by Liz Braswell
Jafar struggled away from her, turning his head and making little pfft pfft noises. When he finally managed to throw her off, he spun around to look—then laughed maniacally at what he saw.
Jasmine despaired.
Inches from the lamp, Aladdin’s hands were caught up in what looked like golden vines that grew out of the painting on the table itself. The more he struggled, the more they tightened. The shadow gargoyles faded, their work of warning done.
“Oh, nicely played,” Jafar said with the benevolence of someone who had just won. He strode toward Aladdin, his cape flaring out menacingly behind him. “I should have expected something like this. Oh, wait—I did. Thus the gargoyle alarms and the vines.”
“Jafar…” Jasmine said, unsure what she could accomplish.
“It was very clever, my dear. Saying it was all for peace. If you had pretended to actually have fallen in love with me, I wouldn’t have believed it for a second.”
The calmness in his voice didn’t fool anyone. Those ministers and servants who weren’t actively running out of the room were very casually and quickly finding reasons to gather their stuff and leave.
“Aladdin,” Jafar said, tapping his cobra-headed staff on the floor once. “You are an exceptionally talented—and relentless—young man. I admire that. I really do. You remind me of myself in some ways. So I’ll make you a deal.
“You join me. Jasmine marries me. You convince the Street Rats to give up and give in. We all live happily ever after in my new world, Agrabah Ascendant.”
“Never,” Aladdin hissed, pulling at the golden tendrils around his wrists.
“I can bring back the dead now, boy,” Jafar drawled. “Really bring them back. I can bring back anyone who has ever died. Even long ago.
“Even…your mother.”
Aladdin stopped struggling.
How did Jafar even know about his mother?
“She would just be another one of your ghouls,” Aladdin said uncertainly.
“No, no, my dear boy,” Jafar said, leering. “My understanding of Al Azif has only deepened…all levels of life and death are being unlocked for me now. She could be returned in perfect health with whole body and mind.”
Before he could stop himself, Aladdin began to think about what Jafar had said. His mother. She could come back. Healed of her disease. And he could give her the life she deserved. He could treat her like a queen, give her a big house, all the food and fine things she had always wanted to give him.
He saw Jasmine bite her lip anxiously.
But she needn’t have worried; these thoughts spun and died only a moment after he conceived them. Even if Jafar was telling the truth about his powers, Aladdin had seen Rasoul. He had seen the little boy. Who knew what his mother would really be like?
And even if she did come back alive and whole, he knew what she would have to say about it. Making an alliance with an evil sorcerer would only guarantee more deaths and more unhappiness.
“Not even for my mother,” Aladdin whispered. “I will never ally with you.”
“Oh, well, it doesn’t really matter,” Jafar said with an unsurprised shrug. “Once I crack the third law of magic, all of Agrabah will love me. Jasmine will love me. And you…well, no; I won’t force you to love me as well. I shall leave you as the only sane man left in Agrabah. While everyone else around you worships me…you will be completely alone.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Jafar,” Aladdin said with a grin. “No Street Rat is ever alone.”
Before Jafar could raise his eyebrows in a suitably nasty sneer, a scimitar flashed down out of the air, slicing the golden tendrils off of Aladdin’s wrists. Duban came out from behind the throne.
A moment later a tattered, flying mess of hair and pants came dashing into the room. Morgiana was only bleeding a little and carried a short sword in each hand—plus an extra scimitar in her right.
“Took you long enough,” Aladdin said accusingly.
“You said ‘no killing,’” she said, shrugging. “Stuff like that takes time.”
She turned and tossed the scimitar to Jasmine.
Jasmine caught it with a grin.
Jafar snarled. He snatched the lamp off the table and thrust it into his robes. Then he lifted his staff.
“I feel I should warn you,” the genie said weakly. “The camel dung is about to hit the fan.”
But the Street Rats weren’t waiting around.
Aladdin leapt up onto the magicked table and aimed a roundhouse kick at the sorcerer’s head. Duban made for Al Azif, reaching for it with his two daggers held like tweezers. Morgiana ran over to the deadly hourglass and began to slam it with the butt of her sword.
