At the instant of contact, a hidden lake of memory burst its banks. It flooded their minds and overwhelmed them both, drowning them in images, sensations, impressions.
Where before there had been a gap in the Jinni’s memory—describing the bare moment between the sight of a hawk wheeling about in a bloodred sunset, and coming to on Arbeely’s dusty workshop floor—now there lay weeks, months full of time. He watched a young Bedouin girl as she glimpsed his palace shining in the valley; and then he watched himself enter her dreams. He saw himself visit the girl again and again, noticed his own growing fascination with her. He saw, as he never could have before, how the days between their visits passed so quickly for himself, and so slowly for her; saw the signs that the girl’s perceptions of dream and reality were sliding perilously into each other.
He watched, unable to look away, as he entered her mind one last time. He felt her draw him eagerly down (and how little he’d protested!) into her imagined wedding, felt the lust that blinded him to the danger; and then the panic of her waking, and the jagged, terrifying pain as he ripped himself from her mind.
He saw himself hovering near obliteration. He watched as he turned away from the cries of her family, and ran to the safe haven of his own glass palace.
And then he saw what followed.
The day was fading little by little, reaching toward sunset. Above the parapets of his glass palace, the Jinni noted the changing angle of the sun with irritation.
It was nearly a week since his last, catastrophic visit to the Bedouin girl, and still he was not healed. He’d spent his daytime hours since then hanging motionless in the sunlight, allowing the heat to knit him back together. But at night, he retreated back inside, where the glass would protect him. The nights irked him now: his tattered wounds itched, turned him impatient and bad-tempered. A few more days of healing and he would be strong enough for his long-delayed trip to his fellow jinn, and the habitations of his birth. Why, why had he not gone earlier? He’d grown far too fascinated with humans, allowing himself to be lured into complacency and danger. He couldn’t think of Fadwa now without cringing at his own innocence.
Not that he blamed the girl for what had happened! No, the fault lay entirely with himself. He’d been far too taken with her, too impressed by the tenacity with which she and her people clung to the desert, fighting for every stalk of grain and drop of milk. He’d mistaken fortitude for wisdom and failed to see that she lacked a certain maturity of intellect. Well, his lesson had been learned. Possibly he’d allow himself to observe an occasional caravan from afar; but as for the rest of it, he was finished. No more dallying with humans. The jinn elders had been right: the two peoples were not meant to interact. No matter how fascinating, how sensual, the cost of these encounters was too high for comfort.
From the safety of his palace, the Jinni watched as the fading light bred shadows across the walls. Perhaps, he thought, he would wait a few extra days before setting out on his journey. He wanted no wounds or scars to remain of his misadventure. No one would know how close he’d come to his own destruction.
Help!
He turned, startled. A voice, from far away, drifted through the glass wall. . . .
Jinni, help! We are at battle with a band of ifrits, and are injured—we need shelter!
Up he flew to the highest tower, and looked out over the valley. Sure enough, three jinn were approaching from the west, riding the wind. At this distance he couldn’t recognize them, but they were unmistakably his own kind. There was no sight of their pursuers, but that was unsurprising; many ifrits liked to travel beneath the desert’s surface, outdistancing their enemies and then bursting forth in front of them. One of the jinn, he saw, seemed to be carrying another, who indeed looked less than whole.
You are welcome here, he called to them. Enter quickly, and take your shelter. He felt a pang that they would see him in this weakened state—but then, they themselves were no better. Perhaps they could all keep each other’s secrets.
The gateway to the palace was shielded by a door of thick glass that hung on silver hinges. To open or close it, the Jinni had to be in human form; it had been a conceit of his to pretend he was a human ruler of old, coming home to his seat of power. As he removed the bar that locked the door and swung it open, he reflected that perhaps it was time to modify the gateway. What had once seemed an amusing fancy now felt, in the presence of his own kind, faintly embarrassing.
A hot wind caressed him at the gateway; and the three jinn flew past him and into the palace, one of them—a female, he saw now, a jinniyeh of some beauty—supported by another of her fellows. He smiled to himself. The evening had just grown slightly more promising. He closed the door, and then hefted the bar back into place.
A clawlike human hand clamped a metal cuff over his wrist.
Shocked, he tried to pull away—but his arm had turned to frozen fire. The pain was blinding. Desperately he tried to change shape, to get away from the freezing iron, but to no effect. He could feel the cuff holding his body in place, blocking every attempt to transform.
