The Fire Wish (7 page)

Breathing easier now, I remembered that the prince had taken the strange object out of the laboratory. If I didn’t follow, the Corps wouldn’t know what had become of it. Even though I was supposed to stay in the room, I went to the door he’d left open and stepped into the hall.

Besides, although I didn’t want to admit it, I couldn’t resist following him. He left behind the scent of cinnamon.

The walls of the hall swept up and up until they touched a ceiling covered in sharply angled blue lines. The lines spread along the ceiling like a maze, crossing each other. I ran my fingers along the tiled wall and caught up with the prince.

He hadn’t gone far, because another man had stopped him. The man clapped the prince on the back and held him still. The prince nodded once, while a grin spread across the other man’s face. I tiptoed closer and pressed myself against the wall.

“Don’t,” said Prince Kamal. “I’m trying to get out of it.”

The other man chuckled.
“Insha’Allah,”
he said. It was a human phrase that meant “God willing.” Although I’d heard Faisal say it, it was different hearing a human use it as though he said it all day long, and I grinned despite myself. “I’ll see you at prayers. You have half an hour, by the way. Better get moving.”

The prince nodded and swept by me. His robes brushed
against my ankles, and he did smell like cinnamon. Somehow he hadn’t noticed the jinni squashing herself against the wall. It took me a second after he passed to peel myself off and follow again.

The hall ended in a large, high-ceilinged room. Painted birds and vines climbed up the walls, and ornate plaster relief decorated all that remained. Tall white-and-gold columns divided the space, sprouting up to the ceiling like trees. Between the columns were more men than I wanted to count. They were close together, whispering over each other’s shoulders and debating something written on sheets of paper they shook in the air. Boys ran between them bearing trays heavy with copper pots of coffee. The smell, sweet and bitter, wafted through the columns, carrying with it odd spices Faisal hadn’t yet had me try. Rich, pungent, and masculine. I pressed the mark on my hand.

At the head of the hall, on a pedestal of rose-colored marble, stood a chair made of gilded peacocks. They reached toward each other, interweaving their necks to create a throne of such metallic poetry that I stared.

I knew that chair. I’d seen a sketch of it in one of Faisal’s books. It was the caliph’s throne. I laughed, despite the danger of discovery. If there’d been any doubt that I’d gotten into the palace, there wasn’t now.

The prince was making his way around the older men. He paused, looked at the throne, and then trotted, faster now, through a set of double doors across the room. Everyone moved to let him pass, bowing their heads.

I wove between the men as quickly as I could and passed through the doors before they closed. I was in another hall now, empty of anyone but the prince, and let out a silent sigh of relief. Any one of those men could have bumped into me.

The prince had stepped into a hall glimmering in gold foil. He stopped at a set of golden doors and knocked twice.

“Kamal? Come in,” came a sharp response. I smiled, knowing I’d guessed his identity correctly. The prince reached for the door handle with his free hand and hesitated. Then he shook his head, as if clearing his thoughts, and pulled the door open. I should have stopped there. I should have gone home. Instead, I leaped across the width of the hall into the space behind him.

The air inside was scented with rose syrup, and the room was completely white. The plaster adornments climbing up the walls were the color of milk. The furniture, made of interwoven reeds, was the same color as the walls. And the plants, which hung suspended from the six windows, had been pruned so that only their pale blossoms remained.

A man with a robust black beard lay sprawled on a divan. It had to be the caliph. He matched the descriptions and sketches of him exactly.

“What is it?” he asked. He wore a wide leather belt over his tunic and a ruby-capped dagger. The rubies shone like drops of blood in the blindingly white room.

I didn’t dare breathe.

Prince Kamal held out his selenite sphere. “I finally figured it out.”

The caliph sighed. “Bring it here.”

The prince strode to the caliph and gave him the sphere. The caliph turned it around, then gave it back.

“I don’t see how this would work.”

“You can’t tell at first, of course,” Kamal began, “but see how it’s hollow? We can put it inside, where it’d be protected.”

“But why this kind of rock? Why not a brass tube?”

“Because brass isn’t strong enough, and this crystal resists fire. It’s almost impervious to heat. In fact, we could use this kind of rock to outfit our soldiers with—”

“How? Have them wear little balls of this hanging on their armor? It’s too heavy; it wouldn’t be worth it.”

Kamal shook his head. “No, Father, we would crush it, then find a way to bind it into the fabric. It would work—”

Crushed-selenite armor? That was brilliant, actually. It would repel our fireballs better than anything they were using now.

“Kamal, I know what you’re trying to do.” The caliph sat up and faced his son. “I know why you’re here.”

Kamal straightened, then looked down at the sphere. “I’m trying to help.”

“No, you’re trying to delay the inevitable.”

“Father, please. I have too much work to do.”

“Hashim and I talked about this at great length before he left. The girl he is going to bring back with him will be good for you. She is from a tribe whose loyalty we will need in the coming months, and more importantly, she’s from Zab. Her presence will give the people in the city more resolve in the coming battles.”

My skin prickled, and I didn’t know if it was because they were talking about Zab or because I was straining to keep my
shahtabi
going. Zab was where the chain of bloody events that had started the war had begun. It was just a village, but the humans believed we’d murdered two people there, and in a time when fear was running high, that sparked the end of the peace treaty between the races. I had been a baby then, but everyone talked about it like it had just happened.

Kamal swallowed, and when he spoke, his voice was strained. “When are they due to arrive?”

“In a day or two. Until then, you can go back to your rocks.”

Kamal’s eyes flashed at his father, but he bowed his head. Then he turned around and I had to sidestep to avoid getting run into. He pulled the door open and I followed, afraid to stay behind, alone with the caliph.