Jafar swung his staff sideways and blocked Aladdin’s blow.
“INSOLENT WHELPS!” he roared, eyes turning red. “You dare defy the most powerful sorcerer in the WORLD?”
He raised his hand.
A wall of fire sprang up between Duban and Al Azif. Elsewhere, furniture began to lift up into the air and fly across the room. Couches scraped along the floor. Vases spun out of control. An ottoman aimed itself at Aladdin’s head.
Aladdin leapt down from the table, doing a flip and hitting the ottoman aside with his feet as he tumbled. Duban dove for the floor, avoiding a brass-and-gold hookah that was meant to connect with his face. Morgiana and Jasmine leapt around the smaller pieces of furniture meant for them.
Aladdin swept his foot around, spinning like a dervish. He connected with Jafar’s ankles.
The sorcerer started to topple to the ground—then stopped midway.
With a nasty laugh, Jafar rose back upright in a thoroughly unnatural fashion.
He threw open his cape, revealing the robes he wore beneath. Aladdin saw to his horror that cinching them in the middle was the last piece of the carpet—the end with the tassels that he had always thought of as the poor thing’s “face.”
While Aladdin was transfixed, Jasmine took her scimitar and ran at Jafar, trying to bury it in Jafar’s side. He easily turned the blow aside with his staff.
“JASMINE!” Aladdin cried. “What are you doing?”
“Distracting him,” she said, ducking as the sorcerer tried to clock her in the head, too angry to remember to use his powers for a moment. “That was my job, remember?”
“Yes! And you did a great job. Now get out of here before you get killed!”
With obvious difficulty, Jafar mastered his rage and calmed himself. His eyes glowed red again.
Things around the room now began to explode into flame—things that normally shouldn’t be flammable. Stone vases and metal bric-a-brac. The throne itself exploded, throwing Duban to the floor.
Shrapnel and debris went flying toward the back of Jasmine’s head, streaked with fire and smoking as they went.
“Jasmine!” Aladdin cried.
The princess spun around but not quite fast enough to avoid the flaming missile entirely. She screamed as it connected, covering her head with her arms. The air filled with the smell of burnt hair and flesh. Angry red skin bubbled up and pulled apart in a fleshy split across her forehead.
Another vase lifted up and aimed at her.
Morgiana immediately abandoned her attack on the hourglass and threw herself in front of Jasmine.
Shirin and Ahmed howled silently as Morgiana seemed to abandon them—and the spiderweb of cracks in the glass she had managed to start—but Maruf merely looked resigned, understanding what they needed to do. It was too painful to watch.
Using both of her swords, Morgiana swirled into a blur of movement, batting aside one flaming object after another as the sorcerer focused all of his rage on the princess. The faster the projectiles came, the faster she moved.
Jasmine reeled from the pain of her wound, stumbling around in her attempt to stay upright. She gritted her teeth and forced herself to stand firm. She raised her scimitar to defend herself.
“Morgiana! Forget me!” she ordered in a croak. “Go back and save the chil
dren!”
The thief looked unsure for only a moment, then nodded and went back to attacking the glass. Shirin and Ahmed wept in relief.
Duban began to crawl back to the table that had Al Azif.
Aladdin noticed that Jafar was frowning while things exploded and flew; he seemed to need to use all of his concentration on these multiple attacks.
The thief immediately acted on this and leapt at the sorcerer. But he fell on the floor instead, grasping nothing. Even the cloth disappeared out of his hands.
Jafar laughed maniacally, suddenly on the far side of the room.
He aimed a finger. Fiery bolts shot through the air.
Aladdin leapt from one foot to another, forward and backward, trying to avoid them and remain standing.
Jafar aimed his finger—elsewhere this time.
Duban let out a tortured cry.
Aladdin spun around to look.
Standing between Duban and Al Azif was a figure made up entirely of fire. A figure who looked exactly like Shirin. She even stood like Shirin: shyly, weight on her right foot while her left crossed over. But there was no expression on her red-and-yellow face.
