Maryam winced and peered inside. Arbeely was nowhere to be seen, having abandoned his post rather than faint on the spot—but there was his partner in front of the anvil, wielding hammer and tongs against a glowing steel ingot. The very air sizzled around him. He looked to be enjoying himself immensely.
She shivered, despite the heat. It felt indecent to watch him so closely, even through an open door. More than once she’d overheard the children whispering, trading sightings of his rooftop jaunts with his lady-friend. Who is she? I dunno. I think her name is Chava. Maryam had stayed silent—but she could’ve told them all about the tall, quiet woman, with her own formidable powers. It unnerved her, to keep the pair’s secrets. Sometimes she’d glimpse him in the street, and a nameless fear would steal across her heart—as though he were bent upon some terrible mischief, and not, contrary to all evidence, merely running an ordinary errand. Would she ever grow used to his presence among them? Did she truly want to?
“Bedouins,” said the man on the stoop, with grudging admiration. “They’ve got the desert in them.”
Maryam frowned. “He ought at least to close the door,” she said, and went on her way.
The weather broke that night, descending at last from its unearthly broiling. A grateful cheer went up at Battery Park as a fresh breeze pulled at the flags. All gathered their pillows and counterpanes from the lawns, and went home.
In her slowly cooling apartment, Anna Blumberg sat in a dilapidated rocking chair, her baby asleep in her arms.
Chava Levy. It had to be. No one else in the city would’ve thought of Anna in that moment, certainly no one with the means to spend half a week’s wages on a block of ice. Anna imagined her standing outside in the alley among the sweating vagrants, listening for Toby’s cries, for Anna’s panicked thoughts. Chava Levy, who’d been Anna’s colleague at Radzin’s Bakery, until the awful night that Anna had learned the truth.
It was over a year ago that Anna had invited her shy new friend out for an evening at a Broome Street dance hall. They were supposed to rendezvous there with Irving, Anna’s new fiancé and the father of her unborn child—but when Irving had arrived, there’d been another girl on his arm. Anna had confronted him in an alley outside; Irving, drunk and furious, had attacked her, knocking her to the ground. And then—
His body, thrown against the bricks.
His assailant’s blank, inhuman eyes.
The tall, strange man whom her friend had brought along—Anna, this is Ahmad—pulling the woman off her victim and burning her, with his bare hands, to bring her to her senses.
In mere moments, Anna’s entire life had fallen apart. There’d be no returning to Radzin’s, not pregnant and unwed; and besides, how could Anna work next to such a woman, day in and day out? Monsters, the pair of them—yet already her life and theirs were enmeshed. Soon Anna had fallen afoul of their enemy, an evil old man named Schaalman who’d taken her prisoner and used her as bait to draw them in. She had no true memory of it, only a slippery half-recollection of standing in the middle of that same Broome Street dance hall on a sunny afternoon, unable to move, while the old man held her by the wrists and grinned. Afterwards, she’d been terrified that he might have hurt the baby in some way—but Toby had arrived squalling and kicking, the very picture of health.
Sometimes, she tried to persuade herself that she’d imagined it all. The woman’s strength, the man’s burning hands, the ancient wizard who’d held her in place with a touch: all an invention of her over-romantic imagination, a beguiling fantasy to distract herself from the fact that she was now disgraced and penniless, a Bowery washerwoman with a baby to feed. She couldn’t afford to believe in such fantasies. Not anymore.
Except . . .
She looked at the washtub full of impossible ice that sat beside her, quietly melting, and then at the baby asleep in her arms. Her living, breathing boy.
Toby startled awake and began to cry, little limbs flailing about. She shushed him and nursed him back down into sleep, set him carefully in his cradle. Then she found pen and paper, and wrote:
Dear Chava,
Thank you for the ice. I think it saved Toby’s life. I know we haven’t spoken lately but maybe that ought to change.
In the cradle behind her, little Toby’s eyelids twitched as he returned to his dream.
It was a strange dream, especially for one so young. In it, Toby—no longer a baby, but full grown—stood frozen in a vast, sun-drenched hall while a grinning old man held his wrists in an unbreakable grip. The dream would visit him over and over again as he grew, becoming his oldest memory, his deepest fear. It would be years before Toby could even speak the words that might describe it—but his mother would’ve recognized the hall, and the man, at once.
* * *
From tribe to tribe, jinn-child to jinn-child, the tale of the iron-bound jinni continued upon its journey through the Syrian Desert.
Northward it spread, growing and changing as it went, until it reached an enormous tribe of jinn who, in strength and abilities, were very similar to their cousins in the valley where the story had begun. They, too, could raise the winds with a gesture, and change their shape to that of any living animal; and, when formless and insubstantial, could choose to enter the sleeping minds of flesh-and-blood creatures and roam among their dreams. Their lands sprawled in a wide swath, bordered by two forbidding human obstacles: the city of Homs to the west, and the oasis of Palmyra to the east.
Once, the city of Homs had been of little consequence to
