The tears stopped. Lakshmi stepped back, staring in amazement. “Could you truly? After I have raged at you and battered your castle, could you truly help me find my babes?”
“We can try,” Ramon told her.
Jimena nodded. “I must stay here as castell an, but Ramon shall search—and, I think, so will Saul. Be of good heart, my dear. If wit and wisdom can find them, we shall have them back.”
“And your prince with them,” Ramon affirmed.
Jimena looked up at him with an expression that said, Are you sure?
Ramon shrugged. “Why not attempt the impossible twice? Besides, if Matthew and Alisande fight the horde, we must weaken the barbarians in any way we can, and surely freeing Prince Marudin to fight as his heart dictates will weaken them most amazingly.”
“But how can you manage this?” Lakshmi protested.
“We must learn more before we can try,” Ramon told her. “Try to remember, Princess Lakshmi—try as hard as you can. When you came into the nursery and found your children gone, was there—”
Wind hissed and kicked up a dust-devil right there on the battlements, where there was no sand and little enough dust.
” ‘Ware!” Lakshmi pushed Ramon and Jimena back and stepped between them and the shoulder-high whirlwind. “It is no eddy of air, but a sprite come from the desert! Spirit, it is a princess of the Marid who commands! Show yourself, say why you have come—but if you seek to do harm, I shall dissolve you into the air from which you were born!”
The dust-devil coalesced instantly into a humanlike form, but one covered with rough hair and a hump like a camel’s. Its eyes were small and unwinking, glistening with the cover of a nictating membrane; its lower face pushed out into a muzzle with nostrils that opened and closed and long, thin lips that moved and wriggled like a camel’s preparing to spit.
Princess Lakshmi held up a palm and recited an Arabic verse in a tone that threatened doom. The mobile lips stilled, and the sprite swallowed.
Jimena wondered what the princess had threatened.
“Speak!” Lakshmi commanded. “How come you to know of this place, let alone appear on these battlements?”
“I am commanded hither.” The voice was like the hiss of windblown sand over rock, rasping, eroding.
“Who is he that has commanded you?”
“A magus with silver hair and beard, cloaked all in midnight-blue,” the dust-devil answered, and volunteered no more.
Lakshmi’s eyes narrowed, offended by his obstinacy. “Why has he bid you come?”
“To bear his word to that man and woman behind you.” The dust-devil pointed, and Jimena fought the urge to flinch. She glared at the slight creature with a face of stone.
But its words rasped against her granite. “That the queen and her wizard must withdraw from the defense of the city, or their children shall never again on earth be seen.”
Lakshmi’s face contorted with rage. She stepped forward, lifting a hand, and the dust-devil flinched away, eyes wide in shock. It spun about, pivoting faster and faster until its form blurred into a whirlwind again.
“Stay!” Lakshmi snapped.
The whirlwind hopped up into the air.
Lakshmi snapped her arm out straight, forefinger pointing at the dust-devil. It halted in midair, spinning and hissing but going nowhere.
“They are not here,” the princess told the spirit. “They are in the East, fighting the horde.”
“They must be in the city of which the spirit spoke,” Ramon said, “or its master would not have demanded they withdraw.”
“Even so!” Lakshmi said. “Go to that city, spirit, and give your message to the queen and her Lord Wizard. But beware the wizard’s magic, for he knows nothing of his children’s kidnapping and may be enraged.”
“Enraged forsooth!” the rasping voice said from the whirling form. “Can his magic harm a spirit?”
“It can and has! Speak, O Tool of the Wicked! Where are my own babes?”
“Yours?” The spirit sounded shocked.
“Even so! He who has taken the queen’s children has taken mine also! Where are they?”
“I know nothing of the babes of a Marid.” The dust-devil sounded thoroughly shaken. “I know not where the queen’s babes are hid! Spare me, Highness—I know naught!”
“Save what you were commanded to say,” Lakshmi said sourly. “Enough, then! Begone!”
She waved a hand, and the dust-devil leaped high, as though she had batted it away. Its hum rose in pitch to a shriek, and it winked out.
The battlements were silent for a minute or so. Then Ramon said, “Now we know what ransom is demanded.”
“And who has captured your grandchildren!” Lakshmi agreed. “Can you find them from that?”
· “I doubt it,” Ramon said, “the more so because we know who ordered the kidnapping done, but not who actually carried it out—and we certainly do not know the destination to which the kidnapper took the children.”
“It is so.” Lakshmi’s face puckered again. “Nor do we know where my own babes were taken …”
“Oh, do not weep, do not!” Jimena took Lakshmi in her arms again. “We know more than we did, and we shall learn what we need!” She held the taller woman close and turned to Ramon. “Speak with Saul! Find these robbers, and quickly!”
Ramon nodded and beckoned to the Witch Doctor. They went back into the tower, talking earnestly.
Lakshmi lifted her head, wiping her eyes. “Where do they go?”
“To their workroom,” Jimena told her. “Be of good heart, Princess—you have three very powerful wizards to aid you, and what the vision of the djinn cannot discover, the science of magicians shall.”
The Caliph was conducting his royal guest and new ally on a tour of the battlements of Damascus when a shout of joy rose from the western wall. “Muslims! An army of Muslims!”
“What army is this?” The Caliph turned to Alisande, inclining his head. “Your Majesty, shall we go to see?”
Alisande smiled at his eagerness. “At once, my lord. Set the pace.”
Without armor, clad only in flowing silken robes, she was easily able to match the Caliph’s stride. Matt hurried along behind, thinking that if his stint as a galley slave had done nothing else, it had gotten him back into shape.
As they rounded the southwest corner they saw the army. It darkened the plain in a huge wedge of horses and camels, the soldiers so numerous that it seemed they must surely equal the horde. At their head, beneath a canopy held by four riders and astride a snow-white mare, rode a slender young man in the bright robes of the Rif.
“It is Tafas!” Alisande exclaimed. “It is Tafas bin Daoud! The Moors have come to the relief of Damascus!”
“Thanks be unto Allah!” the Caliph intoned, then called, “Throw wide the gates, for these are allies!”
“Surely now we can drive the horde back to Baghdad, my lord,” Alisande said, “perhaps even recapture it!”
The Caliph nodded. “It may be, it may indeed be. With your knights to smash a gap in the barbarians’ line, and Tafas’ lightly armored riders to counter their horsemen and widen that breach, we may well resist their numbers and greed.”
Then the dust-devil boiled up from the stones of the parapet, where there was little or no dust at all.
The Arab soldiers fell back with oaths, making signs against evil. Alisande took a step backward, too, hand going to the sword that was never far from her side, and Matt called up an all-purpose verse for banishing evil spirits. What came to his lips, though, was:
The whirling sand abruptly ceased, grains falling to the stone in a fine hissing rain, and the sprite within jolted to a halt so abruptly that it staggered, barely managing to keep its feet. It recovered and turned slowly, regarding each of the humans with a gaze so malevolent that Alisande’s sword whisked out. The rasping voice demanded, “Who has dared to interfere with my motion?”