Matt shook his head. “Can’t be in there, or it would be glowing like a coal all the time. Besides, when we found it, it was very far from Arjasp—and he never would have let some other magus get his hands on it. Blast!” Matt struck his fist into his palm. “Now we know where the kids are, we’re within a day’s ride of them—but if Arjasp sees us corning, he’ll project the bottle off someplace where we’ll never find it!”
“Do you say we cannot go to steal them back?” Lakshmi asked, her face thunderous.
“That’s right,” Matt said, and the words tasted like wormwood. “We can’t.”
“But I can,” Balkis said.
CHAPTER 29
The other three turned to stare at her.
“I must go,” she insisted. “I cannot leave four kittens—I mean, children—torn away from their mothers.”
Matt could see the fear in her eyes, but also the determination. “Are you sure?” he asked. “This isn’t really your fight.”
“But it is,” Balkis said. She passed a hand over her forehead, closing her eyes, and wavered for a moment, as with a passing dizziness. Lakshmi leaped forward to help, but Balkis recovered and waved her off, explaining, “Somehow, deep in my bones, I know it is my battle as well as yours. The fairies told me I came from the East, after all, and the caravans took me from the East into Europe. Whoever set me on my course had probably suffered from this zealot’s armies.” Her eyes burned with anger. “He robbed me of my life, whether he knew it or not, and the fact that the spirits gave me a new life that was good and rich does not pardon him. He may not know he has hurt me, there may be hundreds of thousands whom he does not know he has hurt, but that is all the more reason to punish him!”
Prester John listened, gaze intent on her face.
“Okay,” Matt said. “Just make sure you don’t get punished yourself.”
“I will not,” Balkis assured him, but her voice trembled. Nonetheless, she waved her hand, forearm swooping like the bottom of a curtain in front of her, and the air thickened and clouded about her. Then the small calico cat stepped out of the cloud.
“Come, little one.” Lakshmi held down a hand. “Let me send you to the high priest’s chamber.”
“Take some care,” Prester John warned.
“I shall use a spell that will return her to us in half an hour’s time.” Lakshmi picked up Balkis, set the cat on her palm, and recited a spell. A small whirlwind blew up from her palm, churning two feet high, then died down and disappeared. Her hand was empty.
“Brave kid,” Matt said, feeling his stomach go hollow.
Balkis felt the world tum solid, saw the whirlwind about her cease, and stumbled, head still whirling. She fought to steady herself, feeling so vulnerable as to be on the verge of panic. When the floor stopped tilting, she took a step without staggering, and could finally pay some attention to her surroundings.
She stood on a Persian carpet in the center of a very large room. To her right stood a high bed with a golden coverlet. To her left, chairs and tables stood around the room, padded with cushions and inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory. More cushions were heaped about the floor surrounding low tables. There was one high table littered with books and pieces of parchment, one huge tome lying open. True to her word, Lakshmi had sent the little cat to Arjasp’s private chamber.
Fortunately, he wasn’t there at the moment. There wasn’t too great a chance that he would be, during the daytime—Arjasp was probably the de facto governor of Maracanda as well as the brains behind the whole barbarian onslaught—but it was still a relief.
Her heart quailed within her, but Balkis forced herself to study the room more closely. Despite the carpet and the cloth-of-gold, it was nowhere nearly as luxuriously furnished as she would have expected. So much the better—there were fewer hiding places. She looked down at the ring on her foreleg.
It was so bright it dazzled her.
She tore her eyes away with a surge of elation—the children were near! Then she began to prowl, letting her natural feline curiosity take its course. She seemed to remember having heard, sometime in the past, about the effects of curiosity upon cats, but ignored it—she wasn’t idly inspecting, she was searching.
She searched for most of her half hour, her heart thudding in her breast every minute for fear of detection. She found no trace of the bottle, though the ring was so bright it rivaled the sunshine that spilled through the carved screen over the window. She inspected the lamps closely, but the ring was no brighter near them than farther from them.
Finally she stood in the center of the room, faced the door, and turned slowly about, watching the ring for changes in brightness. She had turned a half-circle when she heard footsteps approaching the door.
Balkis looked about her, heart in her throat, searching for a hiding place. It was a choice between the piles of cushions and the bed. She chose the bed.
The cloth-of-gold coverlet came down to the floor. She scampered under it, feeling well hidden in the gloom—and the ring flared.
Balkis stared at it a moment; it was so bright that it lit up the under-bed space so that she could see every knot in the ropes that held up the mattress. But where was the bottle? The ring was telling her that the little djinn were nearby, but where? She padded about under the bed quickly, looking into every corner, but found no bottle, no lamp, no ring other than the one she wore. She heard the door open, though her own heartbeat threatened to drown it out, and looked up at the mattress in desperation, waiting and dreading to hear a body lie down on it.
There, hanging from the knotted ropes, hung a brooch with a huge crystal of rose quartz.
Slow footsteps moved from the door to the desk—she heard parchment rattle. A rasping, quavering voice said, “They cannot prevail so without their wizards! Has this self-proclaimed Mahdi such excellent magicians as to stifle the best efforts of our best sorcerers?”
“Master, he must have djinn to aid him,” a quavering fruity voice answered. Balkis instantly saw a fat middle-aged man in her mind’s eye, multiple chins trembling at Arjasp’s agitation.
“The djinn are banned!” Arjasp ranted. “We have bid them leave the struggle on pain of the deaths of their children! Even if they seek the brats, they would have left the sultan’s force!”
“Perhaps they have left lesser members of their kind behind,” the aide suggested.
“And who would control them? Again, wizards! I am certain it cannot be the Lord Wizard of Merovence—I did not forbid him to seek his children, so I have no doubt he is attempting to do so! Much good may it do him,” Arjasp added as an afterthought, reveling in the notion.
“Perhaps he has left junior sorcerers behind,” the aide suggested.
“They could not be so adept as to foil the ones whom I have trained! And now, to make it worse, Prester John has broken out of his prison! We must have protection!”
“Surely our barbarians can hold him back,” the aide protested, “and if not, there are the city’s walls …”
“We shall call the horsemen in, not risk them against his army. They are only a garrison, after all—but all of them manning the city’s walls should hold us secure until help can come.” A chair scraped, parchment rattled—Arjasp sitting down at the desk. “This Tafas bin Daoud has too many soldiers, and they ride too well! We dare not chance the Caliph using him to chase our horsemen back to their steppes! We must have more warriors.”
Balkis heard a pen scratching.
“Take this letter to the general who commands the troops attacking China,” Arjasp ordered. “Have him withdraw all but enough to hold the men of Han at the Great Wall! He must bring his force to exterminate Prester John and his army once and for all! Then without delay they can go to the front in Persia, before we lose all we have gained!”