Heart of Flame

by Janine Ashbless

  Rafiq shut his sagging jaw and waded forward, climbing up between her wings as she stooped to make it easier. Taqla felt his hands tugging the feathers of her neck uncomfortably, but her Senmurw muscles took his body weight easily enough—at least until she spread her wings for flight. Then she realized what an effort it would be to carry him too, but she launched herself into the air, her wings and chest labouring, and he clung with legs and hands to her feathered body as they gained height in great lurches.

  “Taqla—by Iblis’s balls—be careful!”

  “Just hold on!”

  She’d decided on this form, thinking they’d need to spy out the situation from a safe distance, but almost immediately it became clear what they were up against. Boiling out of the air above the insane glass palace came two huge forms, taller than minarets and trailing silken streamers like banners of war—a djinni and a djinniyah. He was as blue as the ocean and she as white as snow, but both were vast, with a multitude of arms, some bearing huge weapons with which they struck at each other, some armed only with savage claws. Their faces were twisted with fury—twisted to the extent that they were no longer human but tusked like boars, their jaws opening to reveal scarlet tongues as forked and sinuous as the tongues of serpents.

  Where they took hurt, they bled yellow flame.

  Taqla, breasting a rising crest of air and letting it take the strain of flight, stared, almost mesmerised by the two combatants. She couldn’t imagine getting involved in that fight. It would be as futile and senseless as coming between two thunderstorms. But Rafiq thrust his head close to her neck and shouted over the roar of the battle, “Down there—on the left of the palace!”

  He was right. A figure too insignificant for her to have noticed, human in size and coloring, hung from one of the great glass petals like a dewdrop from a spider’s web. And it was screaming, its thin cry audible in a lull during the cacophony of the djinn. Taqla angled toward it, scooping the air with her great wings. Her eyesight in this form was as sharp as any bird of prey’s. She saw clearly that the figure was identical to the girl who had accosted Rafiq on the hillside, her bare legs kicking over the frosty void. Lithe and near naked, she was clinging with both hands to a length of yellow silk looped over a great tongue of glass. If she let go she would fall—she was hanging over the snow-filled ravine, but almost certainly the height would be enough to kill her.

  “Ahleme!” called Rafiq, though his words were snatched away by the wind of their flight. “Hold on!”

  But almost certainly was not good enough for the djinniyah, it seemed. Just as Taqla and Rafiq wheeled within hailing distance of the girl, a huge white hand swept down from the sky and scooped the girl up. The djinniyah shrank to less than a third of her previous size, and as the djinni flailed at the thin air she had previously occupied, shot skyward with her prisoner in one fist. There was no way Taqla could keep up, but she swooped between the rose-pink arches and started to spiral, trying to gain height. The blue djinni roared with rage and shrank too, hurtling upward on the pale one’s heels. His huge fists caught at her but she dodged, her limbs flickering like flame in and out of sight, and even when he grasped at her, she seemed to melt to shreds in his fingers. Against the cloudless sky they zigzagged back and forth, their blades flashed like lightning, and Ahleme—held in the only limb not engaged in battle—was almost impossible to see as they grabbed and lashed at each other. The two djinn no longer looked human even in form, resembling more closely two twisting multi-limbed centipedes knotted together in a tumbling bicolored tangle.

  Then the djinni got the djinniyah by the throat, and this time she didn’t slip from his grasp. For a moment they froze, a massive tableaux hanging hundreds of feet up in the air, and then the djinniyah flung her arm out and threw Ahleme away. Her tiny body spun as it fell.

  The djinni vanished. One moment he was locked in a grapple with the djinniyah, the next he was beneath Ahleme, reaching out to snatch her from her plunge. He caught her in his right palm and lifted her before his face, unfurling fingers like lapis pillars in order to inspect his prize.

  “Ahleme!” he groaned, and the mountain shook.

  At that moment the djinniyah fell upon him, her bare feet striking cleanly into the back of his bowed neck. He crumpled and spasmed—letting Ahleme slip from his hand.

  Taqla folded her wings and stooped, plummeting toward the mountainside. She had one chance to intercept the girl and that was all. She felt the wind burning her eyes, but she narrowed them and arrowed onward, aiming at a point Ahleme was not at yet. “Catch her!” she screamed, and then the girl’s bare limbs flashed into view.

