I realised that what I was feeling was power. True, raw power, the kind that didn’t come from a title or a crown but from the soul of the world itself.
He kept shifting as I stared at him. And I realised he was shrinking and shifting at the same time, changing his appearance. It reminded me of the way Imin shifted when changing shape. Until he wasn’t blue fire and light any more. He was dark skin and dark hair, as much flesh and blood as any desert dweller. Still, even blunted to look like us, there was no mistaking that he was different. He was too handsome, too carefully carved, too perfect to look like a mortal man. And he hadn’t made his eyes look human. They were made of the same changing fire as the rest of him, except they burned more steadily. They burned white-hot around the edges, and bright blue around a perfect black pupil. And they seemed to scrape me inside out.
‘You called me.’ Three such mundane words that carried so much weight. His attention shifted slowly to the Sultan. ‘Though not, I see, for yourself.’
The Sultan was a powerful man. But he was a man just the same, and standing next to a Djinni he looked like nothing more than a spark hovering around a bonfire.
‘Now.’ Bahadur sounded almost bored as he spoke to the Sultan. ‘What would you ask of me? Is it gold? Power? Love? Eternal life? All four, perhaps?’
‘I’m not foolish enough to ask anything from you.’
Bahadur considered him without blinking. I realised I was watching him closely, searching his features for something familiar, something I might share with him other than our eyes. ‘I have seen more days and met more mortals than there are grains of sand in your desert. I have met paupers and kings and everything in between. I have never met a man who didn’t want something. It does not matter if you are a dirty-kneed child on the street or a man who already has more power and gold than you know what to do with. You always want something.’
‘And you always use our wants against us,’ the Sultan said. ‘You take our needs and our desires and you twist them until our only wish is that we hadn’t asked for your help at all.’ He wasn’t wrong. I’d read those stories, too. The ones of Massil, and of the Djinni who destroyed an entire sea in revenge on one merchant. The tinker who died in the desert looking for gold he was promised by a captured Djinni. ‘And in the end’ – the Sultan swept his foot over the edge of the circle tauntingly – ‘we never get what we want.’
‘So you do want something.’
‘Of course,’ the Sultan said. ‘Everyone wants something. But I am not foolish enough to ask you for it. You are going to give it to me, with no strings attached.’
When Bahadur laughed it echoed all the way down the vaults. ‘And why would I do that?’
‘She is one of yours, you know.’ He meant me, though his eyes never strayed from his Djinni prize.
‘Of course I know.’ Bahadur didn’t take his eyes off the Sultan. Look at me, a part of me wanted to shout at him. Another wanted to shout at myself for wanting him to. I’d done just fine my whole life without a father. I didn’t need one now. ‘Why do you think we mark them?’
The Sultan pulled a knife out of his belt. ‘Little Demdji. Take this and drive it through your stomach.’ My body went cold. It was an order.
‘No.’ I said it out loud, like refusing could make it real. But it was no good – my hands had already started to move.
‘Do it slowly,’ the Sultan ordered, ‘so that it hurts.’
There was nothing I could do. My hand was moving, reaching out for the knife, curling around the handle, turning the blade so it pointed at my centre. I fought it. My arms trembled with effort. But there was no helping it. The knife was slowly driving itself towards my stomach.
‘Your daughter will die here.’ The Sultan addressed Bahadur. ‘Unless I stop that knife.’ Stomach wounds killed you slowly. ‘Give me the names of your fellow Djinn, and I will order her to drop the knife.’
Bahadur still didn’t even glance my way. He watched the Sultan with flat blue eyes as the blade inched towards my body. He was an immortal First Being. Second only to God himself. To him even the Sultan, the ruler of the whole desert, was nothing. I was nothing, and I was his daughter. He sank down in the circle, crossing his legs gracefully as he went.
‘All of you die eventually.’ He smiled in that indulgent way parents do at children. Except it wasn’t at me. ‘It’s what mortals do best.’
The knife was still inching towards my stomach and he didn’t care. He was going to let me die. The knife pressed against the cloth of Shazad’s khalat. I was always getting blood on the clothes she lent me. This time she probably wouldn’t forgive me. She’d never forgive me for dying on her in the middle of the war.
‘Yes,’ the Sultan agreed. ‘Everything dies eventually.’ He turned away from the Djinni, like he was the one who was nothing. If he was disappointed in Bahadur’s refusal, it barely showed. ‘Drop the knife.’ The order was thrown at me.
I wrenched the knife away from my stomach, letting it clatter to the ground. My body was my own again. It had been a bluff. A stupid failed bluff against an immortal being. I was shaking. Hard. But anger chased out fear fast. Anger at my own body. At the Sultan. But most of all, that Bahadur would look on, so indifferent to me, as I died.
He had made me drop the knife. But he hadn’t told me not to pick it back up.
My fingers curled back around the hilt, and I moved, plunging the knife toward the Sultan’s throat. One final gesture to end everything.
‘Stop.’ The order came a second too soon. Seizing my muscles with the knife a hair’s breadth from his skin. I’d been a second from killing him.
For the first time Bahadur was watching me with interest.
The Sultan’s gaze flicked from the knife to me. I expected rage. I expected retribution. But none came. His lip just twitched up. ‘You’re a dangerous little Demdji, aren’t you?’ And then I knew why his mouth looked familiar.
His face was Ahmed’s, but that smile – that smile was all Jin.
Chapter 16
I was valuable.
That was why I was still alive.
That was why he’d stopped the knife.
I was going to be kept in the harem. That was what the Sultan said. Kept. Not like a prisoner. More like an especially nicely crafted gun. Stored until I was needed again.
Other orders came with it as I was handed over to a servant woman in a khalat the colour of pale sand, her dark hair bound up in a sheema. Like she might have to worry about the desert sun in the shaded halls of the palace.
‘You will stay in the palace,’ he instructed calmly. I wanted to fight. But while my mind might be able to rebel against it, my body wouldn’t be able to. ‘You won’t set foot beyond the walls of the harem without permission from a member of the palace.’ He understood Demdji too well. He chose his words carefully. Don’t leave the harem. Not, Don’t try to escape. Trying and succeeding were two different things to a Demdji.
I spared a glance down the steps as the Sultan ordered me back up. Towards Bahadur. My father – though the word felt unnatural. He watched us go from where he sat inside the small circle. Darkness folded around him as our lamp retreated but I could still see him long after I ought to have been able to. Like he still burned with his own fire, even in human form. He was a thousandfold more powerful than I was. He had lived countless lives before I was even born. But he was as trapped as I was here. What hope did I have of getting out if he couldn’t?
‘And you will not harm any person here. Or yourself.’ He worried that I’d kill myself. That I’d try to slip through his grip into nothingness. I didn’t want to know what he had planned for me that was so bad that killing myself might be better. ‘But if any harm comes to me – if I die – you will walk up to the highest tower in this palace and throw yourself off it.’ If he died, I died.