“the one who freed me the second time, said I should kill anyone who came to the valley, except for those other people from Yurt.”
It looked as though the Ifrit had gotten himself into a moral dilemma by granting contradictory wishes to different people. I hoped to find out what had happened someday myself. “In the meantime you
I left him trying to work through this and hurried back to the others. It sounded as though someone powerful might still appear at any minute, even if the Ifrit did refuse to grant the mage’s second wish. I was in time to get some of the melon and settled myself again to look at the onyx ring. Now that I knew what kind of spell Elerius had put on it, I might have some chance of unraveling it.
“I keep thinking about that boy and my stallion,” said Dominic, sitting down beside me. “Do you think he was simply trying to escape the Ifrit, or was he going to alert someone after having led us into a trap?”
“It just looked like panicked flight to me,” I said. “I don’t know where he’d go. The emir’s city wouldn’t be safe for him, and it took us many weeks of travel to get here from Xantium.”
“It wouldn’t take him nearly as long to get back, riding Whirlwind all out, especially if he didn’t detour to the Holy City. I’m beginning to wonder, Wizard, if we should start expecting that mage.”
“It would certainly take Maffi much longer than two days to reach Xantium,” I said, “even on Whirlwind. And the Ifrit’s just told me he’s not answering any magical calls from the mage.” I stopped speaking abruptly to concentrate more fully at the onyx ring.
While talking to Dominic, I had been teasing at it delicately with little tendrils of magic. Suddenly I saw the whole spell as clearly as though it had been written out, step-by-step, in a book of wizardry. I could see exactly which words of the Hidden Language Elerius had used, the complicated and quite inventive way he had combined a spell of discovery with a spell of sight, his elegant means of attaching the spell to the onyx so that it was permanently latent in the stone yet would need someone with fairly powerful magic-or at least the right powerful spell-to put it into action.
I knew at once which words to say, and for a second the valley again flickered with other mirage-like images, even if no one could see them but me.
But this was wrong. I had never been able to visualize a spell like this in my life, even my own. I knew I wasn’t this good. In fact, I didn’t think anyone was.
I looked up, startled, toward the Ifrit. Had he given me his magical abilities instead of my own?
No, because with this strange clarity I now had, it was quite plain that I had nothing more than the mix of school magic, herbal magic, and improvisation I had always had, and the Ifrit had his own enormous fund of powerful though unfocused magic. But the difference now was my ability to recognize a spell and all its attributes.
“I think I see the difference at last,” I said excitedly to Dominic, who didn’t have the slightest idea what I was talking about. “Wes tern magic is organized scientifically. There’s very little scientific about eastern magic. That’s why Melecherius had so much trouble explaining it, even if he understood it himself. Instead it’s an art.”
“Do you and this scientific art know how to get us out of here?” asked Dominic.
“I’m working on it,” I said. If this clarity only lasted, I should be able to discover the spell on Dominic’s ruby ring as well. Maybe if the Ifrit wanted to take a nap, and he took his wife off with him somewhere while he did so, then I could try to use the onyx to locate Sir Hugo’s party, and we could-
“What’s that?” said Dominic sharply.
I looked up quickly, putting together far more easily than I ever had before a scientific far-seeing spell.
It was a flying carpet, soaring over the steep edge of the valley and approaching us rapidly. Seated on it were Maffi and the massive black bulk of Kaz-alrhun.
PART EIGHT — THE WADI HARHAMMI
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
