employ of someone who had sold his soul to the powers of darkness.
But that needn’t mean my own soul was in danger, a voice in the back of my mind pointed out. King Warin was not the devil, only a human king, even if he did give every appearance of wanting super natural knowledge not meant for humans. Elerius, after all, had served there for years without plunging into black magic. Maybe I could even function as a force for good within the kingdom.
And Elerius had left, and I was no priest.
“You’re wasting your time,” I told King Warin. “If you don’t want to tell me what you know about the Wadi- assuming you know anything-that’s fine, but you must realize it would be a lot easier if we all worked together. I’d prefer in fact to be here without you, even if you did have some little piece of information we could use. I certainly have no intention of spending the rest of my life in your kingdom.”
Dominic startled me by breaking into a broad smile and clapping me on the shoulder. It had never occurred to me he might miss me.
“If that is settled,” said Kaz-alrhun, “let us see what else is in this watercourse.”
But before we had walked more than a dozen yards I caught distant voices, brought faintly by the wind. I rose up from the rift in the earth to be able to see. The rest of the party from Yurt, Maffi with them, was coming across the valley on foot.
I flew to meet them. All of them were scratched and dusty. Ascelin looked exhausted, the king disoriented, and Hugo strangely pleased.
“It was the emir’s men,” said Ascelin, dropping to the ground as I reached them and wiping his forehead. “They must have been in hiding somewhere among the rocks and gullies, because they appeared almost as soon as you’d left.”
And the mage had distracted me from probing for soldiers with his talk of unimaginable dangers. “But you all got away-” I said, looking from one to the other. Joachim tried to smile, but I noticed he was absently rubbing his scar with one thumb.
“Just barely. I had to carry Haimeric down the slope, while the chaplain and the boy managed on their own. Hugo held off the vanguard of the troops until we were all safely on our way. If the descent hadn’t been so steep I’m sure they would have followed us at once.”
I glanced toward Hugo. For one moment he managed a triumphant grin. “Saying I ‘held them off’ may go a little far,” he said with quite unconvincing modesty. “I put my shield and sword arm between Ascelin and the troops, and with a few lucky strokes I intimidated them just long enough-then when they rushed me I went down the valley wall on my belly!”
I looked up toward the edge of the valley with a far-seeing spell and could see the white turbans and glittering curved swords of the emir’s soldiers. It was a large troop, at least a hundred men, and their swarthy faces looked angry and frustrated. Apparently sharing salt with us only meant that the emir would not kill us inside his palace-either that or he planned to capture us alive, which didn’t sound much better.
But if they didn’t want to come cascading down the nearly vertical descent after us, we were safe for the moment. As I watched they settled themselves, apparently intending to wait us out. “What about the horses?”
Ascelin shook his head. He flicked his eyes toward the king, then back toward the sand. “At this point,” he said in a low voice, “it would take the Ifrit to get them back. And all our supplies and food are gone with them. Even if we elude the emir’s men and get out of this valley alive, I don’t know how we’ll ever get home.”
I didn’t answer. If we somehow escaped from the Ifrit and the emir, there were still hundreds of empty miles between us and Xantium, much less Yurt. Sir Hugo’s party might have been in the same situation, and they had never come home either.
“Where’s Dominic?” Ascelin asked then, looking up.
“Down in the Wadi. It
This took some of the despair from Ascelin’s face. “Where is the Wadi?”
I looked around and could not see it. I had no idea what level of existence we were actually on, but at the moment it did not include the Ifrit, the Wadi, or Dominic.
Before I could try manipulating the spell again, King Haimeric stepped up beside me. Everything about him seemed old-his frail body, his wispy white hair, his wind-wrinkled cheeks-except for his eyes. They were bright and excited. “I’m not sure what you’ve been able to see, Wizard,” he said, “but just before we got on that flying carpet I saw the blue rose.”
I turned my attention fully toward him. “You saw the blue rose?” I repeated idiotically.
“There wasn’t time to say anything then, but it’s here in the valley. I always knew it was. That’s why the emir didn’t want us to come here.”
I hesitated only a second. If we had lost everything, even our waterskins, we wouldn’t live long enough for a second chance to find the king’s rose. Dominic and Kaz-alrhun between them could take care of Warin while I was gone. I didn’t think King Haimeric had yet realized we would never get home, but he might as well die with his own quest fulfilled.
“Rest a little longer,” I said to Ascelin and the others. “I’ll take you to the Wadi shortly.” Then I turned to the king. “Let’s find your rose, sire.”
III
King Haimeric and I walked across the valley floor, leaving the others behind. Even without any visible landmarks, the king seemed to know exactly where we were going. I murmured spells that made the air around us shimmer with a kaleidoscope of shifting images, including again the silk caravan. But I did not see the group of people who might have included a red-headed wizard-assuming I had ever seen them at all.
“There it is,” said the king, stopping short.
We stepped into a flowering garden and out of the layer of reality in which we had been. The garden was surrounded by a low wall and was filled entirely with rose bushes.
We walked silently among them. The green, glossy leaves looked completely out of place in the barren desert, and even the air around us was slightly damp. We passed enormous, showy red blooms; tiny pink buds no bigger than my littlest fingernail; and soft yellow blossoms whose scent threatened to overwhelm us. We saw no humans, but someone, I thought, must tend these bushes daily, for there were no insect borers, no faded blooms, and no weeds.
The garden was much bigger than it at first looked. We walked half a mile, and the colors began to change. Here were maroons, rich violets, like what we had seen in the emir’s garden outside Bahdroc but somehow brighter and more vivid. The king walked faster and faster, until I was hard pressed to keep up with him.
But then he stopped so abruptly that I, following behind, almost knocked him over. Standing up from where he had been digging was the emir’s swarthy rose grower.
I tried at once to shape a protective spell for King Haimeric, but I need not have bothered. After a surprised second, he sprang forward, and he and the grower clasped hands in delight at their meeting.
“I had in truth hoped that even a western wizard might be able to find the magic to bring you here,” said the grower, a smile splitting his face.
“Won’t the emir be furious with you?” asked the king in concern.
“He gave me no specific instructions concerning you. I did most carefully obey his orders, and I never explicitly told you or any other man how to find this garden.”
He smiled again and added, “The emir considers this
“Are you working with the Ifrit?” I managed to ask.
“Of course. It was just last year, once stories of the blue rose began to spread, that the emir decided he must break part of my garden away from the rest, and transport it entire to someplace no one else would find it. Nothing but an Ifrit would have the power to do that, or to carry me quickly back and forth.”
