by Lucy Tempest
I called at the top of my wheezing lungs once more, hoping this would reassure them, then dragged myself out of the water. I slammed onto the edge with a wet slap, heaving, muscles aching, head about to burst, the foul tasting water spilling into my burning eyes and panting mouth. The chill set in almost immediately, but my teeth chattered for a different reason.
My destination was six clams up—a unit of measurement I’d never dreamed I’d use.
Climbing up seemed doable. It was climbing down that was always an issue. Now more than ever. I had no bag to hold whatever I’d find and no rope to lead me down.
I launched up and caught the bumpy edge of the first clam. Kicking in the air, I found the wall with my toes and pushed myself onto it, careful not to touch what it held, a splendid scimitar I would have loved to get for Cyrus.
I stood up and climbed onto the top shell, steadied myself enough to jump to the one above it. The force of my leap closed the first clam with a loud creak. I didn’t dare look below, repeated the process before my aching arms could give out, as if navigating a giant ladder with curved, uneven rungs.
Once on the fifth shell, anticipation inched out exertion and anxiety.
I was close. One to go before I got what we came here for. Whatever it is.
As I tensed my muscles to jump to the sixth clam, I lost my footing.
I thudded on the shell below, breaking it off and sending it crashing down on the ones below, smashing them one after the other. I threw myself up with a shout, and my sweaty fingers barely gripped the wet, uneven edge of my destination shell. Now there was fifty feet of empty air between my kicking feet and a ground heaped with knife-sharp broken shells.
Whatever hope I’d had of climbing down was gone. I had nowhere to go but up.
Wrists about to snap off and palms inflamed, I pulled myself up and rolled into the clam.
To my rib-rattling relief, it didn’t crack under my weight. Rather than a smooth mussel or a pretty scallop, it was a rough, uneven oyster, the last shell I would have picked.
And so was the prize inside it.
It looked like a rusted silver gourd, long-necked with a bulbous bottom covered in delicate etchings of flames with trailing smoke that went up to the stopper—a carnelian in a bronze seat. It matched my ring, and like it, it was an unremarkable trinket, something to be sold in a street auction for a few coins or to a smith who’d melt it down and reshape it.
“Is this it?” I yelled at the ring, voice wavering. “I almost killed myself for this?”
It was now as dull and lifeless as the stone stopper.
Did that mean it had done its job and got me where I needed to be or was it just malfunctioning again? This bottle couldn’t be the answer to all my wishes.
But I’d underestimated the lamp before. And I’d been let down by my ring, which didn’t contain a genie as it had claimed.
But what if this did?
I snatched the bottle up and crawled into its space, and the place shook again.
“Here goes nothing.”
Thinking this should be my motto, I grabbed the stopper. The ring went wild, flashing faster than a round of lightning.
Tongue dry, hope a flickering ember in my ashy insides, I pulled the stopper. It was stuck. Or my fingers were too wet, too weak.
Grabbing it with my shirt for more traction, I yanked at with a screech of frustration.
It finally uncorked the bottle with a POP that echoed everywhere.
The world exploded in a blossom of crimson as the wall mounting the oyster shattered and sent the shell and I hurtling down. Beyond panicked, I clutched its edge and flattened myself inside, hoping it would even lessen the brunt of the impact.
An impact that never came.
I pried open my eyes over the edge and found myself staring into eyes filled with fire. Literally.
Chapter Thirty
Locked in a staring contest with a fiery-eyed creature sparked one thing to life.
Survival.
It yelled for me to slam the oyster shut. If it proved too hard to pry open, it might look for its next meal elsewhere.
Also if it did, I might not be able to get out. But between being roasted alive and suffocating to death…
I actually didn’t approve either end. Which meant I had one last thing to do.
Run.
Holding the flaming gaze, I backed away slowly, dangled my leg over the corrugated side and…
“Thank you.”
The voice, decidedly human, would have been enough to stun me into stopping. But Thank you?