The pain moved past his shoulder to envelop his entire being. He collapsed to his knees, looked up with his dimmed human eyes at the jinni that had done this to him. But all three jinn had vanished. Standing before him was a Bedouin tribesman carrying a young girl in his arms. The girl was Fadwa, bound and blindfolded. Next to them stood something that he first took for an animated corpse—but then he saw it was a grotesque old man in a filthy, tattered cloak.
The old man was grinning hideously, showing dark and broken teeth. “It is accomplished!” he said. “Captured, and in human form! The first since the days of Sulayman!”
“Then he’s bound to you?” asked the Bedouin.
“No, not quite yet. For that, I’ll need your assistance.”
The tribesman hesitated for a moment, and then lowered his cloak-covered burden to the floor. The Jinni, unable to move or even to speak against the freezing agony, watched as Fadwa twitched and whispered. The Bedouin noticed his gaze. “Yes, look!” he shouted. “Look at what you’ve done to my daughter! This is your payment, creature. However terrible your suffering, know that you yourself have caused it, and it is nothing compared to hers!”
“Yes, well put,” said the ancient man dryly. “Now come and help me, before the pain unhinges him. I want him fully aware of what’s happening.”
Cautiously the Bedouin approached. “Hold him steady,” the old man said. Fadwa’s father grabbed the Jinni roughly. The Jinni tried to cry out, but nothing came. “Hold still,” the Bedouin hissed, gripping the back of the Jinni’s neck.
The old man had closed his eyes; he was muttering under his breath, as though rehearsing or preparing himself, making ready. Then he knelt down and put one rough and dusty palm on the Jinni’s forehead.
The rasping syllables the old man chanted made no sense—but even through the iron’s torment he could sense the net of glowing lines that spun out from the man’s hand and around his own pain-racked body. He strained against the cuff, panicking, trying desperately to change form as the lines twisted to form a cage. Foolish, careless! Baited and captured like the basest of ghuls! Everything, everything had been stolen from him!
“I am Wahab ibn Malik,” the man growled, “and I bind you to my service!”
And the cage of glowing lines sank inside him, flame joining to flame.
The old man staggered; for a moment it seemed he might faint. Then he righted himself, and smiled in triumph.
“Then it’s done?” asked the Bedouin. “You can heal her now?”
“One last thing. The binding must be sealed.” The wizard smiled sadly. “My deepest apologies, Abu Yusuf, but here our agreement ends.”
A knife appeared in the wizard’s other hand. In a swift and powerful motion, he plunged it into Abu Yusuf’s ribs. There was a horrible gasping noise; and then, as the wizard withdrew the knife, a hot spray of blood, and the choking smell of iron. Abu Yusuf collapsed, his hand slipping from the Jinni’s neck.
The wizard took a deep breath. Again he seemed exhausted. His skeletal frame sagged with fatigue, but his eyes were full of a quiet triumph.
“Now,” he said. “Let us talk. Ah, but first . . .” He grabbed the Jinni’s wrist again, and muttered something over the iron cuff. In an instant, the pain vanished. Freed from his paralysis, the Jinni fell, sprawling across the bloodstained glass.
“I’ll give you a moment,” said the old man. He turned his back to check on the girl, who lay bundled on the floor, oblivious to her father’s murder.
The Jinni gathered himself, rose shaking to his feet, and launched himself at the wizard.
“Stop,” ibn Malik said.
And just like that, the Jinni jerked to a halt, a tamed animal at the end of its leash. There was no way to fight it; he might as well stop the sunrise. The wizard whispered a few words, and the iron’s freezing torture roared back to life.
The wizard said, “Do you know that no one, not even the wisest of the seers, has discovered why the touch of iron is so terrible to the jinn?” He paused, as though awaiting a response, but the Jinni was near insensible, curled around his arm. The wizard went on. “Nothing else produces such an effect. But here lies a conundrum, for if I can control you with iron, then so can another. It’s no use to send one’s most powerful slave to kill an enemy, only to see him driven away by an ordinary sword. I pondered this problem long and hard, and this is my solution.”
He muttered the words again; once more the cuff’s torment ceased.
“I will be a stern master,” the wizard said as the Jinni lay boneless on the floor, “but not a cruel one. You will only feel the iron if you deserve its touch. If, however, your attitude merits reward, I’ll allow you to resume your true form from time to time. But don’t think you can escape—your actions are mine to control. You are bound to me, fire to flesh, soul to soul, and sealed in blood for as long as you shall live.” He smiled down at the Jinni. “Oh, my proud slave. We’ll outdo all the stories of old, you and I. Our names shall be sung for generations.”