He ran down the hall, past the doors to the Court of Honor, and kept going, but I slumped against the wall, releasing the
shahtabi.
The Eyes of Iblis would want to know about this girl from Zab.

I GRIPPED THE edge of the bed platform until my fingers ached. The barge had set off, and we were drifting down the canal. Someone was piloting, but I couldn’t see who it was. Probably one of Hashim’s guards. At least one of his guards had taken a position on the bow. He stood facing downstream, ready in case anyone tried to leap off the shore onto our barge, or come up on us from another boat. As if there was any threat of that happening. The land was flat as bread all around us, and even from the little window, we could see for miles. Not down the canal, though. The view ahead was blocked by Hashim’s barge, and I tried to avoid looking at it. The first hour of our trip, he caught me watching him and he just stood there, staring with his river-water eyes until I sank back into the darkness.

Rahela and I had unpacked a few things and set them on the crate beside the bed. She took out her lap loom and began to thread it with yarn, a process that took longer than you’d think. I stretched my legs out. My toes could touch the door.
Our room was too small for two girls, especially on a trip that would take days.

“What does he expect us to do in here?” I asked Rahela.

She shrugged and continued with her loom. She’d gotten one color set into the frame and was selecting a second color.

“How can you do that right now?” I asked.

Rahela wrapped the chosen yarn around her fingers. “There’s nothing else to do, and it calms me.”

“I thought you were going to do something to the green dress.”

“I was, but right now I don’t feel like it. I’m still irritated that you ruined the red one.”

I pushed my toes into the door, not wanting to talk about the dress. After I had come back with Yashar, Mother and Rahela had ranted at me all afternoon about the dress. They wouldn’t stop until I told them I was leaving the next day. Then, when I told Rahela she was coming with me, she turned pale as snow. But she didn’t cry or complain. In fact, she didn’t say anything for the rest of the night. She just packed her trunk and then helped put the younger children to sleep, as if nothing had changed. I, on the other hand, threw my dresses into my trunk and thought of a dozen reasons why I should run away.

Now we sat, side by side, for what felt like another mile along the canal. “I could help you,” I said. I was trying to have a positive attitude. She was stuck, just as I was. We were in it together.

She studied the loom for a moment, then humphed. “Maybe later. The sun is going down soon, and we don’t have a lamp.”

I hadn’t thought of that. So we weren’t just locked into a tiny room, where we’d surely drown if the boat took on any measurable amount of water, but we would be in the dark. I stood up and took the one step to the window. The sky to our east was the hazy purple that took over at sunset. Ahead, Hashim was shaking out a prayer rug. Travel wasn’t stopped for prayers, even for the caliph’s vizier.

When the prayer call came from the barge behind us, Rahela pulled me from the window and made me kneel beside her. I tried to pray, but all I could do was go through the motions and think about how we were like birds in a cage. I snuck a peek at the sky, wishing I could fly out into it.

Later, a hanging lamp was lit on the bow of our boat. Hashim ate a meal served to him by one of the men, and the two laughed. Their voices carried across the water. If a laugh could make it, then surely he could hear me if I yelled.

“Great Vizier,” I shouted, “could we have a lamp and oil? It’s very dark in here!”

He looked up from his bowl, but it was too dark to see his face clearly. “An open flame would be too dangerous in such an enclosed place,” he called back.

“Can we come out for meals?”

“You will get out when we arrive at the palace’s dock.” He said this like he was stating a fact of nature, like how the sun rises at dawn. Then he got up and disappeared into his cabin, which was set into the center of his barge, like ours. But he didn’t share his with anyone, and he wouldn’t have been locked in.

I was about to call out again, but a figure appeared on the
other side of the door. “Dinner,” the man said. He unlocked the window, which was on a hinge that I hadn’t noticed, and passed us two bowls of lentil stew.

I took the food, and we ate in the nearly full darkness.

I looked up through the window into the indigo sky. I could almost feel the wind that blew past our locked door. I wanted to feel the wind. I wanted to be out there in the open, where anything could happen as long as I allowed it to.

I almost wore down the floorboards. I couldn’t stop pacing. On the third day of this, we slid out of the canal and into the Tigris River. The water was a deeper green and bubbled with eddies. We moved faster, and the pilot had to work harder to keep us away from the banks. For Rahela and me, though, nothing changed.

That afternoon, we rowed past Samarra, a city squished along the river like weeds against a fence. Once we cleared the city, the guard at the prow seemed more tense than usual. He stood straighter, if that was possible. A series of dark holes, some as wide as a horse, dotted the riverbank, and he kept turning his head to look at them.

“Look at that,” I said to Rahela. She put down her loom and I gave her some room at the window. “What are those?”

The holes grew larger. How was the bank not sliding down into the river?

“I think those are tunnels, or caves,” she whispered. Rahela rarely whispered, and when she did, you paid attention.

“Jinni tunnels?” I asked. She didn’t answer, so I cleared my throat and shouted, “Hey, guard! Are those jinni tunnels?”

He glanced back at me and nodded. He didn’t have to tell us to be quiet. Rahela backed into the cabin.

“Zayele,” she hissed, “get away from the window.”

“It’s fine,” I said, and I slid my fingers through the slats.

The tunnels were dark and vacant. Either the jinn were hiding from a few poorly defended boats, or they had been driven inward by a battle. Every battle we’d had with the jinn was at the mouth of a tunnel. They were trying to work their way back onto the surface to take our lands. Their numbers had grown and their little cavern wasn’t big enough anymore. Also, they were driven by the devil himself. They wanted most to rid the earth of humans.

According to my father, the caliph’s army had been able to hold them off, even though the jinn had powerful wishes on their side. The army had positioned itself at the mouth of every cave and tunnel that led to the jinni cavern. So far, the jinn hadn’t been able to make it out, and their primary weapons were fireballs, which scorched more than they burned.