Then the fire died, leaving behind yellow eyes. Human eyes. Sort of.
A face followed over the rim, a human face. A man’s.
But I shouldn’t be fooled. This was no man. He was holding the oyster with me inside it like we both weighed nothing.
Even more unsettling was what blasted from within the darkness of his short, black beard. The biggest, white-teeth-filled, ecstatic smile.
“I can’t tell you how long I’ve been in there…” He stopped, frowned. “I actually can’t tell you how long I’ve been in there…” His frown melted and the smile split his face again. “But I can tell you how unbelievably good it feels to be finally free.”
It took one more heartbeat. Then it lodged in my mind.
“You were in that bottle.”
It was a statement, not a question. He bowed his head in acknowledgment, stepping off the towering pile of crushed shells, still holding the oyster and I up like I would a cup of tea.
No taller than myself, he was a slim man with short, curly, black hair, smooth golden-brown skin, a curved nose and rectangular brows that slanted over his eyes and tapered sharply. He was dressed in a turquoise sleeveless robe opened over a white V-neck tunic and loose pants hemmed at the ankles, with a golden sash around his waist. His shoes were made of the sash material and color, with curling tips, and he had wide, polished bronze bracelets on his wrists.
Apart from the fiery and now-owl-like yellow of his eyes, and the pointed ears sticking out of his hair, he looked no different than those I’d passed on the streets of Sunstone. He looked nothing like a genie.
Unless this was a disguise.
He might be exactly like the genie in the lamp in reality. A gargantuan being of blue fire, humanoid only in outline, with no features, no solidity. If so, I appreciated his effort to soothe my skittish human sensibilities.
Cyrus had once told me becoming a genie was a punishment. So what could have been his crimes to deserve this eternal prison and perpetual enslavement to whoever freed him? And did I even want to know?
As if reminding me of the ongoing crisis, the place shook violently, dislodging more clams from their mountings, bringing down more fragmented crystal from above like a beautiful, lethal hailstorm. At least this time I was inside the oyster and protected from being shredded to death.
But within the din, a silence had my heart almost stopping. The echoes of Cyrus’s and my mother’s shouts had stopped.
Forgetting the entity who literally had me in his hands, I spilled out of the oyster, ran as fast as my wobbly legs could carry me.
An ominous rumble struck from above. I snapped my head up in time to see a wall crumbling right on top of me. I barely threw myself out of the way of the crashing chunks.
Disoriented, sprawled on the ground, I felt like a sandstorm blew over me as the yellow-eyed man appeared beside me. I gawked up at him.
Hair in disarray, pointed ears on full display, he tutted. “You could just ask, you know.”
“Ask what?” I huffed, shaking at nearly being crushed to death—again.
He tapped the bottle I still clutched in my hand. “For help? You want to get out of here, right?”
“Yes! No! Not yet, I’m here with two others…” I stopped, a trickle of rationality seeping among the panicked disorientation. “How can you help me? Why were you in the bottle?”
“I can help by making what you wish possible,”
he answered patiently. “The bottle is a very long story that we don’t seem to have time for now—so—what do you wish?”
I could only think of one thing. “I wish to find my mother and Cyrus.”
“Done!” He grabbed my arm and we disappeared in a puff of fire-colored smoke.
It was an—inexplicable experience, turning into something intangible and transporting between—realms? Then we reemerged on the other side and my protesting yelp sounded only when we rematerialized.
We were at the bottom of a pit we’d flown over. One would need a flying carpet to reach any the objects on display here.
And that was exactly what I found, pinned to the ground by a giant, green malachite hand that had broken off the nearby sculpture of a towering, six-armed, meditating god.
But if it had been brought down, where were my mother and Cyrus?
I swung back to him. “Where are they? I told you to take me to them.”
He steadied me, glanced around. “I did. They’re here. Somewhere.”
“I already knew that!”
“You weren’t specific.”
