I meet the Shaitan in midair, drawing conjured blades. I raise my swords, clashing with his claws in a shower of sparks.
“You can’t defeat me,” he hisses, all trace of human form gone. He thrusts his head over my crossed blades, fangs snapping.
I roll aside, clear of his teeth. This fight is not going to be determined by swords and stances. Nardukha’s attacks are primal and powerful, not to be overcome by human tactics.
I draw him away from Aladdin, who is struggling to his feet amid a crowd of creeping, hissing jinn. He draws a short knife from his boot and holds it up, a paltry defense against the claws of a ghul or the teeth of an ifreet.
“Leave him,” the Shaitan snarls, and the jinn back away.
Then he pauses a moment, his eyes intent on me. Once, I would have cowered to be the center of his terrible attention. Now, I want only to finish this. Live or die, this is a fight I cannot abandon.
I draw a deep breath and relax, my conjured blades evaporating.
I reach for my magic.
And for the first time in my long, strange life, it answers my call.
With a gasp, I sway and nearly topple, but gritting my teeth, I stand my ground and let it swell. Always the magic has come from a human, siphoned off them and into me.
This time, the power is born at my center. It is an entirely different feeling. It’s dizzying and terrifying and wholly exhilarating. It spreads like white fire through my body, filling my limbs, my head, even my hair.
I can do anything. The Shaitan formed me into the most powerful of his jinn, and now I truly know what that means.
Nardukha acts first. He sends a funnel of fire shooting toward me. The blast of heat hits me first, blowing my hair back. I react instinctively, throwing up a wall of smoke to break the flames. By then he is already on me, striking me hard in my stomach and flinging me through the alomb. I let the momentum of his blow carry me out into the open, over the side of the mountain, where I shift to smoke from the waist down and hover in midair.
The Shaitan doesn’t immediately follow. Instead, he stands at the edge of the alomb and waves a hand. The clouds around the summit part, affording a view of Parthenia below. He looks at me, then at the city, and the moment I catch on, I throw myself at him.
“No!”
But he sends me reeling with a shake of his arm. Before I can recover, he directs a finger toward the summit, and the ground splinters with a succession of deafening cracks, which begin to glow red with swelling lava. The shaking of the ground knocks Aladdin to his knees, and he retreats farther into the alomb as the mountain rumbles.
“Aladdin!” I shout. “Stay down!”
Horrified, I try to dive past Nardukha to help, but he grabs me and hurls me outward. Without pausing, he issues a command to the jinn, and they rise and begin winging toward Parthenia.
“This is the price of your treachery!” he spits out. “This is the cost of your pride!”
He will destroy Parthenia, just as he destroyed Neruby and Ghedda, all to punish me.
But this time, I can fight back.
I fly away from the mountain, which begins to spew black smoke from the cracks opening in its sides. Nardukha follows, his enormous wings of shadow fully unfurled. He rolls onto his back and brushes a hand through the air, causing the stones of the mountain to break apart and rise up, igniting one by one. These he sends arcing toward me like comets.
I dodge his flaming stones while flying farther out. The sky is filled with falling fire and trails of black smoke. I blaze through them, then turn and fling my hands wide, sending a powerful wind gusting toward him. At my thought, the wind hardens into icy fangs that whistle as they speed through the air.
Nardukha crosses his arms in front of himself, breaking the icicles. I am already moving, heady from the power that pours through me in boundless amounts. Usually there is a limit to my magic, proportionate to my master’s wish, and I must wield it judiciously. Now with a mere thought I release floodgates inside, fueled by my desires, hampered only by the limits of my own imagination. And after four thousand years of granting wishes, my imagination is the most powerful muscle I possess.
I conjure at a rate that dazzles even me. Fire, wind, water, stone: All the elements bend themselves to my command. I send glittering eagles of flame screaming toward Nardukha. They claw at his eyes until he dashes them into a shower of sparks.
