CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Sioned came back from the heart of the flame to find her tent heaped with books and scrolls: a mage’s trove of them, some in languages that she had never seen or imagined. There was a small jinni sitting on the heap of those, looking rather like a tasseled and turbaned frog; yet its voice when it spoke was as rich and orotund as a bishop’s. “I serve you,” it said, bowing low.

She bowed in return, less deeply. “You are welcome in my tent,” she said. “May I offer you—”

“Peace,” said the jinni, “and ink and pens and parchment. If you will, bright lady.”

She sent one of Richard’s pages to fetch what the jinni had asked for. She could give it peace easily enough: she needed sleep, however little of it she might manage. The jinni was deep in scrolls by the time the ink and pens arrived; it reached blindly for them and went on reading, its big round eyes barely blinking.

She should be reading those books which she could understand. But first, sleep. She scaled a mountain of books to find her bed on the other side, open and welcoming.

 

It was three days before Sioned mustered the courage to face Ahmad. Henry still had not come. He was close, the scouts kept insisting, but the Saracens knew it and were harrying him. Richard sent out a company to find and help him, then after half a day of pacing, snarling, and trying everyone’s patience, he gathered another troop of knights and set out himself.

The camp without him was no quieter. He had left the Archbishop of Canterbury in command; Hubert Walter, though a quiet and clerkly-looking man, had a will of iron, and he was determined that the army be well ready to rise and march as soon as Richard came back. If Saladin took it into his head to leave off fortifying Jerusalem and fall on the Franks in their king’s absence, he would find no easy enemy.

Sioned waited until after nightfall to begin the spell. The scholar-jinni was deeply engrossed in a book of many strange leaves, tall and narrow and written in a tongue that was spoken, it said, on the roof of the world. Its presence was more a comfort than a distraction.

Sioned hardly needed to speak the word of power or to kindle the flame. He was present in her heart, rousing as if from sleep, smiling as he grew aware of her. She could see a little of where he was: a room of stone, warm with hangings, soft-lit with lamplight. One of his sons was asleep at the foot of the bed on which he was sitting. He had a scroll open on his knees, but something in the way he sat told her that he had not been reading it even before she intruded on his solitude.

He was in Jerusalem. She could feel the power of the place even through the veil of the flame. It was not the power she had expected, even camped so close to it. She had thought to find more light and less darkness; more peace and less throbbing discord. It was so old, this city, and so heavily imbued with sanctity, that it could scarcely sustain the weight of itself.

He seemed undismayed by the paradoxes of the city, and glad almost beyond bearing to sense her presence. “Beloved,” he said.

She almost wept at the word; her tongue had echoed it before her mind was aware. She would have fallen through the flame if she could, into his arms, but that power was not given her—and well for them both. They were in the places in which they were most needed.

Time was short. Something hunted them—something that she feared she knew, a power that rode on the winds of magic as a vulture circled the mortal sky. “I need to know,” she said. “To destroy our common enemy. Your lady said—”

“She told me,” Ahmad said. “I’ve searched through all I know, and everything that I can call to memory. I found the same old tales, the same legends, but nothing of use.”

“She said that it’s something you know,” said Sioned. “Something maybe you found when you helped your brother to besiege the castle, or something you discovered when you went to him again.”

“Or anything I could have read or thought or seen in the years between,” he said with a wry twist. “No, don’t frown; I trust your instinct and hers. Will you walk in memory with me? It may be this needs another eye, a fresher mind.”

“Gladly,” she said, “but how—”

“Swiftly,” he said. “Come.”

The thing that stalked the edges of awareness was drawing closer, but he seemed unaware of it. He caught her and drew her in, spinning through a whirl of darkness and flame.

His eyes were at the heart of them. They opened on his house outside of Damascus, a place she had come to love better than anywhere in the world. Its gardens were rich with summer, the light in them golden, but the rooms within shifted from sunlight to moonlight and back again, through all the phases of night and day.

They were rooms of memory, places he had been and seen. They passed in rapid succession, dizzying in their multitudes, until one caught, wavered, paused.

