"You're both better off than I," fluted a voice. The two young men turned. Star's face was taut with pain, but she forced a smile. "You can direct your lives a little or at least count on some surprises. Look what fate awaits me back at the palace and count yourselves lucky."
She paused, looking down at nothing, then said, "I apologize for snapping earlier. My leg throbbed like fury, and my temper grew short."
Embarrassed, her friends looked at the road.
"If I'm short-tempered, I'm also stubborn," the samara continued. "Who knows? I might foist my arranged marriage off on my sister Tunkeb-she does whatever my parents wish anyway-then I could marry anyone I choose. I might marry one of you. Or both!"
Her teasing made the men blush, so they were glad when riders approached in blue kilts and tunics painted with eight-pointed stars. Yuzas Anhur, captain of Star's personal bodyguard, spurred the troop to a canter. "Your majesty," he said, "why do you persist in slipping away…?"
Star tuned out the familiar lecture as guards fussed over her bandaged leg. Gheqet and Tafir collected black looks for leading her majesty into danger.
Following the aqueduct, the party eventually passed from grasslands into farm country, a beltland three leagues wide and lush with squash, strawberries, winter melons, caraway seeds, green and broad beans, chickpeas, cabbages, eggplant, asparagus, celery, lentils, rye, and barley. Farms and granaries dotted rich brown fields well-tended and well-magicked by farmers, well-manured by livestock, and well-watered by irrigation ditches fed by the aqueduct. Eventually the road left behind the heady aroma of spring blossoms and manure and dropped over the lip of Cursrah's valley.
More travelers rode camels, jounced in chariots, were toted in pallaquins, and even perched astride the occasional elephant. Some were Cursrahns but more were strangers, aiming for the city like bees to a hive. Visitors were another measure of Cursrah's wealth, for scholars journeyed from all points of the civilized world to study at the famous library. "The world in ignorance streams to Cursrah's enlightened door," citizens liked to say.
Like newcomers, Gheqet and Tafir paused at the lip of the valley to look. The city below glittered like nested, jeweled bracelets. Sculpted valley walls and precisely laid streets formed concentric rings as regular as ripples in a pool.
Nodding at the many visitors, Tafir joked, "Our pretty city draws more suitors."
"True," Gheqet said, frowning, "but I hope they brought enough to drink."
The two young men still led Star's horse, and now turned onto the winding cobbled road that switchbacked down the valley rim.
Tafir asked, "How's that?"
"Lately I've learned a few things from studying engineering and stonemasonry that bother me, Taf. Our aqueduct and its lakehouse… they're parts of a very delicate instrument."
"Delicate?" laughed Tafir. "What an odd word. They were built by genies and genie-slaves."
"That's just it," Gheqet admitted. "This city was built by genies but is maintained by men, mostly."
"Tell me."
As they walked, the architect's apprentice talked and pointed. Cursrah, everyone knew, was a thrice-blessed city, for it had sprung from the brow of Calim. Greatest of ancient genies, Calim came from the far south to the peninsula now called Calimshan in his celebrated Great Arrival. Plying powers beyond imagination, Calim worked endless wonders. Among them, in one barren, sandswept valley, an army of minor genies and their human and non-human slaves labored for years to fashion a city called by some "Calim's Cradle" and others "the College," for Cursrah served a sole purpose: to record the accomplishments of Faerun's greatest genie, Calim.
From high on the valley road the young citizens could see the fabulous library and college, a long, low building anchored by stair-stepped ziggurats and painted a blinding white. At the city's center, on its own water-ringed island, glowed the fabulous Palace of the Phoenix, rich with gold leaf. Radiating outward streamed plazas, arches, lush shaded gardens, solemn gated necropolises, the domed temple of Shar and the crescent moon temple of Selune, and more. The city of ten thousand spilled up the slopes in scores of high-walled mansions, apartment houses, neat cottages, and-highest of all-ancestral tombs with their ends brightly painted or hung with floral wreathes. Only at the south did the valley's rim dip, and there a sturdy wall was manned by the bakkal's tiny army.
"Anyone can see that Cursrah is prosperous," Gheqet admitted, "but money can't buy water that doesn't exist."
"Doesn't exist? We've got oceans of water. Well, lakes of it."
Tafir pointed across the city. Throughout the public sector, and at every home, pools and fountains and waterfalls sparkled like living things in the bright spring sunshine.
"True, but the aqueduct water enters there," Gheqet said, pointing higher up the valley wall where a blank stone building crouched, "where it's channeled into underground pipes, then,"-the apprentice swept his finger toward the valley's lowest point, where glittered a small, clear lake sporting sailboats and punts, and a tiny island sprouting a blocky building-"most of the water empties into the lake and from that pumphouse is distributed all over the city. That's where the marid lives, the sea genie bound by Calim to oversee and protect the entire waterworks from this valley clear back to the River Agis itself, at the Mouth of Cursrah. I'll concede, the whole waterworks is a miracle, Great Calim's finest work, all praises to his name and so on, but think… only this water and thin winter rains keep Cursrah alive. Every drop hinges on one fragile aqueduct and one ensorcelled water genie."
"So? Bitrabi is immortal," Tafir said, then yawned from a long night and day, and now a long walk.
"Look what happened to Calim, may all mortals revere him," Gheqet persisted. "In the Era of Skyfire he battled Memnonnar and wound up banished to the winds. Don't you see? If one genie can be banished, so can another. If Cursrah loses Bitrabi, our marid trapped against her will in that pumphouse, it loses its water… and its way of life. No one's even sure Great Calim guards our city these days. My master, old as he is, has never even seen Bitrabi. No one's seen her in over fifty years. We've put all our eggs in one basket… or all our water into one jug."
"Hush, you scurvy beggars," Yuzas Anhur, loyal defender of the crown, growled. "You speak heresy, young sir. Cursrah shall live as long as Calimshan endures."
Gheqet and Tafir let their faces go blank. Preoccupied with her aching leg, which was cradled by a guard walking alongside the horse, Star ignored how her captain chastised her friends.
"Forgive my waywardness, Yuzas," Gheqet mumbled, "I'm but a simple student with much to learn. A thousand pardons, I beg you."
"Accepted," the captain ceded, "and you may put your mind at rest. Our genies will never forsake Cursrah, no more than our other sprightly beings, for they glory in serving Calim's Cradle. From Bitrabi below to Jassan above, we're safe as long as the sun shines."
Gheqet and Tafir turned their eyes upward. Jassan was another Cursrahn legend, an invisible air genie, a djinni, who patrolled the sky and kept dragons at bay- or so people reckoned, for in the city's long history no dragon had ever come marauding. Gheqet believed in the djinni too and had been warned as a naughty child that Jassan might swoop down and eat him, and danced in the Dragon Parade every year at Jassan's Jubilee. Lately his educated mind noted it was impossible to prove or disprove the existence of a mile-high invisible air spirit.
Some guardian genies were seen every day, as well as other enchanted beings from planes known and unknown. In Cursrah's parks, sylphs flitted on dragonfly wings and sang their sad songs while stwingers swung from tree branches and filched sweetmeats from picnickers. In noble kitchens, ice mephits chilled food. Down in the sewers, steam mephits cleared drains and cured odors, and at the city's dump, elemental vermin flame-lings incinerated garbage while grigs potted rats.