by Liz Braswell
The genie quietly regarded her for a long moment.
“Apology accepted,” he finally said. Making not quite a joke out of it. But she could see in his alien black eyes that he understood.
Jasmine suddenly felt all of her energy—all of the fear, sadness, hysteria, anger—drain from her. She collapsed as gracefully as she could on her bed and rubbed her eyes. She had a comrade in the same position as she—who was just as powerless as she. They could sympathize with each other and not much else. What kind of win was that?
The kind she would have to make do with, for now, Jasmine realized.
“A whole race of djinn? Just like in the legends?” she asked, weary but curious. Rajah clambered up onto the bed next to her. She stroked his head and lay against his firm, warm back, as if preparing for a bedtime story.
“Yep. People just like you,” the genie said wistfully. “I mean, not just like you. We all were what you call magical, but what we called normal. And we didn’t all look the same the way you humans do. My wife was purple, and—”
“Your wife?” Jasmine gasped, sitting up.
“Yeah. She’s gone, too,” the genie said sadly. He snapped his fingers and a silver mirror appeared and floated in the air between them. Instead of reflecting the room it showed a grinning purple girl. She had what looked like tiny horns behind her ears and claws on her feet.
As Jasmine looked closer she tried to remind herself that this wasn’t just a creature of legend; this was a woman who was once alive and married to the genie and had whatever a normal life was for a djinn. If she focused, Jasmine could begin to see the person behind the purple: tiny laugh lines around her eyes, a smattering of deeper purple freckles across her nose, frowny marks between her brows. The sort of round belly and arms that people often got when they had been married for a while and were content with their lives.
“She looks happy,” Jasmine said, carefully not choosing the platitude beautiful. Plus, the horns…
“Yes, well, that’s because she wasn’t screaming at me right then. Or throwing things,” the genie said fondly. “I kid. We fought, but we loved each other. Very much.” He blew the picture a kiss and it faded away into blue smoke.
“What…happened?”
“Oh, you know.” The genie waved his hand dismissively. “Same old story. Dark prophecies about the end of the world. The end of our world, I mean. Time running out for the djinn. The Age of Man beginning. A young, greedy djinn who already had a bit more power than those around him and used that as an excuse to seek even greater power. Saving our world. ‘I’m doin’ it for the wife and kids,’ you know?”
“You had children, too?”
“No, it’s just a saying. I’m telling a story here, sweetcheeks. You mind? Anyway, long story short, the quickest path to infinite power is…infinite wishes. Right? A wish is the most powerful thing in the universe. If you know how to work around the limitations. So I went down the path of becoming what you folk call a genie, the most powerful being in this world.
“Only there was one tiny problem. I hadn’t quite understood the catch: you can’t make the wishes yourself. The universe has a way of keeping things in balance. Which, yes, I should have understood better as a student of the great magics. I thought I was above all that. So wham, bam, thank you, Kazaam, here I am. Still paying for my hubris ten thousand years later. And the djinn still died out. The, as they say, end.”
Jasmine was silent. There was too much to think about. An entire race gone, one man attempting to stop it—and losing. The genie’s story was sad and horrible.
And yet, if one ignored the fact that he was sort of thinking about saving his people when he went seeking unlimited power, one could almost see similarities between his and Jafar’s paths.
The genie still wound up losing everyone and, by trapping himself in the lamp, set things in motion for a greedy Jafar to attain almost limitless power himself. It was like a never-ending cycle of greed, power, and insanity.
And unhappy endings.
The universe sure had a terrible way of keeping balance if this was how it chose to do so, Jasmine reflected.
She shivered, wondering if Agrabah would wind up like the empire of the djinn: forgotten and legendary.
“So…again with the long story short…I would help you in a heartbeat, if I could,” the genie said gently. “But this is all I can do right now.”
