“A bronze bottle with an Ifrit in it was taken to the emir as something different and new,” I said with sudden inspiration, “and the Ifrit agreed to help him in return for being released.”
The grower smiled and nodded. For a second I even dared hope I was teaching him respect for western magic.
But the Ifrit himself had told me that a mage had freed him from Solomon’s enchantment, and I was quite sure the grower didn’t know any magic. Besides, the Ifrit had been freed for five years, and the grower had just said this had only happened last year. But I didn’t have a chance to work it out.
King Haimeric, showing no interest in Ifriti, had moved away, looking intently at the roses. The grower led us down the final pathway between the bushes. “Here,” he said in a low voice.
The king drew in his breath but did not speak. This was it at last. A bush stood by itself, bearing a single blossom: an enormous, sapphire-blue rose. The three of us stood looking at it in silence. I probed quickly and surreptitiously with magic, but I already knew. At least where we were at the moment, this was no illusion but real.
It was as big across as a saucer, yet its stem easily held it upright. The petals were beaded with dew. From deep within the rose came a scent, both sweet and spicy, subtle yet unforgettable once caught. This was the blue rose the king had sought, and suddenly I understood why it was worth it.
“You’re the first and only outsider to find the blue rose,” said the grower to the king after a minute. “Do you wish a root cutting?”
“I would like a root cutting beyond all things.”
The grower produced his trowel. “I have started several plants from seed in containers which the emir hopes to have in his palace in a few years, but you do not want a root-bound container plant for your garden. You need a piece from the adult far-spreading root.”
We didn’t need a piece of root but a way to get out of this valley, guarded against us both by the Ifrit and by the emir’s men. Even if we got out, a cutting would quickly dry up in the desert air and be worthless long before we died of thirst, trying to get back to Xantium on foot. But I said nothing.
The grower knelt down and began digging again. I looked out, away from the well-irrigated garden. The dry land beyond could have been seen through a pane of glass.
The grower packed the piece of root carefully in damp earth and paper. “It should last a few days,” he said, frowning for the first time. “But it really should be planted as soon as possible.”
King Haimeric frowned as well. For a few moments, his expression had been beyond joy or happiness, but the grower’s comment brought him back to reality-or whatever one might call this. “I’ll see what I can arrange.”
He turned to me. “Thank you, Wizard. It’s silly, I know, but I would not have wanted to die in this valley, having come this close to the blue rose, without first seeing it.” Then he understood our situation after all. “Now we should try to find Dominic and the Wadi Harhammi, to see if he can find what
“You want the dry watercourse?” asked the grower. “We are at this moment in it, although you might never know it. The Ifrit insisted that if he took my garden away from Bahdroc, this is where he would take it. But if you leave the garden through that little gate over there, you shall find yourself in the Wadi.”
I paused with my hand on the gate, wondering again if this rose garden could have been what the elder Prince Dominic had heard was in the Wadi. But the prince had been dead fifty years, and if we were to believe the grower, this garden had only been brought here very recently. With something so precious to him here, no wonder the emir’s mood had changed when we mentioned we were seeking the Wadi, and no wonder that part of the agreement he had extracted from the Ifrit had been to guard it closely.
This was the same sort of gate through which we had entered, with apparently nothing but the valley floor beyond. But I had given up assuming that what I thought I saw had any relation to what I would discover. We opened the gate and stepped through.
We were immediately sliding down the steep side of the Wadi, raining pebbles on those beneath. The garden where we had been a second before was gone.
Dominic jumped out of our way. Kaz-alrhun sat to one side, apparently enjoying the experience.
“Where’s King Warin?” I asked at once.
“He left right after you did,” said Dominic, “saying he would find the Wadi’s secret by himself-though why he should be able to find it now when he hasn’t before, I cannot say,” he added in disdain. “I think he didn’t want to have to answer my case against him.”
King Haimeric was quite incurious about Warin. He turned eagerly to Dominic. “I’ve seen it,” he said. “The blue rose. And I have a cutting.”
Dominic managed to smile, in spite of his own concentration on whatever might wait ahead. “That’s excellent news, sire.” He turned to me again. “We waited for you to go on.”
I could understand Dominic waiting for me, but Kaz-alrhun was something of a surprise. He seemed remarkably deferential for someone who wanted to know the Wadi’s secret himself, I thought as we continued. The ground underfoot was broken, and patches of soft sand made walking difficult. Boulders were scattered in our path, none obstructing our passage, but placed such that it was hard to see more than fifty yards ahead.
As we walked, we started occasionally to notice something hard and white that was not stone, half-buried in the sand. I reached down to loosen a piece and realized it was human bone.
“What’s here?” I said, dropping the bone abruptly and turning to the mage. “Is this the unimaginable danger you warned us against?”
“I know not whose bones these may be,” said Kaz-alrhun in interest, “nor why they are here, though I would guess they are from earlier seekers after the Wadi’s secrets.”
As we continued, the king picking his way carefully so as not to step on any, the bones became more frequent. I kept probing with magic and finding nothing but scurrying desert creatures. Some of the bones were made into neat stacks. They all seemed fairly old, though I realized I was looking hopefully for fresh ones from Warin.
We came around a boulder and found a cave cut into the side of the dry watercourse. We were now at least thirty feet below ground level. The low cave entrance was blocked by a latticework gate of white marble, which looked as though it should be in the emir’s palace rather than here in this sandy wash. But while the others clustered around it, I staggered and leaned against a stone for support, because I felt a wave of magic pouring out of the cave toward me.
It was incredibly sweet, as though the waking revelation of the magical abilities I had sometimes dreamed I had. I checked quickly to see what new spells I might know, found none, but felt even more intensely before the strange clarity of vision. This cave was the source of that clarity, and it made everything around us seem so vivid that I hardly dared probe for what might be hidden within it.
And it wasn’t just magical clarity that poured out toward me. It was also quite irrational happiness. Wizards are always more susceptible to magical influences than anyone else. We might be trapped here in the Wadi, with both the Ifrit and the emir deter mined that we not leave alive, and the desert determined that we not live even if we did escape, but at the moment it hardly seemed to matter.
“There are footprints here in the sand,” commented the king.
“If Warin was here, he did not win past this gate,” said Dominic. “There is no obvious way to open it.” He gave it an experimental tug with his right hand, then drew back quickly as though it burned his fingers.
But the moment his hand touched the latticework, it began to buzz, a high keen sound that made us all look at each other with disquiet.
“What kind of magical defenses would the caliph-” I started to ask Kaz-alrhun, then stopped, for something was coming, something that clattered as it came.
We looked behind us in horror. Coming around the boulders, claws extended and venomous tail arched over its back, was a twenty-foot scorpion.
Dominic pushed the king behind him and whipped out his sword, though I feared many of the bones we had seen had been of men who had tried to fight a giant scorpion with steel. Kaz-alrhun scrambled out of the way while I desperately tried to put a binding spell together.
But the scorpion came straight on, too powerful and moving too fast for my magic to bind. The leg-joints clattered as it scrambled over the stones toward us. The claws reached for me, and I found myself staring into its