“I’ll destroy myself,” said the Jinni in a hoarse voice.
The wizard raised an eyebrow. “I see the truth of your position has yet to set in,” he said. “Very well. I’ll make it clear to you.”
The Jinni braced weakly against the expected pain of the iron, but it didn’t come. Instead ibn Malik went to Fadwa and crouched over her. The girl had thrashed free of her cloak. A dribble of saliva ran down one side of her face, and her hands jerked and clawed against their bonds.
“You left a piece of yourself inside this girl,” the wizard said. “I promised her father I would remove it.”
He placed his hands on the girl’s face, slipping his fingers beneath the blindfold. Closing his eyes, the man began to mutter. After a moment, Fadwa went still—and then she screamed, a sound that went on and on, as though her soul was being drawn from her body. The Jinni shuddered, tried to cover his ears, but found he couldn’t move.
At last the screaming ceased and the girl lay motionless. Ibn Malik smiled, though he looked even more tired than before. He slipped off the blindfold, untied the rag that bound her wrists, and backed away.
“Go to her,” ibn Malik told the Jinni. “Wake her.”
He had no strength left, but nevertheless his legs carried him of their own accord to Fadwa’s side. The binding moved his limbs, made him kneel down and gently shake her shoulder. “Fadwa,” he said, struggling against it. Don’t wake, he thought. Don’t see.
The girl stirred, brought one hand up to rub at her eyes, then winced at the ache in her wrists. The last of the twilight was shining through the palace walls, casting a blue aura about her wan and drawn features, turning her hair a deep blue-black. Her eyes opened; she saw the Jinni. “It’s you,” she murmured. “I’m dreaming . . . no, I was dreaming. . . .”
She frowned, confused. Slowly she sat up, and looked around.
“Father!” the girl shrieked.
And then the binding was moving him again, making him crouch above her as ibn Malik had. His hands went around her throat. He felt the delicate bones as they bent and cracked under his fingers, felt her hands as they scratched and slapped at his face. He could not look away from her eyes as they stared back at him, protesting in disbelief before they bulged with panic, and then, finally, dimmed.
At last the Jinni sat back. His hands still moved with the binding’s command, convulsing against air. He watched them until they stopped.
“Now you understand,” said ibn Malik.
And it was true. He understood. He stared at the cold glass walls and tried to feel nothing.
The wizard put a hand on his shoulder. “Enough for today, I think,” he said. “Rest and regain your strength. Tomorrow your true work begins.” He paused to look about at the cavernous hall. “You must prepare yourself for one more disappointment, I fear. Your new quarters are not nearly so elegant.”
From his tattered cloak he extracted a long-necked copper flask, etched with intricate loops and whorls. He tipped the flask toward the Jinni, and muttered another series of harsh and meaningless words.
A bright flash seared the Jinni’s eyes, lighting the chamber to translucence. There was a horrible sense of diminishment as the wizard’s spell gathered and compressed his being, banking his essence to the merest spark. Slowly the flask drew him in—and time slowed to an elongated instant, full of the taste of metal and a wild, searing anguish.
Here the Jinni’s own memories ended.
But these were not the only memories that he regained in that moment, for the lines of the binding stretched both ways. The Jinni saw himself, remembered what he had done—but he also saw the memories of the wizard ibn Malik, felt his triumph as he enslaved the Jinni with Abu Yusuf’s blood and compelled him to kill Fadwa. Like two patterns overlaid, their recollections ran together and diverged, overlapped and intertwined. He was inside the flask, trapped in that endless moment; and he was standing alone in the glass palace, holding a copper flask that was warm to the touch.
Ibn Malik replaced the flask inside the pocket of his cloak. Then he staggered to the nearest wall and sank to the floor, breathing in shallow gasps.
The day’s exertions had drained him more deeply than expected. He hadn’t meant to put the Jinni in the flask so quickly, but it would have done little for his authority to allow the Jinni to see him panting with fatigue. And still, what a day, what an unparalleled accomplishment! He only regretted the death of the girl. It seemed wasteful to kill one so young and beautiful when she might have served as a menial in his future palace, or a tempting motivation for the Jinni’s good behavior. He should have anticipated that, like any powerful animal, his new acquisition would require a certain amount of breaking.
