AFTER his disappearing act this morning, Hashim was stunned—but relieved—that Ringmaster hadn’t shown up to micromanage his performances for the rest of the morning. By the time he punched out for his lunch break, he hadn’t seen so much as an ear tuft of Ringmaster since.
He stopped by the Carnival café briefly—ducking in the back door in case Ringmaster was out front intimidating the servers—to cadge something to eat from the kitsune who’d been the Carnival cook, she claimed, since Hashim had been nothing but an embryonic spark.
“What’s on special today, Omisan?”
“For you?” She swished four of her nine tails. “Whatever you want, as long as you make it yourself.”
Hashim pretended to pout, which always made Omisan chuckle. “You would deprive me of your delectable tofu chankonabe? And don’t deny it—the aroma drew me across the grounds like a helpless moth to your flame.”
“Flatterer.” She swatted his arm with a spatula. “As if I didn’t know you could do as well yourself.”
“Never. You are a matchless flower and queen of my heart.”
She sniffed, tossing aside the spatula and choosing a ladle from the rack above the counter. “I think you confuse your heart with your taste buds.” She handed him the ladle. “Here. Take some soup for yourself and also for your friend, Rion. You boys both need to keep up your strength, and nothing is better than my chankonabe for that.”
“Bless you, my darling.” He bowed to her, palms pressed together, and she chuckled again, returning to sharpening her chef’s knife.
Hashim sighed as he dished up the savory soup. He would miss Omisan when he went home tomorrow. She was far kinder to him than the clan cook had ever been. Of course, everyone in the clan, from Yashar to the youngest goatherd, treated Hashim with barely veiled contempt, if not outright hostility, blaming him for every setback or stroke of ill-fortune. Wizards. Always looking for a scapegoat.
He carried the steaming bowls from the café to the mess tent. While the heat from the thin ceramic might have been excruciating to another person, to Hashim it registered as barely a tickle. An advantage of being a fire entity. He supposed he should be grateful that there was at least one.
Rion was sitting at his usual table again, nibbling on the edge of a sandwich with a halo of empty seats around him as if he had the Pandora pox. Hashim sat down across from him and nudged one bowl of soup toward him. “Compliments of Omisan.”
“With tofu?” When Hashim nodded, Rion’s eyes lit up like candles. “Wow. That’s so nice of her. I love her chankonabe.” He offered Hashim a wax-paper-wrapped bundle. “You want my other sandwich, then? It’s egg salad. I made it myself.” He sighed.
“Thanks, but why the heavy sigh? You don’t have to give me the sandwich if you’d rather eat it yourself.”
“It’s not that. It’s just that my mom used to make my lunch for me when I still lived at home. Her egg salad was the best. I really miss her, and not just for her sandwiches.”
“Thank you, then.” Hashim opened the sandwich. Rion had cut the crusts off and bisected it into perfect triangles. “It looks great.”
“If you tip one triangle on its end, it looks like a little boat.”
Hashim smiled at Rion’s conspiratorial tone. “Did your mom teach you that too?”
Rion nodded. “Uh-huh. We lived on a cliff overlooking the sea. From the meadow outside our cottage, we’d watch the boats sailing into the harbor, and have picnics whenever it was sunny.”
“It sounds lovely.”
“It was. In spring and summer, the meadow was full of wildflowers. Sometimes they smelled so good that I tried to eat them.” He wrinkled his velvety nose. “They smell a lot better than they taste.”
Hashim laughed. “I imagine. Eat your soup.” When Rion picked up his spoon, Hashim noticed a SpongeBob Band-Aid on his arm above his cuff. “You’re hurt.” He looked closer and noticed several other bandages dotting Rion’s neck, chest, and forehead.
Rion shrugged. “It’s nothing. A couple of the labyrinth customers got a little excited this morning.”
“How can laser tag excitement translate to bruises for you?”
“It wasn’t laser tag this morning. Ringmaster’s giving mornings over to paintball now, but he won’t let me wear any of the protection. He says it lessens the experience for the customers. If I’ve got a vest and face mask on, how will they know I’m a real minotaur?”
“But paintballs can do real damage to you, especially if they hit your eyes. That’s wrong. They should recognize that you’re a person.”
“They look at me and see ‘monster.’” He stirred his soup. “Monsters aren’t persons. At least nobody wants to think they are. It might give them a reason to wonder about themselves.”