  Rafiq caught her. He reached up from Taqla’s back and snatched her from midair, and quite suddenly all three of them were falling together. Taqla snapped out her wings and tried to brace them. There was no chance at all that she would be able to fly with that extra weight, but she could try to mitigate their plunge into a glide of sorts. She steered toward the whitest patch of hillside, some detached part of her mind wondering if her bones would splinter before they hit or only after they crashed, and by straining every muscle to the utmost she brought them in at a shallow angle. She couldn’t slow, though, because she had no strength to flap. They plowed the snow in a long furrow and then she flipped head over heels, shedding her riders. Taqla blacked out before she came to rest.

  She came to in her own form, lifting her head weakly and coughing out the half-melted ice that had crammed her throat. Everything hurt. Every bone in her body was filled with the grinding ache that came as the price of shapeshifting, and for a moment she wished she hadn’t regained consciousness. But she hadn’t been out long, she realized groggily. Over her shoulder she could see Rafiq climbing to his feet and unsheathing his sword.

  The djinniyah landed lightly on the snow, human in shape once more but tall as a citadel wall, and as beautiful and terrible as an avalanche. Her skin was now the color of a winter sky. Her translucent draperies fluttered around her and she drew herself up imperiously, but there was no doubting the punishment she’d taken in the battle. Liquid flame, like lava, oozed down her skin, and one of her eyes was nothing but a whitely burning hole in her face.

  “What do you think you’re up to?” the giant woman hissed at Rafiq.

  “I’ll take the girl!” he answered, desperately. “I’ll take her away!”

  Taqla looked round and saw Ahleme crouched on all fours beyond Rafiq. She must have fallen off first; she looked unscathed. In the distance, the male djinni had collapsed over the spires of the glass palace. He was still twitching.

  “Too late, Man of Dirt,” the djinniyah boomed, and strode forward to seize the girl. Her hand was as long as Ahleme was. The girl screamed, and Rafiq dived forward and slashed at the huge wrist with his scimitar. The blade flashed in the sunlight, cutting through djinn flesh as if it were smoke—and doing precisely as much damage. She laughed and scooped the girl up. “Try harder, Born of Shit,” she sneered, swatting at Rafiq with the most casual of back-handed slaps. It sent him flat, and the djinniyah staggered, coughing. Then she shook herself off and stood, looking down at her captive.

  Taqla tried to think of something she could do, but she wasn’t sure she had the strength even to stand. Rafiq floundered, trying to regain his feet, and the djinniyah didn’t even glance at him.

  “Zubaida!” shouted Ahleme. “In the name of God—have mercy!”

  “I am being merciful,” she answered, her wildly beautiful face drawing to a frown. “On all of us. On the generations to come, both Djinn and Men, that would curse your name.”

  Taqla braced herself inwardly, expecting the huge woman to crush the smaller one with a squeeze of her hand. But Zubaida glanced upward at the blue sky.

  “Yazid!” screamed Ahleme.

  Then as Zubaida’s bare toes lifted from the unsullied snow, Rafiq lunged forward over and struck at her for a second time, not with his scimitar, which lay sunk in the snow somewhere, but with something much smaller. The knif
e, thought Taqla. The knife that could cut out an immortal heart. Only, Rafiq was incapable of reaching the djinniyah’s heart. Even grasping her trailing garments and leaping, he just managed to plunge it into her thigh above the knee.

  This time, Zubaida shrieked. Flaming blood squirted across her azure skin, and Rafiq jumped back to stop it splashing on him. But he wasn’t fast enough to dodge the sweep of her hand. She grabbed him bodily and lifted him to her snarling face.

  “Son of Shit!” she roared. “I shall hurl you both from the Gates of Paradise itself!”

  “In the name of Solomon the Wise,” he gasped, “I bind you as my slave.”

  The Ring of the Djinn ate her. Taqla saw a look of utter horror cross Zubaida’s face, and then she shrank to nothing in less than a heartbeat, disappearing completely. Rafiq and Ahleme fell back into the snow, both sinking so deep they vanished from Taqla’s sight. She found then that she did have the strength to get up. She staggered over to the hole he had made in the crust and nearly fell over him where he lay.