With a snap of my fingers, a pair of dragons appear in the sky above him, one of ice, one of fire. They roar and dive, spiraling around one another, their jaws gaping to swallow Nardukha. He turns and catches each by its muzzle, and with a growl, he reduces them to tiny harmless sparrows.
Enraged now, he goes on the offensive, slinging fire and rock in a crude but effective barrage. I dissolve into smoke and race through the air, flying over Parthenia, streaking toward the cliffs. Below me, the city is in chaos, as the people catch sight of the mountain erupting above them. The fighting around the palace begins to die down as they realize a greater threat is upon them. The earth beneath the city cracks and splinters, and when the walls begin to break apart, the wards protecting the people are broken. Jinn pour into the city. My spirit aches, longing to fly down and defend them, but I can barely hold off Nardukha.
The Shaitan is close on my tail, his massive wings beating with a sound like enormous drums, whipping up powerful gales with each stroke.
I re-form into human shape on the spot where Caspida nearly dropped me from the cliff not long ago, my back to the sea. Nardukha lands in front of me and conjures a pack of shadow wolves. They snarl and snap and salivate, and I shudder. Of all animals on the earth, wolves I hate most, as all jinn do. Wolves thirst for our flesh and take particular savage joy in hunting us. How Nardukha can even conjure them I do not know.
Nardukha’s wolves leap forward at an impossible speed, fangs bared and eyes glowing. Fear courses through me, immobilizing me. Nardukha’s eyes flash with triumph. I can’t look away. Can’t think. Can’t—
No. I am a slave to fear no more.
I spread my feet and hands and call to the one thing I fear more than wolves: the sea. For a moment, nothing happens.
The wolves are a breath away. They jump high, stretching their jaws wide, revealing far more teeth than any wolf should have. Their eyes burn red in their black shadow forms, and my body seizes as I turn my face away, eyes squeezing shut, knowing this is the end.
And then the sea answers.
It rises behind me in a mighty wave, deep gray coursed with rippling veins of blue, frothing and foaming, blocking out the sun. The wolves drop to the earth and cringe, tails between their legs. I stand, arms uplifted, holding up the sea. Then, thrusting my hands forward, I send the wall of water gushing over my head, dashing the wolves away. They dissolve into puffs of smoke as the wave washes over the cliff top and pours back down, leaving several fish and one green turtle floundering on the grass. I lift them with a thought and gently drop them back into the water.
Breathing hard, Nardukha and I stare at each other for a moment. He is drenched with seawater, but it turns quickly to steam on his hot skin. His wings droop to the ground, leaving him standing tall as two humans, more coal than fire after the drenching I gave him.
“You are not the first jinni to break free of my rule. Do you wonder why you have never heard of the free jinn? Because none of them survived more than a few days. I will not allow it.”
I want to reply, but I can only pant, sore and exhausted.
His wings and hands begin to glow red. He pauses, just for a moment, to say, “You could have been a queen of Ambadya. Now look at you. I will finish you, jinni. I will crush you by crushing that damnable boy.”
With that, he rises and streams toward the mountain, and I race to catch up.
Sacrificing subterfuge for speed, I rise high into the sky before driving northward at a blinding pace.
The sky is dark despite its being afternoon, and it is impossible to tell jinn from clouds. But they are there, flying to and fro, dropping into the city like hawks hunting mice. I dodge columns of black smoke rising from the city and race up the lava bubbling down the mountainside, its heat stifling. It has reached the city and begun to engulf the palace’s north wall. As I fly, I conjure a rash of frost across the slope, and at its touch, the lava begins to cool and harden.
Nardukha has almost reached the alomb when I catch up to him. I spring on him from above, bringing us both crashing onto the obsidian floor by the Eye and nearly on top of Aladdin, who scrambles out of the way.
At once I leap up, conjuring a torrent of sand, then spread my hands wide. My sand separates and hardens into a line of shining glass warriors who advance on the Shaitan, brandishing glittering spears. Light refracts through their crystalline forms, making them seem to glow. Caught off guard by their sudden appearance, Nardukha shifts to smoke to avoid being impaled.