An army besieged a fortress on a high crag. The force was strong, its engines powerful, but the fortress stood unmarred. It mocked them with its changelessness.

Sioned recognized the man who commanded the army, although she had never seen him face to face. He looked like Ahmad, but somewhat smaller, somewhat thinner, and somewhat finer drawn. He had no magic, but his spirit shone with a white light, such purity as the jinn would have bowed down and worshipped.

He was, in that moment of memory, on the raw edge of frustration. He had given the command to retreat; the engines were being taken down, the camp disbanded. It was a wise decision, but he was not at all happy to have made it. “Allah! Why can’t I be the end of him?”

“It’s not his time,” Ahmad said. They were standing side by side on an outcropping of stone, not far from the dismantling of the siege-engines. He was still quite a young man, and his magic was just beginning to know itself, yet he was still beyond question the man she knew. He had the same cool composure; the same air of quiet self-restraint.

“If it’s not his time now,” Saladin demanded, “then when will it be?”

Ahmad lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “God knows,” he said.

“God keeps His counsel,” Saladin muttered. “I need a source that is more forthcoming.”

“All men are mortal,” Ahmad said. “Even sorcerers like that one can be destroyed.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” said Ahmad.

“Find a way,” Saladin said.

Ahmad bowed. The memory melted into a blur of speeding days.

Some Sioned almost caught—almost remembered. The rest passed far too quickly to grasp. Only one slowed enough to be understood.

An old man sat in an eerie and beautiful garden. Its flowers were too strange, its greenery too bright for earth. The man was human enough, or so it seemed. She knew his face all too well, though he was younger here and stronger than he had been in his passages of magic with the queen.

He did not speak. The chair in which he sat was peculiar, like the stump of an ancient and twisted tree. It grew out of the otherworldly soil, writhing its stunted branches, grappling the dirt with its roots.

It was, in its way, the image of the man who sat in it. She sensed no stronger magic in it than anywhere else in the garden, no evidence that Sinan had set the heart of his power there. And yet as the memory faded, she held on to that tormented shape.

And something more. Something very close by it; a glimmer, half-seen, barely remembered, and yet . . .

Darkness roared upon her. The stalker had found her. She had been on guard, or so she thought; she had had wards. They crumpled like parchment.

Ahmad was nowhere within reach. She could not go hunting him—that would bring the stalker down on him. She turned as best she could and fled.

She was bleeding magic. Her wards were in tatters. The flame of her conjuring was lost in the swirl of darkness.

It did not know her name, in which was the greatest power and the strongest binding. It groped, clawing at her unprotected self, seeking the word that would grant it power over her. She guarded it with all the strength that she had left, and as she guarded it, she ran.

A clear voice rang across the starless sky. It brought the hunter wheeling about, jaws opening wide, fangs dripping pallid light. Safiyah stood in a gleaming gate, wrapped in white. She spoke again in a tongue of which Sioned knew only a little, words of summoning and of irresistible temptation. Come to me. Conquer me. Make me your slave.

The hunter knew her name and the measure of her power. It abandoned Sioned to fall on that great queen of mages.

Sioned gasped in protest and tried to catch it, but she was too weak, her movement too slow.

“Now!” cried Safiyah as the hunter fell upon her. “Run!”

The gate was open. Safiyah had sprung aside from it, leaping to meet the hunter. Sioned veered, but a buffet of power flung her aside. The gate caught her and spun her down and down, out of darkness into light, and into shadowed dimness—the dimness of a tent heaped high with books, lit by a single lamp.

Sioned’s body was cold, but never as cold as her heart. The door of the spirit was closed to her. Safiyah was trapped on the other side of it, sundered from all help both mortal and otherwise, doing battle with the hunter.

The armies of the jinn could not come to her, not through those walls of power; Sioned’s little bit of magic was helpless to defend her. The hunter would kill her, and there was nothing Sioned could do. Not one thing—except lie in her chill bed and remember: every word, every image. Over and over. Seeking the thing, the one thing, that would give her the answer. If there was an answer at all.