  “Rafiq!”

  “I’m all right. I’m all right.” He sounded winded and breathless. He held up his arm and she saw the little bronze ring glint on his finger. “Aah— No…I’m all right. I got her, didn’t I?”

  “Yes.” She grasped his wrist and helped him pull himself upright.

  “How’s the girl?”

  Taqla glanced over, just as a shadow fell across the bright day. The mountainside trembled.

  “Man of Earth,” said a huge voice from behind her, resonant enough to start snowfalls on the higher slopes, “that was my sister that you enslaved. Now you’ll die.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  In which a sorceress both loses and gains, and a traveller comes home.

  The djinni Yazid hulked over them, dark blue like a thundercloud. Around his naked feet the snow boiled away to steam. He looked battered, but no less terrifying for that. Flame ran from his nostrils down over his jaw and dripped onto his bare chest.

  “Oh,” said Taqla in despair. “God is great.” There was nothing else to say. They had used their only weapon against the first djinni. The ring could not consume another. This was the end.

  Yet Rafiq lurched to his feet. “Do something clever,” he muttered as he moved, putting himself between the djinni and her—a futile gesture, she thought, but it touched her.

  “I will take you fathoms beneath the earth and leave you to suffocate in darkness,” the djinni snarled, stooping. “You will lick the rocks for moisture and die unable to even lift your hands, and you will know what it is to imprison one of the Fire-Born!”

  “Do you want me to summon Zubaida from the ring?” Rafiq asked. “One move and I will order her to fight you to the death! Are you ready for more?”

  The djinni roared with fury, raising his fists, and rocks slid into the ravine nearby. Taqla felt the ground tremble and wasn’t sure that that the whole shoulder of hillside wasn’t about to collapse into the valley. Then Ahleme pushed into view, facing the giant.

  “Yazid! Please don’t! They saved my life!” Her voice was clear, and even dishevelled and gasping, there was a confidence about her that took Taqla aback.

  “Zubaida is my sister!”

  “She was going to kill me!” Ahleme reached her hands up to him beseechingly. The fact that she was dressed in nothing more than netted pearls did not reduce her appeal. “They saved me! Yazid, please!”

  The djinni hesitated, and then diminished in size so that he was only three times as tall as a man and could speak without the air shaking. He levelled a finger at Rafiq. “She has just bought you your life. You will not find me ungrateful. Now release my sister.”

  “Forgive me, but I don’t think so.”

  “Release her, or I’ll change my mind about your continued survival.”

  “He can’t,” Taqla said firmly, putting her hand on Rafiq’s arm. “The ring binds her for a hundred years. He hasn’t any choice.”

  The djinni’s pale eyes widened. “One hundred years of servitude? To…a talking ape?”

  “An ape,” said Rafiq grimly, “with enough sense not to release someone who was recently trying to slaughter me—and everyone else.”

  “This is intolerable!”

  “Yazid,” said Ahleme, cupping her hands between her bare breasts, “please think. If you free her, she’ll try to kill me again.” With the air of receiving a revelation, she added, “She’s already tried it once, in the lake of fire! She hates me, I don’t know why. But these people are my friends, they saved my life. I would be dead if they hadn’t come for me.”

  “Your friends? You know them?”

  She glanced shyly over her shoulder at Rafiq. “I remember him. He comes from Dimashq.”

  “Yes,” said he. “Her father sent us to find Ahleme. To bring her home.” He clenched the hand wearing the Ring of the Djinn. “Father of Storms…it’s time to let her go.”

  Yazid barked derisively at that, spraying fire. “No. She’s mine.”

  “She’s human. She belongs with her family.”

  “She wishes to stay with me,” said the djinni.

  Rafiq’s eyebrows rose. “Is that true?” he asked, shifting so that he could look Ahleme full in the face, and Taqla thought then that if she hadn’t loved him before, she would have loved him for that—that he was asking the girl what she wanted. But Ahleme didn’t answer. She folded her arms over her breasts and looked stricken and shamed, catching her lower lip fearfully between her teeth, her lashes lowered. The pearls trembled against her dark skin.

  Of course, thought Taqla with a frown, how could she dare admit to desiring her abductor? Even if it were true?

