I
I wrapped my magic firmly around me and stood up to meet Kaz-alrhun. He hopped off the carpet as soon as it had set down gracefully on the sandy soil. “If you are here to gloat over us,” I said with dignity, “and to watch your Ifrit kill us, you might at least let us know first why everyone in the East seems to find the mention of Yurt so exciting.”
But he ignored me. “Ifrit!” he shouted. “In the name of God, the all-compassionate, I adjure you not to harm the tiniest hair on the heads of these people!”
My suppositions shifted wildly, but I had nothing with which to replace them. I had steeled myself to face a mage who was about to order the Ifrit to kill us, and instead he had just commanded the Ifrit to spare us.
An enormous bare foot was suddenly between Kaz-alrhun and me as the Ifrit stepped forward. He picked up the mage to peer at him. “They do have rather tiny hairs,” he agreed, running a clawed hand through his own thick locks. His voice was about ten octaves lower than the mage’s. “But I am guarding this valley, and they came tumbling in. So did you, for that matter. Are you from Yurt?”
“Do you want me to bind you by the name of the Most High, as King Solomon once bound you?” Kaz-alrhun demanded. He was putting a paralysis spell together, one which I would never have been able to duplicate, full of eastern tricks and connections unlike anything I’d ever seen before but which I could observe as clearly now as though it were a picture before my eyes. I wasn’t sure it really would bind an Ifrit, but it looked as though it had greater potential than anything of mine.
“All right,” replied the Ifrit sulkily. He bent to put the mage back down on the ground. “I wasn’t going to make them die an evil death anyway, or at least not yet.”
I expected Kaz-alrhun to accept this agreement, but he abruptly smiled, flashing a gold tooth, and threw his paralysis spell onto the Ifrit. With a stunned and rather puzzled look, the Ifrit subsided onto the sand, as majestically and inexorably as a piece of a mountain breaking free and tumbling toward the valley. His hand opened, and the mage hopped out.
“Now!” cried Kaz-alrhun. “Onto the carpet! All of you, if you value the life God gave you!”
None of this made any sense. “But I thought you had set your Ifrit to capture us!”
His gold tooth flashed again as he smiled widely. “But this is not my Ifrit.”
I had no time to create new assumptions, but my old ones were irretrievably gone. “We’re never all going to fit on a little carpet like that,” I said, the one thing I thought I could say with certainty.
“Watch and learn, Daimbert!” He said a few quick words, gave a great flourish, and the carpet twitched, shivered, and grew until it was indeed big enough for all of us, even the horses. “Come!” he said when I hesitated. “Do you not wish to escape the Ifrit?”
I shook myself into action and herded the rest of our startled party onto the carpet with Maffi. The Ifrit, stretched out with his eyes shut, snorted as though he might soon awaken from the paralysis-and awaken furious. I had never flown on a magic carpet and had no reason to trust Kaz-alrhun’s, but we didn’t have much choice.
It lurched up from the ground, and we all clutched at each other. The horses neighed desperately as it seemed we must slide off the carpet’s edge, but it straightened itself as it began to climb. We rotated twice, then sailed slowly up and over the rim of the valley.
From the air we could see for scores of miles across the sere desert landscape, and I thought I could spot the glittering spires of Bahdroc in the distance and the uneven line of rocky hills beyond. I caught a flash of light reflected from the Dark Sea and, for one moment, saw what might have been the spires of the once ensorcelled city. The carpet turned around again, a quarter mile above the ground, then plunged downward to light on the steep hillside outside the circular valley.
I tumbled more than stepped off the carpet, glad to feel the solid ground beneath my feet again. For the brief moment we had been up in the air, the carpet’s flight had seemed strong and smooth, but I could see it would take me a while to get used to the rough takeoffs and rapid landings.
“This is good fortune indeed,” said Kaz-alrhun, straightening the odd-shaped pieces of silk that covered his enormous bulging body. “I have never before ventured to bind an Ifrit. Even you, Daimbert, were able to find a way out of one of my spells. I cannot be sure how long my magic will hold such a creature.”
“But are we safe, this close?” asked Ascelin. He seemed to be rallying, though Hugo still looked too exhausted to care.
“Of course not,” said Kaz-alrhun cheerfully.
“You wouldn’t have come all the way from Xantium just to rescue us from the Ifrit,” I said. “Why are you here?”
“My reason is the same as yours, Daimbert,” said the mage. “I wish to enter the Wadi.”
This entire trip I had had to keep adjusting my expectations, as everything turned out to be not quite what it seemed, as I looked for aid one moment to those whom at another point I considered my enemies. A very short time ago, I had feared Kaz-alrhun’s arrival. Now quite irrationally I found myself thinking of him as an ally.
“You can have the onyx ring Maffi stole from you,” I said, pulling it off. “Don’t be too hard on him.”
This set the mage into a paroxysm of laughter. “He told you he stole it?” He gave the boy a buffet on the side of the head, still laughing. “And you believed him?”
There were a number of things I needed to find out at once, but one took precedence. Maffi still stood on the carpet, carefully not meeting my eye. I took him firmly by the arm. “So Kaz-alrhun sent both you and this ring with us on purpose,” I said, putting it back on my finger since the mage apparently didn’t want it. “I should have realized, ever since you first offered to escort us to the Thieves’ Market in Xantium, than you were working for him. Did you enjoy spying on us all the way from Xantium? Were you sending back messages from every oasis by means of the deep pools? And you made me believe that you wanted to ‘learn’ magic!”
Maffi looked as subdued as I had ever seen him, but he still managed a grin. “I do want to learn magic, my master! The communications spell was all Kaz-alrhun would teach me.” He promptly created a large pink illusory spot on the front of my shirt, as though hoping this would placate me.
“First you need to learn to play chess,” said Kaz-alrhun to the boy, “before I could begin to teach you magic.”
“But don’t forget,” Maffi continued to me, “if it hadn’t been for me, the mage wouldn’t have known to come save you!”
Dominic stepped up at this point. “Where is my stallion, boy?” he demanded.
“At the first oasis north of the emir’s city,” said Maffi with another grin. “That really is a magnificent horse. I would never have been able to bring help so quickly if I’d been riding any other steed.”
So when Maffi had escaped, he had ridden like the wind to the first place from which he could send a message to Xantium, and Kaz-alrhun had come swooping across the desert on his flying carpet. But if the mage had been using the boy to keep an eye on us, and thought he had to come rescue us, then someone else had set the Ifrit here, someone who might himself appear at any moment.
“The Wadi’s down there in the circular valley,” I said to Kaz-alrhun, “but it’s hidden-or only visible for a few seconds. The Ifrit isn’t going to let us get to it if he can help it. Why did you let him out of the bottle in the first place?”
Kaz-alrhun smiled slowly. “It was not I.”
“He said it was a mage-” But there must be many mages in the East, most of whom I hadn’t met.
“That mage,” said Kaz-alrhun enigmatically, “hoped that an Ifrit would help him find the Wadi’s secret. He was mistaken.”
“Then you and I and Prince Dominic need to get in before that mage gets here.” I wondered briefly why a mage with the power to master an Ifrit couldn’t find the Wadi’s secret, but I pushed the issue aside. There were still too many other things I didn’t understand. “But tell me first, Mage. What is in there?”