He waved his finger sadly up and down. White smoke trailed out of the tip and became a silken thread. The thread rose up and down and then began to circle around itself. Faster and faster it ran, its point becoming sharp and golden like a needle. The whisper of cloth against cloth grew louder as a form began to take shape.
Jasmine watched, mesmerized, as a dress appeared in midair.
It was not the most magnificent gown the world had ever seen. It was a natural off-white, the rough threads woven so loosely it was like layers of netting. Instead of normal sleeves the material was gathered once at the shoulders, once at the elbows, and once at the wrists, draping down to the floor and exposing most of the arms. There were no rosettes, no embroidery, no tiny mirrors sewn into the fabric, no pearls or jewels on any trim. The hem ended far above the ankles.
“It’s beautiful,” Jasmine said, standing up and drawing it close to her, to see how it would hang. She spun and the layers bloomed out. It was perfect for dancing in.
“It’s the dress my wife wore on our wedding day,” the genie said sadly.
He turned and drifted out of the room like so much smoke, barely needing to open the door to go through.
Jasmine watched him leave, still holding the dress. Somehow her grip had tightened. She had to make herself relax so her nails wouldn’t ruin the beautiful cloth.
No more crying on the bed for her.
She was the royal princess. She had to start acting like one. She had to stop talking about being trapped, about being handed over from one man to another. She had to start acting.
She had to start being the hero.
THE CARPET FLEW DOWN an empty street. Aladdin stood tall and barely needed to move his arms to balance—even when they took corners fast. Once again he wished he had time to really see what it could do—but more pressing things awaited in the Quarter of the Street Rats.
If the section of it that Jasmine had seen was frightening, well, Aladdin pressed on through neighborhoods that were downright dangerous.
Tall old buildings toppled toward each other and blocked out the sky overhead. At midday the streets were in shadow—which was a relief from the sun but left everything in a strange hot twilight. There were a lot of places to hide. Black windows on vacant houses looked like empty eye sockets. Grim broken statuary and crumbling piles of bricks made it seem like an ancient war zone. The only open space was one of the few graveyards inside the city walls. Its creepy, spiky stones stood like snaggleteeth pointing in all directions.
The whole place was flooded with loneliness and desperation…and yet at the same time there was a constant feeling of being watched by someone—or something—unseen.
The only people visible had shifty eyes and a palpable sense of roguery about them. Aladdin jumped off the carpet in front of an abandoned building that looked like all the others. Growing used to their routine, the carpet helpfully rolled itself up and slung itself over his shoulder.
It had been, quite literally, years since Aladdin had set foot in this place. As he carefully stepped over the dusty threshold, he saw that it was all almost exactly as he remembered it. Although the windowless rooms should have been nearly pitch dark, strangely convenient cracks in the walls and loose stones illuminated necessary things. A doorway here and a stairway there. And a deadly booby trap there—
—which Aladdin remembered at the last moment, pulling his foot back just before stepping onto the rope that would snap around him and fling him aloft, trussed up like a rabbit.
With a shuddering release of breath Aladdin proceeded more carefully through the building to
a back room. Counting by threes, he found the right board to lift up and revealed an old storage cellar. Once down there he tiptoed around what looked like a nest of scorpions and slipped behind some old broken clay amphorae. Finally he jumped into a black, slanting tunnel, landing on a slippery metal slide that he surfed down with ease.
Receiving him at the bottom was a cave, which, while he remembered it fondly, now seemed a little too similar to the Cave of Wonders. He tried not to panic, swallowing several times and trying desperately to notice the differences. This was smaller, and not full of wonders at all, but dozens of flickering oil lamps—and pairs of glittering eyes.
“Nice place you still have here,” Aladdin drawled, trying not to let his voice crack. “Love what you haven’t done with it.”
“Aladdin.”