His breathing began to even and slow. He would, he decided, take a small, well-deserved rest, and then return home. The Bedouins’ mounts were hobbled safely outside the palace, and it was a clear, warm night with no windstorms. The mounts could wait a little longer. Or perhaps he would leave them behind and command the Jinni to carry him across the valley. He smiled at the thought, and sank into a deep and grateful sleep.
Ibn Malik did not usually dream, but within moments his slumbering mind brought him visions of a city on an island, an impossible city that reached far into the sky. Perhaps it was the city that he would build, he and the Jinni? Yes: a monumental undertaking, but was it not within his reach? For now that he had captured one jinni, who was to say that he could not capture another, and another? He would bind the entire race, and make them build him a kingdom to rival Sulayman’s. . . .
The city blurred, coalesced, and became a man, a wrinkled old man with skin pale as milk, carrying a stack of singed parchments. Ibn Malik had never encountered such a man before, and yet he felt he knew him, felt both kinship and a dreadful fear. He wanted to warn the man—but of what? And now the man was reaching out toward ibn Malik, his face full of warning as well—
Pain, sudden and horrible, cut through the dream. The pale man’s face disintegrated as ibn Malik woke with his own knife in his stomach, and Abu Yusuf’s hand on the hilt.
Either Abu Yusuf had been biding his time, or he’d been revived by his daughter’s screams. In either case, he wasn’t nearly as dead as he’d appeared. A wide trail of blood showed his slow progress to ibn Malik’s side; now he lay next to the wizard, twisting the knife with the last of his strength. Ibn Malik roared and backhanded the man, but it was too late, the damage was done: Abu Yusuf had pulled the knife away with him.
Ibn Malik’s vision blurred. Blood filled his mouth. He spat it out and hauled himself to standing. Abu Yusuf lay at his feet, weakly smiling. The wizard pressed a foot to his neck until there could be no question the man was dead.
Beneath the taste of blood ibn Malik could smell the meaty stink of his own intestines. Grimacing, he ripped a length of cloth from his cloak and stuffed it into the hole in his belly. Stomach wounds corrupted quickly—he would need herbs and fire, needle and thread. . . . He thought of the Jinni, and cursed. Weakened and wounded like this, he had no strength to conjure his servant from the flask. The effort alone might kill him.
The horse. He had to get to Abu Yusuf’s horse.
He staggered to the palace gate and struggled to lift the bar away, ignoring the feel of his insides shifting. At last the gate was open. He found the stallion and untied it, leaving the pony behind. He hauled himself onto the horse’s back, smearing its side with his blood. He tried to kick it into a gallop; the horse, feeling only a gentle nudge, began a slow and jarring trot. Go, you stinking bag of bones, thought ibn Malik, but it was all he could do to lace his fingers into the mane and hang weakly on.
He’d made it halfway across the valley when the jackals descended.
Frenzied by the smell of blood, they ignored the horse’s kicks and pulled ibn Malik screaming from its side. With the last dregs of his energy he fought a few of them off; the rest, sensing his exhaustion, vaulted the charred bodies of their pack mates and tore out his throat.
For all the wizard’s strength and power, the jackals found he made rather a small meal.
The desert is a vast and empty place, and travelers are few and far between.
The gnawed bones of Wahab ibn Malik bleached and cracked in the sun. His cloak dissolved into scattered shreds. The copper flask lay tipped on its side. It gathered a light covering of dust, but it did not tarnish. Animals sniffed at it, then left it alone.
In faraway cities, caliphs rose and were overthrown. Waves of invading armies fell upon the deserts, made their brief mark, and were conquered in their turn.
One day, long after the last traces of ibn Malik had vanished from the desert, a caravan outrider stopped by a sheltering rock to relieve himself. The caravan was twenty days out from Ramadi, and bound for ash-Sham. The outrider was tasked with ensuring there would be no surprises along the way, no raiders or mercenaries demanding payment for safe passage. He took a drink from his waterskin and was about to mount his horse again when a glint of metal caught his eye.
In a small depression in the ground lay a copper flask, half-buried in dust and scrub.
He picked up the flask and brushed the dirt away. It was well made and handsome, with an interesting pattern of scrollwork around its base. Perhaps it had been lost from an earlier caravan. He thought it was the sort of thing his mother might like. He placed the flask in his saddlebag, and rode on.
