“Deceived?” Tafas demanded warily, even as his heart leaped with hope that he might live. “How is this?”
“You thought you fought for Allah,” Matt explained, “but you had been tricked into fighting for Shaitan’s cause.” He raised a hand to forestall the youth’s objections. “Think of the results of your invasion—misery and suffering, and not many conversions. If you had conquered Ibile, the sorcerer who deceived you would have slain you by magic, then taken all your lands to rule them for Satan.”
The Moorish captains cried out in indignation.
“Shaitan?”
“No!”
“Never!”
“Who else could be the source of magic that addicts young people, even children, to a drug that allows him to drain their life energy slowly in order to strengthen your forces?” Matt demanded. “And if your victories are bought with such stolen life, whose victories are they?”
“You lie!” Tafas cried, shaking with anger—and fear that Matt might be right. “I fought only for Allah!”
“But the man who talked you into fighting served a different master,” Matt told him. He shook his head sadly. “Sorry, my lord. He used his magic to hunt up a shepherd boy who could convince men to follow him and had the genius to win battles, then bedazzled him with talk of the victory of Islam—when all along, he only cared about his own conquest, and manipulating you into conquering for him.”
“You lie!” Tafas cried in despair. “You must! Nirobus is a holy man! He would never promote the cause of Shaitan!”
“But perhaps the cause of himself?” Matt shrugged. “Have you ever heard him call upon Allah, my lord? Oh, to speak of Allah, certainly, even to quote the Koran, for the devil can quote scripture to his purpose—but to actually pray? He is no muzzein or imam, my lord, nor a quadi, nor a clergyman of any sort.”
“He is a holy hermit!”
Matt shrugged again. “Prove it, my lord. Go ask him—but take me along.”
“Oh surely, lead my armies back to Morocco! Do you think me a fool?”
Matt’s eyes lost focus; he turned slowly, gazing off toward the mountains. “I don’t think we need to go that far.”
Alisande looked up at the patch of white on the distant mountainside. She had thought it only a sorcerer! Could it really be the man who stood behind all this, come to see what he had expected to be a victory? But he had seen his own army vanquished! Why had he not fled? “My Lord Wizard,” she said slowly, “I pray you, take care. Why would the genius who has wrought this all stand to await your coming, if he did not still expect victory?”
“Good point.” Matt seemed to tense a little, to grow a trifle more bulky, but looked up to smile at the Mahdi. “I’m willing to take the chance, Lord Tafas. Are you?”
How could the Mahdi have refused the challenge, there in front of all his troops?
They climbed the trail to the cave, a dozen Moorish captains and a dozen knights of Merovence, with King Rinaldo and Sir Guy. Matt rode a captured Arabian stallion with Groldor slung over the pommel before him, bound, gagged, and gurgling with fury.
The white-robed man stood waiting for them—but as they came closer, they saw that his robes weren’t really white, but a light gray, and the turban on his head was pinned with a blood-red ruby. Matt glanced at it narrowly as they approached; he didn’t trust jewelry anymore.
He recognized the man, of course, though he did look a bit different without his gray three-piece suit and bowler hat.
They drew up in front of him. Nirobus was smiling at them, amused—even when Matt shoved Groldor off the horse to fall in front of his boss, red-faced and gabbling. “I thought I’d be a nice guy and return your minion,” Matt told him. “No charge, no ransom.”
“Why did you bother?” Nirobus didn’t even look at Groldor. “He failed.”
“So did you, Nirobus.” Matt jerked his head downhill. “Your army has lost the war. Without your draining my world for energy, they can’t win.”
“They still outnumber you,” Nirobus reminded, “and the Moors are ferocious fighters. They only need to change their tactics.” Then he smiled, and the gentleness, even tenderness of that smile was even more chilling as he said, “Besides, there are other lands in your world—and other worlds. What I have done once, I can do again.” He turned to Tafas. “Be sure, you can still gain the victory.”
