“Are you truly he?” Lakshmi swayed closer again, hitting Matt with a sensual blast twice as strong as anything she’d dealt before. “Of course I shall not kill you… but perhaps I can remove you from this conflict by other means. What say you, mortal… will you spend a month or so with a djinna? I promise you pleasures of which you can barely dream, ecstasy so intense as to make you think you have died.”
Matt swallowed hard, wondering how his spells had backfired. “Look, you don’t really have to show that you’re grateful… “
“I do not,” she breathed, lips only inches from his own. “I am entirely selfish in this. I seek my own pleasure, but I assure you it shall result in your own. Do not fear this conscience of yours; you shall die to remorse, only to come alive again to delights only spirits can know.”
“Exactly… only the spirit can know true ecstasy.” Matt clung to the idea, like Ulysses lashed to the mast.
“That means that the real thing, the fullest intensity of it, is only for those in love.”
“Perhaps among your kind,” she said, “not mine.” Her breasts brushed his chest.
Matt fought the urge to step back, knowing how that would end. He had to convince her, not avoid her… and had to do it with his body screaming at him to stop being an idiot and take what was offered. “You wouldn’t want to take your pleasure knowing I wasn’t really enjoying it as much as I could, would you?”
The djinna stilled. “If that is true of you, mortal man, you are the only male of such persuasion that I have ever met.”
“No, the others just don’t admit it, even to themselves,” Matt told her. “That, or they’ve never known what it is to be really in love with someone who’s in love with them.” For a moment, a wave of sorrow swept him, pity for all the poor people who had never known the intoxication of being in love. He remembered what Saul had told him once, and said it again now:… If you’re not in love, it’s nothing. It’s a long, tantalizing climb, but when you get to the top, there’s nothing but ashes.”
Lakshmi stepped back an inch, tears on her lashes. “What is this heaviness that drags at my heart of a sudden? O wicked magician, you have made me sad again!”
Matt realized that his pity for the untold millions had engulfed her. “It’s just the sorrow that comes over me when I realize that so many people have never really been in love. It happens whenever I remember how lucky I am, to love and be loved.”
Even as he said it, joy flooded through him. The djinna felt it, too; astonishment swept her face. “What an amazing feeling! Can mortals truly know such bliss?”
“The lucky ones, yes.”
“I could almost begin to believe that some things may be sacred.” Lakshmi stepped farther away, face becoming stern with the effort of pulling her allure back in. “I could not intrude on something so precious. No, Wizard Matthew, I’ll not beguile you with dalliance. How, then, may I thank you for freeing me from the sorcerer’s bonds?”
Matt heaved a silent sigh of relief. “You could tell me some more about the sorcerer who sent you after me, and the army he’s helping conquer Ibile. Where did they come from? How did they get this far into Merovence?”
“As to how they came in, your border guards made no effort to keep them out,” she said, surprised.
“They admit all who claim to have business here.”
“Yes, the disadvantage of an open border.” Matt had recommended the policy himself. “On the other hand, why bother closing the roads when they could walk in through the fields so easily?”
“As thousands of folk from Ibile do even now,” Lakshmi told him. “I have seen them from the air, when I have gone about the errands on which my master sent me.” She grinned. “My former master, now.”
For a second, Matt imagined he saw pointed teeth. He hid a shudder and wondered what kind of spirit he had loosed on the world. “I hadn’t realized we were absorbing a flood of refugees. I’ll have to send word to the queen so she can have support services ready.” He wondered why they hadn’t had any word from her reeves in the provinces. “How long has this been going on?”
“Perhaps a week.”
Allow a few days for the reeves to realize something big was afoot, another day for them to decide they should report it, three more days for the messengers to arrive… yes, Matt could see why word hadn’t arrived till Alisande had left the castle. “So the Mahdi’s big offensive only started a couple of weeks ago?”
“It did,” the djinna confirmed. “Of course, for half a year he has been biting off one province at a time, but the folk who fled that war only needed to go to a province he had not yet conquered. There have been some coming through the mountains for several months, but the steady outpouring did not come till the Mahdi made his rule among the borderlands completely sure, then struck north against King Rinaldo.”
“And Christians were told to convert or get out?”
“Not forced,” she said slowly, “but encouraged.”
“So he’s not killing or torturing unbelievers, only taxing them and keeping them out of the big-money industries.” Matt nodded. “Well, I can accept that. Even the early Christians had to place their faith above worldly success. Doesn’t mean I’m willing to let him keep doing it, but at least I don’t have to think of him as being evil.”
Lakshmi frowned. “How is this? Would you rather fight a good man than a bad?”
“No, but if my enemy deserves respect, I’d like to know it. It has something to do with whether or not I pull my punches.”
“Pull your punches?” the djinna frowned.
“How much mercy he shows,” Papa clarified.
“You mortals worry about such silly things!”
“Yes, I’m sure.” Matt felt a chill down his spine. “Where do they come from, this Mahdi and his men?”
“From Morocco, across the strait by the great rock. Many are Arab, but most are Berbers or Rifs.”
“What started them moving?”
“Holy men arose among the hill folk, the Rif, and preached that they had found a sheikh who could lead the faithful to victory… that the time had come for a jihad to conquer Ibile.”
“Holy men.” Matt frowned. “They didn’t work magic, did they?”
“No, but my master and those like him were the ones who persuaded the holy men that the time had come, that they were seers who had seen the birth of a general who could bring Islam to Europe.”
So the sorcerers had fired up the holy men, and Nirobus had started the sorcerers. “That pretty much confirms what we guessed, and tells us a bit more.”
“What?” She frowned.
“Who we’re really fighting,” Matt said, “and where to hit them. Thanks, Lakshmi. You’ve been a big help.”
“I would be an even greater aid.” For a minute, allure blazed forth again, and she took a step closer to Matt. “Are you sure there is no other way in which I can serve you?”
“Not right now, thanks,” Matt said quickly. “In fact, you can go anywhere you want. You’re free.”
“I thank you.” She didn’t sound as though she meant it. Then the other side of her freedom must have occurred to her, because her lips curved into a secret smile. All she said, though, was “If you ride your dragon again, you will seek to fly, will you not?”
“We will,” Stegoman replied.
But Matt was finally picking up on hints. “Any reason we shouldn’t?”
“There is,” the djinna told him. “The sorcerers have set other djinn about the queen’s army, and between her and the mountains, to watch for Matthew Mantrell and smite him down if they can, chase him away from Ibile if they cannot.”
Chapter Fourteen