While Nardukha is distracted, I shift to sand and stream across the floor, re-forming behind him, conjuring a trio of tigers, one of light, one of water, one of sand.
Nardukha, snarling, is driven back by my barrage of conjurations. He is stronger than me, and I know that if I give him one moment to think, he will destroy me—for good, this time. So I don’t let up. I whirl and weave, teeth gritted, hair flying, crafting creatures of sand and fire, air and water, in a dizzyingly endless barrage. Scarlet and blue tigers, flaming eagles, a massive stone bear, warriors of water and smoke. They throw themselves at Nardukha, who furiously defends himself, shredding my weaves as quickly as I can conjure them.
He may be stronger, but I am more imaginative.
And after four thousand years of practice, I am fast.
I gather the elements and shape them in a blur, until the air in the alomb is thick with magic, flowing in ribbons of light and curls of smoke. I conjure as I have never conjured before, throwing everything I have at him. And he is losing ground. Framed by the fiery doorway, Nardukha is a dark shadow, wings spread, fangs bared.
Light flashes off the ring on my hand as I weave, and I glance at it.
My mind stumbles.
The symbols on the ring have been obliterated, probably by the fire blast that knocked me into the sea. I realize then that I’ve seen this scorched ring before, before even I forged it for Aladdin.
My eyes grow wide as the weight of this crashes over me like a tidal wave, but I hesitate too long.
The Shaitan tears through my last conjuration, a glittering dragon of glass and water. With a shriek it bursts into a thousand and one tiny flashing pieces, which fall like rain around the Shaitan.
And in that moment he attacks, throwing two powerful beams of blinding lightning—but I am not the target.
Aladdin is.
I move without thinking. I spin, a trick to gather as much magic as I can hold. The lightning is so close to Aladdin that his hair crackles with it, his eyes wide.
I reach deep, deep, deep, guided by instinct, guided by the memory of my strange journey back from death. I reach through the elements, through the unseen fabric that binds the world together. I reach farther and deeper than I have ever gone before, to those threads of the element I have only seen once, when I stood on the edge of the universe—the threads of time itself.
Time is the strongest magic, your voice whispers in my thoughts.
Wrapping my fingers tight around the seconds and minutes, I twist the strands. The effort leaves me gasping, as if I’ve grabbed hold of a comet’s tail, but I do not let go. Unlike the four main elements with which I usually work my magic, these threads are alive and moving. Manipulating them is like trying to change the direction of a river. And yet I stand firm, bracing myself against the flow of the hours. The tide pulls at me, courses through me, beginning to separate my fibers. If I hold on much longer, I will dissolve once and for all and be lost in that eternal current. Easier it would be to hold back the sea with one’s hand.
But I will not let him kill Aladdin.
He took you, Roshana. He took the Gheddans. He took me, for four thousand years.
No more.
With a deep cry that wells from the bottom of my lungs, I twist the threads of time. Around me, events pause and reverse, Aladdin falling to his feet, the fragments of my sand and water dragon re-forming into their original shape, the mountain sucking in bright streams of lava. Faster and faster the events unwind, flowing like a river running uphill. Deeper and deeper I dive, until the current begins pulling at me, and I must brace myself against it like an anchor dragging through the sand. When we stop, a thousand and one moments all happening and unhappening around us, only Nardukha and I stand outside it all, staring at each other as the time threads flow and pulse around us.
“How are you doing this?” breathes the Shaitan.
“I fell outside time,” I reply. “I saw the gods weaving the universe.”
Nardukha looks around, but I can tell by his gaze that he cannot see the threads I’ve twisted around him, trapping him in a single moment. He has never journeyed to death and back, as I have. He has not stood on the edge of the universe and seen the turn of the hours. And if he cannot see it, he cannot manipulate it. Finally his gaze returns to me, thoughtful, even a bit awed.