“Helpful, aren’t you?” I grumbled, putting everything into trying to roll the hand off Carpet. The man watched me, doing nothing as I finally managed it and Carpet shot up to a hover before me, dusting itself and shaking its tassels.
I grabbed one, shook it urgently. “Where are they?”
Bending one corner into a step, it urged me to hop on. Once seated, it shot up, giving me a full view of the canyon-like area now cluttered by the demolished exhibits. I lay down on my stomach, clutching Carpet’s edge to peek beyond it, my aching arms trembling. As it started descending on the other side of the malachite god’s statue, I saw a body. Mother!
She was passed out—please let it be passed out—in the malachite god’s lap.
But I couldn’t see Cyrus!
My mind was filling with the dread of finding his broken, lifeless body in the canyon pit when, with another puff of billowing, colorful smoke, the man appeared on Carpet.
He surveyed the place in disinterest as Carpet lowered us next to mother. I almost keeled over her when I found her breathing easily.
But would it be safer to leave her here, or take her on Carpet as I looked for Cyrus?
I decided that the god provided adequate cover and I couldn’t risk her rolling off Carpet mid-flight, so I left her there. Now Cyrus!
I was about to yell at my companion to find him, when a realization hit me.
If he was a genie, then I’d wasted the first of my three wishes!
Instead of wishing for us to be rounded up, fixed up and dropped back in the palace, I’d made a vague wish and he ended up only crossing a barrier I could have probably crossed myself. He hadn’t even found them for me, just taken me to the general spot where they’d landed, and only my mother at that. The sheer stupidity of what I’d done made me want to gnaw on my raw, swollen fingers.
Peeling myself from the muck of self-loathing, I knew one thing. I wasn’t in a state to frame my next wish for maximum efficiency, so I’d better keep my mouth shut.
I was finding Cyrus on my own.
“What are we looking for?” he asked, strange eyes panning around.
If I answered that without making it a demand or saying I wish, was I safe from this entity’s trickery? It couldn’t claim I’d made an inadvertent wish like the other genie had done to Jumana, right?
To be on the safe side, I kept my answer to one word. “Cyrus.”
“Who is that?”
“My uh…” What did I call Cyrus? He’d called himself my “betrothed.” I settled for, “My prince.”
“Oh,” he said, intrigued. “Prince of what?”
“Cahraman.”
His brows met in a bemused frown. “Never heard of it. Is it beyond the Silent Ocean?”
How long had he been in that bottle?
He’d said he had no idea. Which gave me an idea. One I couldn’t even finish as I prodded Carpet to search for Cyrus.
Considering I had no use for him, the man puffed away.
I shoved the bottle down my shirt. As long as I had it, he’d be compelled to come back.
We were circling the far end of the canyon when a shout came from above.
“Ada! Over here!”
Cyrus! Alive. Shouting clear and strong. Yes, yes!
Snapping my head towards his voice, I found him in the distance, hanging from a stone bar carved out of ceiling rock, at least ten feet away from steps hewn in the wall. A sheer drop of hundreds of feet loomed beneath him.
He was disheveled, covered in dried blood, and the best thing I’d ever seen.
“Carpet, get him!”
We shot towards him, arriving at the last second before his arm gave out.
He landed heavily in front of me, his plummeting weight causing Carpet to dip and veer, almost rolling him off the edge. I caught handfuls of his shirt and hair and tugged him back with rabid strength. Then I hugged him and hugged him, sore arms trembling, no more tears to cry.
He sagged in my arms for a long moment. Then he mumbled something. I drew back, blinking.
He chuckled, a sound of absolute tiredness and delight that made my galloping heart stumble. “My hero.”
I sighed and rested my forehead against his, sinking into the fathomless relief of having him safe and in my arms. “H-how did you end up there?”
“Carpet flung us up right before something huge crashed on it. Your mother shot out a spell, to slow our landing I guess, but it only threw us in opposite directions.” He turned worried eyes around. “Did you find her? Is she alright?”
