Devil's Bargain

by Judith Tarr

  Ahmad’s heart was in his throat as the battlements rushed toward him. The jinni’s laughter boomed in his ear. In the very instant when they would have struck the stones, its wings shot out, braking its fall. Softly, lightly, with the delicacy of a butterfly’s landing, the jinni set Ahmad on the roof of the citadel.

  He was dizzy, reeling with speed and shock, but the warrior’s instincts rose quickly. The air was full of wings and eyes. The army of the air had fallen on Tyre.

  He could not stop to gape at it. Time was short; the guards would be distracted, but not forever. He ran toward the tower that rose on the seaward side. There was a door in it, and a guardroom—blessedly deserted—and a stair leading downward.

  At the top of the stair he paused. It sounded as if the city had been attacked with grapples and siege-engines. Voices cried out, weapons clashed. There was even, far away, the boom of a ram.

  For an instant he wondered wildly if Richard had come after all, or if another army had invaded Tyre. But the land about the city had been utterly silent as he flew over it, and there had been no hint or intimation of mortal assault. These were the jinn carrying out his orders, and their uproar was most convincing.

  The castle boiled like an anthill—but all downward toward the army of shadows. Never upward, where the true invasion was.

  He waited at the base of the tower, wrapped in darkness, while the citadel emptied of fighting men. It seemed an endless while, but he kept a tight grip on his patience. He could sense her not far away—not in a dungeon, then, or imprisoned in the city. She was awake, alert, but she had raised no powers. There was no taste of fear about her.

  There were guards. Two of them—there had been more, but those had gone to fend off the apparent invasion. He gathered certain forces and called to him the words of a particular spell. When he had come down through deserted corridors to the one over which they stood guard, he sent the enchantment of sleep ahead of him.

  The guards rocked, swayed, and slid down the wall in a grating of mail. He laid a hand on the brow of each as he passed, and filled their sleep with dreams of sated desire.

  The door was bolted from without, but there was no lock and no need for a key. He slid the bolt as softly as he might.

  The room within was soft-lit, but there was no lamp burning. It was her own light, a gentle moonlit glow. She sat up clasping her knees, still in the shift that he had seen reflected in Sinan’s scrying-basin, with her hair loose about her shoulders, black as the night beyond the walls. Her eyes in that light were dark and deep, meeting his with a soft intensity.

  He gasped as if she had struck him. His heart had leaped and begun to pound.

  He needed his wits about him, and he must master his magic if they were to escape this place before the Franks understood that their sudden enemy was a thing of air and darkness. He summoned every scrap of discipline that he had learned, and calmed the beating of his heart, then focused his mind on what he was about to do.

  He reached to draw her to her feet. She did not rise to meet him. Her arms remained clasped about her knees. Her brows had drawn together. “So the diversion is yours,” she said. “Are you mad?”

  “Are you so eager to die?”

  She shrugged off his flash of temper. “I’m not going to die.”

  “You haven’t been condemned to death?”

  “Of course I have,” she said. “What, you don’t think I have enough magic to escape?”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it. “I know you have enough magic. It’s only—”

  “You came galloping to rescue me. How did you find out? Did you come to meet me, and find rumor instead? The city’s been buzzing with it.”

  “The Berber came to me,” said Ahmad: “Mustafa.”

  Her brows rose. “To you? Not to my brother?”

  Ahmad nodded.

  “But why—” She broke off. “Of course. Magic. Richard doesn’t have it and won’t use it, and Conrad would make sure I was dead—or he would try to make sure—before my brother could come with force of arms. Conrad wants a war with my brother. Couldn’t you have credited me with the wits to prevent it?”

  “You are very welcome,” said Ahmad. “Your gratitude moves me deeply. Your—”

  She launched herself from the bed into his arms, bearing him backward bruisingly into the wall. She pinned him there with her weight and glared into his eyes. “You didn’t need to do this!”

  “I could do no other,” he said.

