Sidra approached the door, a curtain of darkness sewn from threads of cosmic magic. “As-salaam-alaykum,” she said and passed through the veil.
Inside, the air grew dry and comfortably warm. A small whirlwind of sediment and tiny pebbles kicked up from the stony ground. She could remember the first time she’d come to the cave and the fierce storm he’d produced in her presence. But time robbed even seasoned warriors of their hot breath eventually.
Rajul Hakim, called the wise one for his many centuries of gathering knowledge in the folds of his caftan, reanimated in front of her. He’d shrunk again. Though he once had been a giant among his kind, age had knocked a few more inches off his spine so that he stood not much taller than she. His golden-yellow robe puddled on the ground, and his graying hair needed trimming, particularly his brows, which had grown into splayed pigeon wings above his eyes. Despite his disheveled physical appearance, she knew his mental power had merely concentrated after being forced to live in a smaller body. He was still a formidable jinni to be cautious of.
“As-salaam-alaykum,” he said, though he had yet to open his eyes. Perhaps he needed more time than first thought to accept the light. She dimmed the lantern again.
The old man blinked and scratched his scraggly beard. “Ah, Sidra.” He seemed pleased to see her, but then his forehead wrinkled in confusion. He glanced at the wall of his cave where several spiral markings had been scratched into the limestone. A sort of cosmic calendar he conferred with to keep track of the outside world. “Your tribute is not due for another sixty years,” he said. “Where is Hariq? Did he not come with you?”
“No.”
Rajul Hakim seemed then to remember what happened to her husband. His face showed the proper remorse before checking his calendar again. After a quick calculation, he nodded to himself and gestured for her to sit with much more solemnity than normal. When she smiled weakly back at him, finding nowhere to sit, he mumbled an excuse about his aging mind before presenting an illusion of comfort by introducing two plush hassocks beneath a silken canopy. A brass dallah full of coffee appeared on a table beside a bowl of shriveled dates. Sidra sat and inhaled the scent of cardamom wafting from the cup, pleased to let the aroma filter through her lungs. She passed on the dates, believing them to be from an ancient and outdated spell.
The old jinni crossed his legs atop the hassock. “So, you do not bring tribute. Why then have you come?” He waved a finger, and a trio of hanging lamps came to life over their heads. In the brighter light his skin appeared ashen and sun deprived. Lizard-like.
“You should get out of this cave for a change,” she chided gently. “Go to a bazaar. Indulge in some sun and soft desert wind at a street-side café.”
“I do go out. Whenever I hear the little mortal children shouting in the cave on one of their tours, I send a whoosh of air that hits them on the back of their heads and makes the sound of ooooohhhh in their ears.” The old man laughed until he coughed. “They turn heel and run every time.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Bah.” He waved a hand. “I have seen enough of the earth above and its inhabitants. The world is darker up there than it is here in my corner of the underground. Here I see what I need to see and nothing more, nothing less.”
“Do the people not call for you? Ask you for favor using their talismans?”
“A few, but the calling is not as it once was. Too many of our people have let the old ways fall on the side of the road.” He made a gesture with his fingers as if they were two legs walking. “Now they are gone.”
Not all, she thought, but let it rest. He was older and wiser than most she’d known. Old enough that he’d escorted the people when they traveled north to this foreign land centuries ago, carrying their beliefs and their customs with them on their backs and in their hearts. He’d answered the call to join them, saying he’d seen it foretold in the fire that he must go. The travelers asked for protection, guidance, and blessings from the jinn in the earthly realm as they built their new lives on unfamiliar soil. Now it was Sidra who flew to him needing guidance and assurance.
A glass-and-metal pipe appeared at the old jinni’s side. He slipped the mouthpiece of the shisha between his lips and inhaled. His eyes shut for one pleasurable moment. “So,” he said, as if reading printed words on the insides of his eyelids, “you sail freely to my door, yet you are still held in bondage.”
The truth spoken out loud sent a hot flame dancing along her spine. “I am.”
He opened his eyes, leaning into the lamplight to reveal clouded cataracts that had thickened. Though he had become nearly cave-blind, the depth of his sight had been retained, regardless. “The feud continues, then.”
“Jamra put a spell around his northern citadel. For a time, I could not leave the stinking place.” She fidgeted helplessly with the seam on her headscarf, nearly pulling it loose from atop her head. “He might have found me had I not discovered a third way out in time.”
“You’ve always been resourceful. And the authorities?”
“They are little more than clay figures grasping after smoke.”
“Yet they caught you once before.”
Shrewd old one.
“I was too deep in my grief and didn’t see the snare until it was too late.”
“Hmm, and now?”
“They still search, but with no heart for the chase.” She thought of that pale, yellow-haired Inspector Nettles and the look of failure on his face as she disappeared before his eyes. His expression was a memory she would tuck away for nights when she needed amusement to distract her.
Rajul Hakim seemed pleased to hear her report, nodding. He took another hit off his pipe, inhaling the tobacco smoke with the relish of a man satisfying a hunger. He nodded again, though this time in contemplation. “Jamra will not be so easily eluded a second time. His hatred is an oil fire that only grows the more you try to put out the flames.”
The feud between Jamra’s clan and hers had been more than a millennium in the making. Wounds of pride torn open over and over again and left to fester between those of the sunrise lands and those of the sunset in the west. Two jinn houses divided by a broken ideology, skirmishing under the All-Seeing Eye. But she, born of the east, and Hariq, born of the west, had looked past the worn-out grievances between their families and found love in each other’s arms. And were punished for it. Relentlessly. Ostracized by members of both clans for not defending their family’s side in the feud. And yet they endured, creating their own oasis in the middle of the storm.
Until the unspeakable happened.
Hariq wasn’t supposed to die. He was wise and bright and beautiful. Charming and playful, he made her laugh like no other, with his harmless tricks on humans done to entertain her while they swam in the ether together. Tapping men on the shoulder at the train station to make them turn around. Sliding a diner’s coffee cup out of reach while they read the newspaper at a street-side café. Reversing a laundress’s shirts so they hung upside down on the line. They should have had a thousand carefree years together, but one cannot always predict the rock in the road that will next make them stumble.
“Jamra will come,” she said. “He always does. But the All-Seeing Eye has set my feet down here again. With you. With the memory of Hariq.” She stared at the spirals on the wall with vague curiosity. “I had once known great peace here, but this village is now the source of my greatest sorrow. I’m pleased to meet my enemy in such a wasteland.”