Aladdin is.
I move without thinking. I spin, a trick to gather as much magic as I can hold. The lightning is so close to Aladdin that his hair crackles with it, his eyes wide.
I reach deep, deep, deep, guided by instinct, guided by the memory of my strange journey back from death. I reach through the elements, through the unseen fabric that binds the world together. I reach farther and deeper than I have ever gone before, to those threads of the element I have only seen once, when I stood on the edge of the universe—the threads of time itself.
Time is the strongest magic, your voice whispers in my thoughts.
Wrapping my fingers tight around the seconds and minutes, I twist the strands. The effort leaves me gasping, as if I’ve grabbed hold of a comet’s tail, but I do not let go. Unlike the four main elements with which I usually work my magic, these threads are alive and moving. Manipulating them is like trying to change the direction of a river. And yet I stand firm, bracing myself against the flow of the hours. The tide pulls at me, courses through me, beginning to separate my fibers. If I hold on much longer, I will dissolve once and for all and be lost in that eternal current. Easier it would be to hold back the sea with one’s hand.
But I will not let him kill Aladdin.
He took you, Roshana. He took the Gheddans. He took me, for four thousand years.
No more.
With a deep cry that wells from the bottom of my lungs, I twist the threads of time. Around me, events pause and reverse, Aladdin falling to his feet, the fragments of my sand and water dragon re-forming into their original shape, the mountain sucking in bright streams of lava. Faster and faster the events unwind, flowing like a river running uphill. Deeper and deeper I dive, until the current begins pulling at me, and I must brace myself against it like an anchor dragging through the sand. When we stop, a thousand and one moments all happening and unhappening around us, only Nardukha and I stand outside it all, staring at each other as the time threads flow and pulse around us.
“How are you doing this?” breathes the Shaitan.
“I fell outside time,” I reply. “I saw the gods weaving the universe.”
Nardukha looks around, but I can tell by his gaze that he cannot see the threads I’ve twisted around him, trapping him in a single moment. He has never journeyed to death and back, as I have. He has not stood on the edge of the universe and seen the turn of the hours. And if he cannot see it, he cannot manipulate it. Finally his gaze returns to me, thoughtful, even a bit awed.
And then the fury flashes in his eyes. Nardukha opens his mouth in a wordless roar, his throat a cavern of flames, and he lunges—
I close my hands, and time collapses around him. His roar is cut off as he is washed away like a twig in a flood. The minutes swallow him up, pull him beneath the current, until he is simply gone.
With the last of my strength, I pull from my finger the ring I forged for Aladdin and let it fall into the current. It is swept away, lost into the flow of the hours, to land by the side of a fallen queen, to be found by her handmaidens, to wait five hundred years for the right person to put it on. With it I send a whispered prayer.
“Find me, my thief.”
Then, with a soft cry, I release the threads. Something inside me snaps, and, gasping, I pitch forward into darkness.
Chapter Thirty
“ZAHRA.”
My eyes open, and Aladdin is there, peering anxiously at me. He brushes the hair from my face.
“Are you all right?” he asks.
I sit up. My thoughts swim languidly through still waters. Everything is blurred and unfamiliar. Instinctively I reach out for my lamp, finding nothing but a vague tingle, as if I am missing an arm.
“I was unconscious?” I ask.
“Yes.” He cradles my head in one hand. The other holds my arm. “Zahra, what did you do? What happened?”
My head aches as if it’s been beaten with rocks. I groan and wrap my arms around it, trying to quell the pain. Aladdin holds me for several moments, stroking my hair, while I whimper and cringe.
“Are you all right?” he whispers. “Zahra?”
“I’m okay,” I say through my teeth, pulling back a little. “What about you?”
He grins tiredly. “Alive, so I’m not complaining. Where’s the Shaitan?”