The Forbidden Wish(49)

. . . 101 . . . 102 . . .

My stomach tightens. Any moment, Aladdin could take a few steps one way while I take a few steps the other, and my leash will snap and I will turn to smoke. I wonder if Darian notices how tense I am. He still holds my hand, too tightly for me to pull away.

The walls are stone slabs, their faces etched with fading glyphs and symbols. Brass hooks hold burnt-out torches on the walls, but Darian manages to find one with a little oil left in it, and he lights it with a strike of the decorative knife on his belt against a bar of flint tied to the torch.

“The old crypt,” says Darian, holding up the light. His hand tightens more around mine, and I stare at him curiously. Darian is afraid, of the dark, the deep, or the dead. As if sensing my glimpse of this vulnerability, he scowls and pulls me onward.

“The old kings and queens are buried here. Now we lay them in tombs above ground, in the hills to the north. But the walls here are lined with iron, which makes the crypt perfect for storing our . . . special prisoners.”

The hair on my neck stands on end. This is it. This is really, truly it—the night I find Zhian.

And not a day too soon.

. . . 126 . . . 127 . . .

As everything in me screams to turn around and run back, I wonder if Aladdin has noticed me missing yet, then chide myself for even thinking of him right now. I need to focus fully on the mission at hand. I know that soon, perhaps even this very night, I will have to let Aladdin go forever. That is a thought I swallow for now, finding it too painful to touch.

“Prisoners?” I ask, keeping my voice high and frightened. “Are you sure—”

“You’re safe with me,” Darian assures me. “We’re almost there.”

. . . 138 . . . 139 . . . If I had a heart, it would be pounding like a drum.

He stops in front of a door made of iron, a massive thing he couldn’t possibly open on his own. But, dropping my hand, he opens a wooden panel in the wall to reveal a clever system of gears. He pulls out a handle, fixes it to one of the gears, then hands me the torch so that he can grab the handle in both hands and throw his weight against it. Darian strains and curses, and slowly the gears begin to turn. The wall hums and clicks as levers begin to work, and the door slowly eases sideways, sliding into the wall.

When the door is open just enough for one person to fit through, Darian slides an iron bar into the gears to keep them from slipping, then turns to me with a grin.

“Now you’ll see just how mighty we Amulen warriors are.”

And not a moment too soon. I’m nearly sick with apprehension, the distance between me and the lamp seeming to hum dangerously. Just a few more steps. I can last that long. I have to.

He steps inside, and I follow, a sharp pounding in my chest like a phantom heart.

Inside the room, I can feel them all.

Hundreds of jinn, of every kind, are trapped in small bottles of clay and bronze, glass and porcelain, set on shelves that stretch wall to wall. The room is large and high-ceilinged, the floor bare save for a table holding a heavy scroll and several quills.

The jinn feel me enter, sense my true nature, and begin to clamor and cry out, their voices an overwhelming tidal wave. I sway, gasping a little at the impact of noise and desperation.

Darian of course can hear none of this, and he looks pleased at my reaction. “Yes, it’s quite impressive. We’ve been bottling jinn for hundreds of years. There’s no one better at it.”

“You—you bottle them yourself?” I ask, putting out a hand against the wall to steady myself.

“Well . . . not me, personally. But I give orders to the Eristrati, who fight the jinn, and to the jinn charmers we imported from Tytoshi. Since I’ve been in command, we’ve bottled more than thirty jinn, just in a few years’ time.” He struts around the room, like a hunter displaying his trophies. “These are the maarids—water jinn. There are the fire ifreet, and the earth ghuls. We even have a few sila.” He waves at some tall glass bottles on a high shelf. “Very hard to catch, because they’re usually invisible.”

Sister! Sister! Their cries ring in my thoughts like a storm. Help us! Set us free!

Some of them have been in here as long as three hundred years, I gather from their erratic shouting. I sift through the voices, trying to pick out Zhian’s, but it’s difficult to concentrate with Darian droning on about various jinn charmings he has witnessed.

“. . . This one was hanging around near one of our fishing villages, so we waited all night until it appeared, and then I sent Vigo out with his flute . . .”

Be silent, all of you! I command, and the voices just clamor louder. My eyes scan the shelves, back and forth, searching. Zhian! Zhian, are you here?

“. . . And this one,” Darian is saying, “this one is our greatest prize. Not ghul or ifreet, not maarid or sila, but something else. Something bigger.”

My eyes snap to his face, and I barely manage to keep myself from shifting into a tiger and pinning him to the floor until he speaks.

“Which one?” I ask, smiling demurely, hoping there isn’t smoke streaming through my teeth.

Darian points to a clay jar above his head, with a fluted neck and a graceful handle. “There. We captured it two months ago. Thought it might be an ifreet, because of the fire it was throwing at us, but the way it changed form—from man to dragon to cloud of smoke—no ifreet can do that. Only ghuls can change form, and then only by eating the soul of a human or animal before taking its body. We’ve been debating what it might be. I think—”