Morgiana’s tiny, tightly muscled, and very familiar form resolved itself from the shadows. She was dressed differently from the last time Aladdin had seen her; a pair of black harem pants was belted tightly across her belly so they moved with the slightest bump of her hips. She used to wear a close-fitting top that exposed her midriff and arms, but now had a loose black shirt made of the same material that tied up her mass of impenetrable black curls.
Her normally aristocratically hooked nose was squinched like she smelled something bad, and her ample lips were pursed. The dimple on her cheek that used to show when she smiled was nowhere to be found.
“I don’t remember asking you over to dinner,” she said.
“I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d drop by,” he quipped. “What’s cooking?”
“Aladdin!” Duban came forward with a much more genuine smile. It faded after a moment, as if he only just then remembered something about his old friend. The thief looked exactly the same as he always did, if a little taller: square, thickset, with surprisingly intelligent eyes in an otherwise wide and open face. His long black hair was pulled back into a ponytail and held with golden rings. Golden rings were in his ears now, too. “Come, sit down, break some bread with us.”
Aladdin looked at the additional sets of eyes watching him from the darkness. Morgiana and Duban he had known forever. He couldn’t say that about everyone else. Their little gang of thieves had grown over the years; if for some reason anything got ugly, it would be hard to escape.
But he was already this far in.…
“Absolutely,” he said with forced jollity. And yet even the fake smile slipped from his face as he approached the pile of pillows and rugs. Safe for the moment, exhaustion almost overwhelmed him. He still hadn’t eaten much, and the events of the past several days were taking their toll.
Morgiana’s expression softened.
“Are you all right?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, waving a hand at her. He collapsed as gracefully as he could at a low table and tried to reach for some grapes as slowly and nonchalantly as possible.
“We’ll get you some water,” Morgiana decided. She made a clicking noise and raised her chin at one of the much younger thieves in the dark. “Another cup for our guest. Hazan, go!”
A little boy leapt up quick as a shadow to fulfill her request.
“What’s been going on with you?” Duban asked, settling down next to him. “You look like you’ve been in combat.”
“Aw, it’s nothing. Just in trouble, as usual,” Aladdin said. When the boy reappeared with his drink, he sipped it slowly as if it was no big deal. Then he threw five grapes into the air and caught them in his mouth, swallowing without chewing. “I think a bigger question is, what has happened to Agrabah in the last few days while I’ve been…otherwise occupied?”
Duban laughed. “Wouldn’t we all like to know! It seems as if creepy Grand Vizier Jafar is now creepy Sultan Jafar.”
“I noticed that,” Aladdin said, nodding.
“It’s actually been…surprisingly okay,” Morgiana admitted. “The regime change, I mean. Not too much violence. No military uprising. And life under the new sultan has—so far—been pretty good. No one in the city has gone hungry since he took over. Everyone in the Quarter of the Street Rats has had full bellies—for the first time in their lives, some of them. No one has had to steal food because of all the handouts.”
“Which makes our livelihood a little unstable,” Duban said with a wry smile. “Especially with Jafar’s announcement about new Peacekeeping Patrols that will walk the city now. Crime is already down.”
“But other than us, everyone’s been pretty happy,” Morgiana added cheerfully. “Nobody cares that Jafar killed ol’ whitebeard in cold blood.”
Aladdin choked on a grape.
“Killed?”
“Yes,” Duban said with a philosophical shrug. “Despite the largesse, Jafar isn’t exactly an angel. He called everyone in the city to gather in front of the Public Balcony and announced he was the new sultan. And then he threw the old sultan over the railing. Just like that.”
“After he made it rain gold,” Morgiana pointed out. With a familiar flick of her fingers a small coin appeared in her hand. It glittered ominously in the lamplight. Aladdin noticed piles of more of the same coins behind her. Like tiny versions of the mountains of gold treasures in the Cave of Wonders.