“She is. I’m hoping she’d wake up soon. When you both fell silent I almost went mad!”
He frowned. “I didn’t consider that. Once I thought my calls would serve no purpose in finding you, and knowing you must have your hands full or you would have been there already, I decided to shut up and stop adding to your anxiety.”
I surged to hug him. “You meant well.”
He exhaled heavily. “Seems the simurgh was right. The best of intentions seem to lead to the worst outcomes. Anyway, I was about to try one last swing to reach those steps when you showed up.”
I shuddered at the thought. If I’d been any later, I could have lost him.
A puff of color expanded at the periphery of my vision. I turned my head, found the man at the other edge of Carpet, legs crossed, as if he’d been there all the time.
Cyrus followed my gaze, went wide-eyed. “Where did you come from?”
Cutting off the man’s answer, afraid he’d consider any a wish granted, I raised the silver bottle. “This. This is the reason I took so long to get here.”
I didn’t wait to hear the dozen questions crowding Cyrus’s eyes, tapped Carpet to set us down. It responded with a fast plummet that left my startled yelp up in the air.
We jumped off the second we landed, rushed to mother. Thankfully, she roused as soon as I nudged her.
A hand flew to her bandaged head as she groaned, “Please, don’t tell me another six years passed with this concussion.”
I laughed through the pins in my throat, helping her up. “Just an hour or so.”
She hugged me to her side. “Good. I would have hated to miss my grandchildren.”
I looked at Cyrus. I found him looking at me and his expression had my face burning.
Clearing my swollen throat, I helped her off the statue. She was fussing over the bump on my forehead when she finally noticed him.
She blinked, her lips wobbling. “Um, hello. I assume you’re a fairy from Peristan?”
“If I were I’d have wings,” he said, fluttering his hands for emphasis.
Cyrus wagged his finger between the bottle and the man. “Are we supposed to believe you’re a genie?”
“I’m not a proper genie, no, but—” He tucked his hair behind his ears, baring their pointed tips and lack of earlobes. “I am the closest you can find around here.”
/>
Cyrus pursed his lips. “So you’re a weak genie? I assume the more powerful a genie is, the less human it appears?”
He opened his mouth to answer, but my mother’s exclamation drowned him out. “You’re a jann, aren’t you?”
He sighed. “I suppose that would be a name for what I am, since I can grant you wishes, just not big ones.”
I glared at him. “I’ll attest to that. He didn’t even find you for me.”
Cyrus deflated. “So we really did come all the way here for nothing.” He turned to me. “But how did you get this bottle?”
I reluctantly sketched my adventures to obtain it and he seemed horrified I’d risked my life climbing up crumbling walls based on the ring’s glow.
I rushed to defend my decision. “I believed my ring thought the bottle had what we came for, and it did—in a way. These things are lousy at interpreting your needs or commands.” I checked the ring, found the stone dead cold. “But there’s still a chance there might be a genie in my ring.”
Suddenly, the man cracked up.
I glowered at him. “What’s so funny?”
“I should have introduced myself, that would have avoided any misunderstandings.” The man cleared his throat and bowed to me with a flourish. “Mistress, one who has set me free, I am Esfandiar of Gypsum. And I was the ‘genie’ in your ring.”
Chapter Thirty-One
The cogs and wheels that ran my thought process came to a screeching standstill. Some shattered in the violent halt.
It wasn’t only what he claimed to be, the limited, inconsistent being that powered my ring, it was who he claimed to be.
Esfandiar of Gypsum!
The adventurer who’d written some of the best stories in The Anthology of the Dunes—centuries ago.
It was then I remembered why I’d believed my ring contained a genie to begin with.
When I’d first gotten the ring, I’d wished to know what powered it, and it had opened my copy of the Anthology to an illustration of Esfandiar facing a genie emerging from its bottle.
It hadn’t been telling me it was a genie, but that it was him.