“I suppose I would feel odd if I had to stay in a room all night and watch a man sleep,” Arbeely conceded.
“Exactly.” The Djinni sat down on the edge of the bed, and looked around once more. “And really, Arbeely, this place is terrible!”
His tone was so plaintive that Arbeely started laughing. “I don’t mind it, really,” he said. “But it isn’t what you’re used to.”
The Djinni shook his head. “None of this is.” Absentmindedly he rubbed the cuff on his wrist. “Imagine,” he said to Arbeely, “that you are asleep, dreaming your human dreams. And then, when you wake, you find yourself in an unknown place. Your hands are bound, and your feet hobbled, and you’re leashed to a stake in the ground. You have no idea who has done this to you, or how. You don’t know if you’ll ever escape. You are an unimaginable distance from home. And then, a strange creature finds you and says, ‘An Arbeely! But I thought Arbeelys were only tales told to children! Quick, you must hide, and pretend to be one of us, for the people here would be frightened of you if they knew.’”
Arbeely frowned. “You think I’m a strange creature?”
“You miss my point entirely.” He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. “But yes. I find humans strange creatures.”
“You pity us. In your eyes, we’re bound and hobbled.”
The Djinni thought for a moment. “You move so slowly,” he said.
Silence hung between them; and then the Djinni sighed. “Arbeely, I promised I wouldn’t leave the shop until you felt the time was right, and I’ve kept that promise. But I meant what I said before. If I don’t find some way to regain my freedom, even a degree of it, I believe I’ll go mad.”
“Please,” Arbeely said. “Just a few more days. If this is going to work—”
“Yes,” the Djinni said, “yes, I know.” He stood and walked to the window. “But in all of this, my one consolation is that I’ve landed in a city the likes of which I never could have imagined. And I intend to make the most of it.”
Warnings flooded Arbeely’s mind: the inadvisability of wandering strange streets at night, the gangs and cutthroats, the bawdy houses and stews and opium dens. But the Djinni was looking out the window with an air of hungry longing, across the rooftops to the north. He thought again of the Djinni’s image of himself, bound and hobbled.
“Please,” he only said. “Be careful.”
After the stifling confines of Arbeely’s bedroom, the tinsmith’s shop seemed almost cavernous in comparison. Alone, the Djinni sat at the workbench, measuring out solder and flux. He had to be careful with the solder; his hands were warm enough that it tended to melt if he held it too long. Arbeely had patiently demonstrated how to spread the solder along a joint, but when it came time for the Djinni to try, the solder had run from the plate in a river of droplets. After a few more tries he’d begun to improve, but it strained every ounce of his patience. He longed to simply meld the seams with his fingers, but that would ruin the point of the exercise.
It galled him, though, to curtail the one ability he had left. Never before had he truly appreciated how many of his powers were lost to him outside his native form. If he’d known, he might’ve spent more time exploring them, instead of simply chasing after caravans. The ability to enter dreams, for example, was something he’d barely ever used.
Like all their other attributes, this ability varied wildly among different types of djinn. In the lesser ghuls and the ifrits, it manifested as a crude possession, performed mostly for amusement, trickery, or petty revenge. The possessed human would become little more than a poorly handled puppet until the Djinni grew tired and abandoned the game. Many of the possessed were permanently damaged; some even perished from the shock. In the worst cases, the Djinni would become trapped in the human’s mind. When this happened, it was almost a certainty that both human and Djinni would go insane. If the human was very lucky, a shaman or minor magician might be on hand to drive the possessor from its prey. Once, the Djinni had encountered one of his lesser brethren soon after it had been forced from a human in this way. The burning, twisted thing had been perched on a stunted tree, babbling and howling as the branches smoldered around it. The Djinni had observed it with a mixture of pity and distaste, and avoided the tree by a wide distance.
The Djinni’s own abilities were nothing so blunt as wholesale possession. In his native form he could insinuate himself into a mind painlessly, and observe it without being noticed. But he could only do so when the subject lay in the realm of sleep, its mind open and unguarded. He’d tested this ability only a few times, and only on lesser animals. Snakes, he learned, dreamed in smells and vibrations, their tongues darting to sample the air, their long bodies pressed close to the dirt. Jackals dreamed in yellows and ochers and fragrant reds, reliving their kills as they slept, their limbs and paws churning at the air. After a few such experiments, he’d mostly left off the practice: it was mildly amusing, but it tended to leave him confused and disoriented as he readjusted to his own formless form and regained his sense of self.
He’d never tried to enter a human’s mind. The dreams of men were said to be slippery and dangerous, full of shifting landscapes that could trap a djinni and hold him fast. A wizard, the elders warned, could snare a djinni in his mind, trick it into a dream-labyrinth and force it into servitude. They’d made it seem like a reckless folly even to consider it. Likely they’d overstated the danger, but still he’d refrained, even when the caravan men had collapsed in sleep at the end of a day’s journey.
Would he have risked it, if he’d known the ability would be taken from him? Perhaps; but he doubted he would’ve gained much from the experience. And in a sense, he reflected as he measured out yet more solder, the loss mattered little. He was now spending more than enough time with humans to account for the difference.
In the Syrian Desert, the last of the spring rains soaked into the hillsides. Delicate blossoms unfurled among the rocks and thistles, dotting the valleys with yellow and white.
The Djinni floated above the valley, enjoying the view. The rain had rinsed the dust from his palace, and now every inch sparkled. Had he thought to leave this behind, to go back to the djinn habitations? Whatever for? This was where he belonged: with his palace and his valley, the warm spring sun and the fleeting wildflowers.
But already his mind was racing ahead to his next encounter with humans. There was, he knew, a small encampment of Bedouin nearby. He’d spied their sheep-flocks and their fires from a distance, their men traveling on horseback, but until now he’d avoided them. He wondered, how did their lives differ from those of the caravan-men? Perhaps, instead of finding another caravan to follow, he would turn his wanderings toward their encampment. But should he remain content with observing them from a distance, when a much more intimate option lay available to him?
Movement below him caught his eye. As though drawn by his musings, a young Bedouin girl had appeared on the ridge at the valley’s edge. Alone save for her small flock of goats, she walked the ridge with a sprightly energy to match the freshness of the day.
An impulse struck him. Descending to the parapets of his palace, he reached out and touched the blue-white glass.
The girl on the ridge froze in amazement as, for a moment, the Djinni’s palace appeared sparkling before her eyes.
The Djinni watched the girl sprint excitedly back the way she’d come, driving her goats before her. He smiled, and wondered what a girl such as she might dream about.