feel it. And that meant that there was a strong probability that Tamar was behind one of those doors. Well, since he had no way of knowing which one, he would just have to take them in turn. There were around fifty doors, and since the room was circular with no distinguishing features anywhere and the doors were all alike and unmarked. Denny decided that he would have to mark each door himself as he tried them. The torches would come in handy for that. He opened the first door. It opened onto an empty room. Denny had not been prepared for that. He closed the door, and then, on a whim, opened it again. It was as he had thought. This time it opened to the outside air, some sort of turret at the top of a tower. There were armed soldiers leaning on their halberds and having a quiet smoke. Damn. He closed the door hurriedly before they spotted him. Damn, damn, DAMN. He opened it again, this time it was a garden. Denny sighed. This was going to take a lot longer than he had first thought.

  * * *

  Tamar had decided to give up and accept her fate. She was never going to get out of here. She had climbed up the twanging threads with immense difficulty. She was hot and sweaty and tired. She was fed up and discouraged, but she had kept on going for an hour or more, riding a wave of victory. This feeling had been slowly ebbing away as her strength grew less. And now, just when the ledge was finally in sight, she had almost fallen, and when she tried to save herself, she got herself so hopelessly tangled up in the threads that she was now
pretty much immobilized, and was now hanging there, like a bag of washing. It was over. She gave up.

  She had been hanging around for about half an hour more, when she saw a yellow shaft of light appear off to the left of her. She swung herself round, bobbing and swaying to see where it had come from. There, in the side of the cliff, was an open doorway, how was it that she had not noticed it before? She squinted into the light and made out a shadowy figure standing in the doorway. It was shaking. As her eyes grew used to the light, she could make out a face. She fixed the figure with a baleful eye. ‘You took your bloody time, didn’t you?’ she said.

  It was Denny, and he was shaking with laughter.

  ~ Chapter Twenty six ~

  ‘It was amazing,’ Tamar was saying, excitedly. ‘I mean I was afraid, really afraid, you know, but I did it anyway, just like you would have. I mean I think I know now, a little bit, anyway, what it must be like to be you – to be human. You know I’ve seen humans do things that they must have been terrified to do, now that I come to think about it. I’ve seen you do stuff, you know, that you must have… anyway, I never knew what it felt like to be afraid before. It’s terrible, really terrible; well you know that, obviously. I’ll tell you something; I’ll never take my magic for granted again. I mean, my God… are you listening?’