“With energy drained from youths and maidens?” Tafas was a youth himself, or close enough to take it personally. “I will not lead an army with such a force!”
Nirobus shrugged. “You must take power where you can find it, Lord Tafas, or you will never truly be the Mahdi, never conquer Europe for Allah!”
“You do not deny that you strengthened my army with stolen lives!” Tafas cried, paling. “What if I did conquer Europe? What then?”
“Why, you would rule it under my guidance, and the wild horsemen from the steppe would conquer all of Asia and rule it.”
“They are not Muslims!”
“They can become so,” Nirobus said agreeably.
“Must we fight them, too?”
“No,” Nirobus lectured, “for if you did, neither of you would win; you are both too strong, and would only chew one another to bits. You would rule Europe, and their khan would rule Asia.”
“Under whose guidance?” Tafas demanded.
“Why, mine, of course,” Nirobus said mildly.
“Then you do seek to conquer the world!”
“How else may all the world surrender to Allah?” Nirobus returned.
“There’re an awful lot of souls in Africa,” Matt reminded him. “You haven’t started work there yet.”
Nirobus turned to him, and his mild smile was chilling. “What makes you think that?”
For a moment, Matt’s head reeled with the enormity of it. He wondered if the kingdom of Benin had mounted a campaign of conquest into the interior. He had a vision of warriors floating down the Congo River on barges, then coming ashore to burn villages and towns.
He forced himself to pay attention to the here and now—and found Nirobus gazing at him shrewdly. He shook himself, summoning a glare—the sorcerer could have slain him with a single spell while he was distracted.
“You care,” Nirobus murmured, in tones of incredulity. “You actually care! You care about people whom you have never seen, of whom you have scarcely even heard!”
“Of course I care,” Matt said, glowering to hide how the words had shaken him. “They’re human, aren’t they?”
“And you care for all who are human?”
“Yes, I do!” Matt snapped. “Don’t you?”
“Oh, I do, Lord Wizard,” Nirobus said softly. “I definitely do—very much.”
Matt stared. “Then why are you trying to conquer us all?”
“To keep you from fighting one another,” Nirobus explained, “to establish a fair and rational system of laws that will restrain the strong and wealthy, protecting the poor and weak.”
“You’ve brought down all this misery, all the bloodshed and pain of war, in the name of peace?” Matt cried.
“It is nothing compared to the centuries of security, happiness, and prosperity that a world order will bring,” Nirobus returned.
The hell of it was that he very obviously believed what he was saying.
“And the junkies?” Matt asked. “The kids, even grade-school kids in New Jersey? Can the peace of your empire make up for leaching their lives away?”
“They were nothing,” Nirobus said impatiently. “They had become slaves of the poppy already, and would have died young in any case. Why not put to use the life force they were squandering?”
“Because they might have been saved!” Matt snapped.
“Saved?” Finally Nirobus’ lip curled in scorn. “I became a physician to save lives and alleviate suffering, then had to watch people die because my knowledge was not enough to save them. That, I could accept—but seeing people whose lives I had saved come to blows over a woman, a
purse, a horse, to see them wound one another and come back to me to heal those wounds, to see them slay one another wasting the lives I had given back to them—it was enough to make me disgusted with all of humankind! I nearly despaired of our breed! But I finally did despair when I saved a young king from a flux that would have killed him, then saw him march off to make war upon his neighbor—and because I had healed him, a thousand peasants died, two thousand soldiers expired in agony!”
In spite of himself, Matt’s heart twisted. “The guilt wasn’t yours, Doctor.”
“But it was! From that time forth I vowed to save only those who were worthy—then despaired of finding any way to detect them! Muslim, Christian, or Jew, there were good people and bad people of each religion, of every country! I thought that good people were weak and exploited, evil people wealthy and grasping—until I helped poor people become rich and gain power, then saw them turn on their weaker neighbors to gouge them of every penny they could find!”
“Didn’t any of them give money to the poor?”