And then the fury flashes in his eyes. Nardukha opens his mouth in a wordless roar, his throat a cavern of flames, and he lunges—
I close my hands, and time collapses around him. His roar is cut off as he is washed away like a twig in a flood. The minutes swallow him up, pull him beneath the current, until he is simply gone.
With the last of my strength, I pull from my finger the ring I forged for Aladdin and let it fall into the current. It is swept away, lost into the flow of the hours, to land by the side of a fallen queen, to be found by her handmaidens, to wait five hundred years for the right person to put it on. With it I send a whispered prayer.
“Find me, my thief.”
Then, with a soft cry, I release the threads. Something inside me snaps, and, gasping, I pitch forward into darkness.
Chapter Thirty
“ZAHRA.”
My eyes open, and Aladdin is there, peering anxiously at me. He brushes the hair from my face.
“Are you all right?” he asks.
I sit up. My thoughts swim languidly through still waters. Everything is blurred and unfamiliar. Instinctively I reach out for my lamp, finding nothing but a vague tingle, as if I am missing an arm.
“I was unconscious?” I ask.
“Yes.” He cradles my head in one hand. The other holds my arm. “Zahra, what did you do? What happened?”
My head aches as if it’s been beaten with rocks. I groan and wrap my arms around it, trying to quell the pain. Aladdin holds me for several moments, stroking my hair, while I whimper and cringe.
“Are you all right?” he whispers. “Zahra?”
“I’m okay,” I say through my teeth, pulling back a little. “What about you?”
He grins tiredly. “Alive, so I’m not complaining. Where’s the Shaitan?”
I lift my head and blink rapidly, and the world reluctantly takes shape. I’m still in the alomb. Only seconds have passed, it seems, but much has changed. The sky is clear and blue, except for the tattered remnants of clouds drifting northward. The Eye of Jaal lies in two pieces, cracked straight down the center, the fiery tunnel to Ambadya vanished. All around me, massive cracks splinter the stone and the massive columns, as if a god has struck the alomb with a celestial hammer. The sight chills me; I realize that I caused it, that the magic I drew upon to trap Nardukha is greater and more dangerous than I know.
“He’s gone.” I ache to my core, my limbs leaden with fatigue. “Held prisoner by time. He only exists in a single moment, and he can never touch us again.”
Aladdin blinks, then asks, “W
ill he come back?”
“No.” He couldn’t even see the threads that ensnared him. What must it be like to be imprisoned in a moment, to not even see the walls that trap you?
“And the jinn?”
I cross to the doorway and run my hands down its sides, then step through experimentally. Nothing happens. Walking to the edge of the alomb, I look down on Parthenia. Smoke rises from the city, but no jinn soar above it.
“They must have fled back to Ambadya. They felt the loss of their king and panicked. For ten thousand and one years the Shaitan has been the only force that joined them together. They will fracture into their ancient tribes, and they will not return for a long, long time.”
“How do you know?”
Grimly, I turn and meet his gaze. “Because they know that I am here, and they know I defeated their king.”
“So it’s over.”
I nod, a bit stunned. The world has taken on a dreamlike softness, not quite real.
“Zahra . . . what happened to you? I saw you go through the doorway, and I thought . . . I thought you were gone. Where’s the lamp?”
I tell him about the jeweled garden, and the vision of you I saw. But when I reach the point where I fell through time and stars, my words fail me, and tears spring to my eyes. The beauty and purity of those moments still overwhelms me, and I wonder if I will ever truly understand all that I saw.
“I came back,” I conclude. “And for the first time, my magic was my own. I’ll never spend another moment in that horrible lamp.”
“I still can’t believe it’s really you,” he murmurs, running his fingers down my cheek. “This face . . . it’s yours, isn’t it?”
“The one I was born with,” I admit, heat rising under my skin as I feel a surge of shyness. I look down at my hands. “Do you . . . like it?”
“Zahra.”
I can’t help but lift my gaze at the warmth in his tone. His eyes are shining, his lips slanted in a small smile.
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