Over the years the flask passed from hand to hand, from son to mother to niece to daughter to daughter-in-law. It was used to hold oil, or frankincense, or simply for decoration. It accumulated a few small dents but was never seriously damaged, even when it should have been. Once in a while its owner would notice that it always seemed warm to the touch; but then the thought would pass, as such idle thoughts always do. Down the generations the flask went until at last it was placed in the luggage of a young woman bound from Beirut to New York—a gift from her mother, to remember her by.
And as for ibn Malik?
You are bound to me, fire to flesh, soul to soul, and sealed in blood for as long as you shall live.
The wizard had been canny and devious in life, but in death he’d outsmarted even himself. Soul to soul they were bound, as long as the Jinni should live: and there the Jinni sat, trapped in his flask, living out a millennium in one eternal moment.
Which meant that death was not the end for Wahab ibn Malik al-Hadid.
The morning after the jackals devoured the wizard’s carcass down to the bones, a child was born in a faraway eastern land, in a city called Chang’an. His parents named him Gao. From the beginning Gao was a clever boy. As he grew, he soon outpaced his tutors, who began fretting that perhaps the boy was too clever: by thirteen he had written several treatises on inconsistencies in the most beloved Confucian teachings, declaring them bankrupt and meaningless. By twenty Gao had become a brilliant, embittered outcast. He apprenticed himself to an herbalist and grew obsessed with developing a medicinal formula for immortality. He died at thirty-eight, by accident, from one of his self-administered experiments.
The day after his death, a baby was born to joyful parents in the floating Byzantine city of Venexia. Tommaso, as he was called, proved so interested in the Holy Church and its mysteries that he was quickly set on the path to priesthood. He took orders at a young age and soon immersed himself in politics, rising to spiritual adviser to the Doge. It was clear to all that Tommaso would be satisfied with nothing less than the papal robes—until he was observed one evening in one of the city’s catacombs, conducting what appeared to be dark and pagan rites. Tommaso was excommunicated, tried for sorcery, and burned at the stake.
Tommaso’s ashes were still glowing in Venexia when, in Varanasi, a boy named Jayatun was born within sight of the River Ganga. Jayatun loved the stories and legends that he learned as a child, particularly that of the Cintamani, a fabulous jewel that would grant its owner any wish—and could even hold back death. When he grew older, what had been a youthful fascination became an obsession, and he set about collecting every mention he could find of the Cintamani, be the source Buddhist or Hindu or mere storyteller’s fancy. The search devoured all else, and he’d long since become a friendless pauper when one day, under the influence of a high fever, he waded into the Ganga and drowned, convinced that the river goddess had left the Cintamani there for him to find.
And so it went. As the Jinni’s flask was passed from hand to hand, so too did ibn Malik’s soul pass from body to body, in one part of the world and then another. He was a Crusader at the Siege of Jerusalem, looking for holy relics to steal. He was a student of Paracelsus, devoted to finding the Philosopher’s Stone. He was a Shinto monk, a Maori shaman, an infamous courtier in the House of Orléans. He never married, never fathered children, never so much as fell in love. Presented with a religious tradition, he was drawn to its darkest, most mystical corners; in politics, he displayed an unwavering taste for power. His lives were usually unhappy, and rarely ended well. But in each and every one he grew consumed with finding the secret to eternal life—not knowing that it was the one thing he already possessed.
Centuries went by in this way, with ibn Malik’s soul unable to pass to the next world, not so long as the Jinni still lived. Until at last, in a Prussian shtetl, a squalling infant named Yehudah was placed in his mother’s arms.
The Jinni saw all of this.
He saw himself, trapped in the flask, howling in anguish.
He saw ibn Malik born again and again.
He saw Yehudah Schaalman, the last of ibn Malik’s incarnations and the most powerful. He watched as the boy grew from student to convict to master of forbidden magic. And he watched as a lonely furniture maker came to Schaalman’s door one day, in search of a golem to make him a wife.
And Schaalman saw all of it as well.
He saw his own lives laid before him, misshapen pearls on an endless string, starting with ibn Malik and ending with himself.
He saw the Jinni’s memories, experienced his capture and defeat. He saw him emerge from the flask in a tinsmith’s shop, a hole in his memory where the Bedouin girl had been. He saw the Jinni learn his way about the city and grow accustomed to his bonds. And he watched as one night the Jinni crossed paths with a strange and astonishing woman, a woman made of clay.