“Oh, yes, a few here and there!” Nirobus said angrily. “A few Muslims remembered their obligation to give alms, a few Christians remembered that their Savior had commanded them to feed the poor, a few Jews remembered that their Talmud told them to care for widows and orphans—but so few, so few, and for each of them, there was another who used those poor and defenseless as a woodcutter uses trees!”
“But that’s why we have to try to persuade people to be good,” Matt objected.
“I stopped believing in Good and Evil, Lord Wizard.” Nirobus shook his head, eyes glittering. “You are an educated man who has read accounts telling how people have used one another and betrayed one another down through the centuries. You are a man who has traveled widely, you must have seen such abuse with your own eyes!” Nirobus shook his head slowly, gaze locked with Matt’s. “I began to see that there is good in some people, evil in many, some good and some evil in most! I began to see that good and evil exist only within living beings, in people most of all! I saw that the good often remain poor and oppressed and are rarely rewarded, the evil rarely punished and often prosperous!”
He gasped for breath, a little wild-eyed now, and Matt took advantage of the pause to comment. “So you stopped believing in divine punishment or reward, and set out to dispense both yourself.”
“Who else would do it?” The question was a challenge as well as a defense. “Mind you, at first I only exploited people who were themselves exploiters, rewarded the virtuous a little but not enough to make them able to hurt others—but so few, so very few! I began to realize that I would never be able to reward or punish on a scale that meant anything if I were only myself, Nirobus the physician, a man alone. I saw that to make any difference worth making, I would have to have power, be able to govern a nation—and if I sought to avoid war, I would have to govern many nations!”
“So to achieve peace, you declared war,” Matt interpreted.
“Do not mock me, Lord Wizard! You shall discover my meaning all too soon, if you live a few years longer and truly watch the people around you! Yes, I delved through my books and discovered a way to gain enough power to conquer; yes, I set up a channel for bringing that power from the mean-spirited and doomed! Yes, I found a man who could conquer the world, then found sorcerers so self-seeking as to be completely predictable, sorcerers who would help my Mahdi by channeling the energy I’d found into his troops, his victories! But think how few people have died in this war, how few atrocities Tafas has permitted! As to those youths in your homeland, can you honestly say that even one of them would not have bullied or beaten or raped or exploited his fellows, if he could have?”
Matt’s mouth went dry. “I didn’t know them all. Only a handful.”
“Judge by that handful, then! Can you honestly say that even one of them was virtuous?”
“They could have been...”
“Could have been, but chose not to be! They sought their own dooms, they deserved their own fates! I have been as merciful as a conqueror may be, exploiting only those who deserved it, rewarding only those who did my work, turning human cruelty against itself in order to conquer the world and establish peace and order!”
“What about Papa and Mama?” Matt demanded.
“Ah!” Nirobus turned instantly from acid cynic to sympathetic mourner. “That, I regretted, and deeply, for they are scholars, and two of the very few really good people, whose happiness comes from helping those about them.”
“Well, if you like them so much, how come you sidetracked Papa into buying the store, then drove him into bankruptcy?”
“Why, because it was the only way.” Nirobus spread his hands. “You are their son, and I needed to lure you into the world of your birth so that I could trap you there. Besides, your father was blocking me from addicting more than a dozen young folk by making his store a haven. No, if my scheme was to succeed, your parents had to go.” He glanced at Papa with a sardonic smile. “How could I have guessed that they themselves would prove to be wizards so powerful as to tip the balance, and send me sliding toward a temporary defeat?”
“Oh, surely not!” Mama protested. “Matthew would have triumphed without us!”
“Thanks, Mama, but I think he’s right.” Matt kept his gaze on Nirobus. “He was prepared for anything I might do, and watched me like a hawk. But he never thought to watch you two, until you’d already fouled up his plans good and proper.”
“I fear it is so.” Nirobus bowed to Mama and Papa. “Your pardon, lord and lady. I underestimated you severely.”
“De nada,” Mama said automatically, then blushed.
