I expected Dominic to give the order for final departure at once, but he too frowned again, looking down at us from twenty feet in the air. “You seem to know all about this Pearl, Mage,” he called to Kaz-alrhun. “What’s the limit on what I can make the Ifrit do?”
“There is very little limit,” said Kaz-alrhun, “on the powers of a man who commands the Black Pearl and has an Ifrit to obey him. Even without a working knowledge of magic, you could do much. But-” He paused for a long moment. “But you could do nothing to counter the Pearl’s curse when it began to work.”
Dominic bit his lip. “And the first workings of the curse would be that I would be tempted to make myself King Dominic of Yurt, of all the western kingdoms, of the world, and would still think I was acting for good.” He wrapped an arm firmly around the Ifrit’s thumb. “Good-bye, sire! To the Outer Sea, Ifrit! We’re going
“Don’t worry!” Dominic added in a joyous shout as the Ifrit sprang up into the air. “You’ll be safe from the soldiers, because the curse is being ended before it has a chance to work!” He waved, and the red of his ruby ring flashed in the evening light. “And I have found the purpose of my life at the end of it!”
When the Ifrit rose from the valley floor, the wall of flames disappeared, and the emir’s soldiers almost immediately regrouped.
“Do not concern yourself with that!” said Kaz-alrhun as I desperately started over again creating some sort of magical shield. “Everyone, onto the carpet!” He had increased its size again.
King Haimeric didn’t want to go. “He was still so young,” he said, the tears streaming unchecked down his cheeks as he stared into the empty sky. “My own life is nearly at an end, but there was so much Dominic could still have done! Now we won’t even be able to visit his grave.”
“He fulfilled both his life and his quest,” I said, helping the king onto the carpet. I had to pick up and give him his carefully wrapped rootstock or he would have left it behind.
“I never had a chance!” cried Hugo in genuine distress, sounding more like a boy than a blooded warrior. “I never asked him to forgive me for putting ribbons in his stallion’s mane!”
“Come!” called Kaz-alrhun impatiently. “In pouring forth tears there is little profit.”
The Ifrit’s wife wouldn’t go. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “The soldiers won’t find my oasis.” She thumbed the rings on her necklace and smiled at Sir Hugo’s party and then, somewhat less jauntily, at Joachim, as she stepped back under the palms.
We lifted into the evening sky on the carpet, piled as closely together in the center as we could, only twenty yards ahead of the turbaned soldiers. A few arrows hit the bottom of the carpet but bounced away harmlessly. I leaned cautiously over the edge and watched the Ifrit’s oasis wink away into safety, to another level of reality or to non-existence.
EPILOGUE
Fountains sparkled in the glow of the magic lamps in the courtyard of Kaz-alrhun’s house in Xantium. The evening air was still warm, and even here, in the middle of the city, little stray breezes found us, scented with the tang of the sea and with desert sage. Automata, simple self-propelled serving carts on wheels, rattled over the flagstones to bring us a variety of hot and cold dishes.
“So you do not grow eggplants in Yurt?” the mage asked King Haimeric. “Take some from Xantium for your queen. The market will also have every kind of cotton fabric you might desire. And certainly buy coffee beans as well, but remember you will first have to grind them to a sandy consistency to brew the beverage.” When the king did not seem as pleased at this suggestion as Kaz-alrhun apparently expected him to be, he added, “You can buy all the presents for your queen in the government-regulated market if you prefer, rather than the Thieves’ Market.”
The king tried to smile. “She’ll be happy with anything I bring her, but none of it will make up for coming home without Dominic.”
The mage laughed, startling one of his automata, though it was able to recover without dumping its load of spiced lamb. “Is that it?” he asked, looking around the table at the rest of us. “Is this the reason you have all had long faces since we left the Wadi?” None of us answered. “I would expect at least you, Daimbert, to know better.”
“We shouldn’t have let him do it,” said Ascelin.
“I would not say you ‘let’ him do it,” replied the mage with a chuckle. “If so, what do you do when you do
“We have just enough money left to book sea passage from here back to the western kingdoms,” said the king. “Whirlwind should be able to carry Ascelin for the rest of our trip, so we’ll make good time.”
“Nonsense,” replied the mage. “I already told you I would let your wizard borrow my carpet. It is late in the season for as long a journey as you still have before you, especially for an old man. And you know you shall need to plant your rootstock very soon if you wish to grow a blue rose yourself.”
When King Haimeric did not look cheered by this thought either, the mage leaned back and spread out his hands on the table. “I spent much of my career searching for King Solomon’s Pearl, first trying to find the secret of its location and then attempting to maneuver others into uncovering it in a way that would not bring its potential curse down on me. I found it at last, but I lost it almost in the moment of finding, and never even held it in my hands. Life is a game, and you play as well as you can as long as you can, yet you must be prepared not to win every time. Dominic fared much better on his quest than I on mine, and yet you do not see me bewailing my fate.”
None of us tried to answer. I was seated next to Joachim, who paid no attention to the rest of us or even to his dinner, as though his mind was already on his duties in the cathedral.
When the automata began clearing the plates from the lamb course, Kaz-alrhun rose to his feet. “Come with me, Daimbert. I want to show you something.”
I followed him up narrow, dark stairs to a balcony at the very top of the house. The last light was fading from the sky above us. We looked out across the city where fairy lights gleamed, and out across Xantium harbor. Voices and snatches of song rose faintly toward us.
The mage leaned on the railing for a moment, then shifted his massive bulk to look at me in the dim light. “This is what I wanted to show you,” he said, “Xantium, my city, where there are many religions and many conflicting forms of political organization, but only one supreme mage, myself. Are you not the supreme wizard in your own kingdom of Yurt?”
“I’m the only one,” I said. I wasn’t sure what point the mage was trying to make, but if he was saying that it was good to have one’s own home even without the Pearl, well, the Pearl had never been my goal anyway.
“I want to ask you something,” I said. “During the long flight here I was trying to make sense of what happened. Was it indeed you who started the rumors that King Solomon’s Pearl had been found again?”
“That indeed was I,” he said, “as you know well. When I decided to try again for the Pearl, I hoped that widespread-though false-stories of its discovery would bring you to the East if you ever planned to seek it yourselves. But I could not be sure what, if anything, the elder Prince Dominic had told you in Yurt of his quest. It had after all been fifty years since his death. It was even possible, I thought, that you knew neither the ruby ring’s powers nor of the very existence of the Black Pearl. So while broadcasting the general rumors of the Pearl, I also arranged for a separate rumor, one that might bring the ruby ring to me even if those of Yurt knew not its powers.
“I made sure that two separate stories followed the trade routes to your western kingdoms, separate because I did not wish that anyone should realize I was the author of both. The second was sent very secretly, that my ebony horse was on sale in exchange for a magical ring from Yurt. This news I sent only to a few, those whom I already knew were sometimes unscrupulous.” That, I thought, certainly described both Arnulf and Warin. “One of them, I hoped, would bring the ruby ring to me in Xantium without necessarily knowing its true value.”
He cocked his head at me. “When you first approached my stall in the Thieves’ Market, flaunting the ruby ring on your prince’s finger but attempting an elaborate charade of buying my horse with some other ring from Yurt, I