Hashim gripped Rion’s huge hand. “I don’t know how you got this gig, anyway, Rion. You’re the least fierce person I’ve ever met.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Rion sipped a spoonful of soup. “I don’t do anything but stand there and they run away screaming. Well, except when the paintballs start flying. But most of them have lousy aim.” He shrugged his massive shoulders. “It’s kinda boring, actually. It’d be nice if one of them would stick around enough to talk. I mean, at least Sphinx gets to ask all those riddles.”
“I think she’d trade with you if she could. She’d be up for scaring people away, since she’d rather sit in her den and read romance novels.”
Rion sighed. “I wish Ringmaster would let us trade jobs.”
Hashim pretended astonished outrage. “What? A minotaur posing riddles? How could we challenge the customers’ expectations that way?”
His ears drooped. “I know. But—” He brightened. “I’ve been making a list of riddles and jokes in my journal, just in case.”
Hashim smiled. “You have a journal? Where do you keep it? In your locker?”
“Nope. It’d be too hard to get to when I think up something new. There’s a place in the labyrinth that’s got a bunch of loose bricks. I hide it behind one of those.”
“Clever.”
“Want to hear one?”
“Hit me.”
“Knock knock.”
Hashim set his sandwich down. “Rion, knock-knock jokes aren’t actually riddles.”
“They’re not?” His big brown eyes turned shinier, and he blinked as if he might be about to cry. “Shoot. Now I’ll have to start a new list. Do you know any?”
What’s my true name? Unfortunately, that wasn’t a riddle anyone could answer except Yashar, and that was as likely as sorbet in the desert. “Sorry. I’ll try to think of one or two—”
“I forgot. It’s your last day.” He gripped his spoon one giant hand, ears drooping. “I’ll miss you. You were the first person here who was nice to me.”
“We started on almost the same day. That makes us practically clan mates.”
Rion grinned, his blunt teeth obviously not those of a meat eater. “Hey, I guess that’s right. Does that mean you’ll come back and visit?”
Hashim winced and fumbled with the wax paper, rewrapping the other half of the sandwich. “Once I’m back with the clan, I’ll answer to the sheikh, just like we answer to Ringmaster here. I’d come visit if I could. You know that.”
He nodded, his heavy head low on his neck. “I know. But with you gone, nobody will talk to me at all.”
“You can always talk to Omisan. She likes you.”
“Yeah, but I’m too big to get into the kitchen and carnies aren’t allowed in the café unless they’re servers, like you sometimes.”
“I think if you—” A flash of a familiar kaffiyeh outside the open tent flap made Hashim’s words dry up in his mouth. Yashar. Why is he here today? It’s too soon. “I’m sorry, Rion. I have to check on something.” He clambered off the bench, pushing his bowl toward Rion. “You can have my soup and the other half of the sandwich.”
“But—”
Hashim hurried out of the mess tent, craning his neck to catch the sight of Yashar’s kaffiyeh in the crowd. There. In front of Ringmaster’s tent. Hashim had no desire to face Ringmaster, but he had to find out what Yashar was up to.
Excitement kindled in Hashim’s belly. Perhaps he’d calculated his indenture incorrectly and his bondage was over now. I reported back to Yashar after Smith left. Midmorning? Perhaps the indenture period was reckoned based on the time of Yashar’s judgment rather than midnight as Hashim had always supposed.
He quickened his pace. Could it be? Might he already be free, or at least free enough to return home where his humiliation was private instead of public?
Yashar disappeared into Ringmaster’s tent before Hashim could catch up, customers jostling him as they joined the queue for the ring toss or the wheel of fortune. He looked around him. I’ll leave all this. The squalid accommodations. The relentless degradation. Being an object and not a person. Another one-trick pony in Ringmaster’s stable.
He sprinted then, dodging customers eating swathes of rainbow cotton candy or jackalope-on-a-stick, until he was directly outside Ringmaster’s tent flap, chest heaving with his labored breath. Not from his sprint. That was negligible. He expended more effort in his fire-eating act. But to escape. If only it had happened yesterday. Then Smith wouldn’t have seen. Wouldn’t have known.
He tugged on the hem of his open vest and shook his hair back, ready to greet Yashar and perhaps spit in Ringmaster’s eye. Yashar might punish him for it when they returned home, but it would be worth it.