  “You are mad.”

  “They do say love is madness,” he said. “Time is flying, lady. Will you waste a perfectly good diversion and a rather costly bargain, or will you rein in your pride and come with me?”

  “Are you accusing me of pride?”

  She had drawn back a bit when she bridled at him. He got a grip on her and heaved her over his shoulder, and let the force of the movement carry him through and out the door.

  She amazed him by not putting up a struggle, though she cursed him steadily in her mother’s language. The sound of it made him think of water running over sharp and jagged stones. It was a grand language for curses, she had told him once: better even than Arabic.

  As long as none of her curses came bound to a spell, he cared little. He could not run under her not insubstantial weight, but he could walk swiftly back the way he had come.

  The stair was more than he could face at speed and under such a burden. He set her on her feet, not particularly gently, and cut across her stream of invective. “Will you walk, or shall I drag you?”

  Her teeth snapped together. “Don’t tell me we’re flying out of here.”

  For answer he gripped her wrist and began to climb. She had to follow or be dragged.

  At least she did follow, and she left off her cursing. She needed all her breath for climbing. He set a punishing pace, though his legs ached and his lungs burned.

  Part of it was pique, but part was honest urgency. The sounds of ghostly battle were dying down. The jinn were growing bored, or reckoned that they had amused themselves enough. They were not like men, to take pleasure in looting and killing, though it was a great entertainment to watch mortals shriek and run from monstrous apparitions.

  The stair was far longer than he had remembered, but at last it came to an end. The night air was a great relief after the closeness of the tower.

  Somewhere on the climb, his grip on her wrist had shifted until their fingers were intertwined. She stood shoulder to shoulder with him, looking up, as the great jinni came down from the sky. Her expression was as fearless as ever; she was grinning in unalloyed delight.

  The jinni touched the stone of the roof with taloned feet. Its wings spread from end to end of the citadel. They drew in and mantled as it went down, bowing on its face at Sioned’s feet.

  “Pure spirit,” it said. “Child of fire.”

  The laughter that welled in Ahmad had an edge of hysteria. He bit it back.

  Others had come behind the great jinni to bow likewise, making deep reverence before a mortal whose spirit was pure. Their lord rose upright, towering to the stars, and said, “We are yours, lady of light. We offer ourselves to your will.”

  She was clearly baffled, but equally clearly she could see the need of the moment. “Can you take us away from here?” she asked.

  The jinni bowed its great horned head. “Your wish is our command.”

  “You have my gratitude,” she said with a pointed glance at Ahmad.

  The jinni laughed, a soft rumble. It took them up together, cradling them like a pair of birds, and carried them away from her captivity.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Sioned did not know whether to kiss the man or kill him. It was a grand and knightly thing he had done, marshaling an army of the jinn to rescue her, but there was nothing wise about it. And Mustafa . . . she would wring his neck when she saw him, for inciting Ahmad to this madness.

  The jinni, for whatever incalculable reason, would not do as Ahmad commanded, which was
to carry them to his house in Damascus. “The lady commands,” it said.

  She sat in the protection of its hands, looking down at the darkened world, and tried to set her thoughts in order. When Ahmad burst in on her, she had been calling to mind every spell she knew, and gathering powers to free herself before the dawn. For all her haughty words, she had been losing hope. She did not have the knowledge. She could turn the executioner’s axe to a plowshare and transform her chains into garlands of flowers, but she could not spirit herself away. She did not have the art of the mageroads, or of binding place to place with a cord of strong magic. She could not even comfort Henry.

  “Henry!” She sat bolt upright. “Gods help him, he’s still in Tyre. They’ll blame him. They—”

  “Shall we fetch him?” the jinni inquired.

  She shook her head. “No. No, he should stay—my brother needs him there. But if you could keep him safe—if you could protect him—”

  “As you command,” said the jinni. “And you, lady: where does it please you to go?”