  “She is mine!” repeated the djinni impatiently. “I found her! I laid claim to her womb so she will bear me a son, a child of power, who’ll free all the Djinn from your rings—and your jars—and your dominion.”

  Ahleme’s face crumpled.

  “Or enslave you all, forever,” Rafiq answered. “Your sister had a point, you know.”

  “I will be the hero of my people! The father of salvation!”

  “Alas, no. She’s coming home with us.”

  “And who are you to decide that?”

  “I’m the talking ape with the Ring of the Djinn,” said Rafiq, quite softly, but his eyes hard.

  “You’re threatening me?”

  “Oh no. I’m simply pointing out that there will have to be some accommodation between us on this matter. We did come a very long way for her.”

  But Taqla was still watching Ahleme, and she’d seen the look on the girl’s face. “You do know she’s barren?” she asked with a croak.

  “What?” The djinni’s lancing gaze shifted abruptly to her. She cleared her throat.

  “The girl is barren. She won’t bear you any child.” She ignored both Rafiq and Ahleme and met the djinni’s eyes squarely.

  “How do you know that?” he roared.

  “I’m a sorceress. That’s what we do! Reading the fertility of women is the simplest of arts. Besides, use your common sense. Her father was an only son and so was his father. She has no brothers. Her bloodline has dried up. She is almost its last speck.”

  For a moment a huge silence hung over the mountain slope. Everyone was looking at her. The djinni opened his mouth as if to answer, and Taqla braced herself.

  Then the great blue form was gone. There was no warning, no movement, only an absence. He did not so much as leave the snow disturbed.

  They were alone.

  “Well.” Rafiq was the first to speak. “There is no Fate…” he added softly, spreading his hands.

  Taqla nodded, her attention elsewhere. Ahleme’s full carmine lip was pinched tightly by her perfect teeth, her jaw thrust out, her eyes bright with tears. Her nails bit into the flesh of her upper arms. And her expression—oh, Taqla knew that expression, even if it appeared on the peerlessly beautiful face of a young woman whose lush body looked so warm and smooth that Taqla wanted to warm her co
ld hands on it. It was the look of a woman who loved but who knew herself unloved in return. Her heart fell. Sighing, the sorceress took off her long-sleeved aba robe and went over to wrap it around Ahleme.

  “I’m not cold,” the girl said in a tiny, tightly controlled voice.

  “You’re not dressed.” Taqla turned away, still dizzy with the rush of events, wondering what she should say to the girl—what there was she could say. The thin air lapped at her skin like a cold tongue. The sun was so bright that the temperature wasn’t unbearable, but her feet in their sandals were painfully cold.

  She’d taken no more than a couple of paces before Rafiq came up to her with his own aba in his hands and furled the voluminous robe about her, wrapping her in his arms too, and pulling her close to stand on his boot-tops. The garment smelled of him and was warm from his body, and as he kissed her, she felt him flood her senses like a hot tide until the ache in her limbs and the chill of her feet were forgotten. Face-to-face they stood, holding each other, so close that it was easier to taste each other’s joy and relief than to see it. Suddenly she wanted him so very much, even there, that her legs felt weak.

  “My sorceress,” he murmured. He took one of her hands in his, holding it against his chest, and pressed the Ring of the Djinn into her palm. “You do know I’ve no idea how to use this thing?” he whispered, and she couldn’t help giggling. Then, “Your feet must be frozen.”

  She nodded, slipping the ring back onto her finger.

  “Can you command the djinniyah to get us all out safely?”

  Taqla winced inwardly. “Not here…and not yet, please. She’s going to be…I need to get my strength back.” The truth was that she didn’t want to summon Zubaida from the Ring before she’d undertaken a great deal more research on the commanding of djinn. Even the most amiable were hard to control, she understood, and this was one who held a personal grudge. It was going to be some time before she dared try.

  “Well then.” He sat her down in the snow and knelt before her, taking off his headscarf and tearing it lengthways before wrapping her feet and sandals with the strips. “We’ve got to get off this mountain before nightfall,” he said as he worked. “There looks to be a bigger valley down the bottom of this one, a green one. We need to get down out of the snow, or we’re in serious trouble.”