The rose grower said nothing for a moment, instead making ruminative hums and grunts. “Go around to the south side of the city,” he said at last, as though in sudden decision. “This track should take you much of the way. Ride south on the main highway for three days-the road that would eventually lead you to the pilgrimage sites. But on the fourth day stop and look off to your right for two rocky peaks in the distance, forming a gate, with a saddle of land between them. You will find a little path leading toward the peaks. The path will lead you up all the way up to the pass, and beyond the pass- Well, if you do not find your blue rose, you will be closer than you are here.”
“Thank you!” cried the king, pulled his mare around, and started along the track the grower had indicated. The huge man lifted a hand in solemn farewell.
Ascelin caught up with the king a quarter mile along and took hold of his saddle leather. “Don’t you think we’ve followed this track far enough to put him off the scent?”
“Why put him off the scent?” asked the king in surprise. “It will be easiest to follow this way around the city.”
“Because he’s going to set the emir’s guards on us!”
“And you think me a silly old fool?” said King Haimeric good-naturedly. “In fact, he has neither betrayed the emir’s trust nor betrayed us. He told us the direction to take to the Wadi Harhammi but without ever mentioning its name. And did you notice he carefully didn’t warn us against what we would find there?”
“But why do you think you can trust him, Haimeric?” Ascelin demanded.
“He loves roses,” said the king. “Come on.”
We found the path away from the main south road on the morning of the fourth day. It was well marked at the beginning, but it quickly became so faint we might never have been able to follow it for long without the sight of the gate in the line of mountains ahead of us. We needed the path, however, because it seemed the only way through a rough, dry land of crevices, bare eroded slopes that led down to exitless ravines, and tumbled boulders. Ascelin, bent low to the ground, led us as the path wound around and up, a way marked by little more than the occasional darker stone which an earlier foot had turned over, a different shade than the tawny color of stones exposed for centuries to the desert sun.
“No Ifriti have followed us, anyway,” I commented, looking back north toward the emir’s city.
“What
“They’re magical creatures,” I answered, “created when the world was first formed. In fact, it is said that they were used for some of the more difficult parts, such as digging the rivers or pushing up the mountains. They’re supposedly immortal, and over the millennia they’ve taken on something of a human shape, though they’re far, far bigger.”
“You think, then, sire,” said Dominic to the king, “that the Wadi my father wanted us to find lies beyond that line of mountains?”
“It certainly looks that way on the map,” said the king.
“And there we’ll find something wonderful and marvelous,” said Dominic eagerly.
But there imagination failed us. “My father?” said Hugo without much hope.
“The Black Pearl?” said Ascelin. “But no. Even if it was once there, too many other people will have been there before us, from King Warin to the mage Kaz-alrhun.”
“It might be Noah’s Ark,” put in the chaplain, “if the rumors Sir Hugo’s party supposedly heard in the Holy Land last year were true. We know the Ark came to rest on a mountain, but Noah and his sons left it behind when they came back down to repopulate the land.”
“The blue rose,” said the king confidently.
Maffi and I had no suggestions.
Ascelin with his hunter’s eyes and I with my far-seeing spells kept looking behind us, but the long day passed as had the three days before, with no sign of pursuit. Ascelin looked relieved, but I began to wonder if, on the contrary, the emir had not bothered to pursue us because he knew we would be captured by whatever lay ahead.
The path came in late afternoon to a last steep ascent up to the saddle between the peaks. “Shall we pass the night here,” asked Ascelin, “or try to get through the ‘gateway’ before dark?”
“We can’t stop now,” said Dominic, his face alight. “We’re so close! And look at my ring!”
The ruby was doing something I had never seen a precious stone do before. It was pulsing with an inner red light.
I pulled off my riding glove to look at the onyx ring Maffi had stolen from Kaz-alrhun. I never had been able to find the secret of the spell attached to it. It sat on my finger lifeless and dead.
“Follow me!” cried Dominic. He kicked his stallion who attacked the slope, rushing up the final half mile, hooves sure in spite of the loose stones underfoot. Maffi, riding behind him, held on desperately. “This is it!” called Dominic from the top as we all hurried to catch him.
At the pass we dismounted to rest our horses and look ahead. From here we looked down into a circular valley, five miles across. We stood on the rim, I realized, of an ancient volcano, whose huge throat had partially filled through the millennia with rubble and earth. The floor was still far below us, and the walls were so steep I could not tell how one was supposed to get down. The valley, which must catch any moisture from the sharp mountains ringing it, was just on the green side of brown. It appeared perfectly empty.
“I don’t see any place for a rose garden,” commented the king.
“Is this whole valley called the Wadi Harhammi,” asked Ascelin, “or is that only one corner of it? How will we find the place where-”
He stopped, and we all froze, following his pointing hand. A whirlwind rose from the valley floor, coming rapidly toward us. It grew bigger and bigger, and, as I realized how far away it still was, bigger yet.
In the center of the whirlwind was a dark green, almost human figure, a heavily-fleshed man like Kaz-alrhun but taller, five times, a dozen times taller.
“That-” gasped Maffi.
“That,” I said, “is an Ifrit.”
PART SEVEN — THE IFRIT
I
There didn’t seem much point in trying to escape, so we stood shoulder to shoulder and watched it come.
That is, all but Maffi. He was still on Whirlwind’s back, and he gave a shout, a tug on the reins, and was gone, scrambling wildly back down the way we had just come. Dominic started to say something and changed his mind.
I heard Joachim murmuring, just at the edge of audibility. I turned toward his profile. He looked very calm, but I recognized what he was saying. It was the litany for the dying and the dead.
I took a deep breath, trying to rally what little magic I knew that might possibly help against an Ifrit, but I never got a chance to use it. The world rose, fell, and flipped around us.
It felt as though we were standing not on a rocky pass but on a tablecloth, and an unimaginably huge giant had seized the cloth’s corners and shook. We were thrown into a void without light, with neither up or down. I whirled blind, reaching out for Joachim and Hugo, who had been next to me until a second ago, and found nothing.
I opened my mouth to yell, and it filled with sand. By the time I finished coughing and spitting, the world around me had settled down a little. It was now completely silent except for a tiny background noise of trickling sand. I rubbed grit from my eyelids and tried opening them. I could see a little now but still heard nothing.
“Joachim?” I said tentatively. “Sire?”
In answer I heard a deep, echoing chuckle somewhere far above me.
I grabbed for my spells and looked slowly up. My magic was gone, stripped away as though I had never