“I think we will be more happy here than in New Jersey,” Papa said, “so it has all worked out for the best.”
“Besides, here we have not only our son, but also his wife and child,” Mama said with a happy smile.
“Yes, best for you.” Nirobus still wore the sardonic smile. “But I? I shall have to flee to the barren lands and begin my plans anew.”
“Oh, and come back with a small horde, to start killing people and burning their means of livelihood?” Matt asked grimly. “Begin plans to leave people victims to the famine and plague that always follow war? Plans to slaughter a hundred thousand or so?”
“My warriors slay no more than they must, to conquer,” Nirobus said, affronted. “Is this not so, Lord Tafas?”
“I have made sure that my soldiers treat all enemies with courtesy, even when defeated,” the Mahdi admitted.
“Okay, so you’re only going to slay fifty thousand,” Matt said, “and let famine and plague finish off the other fifty.”
“I have told you that the people I have hurt are only those who would willingly have injured others!”
“Interviewed each one of them personally, have you?”
“I have no need—I know the breed!” Nirobus snapped. “I have hurt only those who are too ignorant and too vicious to matter, Lord Wizard!”
“No,” Matt said softly. “You have slain thousands of good people along with the wicked, Doctor. Even you have admitted that they exist, though they are rare. If you let people die wholesale, as they always do in war, you murder those few good ones along with the rest.” He shook his head. “You have become the oppressor and exploiter you claim to despise. I’m sorry, but we can’t let you go free to start this all over again.”
“No,” Alisande said, with total conviction. “We cannot.” King Rinaldo nodded.
“Fools, do you think you have any choice in the matter?” With a vindictive smile, Nirobus raised a hand to his forehead in salute—and rubbed the ruby in his turban.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Everyone back!” Matt shouted, and started his anti-genie chant—but too late. Smoke boiled from Nirobus’ ruby and jetted high into the air, thickening and condensing into a gigantic human form. A genie with mammoth muscles and haughty, noble mien towered above them—and the women gasped, for he was so handsome as to freeze them in place
.
“We are lost!” Tafas cried, staring upward, finally actually afraid. “He is a Marid, a veritable prince of the djinn! He wields power too great to comprehend!”
Papa started muttering.
The genie’s huge voice rolled out, like a melody played on the deepest bells of a carillon. “What would you have me do...” His mouth twisted, and the last word came hard: “...master?”
“Clear this hillside for me, O Genie!” Nirobus waved a hand at the officers gathered before him. “Send them back to their troops, back to their homes!”
“To hear is to obey,” the genie ground out, obviously hating every word he was saying. He raised huge hands, palms forward, fingers spread wide, chanting in Arabic.
Mama chanted just as firmly.
The genie made a circling gesture with each hand, ending by clenching his fists as his voice thundered out the last syllables of the spell. A gale blasted the line of officers.
Mama finished the rhyme and caught her breath.
The gale died on the instant.
The genie stared. “This cannot be!”
“What cannot be?” Nirobus asked in a tone of foreboding.
“Someone has countered my magic!” He glared down at the host, thundering, “Who has bound my spell?”
Nirobus’ eyes widened. “The spellbinder!” He pointed at Mama. “It is she, O Genie! Remove her at once! Slay her, crush her!”
Papa finished his verse, then leaped in front of Mama, crying, “Do not dare!”
“Dare?” The genie roared laughter. “And who will stop me, little man?”
Dust boiled up in front of Papa, up and up until it was almost as tall as he, then thickened and coalesced into a beautiful woman, clad in her usual harem pants, bolero, slippers, and crown—and a very exasperated expression. “What now, mortal man?”
For answer, Papa only pointed upward.
Mama glanced at Papa, frowning.
Lakshmi turned, puzzled—then stared upward. “Prince Ranudin!”
The genie stared, too, eyes wide, then filling with fascination as a slow smile spread over his features. “Yes, I am Ranudin, Prince of the Djinn! But who are you, most beautiful creature?”
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