Aladdin looked around quickly to see if Duban’s niece was still in the hourglass. She was, watching with horror as Morgiana dealt with a new trouble: she had made progress in shattering a small hole in the glass, but now it was in danger of being sealed up again. Flat, overlapping stones like snake scales had started growing up the sides of the glass, shielding it from her sword strikes.
Duban hesitantly went to reach around the fiery Shirin for the book.
Silently the effigy threw her hand out and burned a long, streaky black mark along his arm. Still her face was blank.
Duban hissed and pulled back.
Jafar smiled wickedly at Aladdin. “You don’t seem to have anyone you love whom I could summon and kill you with.”
Aladdin prayed the sorcerer didn’t guess the truth about him and Jasmine.
“And you killed the only thing you ever loved,” Aladdin spat back.
Jafar’s face darkened with hate. His upper lip trembled in rage.
“There is someone you love, though, isn’t there?” he growled.
Aladdin felt his heart stop.
“I cannot believe I almost missed it!” Jafar grinned, his gold-and-snaggletoothed smile too wide to be human. He closed his eyes and clenched his fists.
Aladdin prepared himself.
A purple monkey made entirely of fire burned to life in the middle of the room.
Although Aladdin felt a huge burst of relief that it wasn’t Jasmine, it also wasn’t as funny as it could have been. It didn’t look much like Abu—it was as if Jafar couldn’t remember him properly and so couldn’t summon his likeness. It was more like a large, angry baboon. The ape screamed and showed fiery sharp fangs.
Aladdin slashed at it with his dagger. That only proved what he already suspected: the monkey was as insubstantial as the gargoyles had been. The blade cut through it and nothing happened except that the metal grip became too hot to hold.
Aladdin dropped his blade and quickly changed tactics. He reached down and pulled up the edge of a rug like a magician about to do a trick. Praying the baboon would behave more like the fire than an actual animal, Aladdin threw himself on the thing, opening his arms out wide to engulf it in the carpet.
Searing hot air blasted out the sides as he crashed to the floor. The hair on his left arm singed off in a painful sizzle.
But when he looked down, the monkey appeared to be gone.
“Morgiana! Throw me a sword!” Duban cried, having seen the whole thing.
She paused her work and did so without hesitating. But in the space of the few seconds it took, the stone scales on the hourglass grew higher. They began to branch out like giant thorns.
With a pained expression on his face, Duban began to slice through the fire effigy with both swords. The fire-Shirin lunged at Duban, fingers splitting into long ropes of fire. He stepped back but increased his speed of attack, twirling his weapons furiously.
The edges of the demon began to blur, caught by the draft the blades were making.
Her mouth opened in a soundless scream. She lashed out with long whips of bloody red fire.
Duban evaded them as best he could but kept his swords going, whistling through the air.
Soon he was simply spinning the blades, deadly twin circles of metal.
The breeze was finally enough to disrupt the integrity of the fire itself. The effigy started to disappear, pulled into shreds. She howled silently as she tried to keep her coherence.
Soon she was nothing more than wisps of hot sparks rapidly dispersing into the air.
Duban collapsed to the ground, a hand to his wounded side and a sickened expression on his face.
“Aladdin! Duban! Help me!” Morgiana cried desperately as the stone continued to form into jagged whorls and thorns. “We should—”
And then a stone branch broke through her right shoulder from behind. She was pinned to the stone tree.
She didn’t move. She opened her mouth but didn’t scream. Her face went white and tense with pain.
“Mia!” Duban shouted—but he could barely stand up himself after his exertions.
Slowly, and with obvious agony, Morgiana looked down and broke off the sharp, marble thorn with the pommel of her sword. Groaning with pain, she pulled herself off the stony tree.
No blood flowed; her wound was cauterized by whatever burning magic had created the thorn. Her arm hung limp.
Growling in fury, Jasmine leapt up and hurled herself at Jafar.
The sorcerer laughed at the sight of the angry princess and started to raise his staff to do something horrible.