  She frowned. “I don’t want war among the Franks. Let Conrad know that I was freed by the armies of the air. Let him think I’m an Assassin if it suits him—but don’t let him blame my brother.”

  “It shall be done, lady,” the jinni said.

  “As for me,” she said, “I’ll vanish for a while, until the marquis has found another obsession. Damascus will do as well as anywhere. On one condition.”

  The jinni waited, but it was not the spirit of fire to whom she spoke. “You will explain everything that you have done. And you will teach me all that I should have known, that would have kept me out of this predicament.”

  “Gladly,” said Ahmad.

  “Damascus, then, of your courtesy,” she said to the jinni, “where this lord of men directs you.”

  The jinni bowed its enormous head and banked on a wing, wheeling away from the sea, toward the pit of darkness that was the land.

  It was the strangest journey she had ever taken, and yet also the most sublimely comfortable. She lay at ease in the loose clasp of fingers as long as her whole body. The wind blew chill through the vast curve of talons, but the jinni’s substance was fire; she breathed clean cold air but was enfolded in warmth.

  Ahmad sat on his heels just out of easy reach, hands on thighs, head bowed. Having told the jinni where to go, he was resting; she thought he might be praying. He was not working magic.

  The light of moon and stars shone softly on him, limning the lines of his profile. Even on this wild venture, there was a calm and self-contained look to him. He always knew exactly who he was and what he was about.

  It was preposterous that he should have raised an army of the jinn and come roaring to her rescue. Preposterous, and yet not inconceivable. If she could believe what it meant. If she could accept the truth. That he loved her—enough to risk everything that he was or had done, to save her from the threat of death.

  She said nothing while they sailed through the air in the jinni’s talons. Dawn was just beginning to glimmer in the eastern sky when it circled above a city of domes and minarets, covered markets and a burgeoning extravagance of gardens. Even from high above and even through the stench of closely crowded humanity, she smelled the heady sweetness of flowers. Roses and jasmine—sweetest of all flowers that grew.

  The jinni deposited them on a roof that she knew well, set amid a circle of gardens: the house in which she had learned so much of magic, and come to love the master of the house. Its roof was a garden. Roses bloomed in profusion, and jasmine tumbled out of pots and grew headlong down the walls. The great creature trod with care lest it trample them, bowing again before her. “We are yours,” it said. “If you have need of us, invoke us in the name of Allah, and in the name of His Prophet, and by the seal of Suleiman—which although it never bound us, is still a great power among our people.”

  “I thank you,” she said, bowing in return, “and wish you and your kin well, wherever you may go.”

  “Some of us will always be near you,” said the jinni. It bent the great golden orbs of its eyes upon her. “Pure spirit. Blessed of Allah. May He protect and keep you—as we shall do, for the wonder of your existence.”

  “What—” she began. “I am not—” But the jinni was gone, leaving behind a swirl of wind and a faint scent of heated bronze.

  She rounded on Ahmad, only to find that he was almost gone himself—downward into the house, with a glance that bade her follow. She could be contrary and refuse, or she could be sensible and let herself be led.

  The house was precisely as she remembered it: a place of beauty and grace, order and peace. Servants were waiting as if they had been expecting her; they greeted her gladly, as a familiar and much loved guest. They took her away to be bathed, pampered, fed—the ritual without which no hospitality was complete. She could hardly object to it. The bath alone was a blessing beyond price; she had dreamed for days of being clean and properly clothed.

  They offered her a choice: garments of the east or Frankish gown and chemise. She chose light trousers and long soft shirt and brocaded coat, but not the veil that lay folded on top of them. She did let a shy and tongue-tied eunuch plait her hair and suspend a jewel between her brows, an amethyst almost exactly the same color as her eyes.

  They would have preferred that she sleep once she had eaten, but Ahmad was awake; her bones could feel it. “Take me to him,” she said, and kept saying it until they obeyed.

