The Forbidden Wish(3)

With a swirl of smoke, I shift from hawk to girl, dropping to the ground beside him. I take his hand and pull him along, trying to ignore the warmth of his touch. I have not touched a human in . . . oh, so very long, Habiba. His fingers tighten around mine, his palm dry and gritty with sand, his veins pulsing with life. As always happens when I touch a human, his heartbeat overwhelms me. It pounds at my ears and echoes mockingly in the emptiness of my chest, where there is only smoke instead of a heart.

There! A gaping doorway, half sunk in sand, which once led to your throne room, Habiba, but that now leads to a dark desert sky bright with stars. The teak door that hung there has long since rotted away, and the stones are chipped and dull, but after five hundred years of lonely darkness, it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

The magic makes one last effort to stop us, and this trap is the most dangerous of all. Sand turns to flame, and the flames rush to us hungrily from the belly of the great chamber. But I can taste the sweet night air, and I redouble my efforts to get the boy out alive. If I fail, I know I will never have another chance to escape.

“Faster!” I urge, and the boy glances back at the fire, then scrambles madly on. He moves so quickly he passes me, and now I am the one being tugged forward. The fire licks my heels. I turn to smoke, and the boy’s fingers close in on the space where my hand was.

“What are you doing?” he yells.

“Go!” I expand and shift again, becoming a rippling wall of water, pressing against the rush of the flames, holding them at bay. Wind and fire and water and sand—and sky sky sky!

The boy is first to emerge. He leaps out of the door and rolls, clutching my lamp to his stomach. I turn to smoke the moment I am in the clear, a great billow of glittering violet. Flames spew across the sand, like a thousand demon hands rending the earth, grasping for a handhold in the world. Fiery claws rake the desert and scratch the sky all around us.

The boy winces and holds up a hand as a blast of heat blows over him. Tendrils of smoke curl from the tips of his hair where the fire singes it. For a terrible moment, we are entirely encased by flames, and I surround the boy, choking him with my smoke but saving his body from the fire.

And then the magic finally collapses, a blaze that has run out of fuel. Fire turns into the sand it came from and falls in a sparkling white mist around us. The desert swirls around the door and sinks into it, until at last the opening is drowned by sand.

All around us rise the ruins of Neruby, once a vast, sparkling city. Over the centuries it has fallen apart, looking like the skeletal remains of a long-dead beast. Now, those ruins begin to rumble and shake. Massive stones fall from crumbling towers, and walls shatter into pieces. The desert heaves like the sea, swallowing the ruins stone by stone, dunes tossing this way and that. Slowly, loudly, the city sinks beneath the desert, crackling as the last of the old jinn magic burns away.

The last time I saw the city from above ground, it stood proud beneath a sky filled with black smoke, its air clanging with the sound of fighting and the cries of the dying, both human and jinn. Many died that final day. I should have been one of them.

Now the city sinks once and for all, taking the dead with it.

On his knees, the boy watches with wide eyes, and I swirl above him. Soon the last tip of the last tower is swallowed by the earth, and the city—once the greatest in the world, the city of kings and conquerors—is gone.

The desert ripples, throwing the boy onto his back. I shift to human form and stand beside him, staring at the ground that held me captive for centuries. When the dust clears, there is nothing but a glinting blue stretch of sand, pure and virgin, coursed with wind ripples. The only evidence that there ever was a garden of wonders, the only testimony to the great city lost beneath the sand, is a single pale coin that lies on the surface, winking at the moon.

And, of course, there is me.





One: The Thief


After the battle, the Queen and her warriors entered the throne hall of the vanquished Akbanids, where they found displayed on pedestals of marble all the great treasures of that kingdom. And the Queen, having little interest in the jewels and gold, passed all these by, until she came at last to the center of the room. And there, on a sheet of silk, sat a Lamp of humble aspect, wrought in bronze, and without a drop of oil inside.

With great reverence, the Queen took up the Lamp, and at her touch, from it rose with a glittering cloud of smoke a terrible Jinni. And all who looked upon her quailed and trembled, but the Queen stood tall and trembled not. Yet in her eyes was a look of wonder.

“I am the Jinni of the Lamp,” pronounced the Jinni. “Three wishes shall ye have. Speak them, and they shall be granted, yea, even the deepest desires of thine heart. Wilt thou have treasure? It is thine.”

And the Queen replied, “Silver and gold I have.”

“Wilt thou have kingdoms and men to rule over?” asked the Jinni. “Ask, and it is thine.”

And the Queen replied, “These I have also.”

“Wilt thou have youth everlasting, never to age, never to sicken?” asked the Jinni. “Ask, and it is thine.”

“Does not the poet say that hairs of gray are more precious than silver, and that in youth lies folly?”

The Jinni bowed low before the Queen. “I see you are wise, O Queen, and not easily fooled. So what would you ask of me, for I am thy slave.”

“Give me thy hand,” said the Queen, “and let us be friends. For does not the poet say, one true-hearted friend is worth ten thousand camels laden with gold?”