That made Aladdin realize something. He was wasting his time trying to break through Jafar’s defenses to grab the lamp. He should have attacked Jafar’s defenses directly: the staff itself. Get rid of that and Jafar was mostly powerless.
Aladdin launched himself through the air, aiming with his feet first.
He crashed into Jafar’s staff—but it didn’t break. He tried to wrench it out of the sorcerer’s hand. Jafar clung tightly, knuckles turning white. He closed his eyes, beginning to cast another spell.
Aladdin also closed his eyes—and slammed Jafar in the head with his own head.
He might have been the world’s mightiest sorcerer, but he had no experience with street fighting.
Stunned by the ferocity of the attack, Jafar opened his eyes in surprise. Blood coursed down his brow and poured out of his nose. He didn’t drop the staff, but his fingers loosened some.
Aladdin grabbed the cobra staff and twisted, leaping over it and pulling at the same time, like one of the demonic drum players from Jafar’s parade.
Jafar clung to it like a cat, hovering in the air with the help of his piece of the magic carpet. His sudden lack of weight caused Aladdin to overextend himself and sent both of them flying to the floor.
Jasmine lost no time, throwing herself on top of Jafar and wrapping her arms around him. It was just enough extra weight and leverage to force him to the ground. Aladdin put all his effort into one final pull—and wrenched the staff free.
Immediately, he felt his throat closing up as Jafar snarled and worked his other magic.
“Jasmine!” Aladdin croaked. As if they were in a game of street ball, he quickly tossed the staff to her.
Surprised, she fumbled desperately but managed to catch it.
“BREAK IT!” Aladdin shouted as Jafar began to transfer his deadly magic to her.
Time seemed to stop as Jasmine looked down at the thing in her hands. Somewhere in a corner of the room Morgiana was shuddering in pain, trying to hold her remaining sword arm up. Maruf, Ahmed, and Shirin were fighting against the sand. Duban was crawling toward the table and reaching for Al Azif with shaking arms. The genie weakly watched everything from where he was tied up.
Jasmine looked from the staff to Jafar. The man who murd
ered her father was right there. The man who held all of Agrabah in thrall. The man who brought nothing but suffering to everyone.
She raised the staff up over her knee and then…began to whisper.
“Ia, ia, shal-alyeah, a’hz’red abenna…”
She pointed the staff at Jafar and spoke louder.
“Ia, ia, shib-benathki alleppa ghoser!”
Jafar’s eyes widened as he recognized the words. His face went white.
Then he crumpled over in pain.
Everyone else stopped what they were doing and watched, also in shock.
“Oh, yes, Jafar,” Jasmine said with an angry smile. “I read those books you stole from all over the world. I picked up a few things I thought would be useful. Committed them to memory.”
The stone scales growing over the room began to melt and drop away as Jafar gasped in agony.
“Jasmine…?” Aladdin said slowly.
She loomed over the sorcerer like a predator.
“And now, I think, I will put an end to all of this. You will die. Powerless, in shame and completely alone. Just like my father.”
“No, Jasmine, no…” Jafar winced and groaned under whatever magical torture she was putting him through. “Please. Anything. I wanted to marry you.…”
“You wanted a princess. Any princess. You wanted to be sultan. You wanted all of the trappings of royalty. Well, guess what? You should have stayed grand vizier. Being royal is far more deadly. As my father found out. As I nearly found out. As you’re about to.”
“I’ve learned my lesson. I was foolish. Exile me. Imprison me. Don’t…”
“Take out your dagger. Now,” she ordered.
“Jasmine,” Aladdin said cautiously, coming forward.
Everyone in the room had reasons to hate Jafar, and yet everyone still looked away as the tears began to run down his face. With a shaking hand, the sorcerer reached inside his cape and pulled out a familiar, curvy black dagger.
Sobbing and sniffling, he pressed it to his own throat.
“Jasmine,” Aladdin said loudly. “Don’t do this. Not this way.”
“What, you want me to let him go?” Jasmine asked. “Imprison him? He’s…Jafar, Aladdin. He’ll escape or bribe someone or magic his way out. No, if I kill him, it all ends. Now.”
