Saul sat across from him, eyeing him critically. “Yeah, I guess you’re doing better.”
Matt took another sip. “When did you become a doctor?”
“When I found out people expected me to be one,” Saul retorted. “I’ve been studying herbs as well as trances.” He turned to Alisande. “I think he’s almost ready for duty.”
“Praise Heaven!” Alisande still clasped Matt’s hand firmly; she had scarcely let it go to help him dress.
Even now, her voice sounded shaken, the more so because he had done the best he could to explain what had happened. It had come out as confusing, but harrowing. “I never dreamed into what danger I was sending you, husband, when I bade you visit your mother!”
No mention of Papa, Matt noticed. “There wasn’t that much danger as long as I was there, darling. It was the time-squeeze that worried me… that, and the fact that I couldn’t get back. And you know paranoid me … right away, I was worrying about conspiracies against you.”
Alisande exchanged a glance with Saul, and Matt frowned. “So I was right! What’s been going on while I was away?”
“It is nothing beyond our ability to cope,” Alisande hastened to say, “or at least, that Saul has not… “
The room shook, and something boomed outside.
Matt was on his feet in an instant. “An earthquake!”
“No, not really.” Saul was up too, reaching out for Matt’s arm.
“I can walk,” Matt said testily, and turned toward the door. “Come on! We’d better get up to the battlements and see what’s going on.”
Thunder slammed in bursts, and the walls shook.
Matt grabbed the nearest tapestry and held on, managing to stay on his feet. When the floor steadied, he sprinted for the door. “Let’s go! Something’s badly wrong!”
“Wait a minute,” Saul called, running after him. “We wanted to fill you in, you know, kind of gradually… “
“Fill me in about what?” Matt asked, and stepped out onto the battlements… into a vast roaring that he finally recognized as laughter so huge that it shook the stone blocks under him. He fell to his knees, grasping the nearest crenel, and stared upward, paralyzed by what he saw.
At first he thought it was a hot-air balloon, a huge, tan, canvas teardrop… but as his eyes began to make sense of its scale, he realized that it was a humanoid form, a huge, turbaned, bare-chested man who rose above the battlements, reaching out to the tallest tower and shaking it as he laughed. The whole castle vibrated with it. His arms were as long as a whole team of horses, his face was as broad as a house, his beard a black hedge, and his chest expanded like the widening front of a baron’s castle.
But if it expanded, it dwindled, too, in the other direction. Matt glanced down and saw that the huge torso narrowed quickly, looking like the tail of a teardrop indeed. He could make out some sort of belt, the beginning of trousers, but below that, the body narrowed quite quickly to a long, flowing tentacle that ended in a point, floating fifty feet or more above the earth.
Matt looked back up, eyes wide in awe, and breathed, “A genie!”
“Look, man, I told you to get away from here!” Saul shouted at the genie, but his anger was clearly diluted by fear.
The genie roared another laugh, but one that had an edge to it, and pointed at Saul. A fireball shot from his fingertip.
Saul leaped aside, and the fireball exploded where he had been. But he didn’t even look at it, just pointed at the genie, narrowing his eyes and chanting,
The genie’s beard burst into flame. He howled, batting at it, roaring a verse in his own language. Matt frowned; it didn’t quite sound like Arabic…
Then rain roared down, soaking Matt in an instant… but going around or through the genie, drowning the fire in his beard on the way. He threw back his head and roared with laughter, laughter that made the walls shake again…
Matt thought of the walls of Jericho and knew he had to stop that torrent of sound. The torrent of rain, too, of course, but that could wait.
The genie kept laughing, but the sound no longer rang or boomed about them; it stayed with the genie himself. The walls stopped shaking, and the genie caught his breath, staring in surprise.
Saul cried,
The rain slackened, but didn’t stop. Well, Saul hadn’t told it to, really.
Matt called out,
Well, a djinni wasn’t properly a fey, but the unwelcome visitor apparently didn’t know that… he gave a very disconcerted howl, shooting downward as though a huge hand had just yanked him. He hit the “cropped slope” below the castle and slid straight downhill.
“I hope he doesn’t hit the town wall,” Saul said, craning his neck downward, “at least, not too hard.”
He needn’t have worried. The genie slowed, then floated back into the air, windmilling his right arm.
“Here it comes!” Saul called. “Hold tight!”
As the genie’s arm swung in a circle, mass gathered in his hand until he had enough to throw. The missile shot from his hand, arcing toward the castle… a boulder four feet in diameter.
Matt realized the sense of what Saul had been saying. He hugged the crenel as though it were his wife.
His wife! He spun to look, saw Alisande hanging on to a torch sconce that was very securely bolted to the granite… but his own hold was loosened.
An earthquake hit. Matt’s hold tore loose, and he went sliding toward the gap between two crenels.
“Matt!” Saul shouted, and reached out toward him… then lost his own hold and came sliding after Matt as the ramparts shook them loose like fleas when a dog scratches.
Alisande screamed and dove after them.
Matt spread his feet and braced himself against crenels to either side. Saul slammed into the left-hand crenel and wrapped an arm around it, clamping the other hand on Matt’s ankle. Alisande caromed into the block on his other side, and Matt seized her ankle.
The ramparts stopped shaking, and Saul levered himself up to peer over the crenel. “There’s more of them!” he called. “Hold tight!”
Matt saw that Alisande had a firm grip on her crenel. He let go and pulled himself up to look. Sure enough, three more genies had appeared, hurling rocks that they apparently conjured just by winding up.
“Can’t throw worth beans!” he called to Saul. “Satchel Paige would have smeared us over the stones by this time!”
“I know!” Saul called back. “But I gotta time this just right!”
A boulder whirled loose from one of the middle genies. Saul chanted quickly,