Before he could enter, however, Yashar pushed through the flap, shaking his brocade money bag, which chinked in a way that brought a smirk to his lips and the old greedy flare to his muddy eyes.
“Sheikh.”
Yashar startled and did a double take worthy of the midway’s Punch and Judy show. “Hashim. What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same. I didn’t expect you to return for me until tomorrow. Is my indenture completed, then?”
Yashar tucked the fat bag into his sash, making it look as if his paunch had spawned. He smoothed his mustache and tugged on his beard, studying Hashim with half-lidded eyes. “No.”
“No? Tomorrow, then, as I expected?”
Yashar laced his fingers over his belly, rocking back and forth in his elaborately embroidered slippers. He smiled, slow and pitiless. “No.”
Cold, rare and shocking, trickled down Hashim’s spine. “No? But—”
“For the good of our clan, I have sold your bond to Ringmaster. Permanently.”
The cold disappeared in a burst of heat, although Hashim wasn’t certain if the cause was anger or despair. “For the good of the clan? You mean for the good of your pocketbook.”
Yashar shrugged. “It is the same.”
“I acknowledged my error. We calculated the value of what I cost the clan and I volunteered for this term. You can’t—”
“I am a wizard and clan sheikh. I can do whatever I wish. You? You are naught but a whim that I’ve regretted since the day I conjured you into my ritual fire.”
Bile burned the back of Hashim’s throat. “I didn’t ask to be so conjured.”
“What ifrit does? But I haven’t had a day’s luck since that moment. Until now.” He patted his coin paunch. “Now I rid myself of your presence and enrich our clan as well. I would call that a win-win.”
“Not for me.”
“What do you matter?” Yashar turned to go. “Your master awaits you inside. I suggest you find a way to serve him better than you ever served me.”
He sauntered away into the crowd. Hashim’s vision danced with black spots, and he wanted nothing more than to send a blast of fire to incinerate Yashar where he stood. He actually raised his hands to do it, but the restraining spells in the cuffs prevented anything but smoke curling from his fingers and shot excruciating pain through his head.
“Augh!” He doubled over, retching, his hands pressed to his temples as Ringmaster’s boots appeared before him.
Ringmaster’s chuckle cut the roaring in his ears. “That’s right. Now that I own you in truth, I’ve adjusted the cuffs to make things more… interesting.”
“You—You—”
“I what? I can’t? I shouldn’t? But I can and I will.”
“I was going to say”—Hashim ground out between the pulses of agony—“you motherfucking piece of shit.”
“Is that any way to talk to your master?” He grabbed Hashim’s hair and pulled him upright. “You forget yourself, ifrit. You belong to me, so you will do what I say, when I say it. No more backtalk. No more insubordination. No more walking out on performances and costing me money. You know the advantage of owning my acts outright?” He bared his teeth in a shark-like smile. “I don’t have to answer for any… unfortunate accidents that befall them. After all, nobody will come looking for you, just like nobody will come looking for Rion, or Sphinx, or Omisan. Because nobody cares. Nobody ever did, and nobody ever will.”
Despite the grip in his hair causing his eyes to water, Hashim refused to give Ringmaster the satisfaction of his surrender. “Don’t count on it. Interdimensional Law Enforcement—”
Ringmaster laughed uproariously, releasing Hashim’s hair at last. “ILE cares least of all, so long as my contributions continue to flow into their coffers. Now.” He brushed off the gold epaulets on his red tailcoat. “I have an appointment. Report to the café. You’ll wait tables until I call for you, and then we’ll have a little… chat.”
“But I’m on a break until my next show.”
Ringmaster tsked. “Yashar told me a number of interesting things when he gave me your name. For instance, I never knew that demons don’t require sleep. But since I know now—” He sneered, tugging his coat lapels. “—you don’t get breaks anymore.”
The cold returned, taking a grip on his lungs, making it hard for him to breathe. If Yashar had given up Hashim’s true name, then Ringmaster could control him completely. “Someday I’ll discover my name, and when I do—”
Ringmaster laughed again, slapping his knee in an excess of mirth. “Don’t think you can outwit me. Your name could be in plain sight, as obvious as the nose on your face, and you still wouldn’t find it. You now live to serve me, boy. So get used it. You’ll never be free.”