He frowned and took the coin from her. She didn’t object—unlike the old Morgiana, who would have yelped and grabbed it back. She merely watched him as he carefully held it between his thumb and forefinger, tilting it in the light to get a better look. It felt like real, pure gold: heavier than its tiny size would seem to have justified. Blank on one side. On the other was a strange, jagged symbol he couldn’t figure out. Ancient and threatening looking. Almost like a stylized lizard, or a…
“Parrot,” Morgiana filled in. “We think. A very angry one by the look of it. See? His beak opened there, and there, his claws, there.…You sort of have to use your imagination.”
“Oh, I see it now.…Jafar has a pet one, right?”
Morgiana nodded. He gave the coin back to her. It didn’t look much like a parrot, really. It looked evil.
“And they just…stay? They don’t disappear after a while, like the treasure of an ifrit in old stories?”
Morgiana shrugged. “Nope. They stick around. It’s all real.”
Aladdin didn’t like it. He couldn’t get his mind off the mountains of ancient gold buried in the desert.
“What about Princess Jasmine?” he asked finally.
“Jafar is marrying her. To cement his claim, I assume.”
“And she agreed to this? She wants to marry him?”
“Oh, yes, I’m sure she is all into a guy more than twice her age who killed her dad and is generally known to be evil,” Morgiana drawled. “When did you become such an idiot, Aladdin?”
“But she doesn’t love him!”
“No kidding, Kazem,” Duban said with a chuckle. “They say his own mother abandoned him at birth, he’s so evil.”
“But what choice does she have, exactly?” Morgiana demanded. “She should count herself lucky that he didn’t kill her outright along with her dad. It was probably some sort of bargain they made. ‘You marry me and seal my claim to the throne, and I won’t kill you.’ Why are you so surprised? It’s the first thing you men do when you seize power. Punish all the women.”
“I’ve got to stop the wedding,” Aladdin vowed.
“Settle down, friend,” Duban said soothingly, but whether it was to Morgiana or Aladdin, it was hard to say. “Aladdin, it’s not going to be a public ceremony you can just go to and say, ‘I object to this wedding!’ It’s going to be held in the sultan’s private chambers of the palace tomorrow night—only the highest highborn are invited. That’s why there was that parade today, to publicly celebrate it.”
“And by the way, just why…do you…have to stop the wedding?” Morgiana inquired sweetly. “Have you suddenly taken it upon yourself to defend women’s rights across the sultanate, or is there something you’re not telling us?”
Aladdin thought about lying. He was
good at it—to other people. These used to be his two closest friends.
“It’s a long story,” was all he allowed.
“Aladdin disappears for a few days, Agrabah is overthrown, and suddenly he has an interest in rescuing a royal princess,” Morgiana mused. “I’ll bet it’s a long story.”
“Well, you have until tomorrow night to play the hero,” Duban said, spreading his fingers to show the food, the pillows, the other, younger thieves who were making themselves comfortable in preparation for hearing a good tale. “You even brought your own carpet to sit on,” he added, looking at the magic carpet doubtfully. “What’s up with that?”
“Part of the story,” Aladdin admitted.
“Yes, tell us the story. Let’s catch up. I haven’t seen Abu in ages,” Morgiana crooned, taking a grape and handing it to the little monkey. He accepted it from her with a politeness he didn’t usually demonstrate.
“I don’t…”
But Aladdin was prevented from having to say anything else by the sudden arrival of a swarm of tiny thieves: sliding down the ramp, leaping into the room, rolling and scuttling to present themselves to Morgiana and Duban.
“Mistress,” the first one said, opening up his hands.
In it was a golden bangle and an emerald necklace.
“Well done, Deni! Excellent. Who’s next?”
All of the thieves lined up to present something to her—even things as little as an empty leather purse or a single copper coin.
“I thought you said Street Rats didn’t have to steal food for the last three days!” Aladdin snapped accusingly at Morgiana.
She shrugged.
“Yes, I said they didn’t have to steal food. The parade was a perfect place to…remove the valuable possessions from all the idiots hypnotized by the magical buffoonery.”
