Beneath my soul’s fingers the djinn felt blisteringly hot, but not so hot that I was ready to let go and fall into Hell, leaving my body as its plaything. ‘Bastard!’ I hauled myself up the djinn, grabbing horns, spurs, rolls of fat, whatever came to hand. With a strength born of fear I was two-thirds out of the trapdoor before the djinn even seemed to realize what had happened. Surprise had unbalanced the thing and though my soul might not weigh as much in the scales as some, it proved enough to drag the djinn forward and down whilst I climbed up.
Within moments the two of us were locked together, each trying to wrestle the other down through the trapdoor, both of us part in, part out. My main problems were that the djinn was stronger than me, heavier than me – which seemed deeply unfair given how the wind blew through him – and blessed with the aforementioned horns and barbs, together with a set of triangular teeth that looked capable of shearing through bones.
It turns out that when it’s your soul doing the wrestling the sharp spikes and keen edges are less important than how much you want to win – or in my case, win clear. Panic may not be much help in most situations, but well-focused terror can be a godsend. I jammed Loki’s key into the djinn’s eye, grabbed both his dangling earlobes, and pulled myself over him, setting a booted foot to the back of his neck and pitching him further into the trapdoor … where his bulk wedged him fast. It took me jumping up and down on him several times, both heels mashing into his shoulders before, like a cork escaping an amphora, he shot through. I very nearly followed him down, but by means of a lunge, a scramble, and a good measure of panic, I found myself lying on the dune, the winds dying and the sand settling all about me.
Quickly I pulled the trapdoor closed and locked it with Loki’s key, finding in that instant that it vanished leaving me poking the key into the sand. I shrugged and went over cautiously to inspect my body. Re-inhabiting your own flesh turns out to be remarkably easy, which is good because I had visions of the sheik and his men turning up and finding me lying there and soul-me having to trek along behind while they slung me over a camel and subjected me to heathen indignities. Or worse still, they might have passed me by unseen beneath my sandy shroud and left me to watch my body parch, the dry flesh flaking in the wind until I sat alone and watched the desert drown my bones… So it was fortunate that as soon as I laid a soul-finger on myself I was sucked back in and woke up coughing.
I sat up and immediately reached for the key around my neck. How much of what I’d seen had been real and how much just my mind’s way of interpreting my struggle with the djinn’s evil I had no idea. I even harboured a suspicion that the key itself had drawn those scenes for me, calling on Loki’s own twisted sense of humour.
The caravan outriders found me about half an hour later, crouched on the blazing dune, head covered with the ill-smelling blanket I snatched from my camel. The Ha’tari escorted me back to Sheik Malik, prodding me along before them like an escaped prisoner.
The sheik urged his camel out toward us as we approached, two of his own guards moving to flank him as he came. Behind him at the front of the caravan I could see Jahmeen, slumped across his saddle, kept in place by his two younger brothers riding to either side. I guessed the sheik would not be in the best of moods.
‘My friend!’ I raised a hand and offered a broad smile. ‘It’s good to see there were no more djinn. I was worried the one I drew off might not be the only attacker!’
‘Drew off?’ Confusion broke the hardness around the sheik’s eyes.
‘I saw the beast had taken hold of Jahmeen so I pushed it out of the boy and then set off at once, knowing it would chase me for revenge. If I’d stayed it would have sought an easier target to inhabit and use against me.’ I nodded sagely. It’s always good to have someone agreeing with you in such a discussion, even if it’s only yourself.
‘You pushed the djinn out—’
‘How is Jahmeen?’ I think I managed to make the concern sound genuine. ‘I hope he recovers soon – it must have been a terrible ordeal.’
‘Well.’ The sheik glanced back at his son, motionless on the halted camel. ‘Let us pray it will be soon.’
I very much doubted it. From what I’d seen and felt I guessed Jahmeen had been burned hollow, his flesh warm but as good as dead, his soul in the deadlands enjoying whatever his faith had told him was in store for a man of his quality. Or perhaps suffering it.
‘Within a few days, I hope!’ I kept smiling. Within half a day we would be in Hamada and I would be rid of the sheik and his camels and his sons forever. Sadly I would be rid of his daughters too, but that was a price I was willing to pay.
Hamada is a grand city that beggars most others in the Broken Empire, though we don’t like to talk about that back in Christendom. You can only approach it from the desert so it is always welcome to the eye. It has no great walls – sand would only heap against them, providing any enemy a ramp. Instead it rises slowly from ground where hidden water has bound the dunes with karran grass. First it’s mud domes, made startlingly white with lime-wash, half-buried, their dark interiors unfathomable to the sun-blind eye. The buildings grow in stature and the ground dips toward that promised water, revealing towers and minarets and palatial edifices of white marble and pale sandstone.
Seeing the city grow before us out of the desert had silenced everyone, even stopping the talk of the Builders’ Sun, the endless whys, the circular discussions of what it all meant. There’s something magical about seeing Hamada after an age in the Sahar – and believe me, two days is an age in such a place. I was doubly grateful for the distraction since I’d been foolish enough to mention that much of Gelleth had been devastated by one of the Builders’ weapons and that I’d seen the margins of the destruction. The sheik – who obviously paid far more attention to his history lessons than I had – noted that no Builders’ Sun had ignited in over eight hundred years, which made the odds against a man being witness to two such events extremely long indeed. Only the sight of Hamada had stopped him from carrying that observation toward a conclusion in which I was somehow involved in the explosions.
‘I will be glad to get off this camel.’ I broke the silence. I wore the sword I had taken from Edris Dean, and the dagger I’d brought out of Hell with me, both returned on my request after the incident with the djinn. In Hamada I would swap my robes for something more fitting. With a horse under me I’d start feeling like my old self in no time!
There is a gate to the west of Hamada, flanked on each side by fifty yards of isolated wall, an archway tall enough for elephants with high, plumed howdahs on their backs. The Gate of Peace they call it and sheiks always enter the city through it, and so, with civilization tantalizingly close, our caravan turned and tracked the city’s perimeter that we might keep with tradition.
I rode near the head of the column, keeping a wary distance from Jahmeen, not wholly trusting the djinn not to find some way back into him and escape the deadlands. The only good thing about that final mile of the journey was that the last of our water was shared about, a veritable abundance of the stuff. The Ha’tari poured it down their throats, over their hands, down their chests. Me, I just drank it until my belly swelled and would take no more. Even then the thirst the deadlands had put in me was still there, parching my mouth as I swallowed the last gulp.
‘What will you do, Prince Jalan?’ The sheik had never once asked how I came to be in the desert, perhaps trusting it to be God’s will, proven by the truth of my prophecy and beyond understanding. He seemed interested in my future though, if not my past. ‘Will you stay in Liba? Come to the coast with me and I will show you my gardens. We grow more than sand in the north! Perhaps you might stay?’
‘Ah. Perhaps. First though I mean to present myself at the Mathema and look up an old friend.’ All I wanted to do was get home, with the key, in one piece. I doubted that the three double florins and scatter of smaller