Tony and Abdul walked through the palace. There were places where there was no longer a roof. The roof-members were out in the prison-meadow where they had waited for Tony to speak to them. There were places where there were no walls. There was one spot where even all flooring had vanished, and Tony saw with some astonishment that beneath the very fabric of the royal palace of the djinn, there was sparse grass and sandy soil, as if this particular part of the palace had not even been in existence for very many days.
Abdul made a dignified flourish before the chasm. He leaped agilely outward into emptiness in what might have been a graceful swan dive—and unfolded himself as a portable suspension bridge that neatly spanned the gap. Tony walked across. He did not quite turn in time to see the process by which Abdul returned to his more normal form.
"Majesty," said Abdul blandly, "have you made your plans as yet?"
"Eh? Plans? Hm—not yet," said Tony.
"I am the first of your servants and subjects, Majesty," Abdul told him piously. "I beg you to trust in me for a time—at least until you find a better!"
Tony said impatiently:
"All right. But why do you call me Maj—"
He stopped. As he spoke, he had passed through a doorway. It was but one of dozens he had allowed Abdul to lead him through. But this was different. He had come unannounced and unwittingly into the audience hall of the King of the Djinns. It was a colossal hall, some sixty feet high and perhaps six hundred feet long. Its walls blazed with all the phony grandeur the djinn assigned to wall-duty could imagine. It was very magnificent indeed.
The group of djinns at its far end was less magnificent. There were but half a dozen of them. They were gathered timorously about one of their number, who was patently their king. And he fumbled with what Tony suddenly realized was the only actual artifact he had seen in any djinn's hands. It was the only accessory he had noted which was not a part of the djinn who wore or carried it.
This object was distinctly non-djinnian. The ancient djinn who clutched it jealously was plainly bewildered by it. To judge by the crown on his head and various other royal insignia, he could be none but the djinn king in person. And he was the first and only djinn Tony had ever seen who really looked old. A djinn looked always as old as he thought, but the King of the Djinns was no longer even able to think of himself as young. He was very ancient indeed, and he was hideously ugly—Tony heard later that there was a trace of efreet blood in him—and he fumbled querulously with an object which surely no djinn had ever conceived or made.
It was a device of glass and corroded bronze and other metals. The glass part of it was remarkably familiar. It was exactly the shape of one of those fluorescent-ended tubes on whose larger, coated surface an image appears in a television set. The rest of it was completely cryptic to Tony. There were coils, and there was something that could be a condenser, and there were objects which could even be batteries, in age-blackened bronze cases. But the whole was old. Unspeakably old. And, of course, batteries could not be expected to hold a charge after as many centuries as the patina on the bronze implied.
"Greeting!" said Tony sternly. He had his cigarette lighter handy.
The djinn king looked up with an elderly start. Then he scowled portentously.
"Hah! The human Lord Toni," he rumbled. "You have betrayed my hospitality, human! It is well for you that I am merciful! But you are my guest! Therefore I take no vengeance on you in my own house. But your camel will return you to Barkut within the hour! The truce between me and Barkut ends! I shall destroy the city and the people. I shall blot out the memory of the nation! I shall—"
Tony found his eyes hot and angry.
"Interesting! You invited me here to have me murdered because you learned that my nation isn't troubled with djinn! You were afraid I might lead Barkut to security! But your planned murder backfired, so now you'll try the same thing openly!" Then he bluffed. "And how do you propose to destroy Barkut? You have seen what I can do!"
The djinn king glowered at Tony. With somehow the air of one changing costume to a more appropriate garb, he swelled to a greater size. Tusks appeared between his lips. His complexion became a ghastly blue. Horns showed on his head. The armor which appeared at the same time was tastefully decorated with human skulls. But he still looked old. And Tony felt that he was uneasy.
"Human!" he roared. "See you this thing in my hands? It is the great treasure of the djinn crown! With this have my djinns been kept subject! With this will I destroy Barkut and the sniveling traitors who bow to you! Know you what this is?"
Tony had a hunch amounting to conviction that the djinn king had been puzzling over the device when he entered. He had plainly no great knowledge either of machinery or electronics. Tony had not much more. But he simply could not believe that any device of such great age could still be in working order. He bluffed again.
"Of course I know what it is!" he said scornfully. "Every low drinking-place in my nation has one! You look in the large end of the tube!"
Speaking of the device as a television set, Tony spoke with strict truthfulness. But he felt the jerking tension in the djinns about the king grow suddenly less. The king himself relaxed visibly.
"Ho!" rumbled the king zestfully. "That was a matter I knew! I knew that! Ha! I but tested you to see if you truly know this device. Then you know that with it pointed at a rebellious djinn or a human city, at any distance I may create explosions beside which the destruction of Es-Souk is as the glow of a firefly!"
The other elderly djinns about him laughed uproariously. Their mirth was almost hysterically relieved. It sounded as if the djinn king had not known which was the business end of the gadget. He had been trying helplessly to figure out how to aim it. And Tony had told them.
"Go you back to Barkut," bellowed the king gleefully. "Tell the humans there that from my palace I shall destroy them all!"
Tony knitted his brows. He felt cold prickles up and down his spine. He couldn't believe the thing would work, as old as it was. But the djinn ought to know! So he said distastefully:
"From your palace? With its walls of djinns?" He remembered Abdul's weeping gratitude out on the sand, after the duel was over, because only Es-Souk had perished. "Remember what will happen if by accident you destroy a djinn nearby! I do not advise you to use that device. Besides, consider how much more deadly is mine!"
He snapped open the cigarette lighter. He blew gently on the wick. The faint fragrance of lasf . . .
There was instant, howling panic. Abdul flashed out the door by which he and Tony had entered. The king and his councilors fled in tumult. Even the floor of the audience hall heaved and melted away, and Tony tumbled some four or five feet to the ground. He was abruptly in the open air with the palace dissolving all about him and whirlwinds darting away in crazy flight in every direction.
Farthest, and fleeing fastest, seemed to be the king.
But the djinn king had not dropped his gadget. Tony hunted anxiously all around. He didn't believe it could work, but still—