  He reclined on a divan in a room of green and golden tiles. His robe was of amber silk embroidered with creatures remarkably like the jinni that had brought them here. He too had bathed; his hair was still damp, his eyes soft as if he had slept while his servants tended him.

  She planted her feet, ignoring the servant who tried to coax her into a chair, and stood with fists on hips, glaring at Ahmad. He blinked like a cat, deceptively lazy, and smiled in return.

  “Tell me what you did,” she said. “Why are the greater spirits worshipping me? What did you tell them? Why did you—”

  “They wagered with me,” he said, “that a human could not be a pure spirit. I assured them that one human could. It appears they agreed. Now you have the fealty of the armies of air. It’s a great gift, and may prove useful.”

  “It was a wager?” She could have hit him. “What would you have had to pay if you’d lost?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing unduly terrible. A year and a day in their service.”

  “A year and a day,” she said, “in the middle of a war. Love’s a sickness, they say, and I believe it. I am not worth that much.”

  “You will pardon me, lady,” he said silkily, “but you may not be the best judge of that. In any event I won the wager. I gained you powers that you will be glad to have.”

  “Powers that I could use against you and yours, to win victory for my brother. That wasn’t simply foolish, my lord. It was stupid.”

  He stiffened. She rather hoped that he would lash out, but he was too much in control of himself—now that he had no compelling need to be. “Time will prove either the wisdom or the stupidity of my choices,” he said.

  “I hope for your sake that they were wise.”

  “As do I,” he said with the flicker of a smile. “Lady, will you sit? Be comfortable? Forgive me a little?”

  She did not want to do any of those, but a belated sense of courtesy convinced her at least to take the chair the servant had left before bowing himself out of the room. “We can’t be doing this,” she said. “We’re on opposite sides of a war.”

  “So we are,” he said. “Does it matter?”

  “It should!”

  “Ah,” he said. Just that.

  “I don’t know,” she said through clenched teeth, “how I can love a person so much, and want so very badly to throttle him.”

  He grinned, so sudden and so startling that she could only sit and gape. “Why, that’s passion, beloved.”

  “It’s my father’s thrice-bedamned temper,�
�� she snarled: “the black heart of Anjou. Aren’t you glad I come by it honestly?”

  “I am glad you are in the world, however you came there,” he said.

  “And I,” she said, “cannot help—”

  Words were feeble; words were useless. She abandoned her chair to kneel beside him. He did not resist, at all, as she drew him close. He tasted of cloves and honey.

  It was a tearing pain to draw back, to separate herself from him. “Your wives,” she said. “Your children. Where—”

  “In Egypt,” he said. “All but Safiyah. She is here. A handful of my sons are with my brother. Would you meet them?”

  “Would they meet me?”

  “They would be honored beyond measure,” he said.

  “Because you order it?”

  “Because you are yourself.” He took her hand and kissed it, a brush of lips so light and yet so potent that it shivered in her bones. “The Christians’ humility—it’s a contagion. You should shake it off; see yourself as you are. Glorious. Splendid. Beautiful and beloved.”

  He was making her dizzy. “Beautiful,” she echoed. “Beloved.”

  “Wonderful,” he said.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t resist. I can’t be sane or sensible. I can only love you.”

  “Why should you want to resist? This is the will of God.”

  “Is that what it is? It’s like a wind from heaven. I’m blown like a leaf.”

  “Yes,” he said, loosing the word in a sigh.

  “We do believe in fate,” she said. “But also that we can choose. I—choose—”

  He silenced the rest. He was gentle, but he was not either tentative or shy. This was an art he knew well.

  She knew only what she had heard and seen. She had never properly understood it. It was a clumsy and rather ridiculous thing to look at, but to be in the midst of it . . .

  She had lived in this body for twenty-odd years. She thought she had known all its quirks and foibles, and all the things that pleasured and pained it. She had never known the full round of its senses. Brush of lips and tongue across bared breast; flutter of fingers down her belly. Murmur of words that were both prayer and love song, gusting breath across skin that felt eerily transparent.