Gateway to Elsewhere

“Hah! The human Lord Toni,” he rumbled. “You have betrayed my hospitality, human! It is well for you that I am merciful! But you are my guest! Therefore I take no vengeance on you in my own house. But your camel will return you to Barkut within the hour! The truce between me and Barkut ends! I shall destroy the city and the people. I shall blot out the memory of the nation! I shall—”

Tony found his eyes hot and angry.

“Interesting! You invited me here to have me murdered because you learned that my nation isn’t troubled with djinn! You were afraid I might lead Barkut to security! But your planned murder backfired, so now you’ll try the same thing openly!” Then he bluffed. “And how do you propose to destroy Barkut? You have seen what I can do!”

The djinn king glowered at Tony. With somehow the air of one changing costume to a more appropriate garb, he swelled to a greater size. Tusks appeared between his lips. His complexion became a ghastly blue. Horns showed on his head. The armor which appeared at the same time was tastefully decorated with human skulls. But he still looked old. And Tony felt that he was uneasy.

“Human!” he roared. “See you this thing in my hands? It is the great treasure of the djinn crown! With this have my djinns been kept subject! With this will I destroy Barkut and the sniveling traitors who bow to you! Know you what this is?”

Tony had a hunch amounting to conviction that the djinn king had been puzzling over the device when he entered. He had plainly no great knowledge either of machinery or electronics. Tony had not much more. But he simply could not believe that any device of such great age could still be in working order. He bluffed again.

“Of course I know what it is!” he said scornfully. “Every low drinking-place in my nation has one! You look in the large end of the tube!”

Speaking of the device as a television set, Tony spoke with strict truthfulness. But he felt the jerking tension in the djinns about the king grow suddenly less. The king himself relaxed visibly.

“Ho!” rumbled the king zestfully. “That was a matter I knew! I knew that! Ha! I but tested you to see if you truly know this device. Then you know that with it pointed at a rebellious djinn or a human city, at any distance I may create explosions beside which the destruction of Es-Souk is as the glow of a firefly!”

The other elderly djinns about him laughed uproariously. Their mirth was almost hysterically relieved. It sounded as if the djinn king had not known which was the business end of the gadget. He had been trying helplessly to figure out how to aim it. And Tony had told them.

“Go you back to Barkut,” bellowed the king gleefully. “Tell the humans there that from my palace I shall destroy them all!”

Tony knitted his brows. He felt cold prickles up and down his spine. He couldn’t believe the thing would work, as old as it was. But the djinn ought to know! So he said distastefully:

“From your palace? With its walls of djinns?” He remembered Abdul’s weeping gratitude out on the sand, after the duel was over, because only Es-Souk had perished. “Remember what will happen if by accident you destroy a djinn nearby! I do not advise you to use that device. Besides, consider how much more deadly is mine!”

He snapped open the cigarette lighter. He blew gently on the wick. The faint fragrance of lasf…

There was instant, howling panic. Abdul flashed out the door by which he and Tony had entered. The king and his councilors fled in tumult. Even the floor of the audience hall heaved and melted away, and Tony tumbled some four or five feet to the ground. He was abruptly in the open air with the palace dissolving all about him and whirlwinds darting away in crazy flight in every direction.

Farthest, and fleeing fastest, seemed to be the king.

But the djinn king had not dropped his gadget. Tony hunted anxiously all around. He didn’t believe it could work, but still—

He worried about it as he walked gloomily back toward the mud cottage where the Queen and Ghail were quartered.

It shouldn’t work. It positively was too old to work! But if it did—

Chapter 17

They started back for Barkut in a state wholly unlike the fashion of their arrival at the djinn palace. Abdul arranged the march. He seemed to delight in devising elaborate ceremonies. The parade began with dragons, sixty feet long and breathing fire. After them marched a troop of giants carrying very knobbly maces seemingly of iron, which should have weighed tons. Then a vast, long column of djinn camels, each camel the customary twenty feet tall and with an impressive pack load of unstable djinn riches, the whole draped with cloth-of-gold and similar stuff. Then djinn soldiers, looking remarkably ferocious. Tony and Ghail and the Queen rode in a colossal litter carried between two elephants. It was extremely luxurious, and the only incongruous note was that the Queen had packed a picnic lunch for the journey in crude earthen pots. They were covered over with seed-pearl brocades, however, and did not show.

Such ostentation had not been Tony’s own idea. Abdul had presented himself fearfully at the Queen’s cottage, almost half an hour after the use of lasf in the audience chamber.

“Majesty!” said Abdul reproachfully. “If you detonate me, who am the most abject of your subjects, how will the government go on?”

“Government?” Tony stared. “What government?”

“Of the djinn,” said Abdul, more reproachfully still. “You are my king, Majesty. You are also king of these others who wait to swear allegiance. And there must be government!”

“Hold on!” Tony cried. “What’s this? What have I got to do with government? How’d I get to be a king?”

“Majesty!” Abdul waved his hands. He had changed his costume, now, and appeared in garments which were exclusively seed pearls with ruby and emerald buttons. His turban emitted a slight and graceful plume of smoke, which looked incendiary but—he had explained—was quite safe under all ordinary conditions. “Majesty, it is simple! You, a human, defeated Es-Souk in single combat, hand-to-hand. This was in the night in Barkut. Such a thing has never before happened in the history of the djinn. Today you fought a duel with Es-Souk and detonated him so that no other of the djinn folk was even harmed. Only the King of the Djinns has even been able to destroy a djinn. It has been a thousand years since even our kings have had to resort to this measure, and on the last three occasions—going back more than two thousand years—in each case numerous other djinns died in the holocaust of the execution. And before my own eyes and many others you caused the former king and his councilors to flee and a part of his palace to dissolve. You are, therefore, more powerful than any djinn, you are more merciful than any king of the djinn in the past, and you are victor in a personal contest with the king we had this morning. Therefore you are the king!”

“The logic is elaborate,” said Tony suspiciously, “but it isn’t airtight.”

“Majesty,” repeated Abdul firmly, “you can destroy any of us, or you can spare any of us. Therefore we obey you. And therefore you are the king. It cannot be helped.”

The Queen of Barkut looked at him, smiling.

“Obviously,” she said brightly. “Abdul is quite right. And you can end my captivity if you wish. What rewards we poor humans of Barkut can offer you—”

Tony looked sharply at Ghail. She flushed hotly.

“All right,” said Tony. “So I’m the king. Do we have a civil war, or is my authority unanimously accepted?”

“It is almost unanimous, Majesty,” said Abdul, beaming. “It may be necessary to detonate the former king. That, however, is not yet certain. He has fled with a few of his councilors. They feel that you have a prejudice against them—”