Then if the man on the black horse was real, then the other group was also real, which might mean that Sir Hugo’s party was right here in the valley with us, even though hidden by the Ifrit’s magic.
I glanced toward Hugo. He was trying to sit up enough to eat. The Ifrit’s wife seemed taken with him and bustled around, offering him choice tidbits of fruit. But in the meantime I didn’t dare say anything to him about his father; he had had his hopes raised too often already.
It could have been either Arnulf or King Warin with the ebony horse, come to try to find the secret of the Wadi Harhammi but caught by the Ifrit before he could fly away again. If it was King Warin, I abruptly found myself hoping the Ifrit would protect us from him.
It was ironic, I thought wryly, to be seeking safety in an unpredictable creature who had planned to kill us-and still might.
“This is just the first part of the secret, Ifrit,” I said. “So far I’ve proved to you that I’m not bluffing. But the man who commanded you to capture us might not want even you to know the rest, at least not yet, so I’d better wait until he comes. In the meantime, you promised to let me have my magical powers back.”
He had in fact promised nothing of the sort, but he did not contradict me. “They’re probably around here someplace,” he muttered.
He said nothing more, only set me down on the ground again. But slowly at first, like the first trickle of water in a dry stream bed, then more and more rapidly, I could feel knowledge of the Hidden Language coming back. It was as though blinders had been removed from my eyes and plugs from my ears. The world around me seemed much more real, much more visible and intense, when I could experience it with magic as well as normal human senses.
Even knowing we would all be dead shortly, I felt filled with unbounded delight. I was so grateful to the Ifrit for restoring my abilities, even though he had taken them away originally, that I could have kissed his stubbly cheek.
But I knew even more intensely than I had already guessed that my own knowledge of magic was trivial and indeed useless for combating the Ifrit.
“Thank you!” I called up to him with my best smile. My mind seemed suddenly to be working much more clearly. “Could you tell me a little more about the man who commanded you to watch for us? I want to be ready when he comes.”
The Ifrit frowned. “I am furious with him,” he said after a moment. I didn’t know if this was good or bad. “He was the mage who first freed me from Solomon’s spell.”
Kaz-alrhun, I thought. “And why are you furious with him?” I prompted.
“I granted his first wish, but he then betrayed me,” said the Ifrit grumpily. “I let him have two wishes for letting me out of the bottle, of course, although he made me agree to come grant them whenever he called, wherever he might be. He finally called for his first wish last year, ordering me to guard this valley and keep my captives alive, especially people from Yurt.”
Everyone in the East except us, I was now convinced, knew something special about Yurt.
“But one of the people from Yurt put me back into the bottle,” continued the Ifrit.
For a second I had a nightmare sense that either I had met this Ifrit before without remembering it, or there was some other kingdom of Yurt somewhere that I ought to know about.
“The mage must have given him the bottle on purpose,” added the Ifrit with wounded dignity. “Therefore I do not think I will answer when he summons me a second time.”
I looked up at the Ifrit’s furrowed brow. “In that case,” I said craftily, “if the mage is not coming, and you’re supposed to keep us safe until he does, then you’ll have to keep us alive forever.” As long as we were still alive, I intended to escape well before forever came.
The Ifrit seated himself slowly on an enormous boulder and thought this over. “But the other man,” he said, “the one who freed me the second time, said I should kill anyone who came to the valley, except for those other people from Yurt.”
It looked as though the Ifrit had gotten himself into a moral dilemma by granting contradictory wishes to different people. I hoped to find out what had happened someday myself. “In the meantime you have to keep everyone from Yurt alive,” I said firmly.
I left him trying to work through this and hurried back to the others. It sounded as though someone powerful might still appear at any minute, even if the Ifrit did refuse to grant the mage’s second wish. I was in time to get some of the melon and settled myself again to look at the onyx ring. Now that I knew what kind of spell Elerius had put on it, I might have some chance of unraveling it.
“I keep thinking about that boy and my stallion,” said Dominic, sitting down beside me. “Do you think he was simply trying to escape the Ifrit, or was he going to alert someone after having led us into a trap?”
“It just looked like panicked flight to me,” I said. “I don’t know where he’d go. The emir’s city wouldn’t be safe for him, and it took us many weeks of travel to get here from Xantium.”
“It wouldn’t take him nearly as long to get back, riding Whirlwind all out, especially if he didn’t detour to the Holy City. I’m beginning to wonder, Wizard, if we should start expecting that mage.”
“It would certainly take Maffi much longer than two days to reach Xantium,” I said, “even on Whirlwind. And the Ifrit’s just told me he’s not answering any magical calls from the mage.” I stopped speaking abruptly to concentrate more fully at the onyx ring.
While talking to Dominic, I had been teasing at it delicately with little tendrils of magic. Suddenly I saw the whole spell as clearly as though it had been written out, step-by-step, in a book of wizardry. I could see exactly which words of the Hidden Language Elerius had used, the complicated and quite inventive way he had combined a spell of discovery with a spell of sight, his elegant means of attaching the spell to the onyx so that it was permanently latent in the stone yet would need someone with fairly powerful magic-or at least the right powerful spell-to put it into action.
I knew at once which words to say, and for a second the valley again flickered with other mirage-like images, even if no one could see them but me.
But this was wrong. I had never been able to visualize a spell like this in my life, even my own. I knew I wasn’t this good. In fact, I didn’t think anyone was.
I looked up, startled, toward the Ifrit. Had he given me his magical abilities instead of my own?
No, because with this strange clarity I now had, it was quite plain that I had nothing more than the mix of school magic, herbal magic, and improvisation I had always had, and the Ifrit had his own enormous fund of powerful though unfocused magic. But the difference now was my ability to recognize a spell and all its attributes.
“I think I see the difference at last,” I said excitedly to Dominic, who didn’t have the slightest idea what I was talking about. “Wes tern magic is organized scientifically. There’s very little scientific about eastern magic. That’s why Melecherius had so much trouble explaining it, even if he understood it himself. Instead it’s an art.”
“Do you and this scientific art know how to get us out of here?” asked Dominic.
“I’m working on it,” I said. If this clarity only lasted, I should be able to discover the spell on Dominic’s ruby ring as well. Maybe if the Ifrit wanted to take a nap, and he took his wife off with him somewhere while he did so, then I could try to use the onyx to locate Sir Hugo’s party, and we could-
“What’s that?” said Dominic sharply.
I looked up quickly, putting together far more easily than I ever had before a scientific far-seeing spell.
It was a flying carpet, soaring over the steep edge of the valley and approaching us rapidly. Seated on it were Maffi and the massive black bulk of Kaz-alrhun.
PART EIGHT — THE WADI HARHAMMI