After a long silence, broken only by the susurration of the djinni’s whirlwind body, the creature slowly rotated until it faced the fugitives. “You are Rodrick and Hrym.”
“Hmmm,” Rodrick said. “What do you think, Hrym? Do we admit anything? Is this thing going to kill us?”
“It could kill you, maybe,” Hrym said. “I don’t see how a man who’s half wind can possibly hurt me.”
“I mean you no harm,” the djinni said.
“Oh. That’s reassuring.” Rodrick held up Hrym’s glittering blade, putting the length of enchanted ice between himself and the djinni. He was frankly overawed at the presence of the immense magical creature, but he’d had a lot of practice pretending to be bored and unimpressed—people hardly ever expected you to steal things when you looked totally bored by them—so he hid his surprise well.
The djinni’s vortex had picked up bits of trash from the storehouse, and scraps of paper and ragged bits of leaf swirled where its legs should have been, an effect that made the thing seem less monstrously inhuman, though not by much.
“Thank you for scaring off those … oh, let’s say ‘muggers,’” Rodrick said.
The djinni stared at him impassively, and Rodrick resisted the urge to clear his throat, duck his head, shuffle his feet, or run for his life under the unmoving onslaught of its gaze.
“How do you know our names?” Hrym said.
Excellent question, Rodrick thought. If he hadn’t been halfway to soiling himself with fear he might have asked it himself.
“I was sent to deliver a message,” the djinni said. “The thakur of Jalmeray requests the pleasure of your company at his palace in Niswan.”
“I understood some of those words,” Rodrick said. “Notably ‘pleasure’ and ‘palace.’”
“Jalmeray,” Hrym said. “You mean that island off the coast of Nex? With all the monasteries and tigers and so on?”
“Ah,” Rodrick said. “The place where those fighting monks study, isn’t that right? I hear they’ll take anyone who shows talent. You just have to go there and pass some kind of test, where you punch an efreeti in the face, outdrink a marid, spank a djinni—things like that. Then you get to join a House of Perfection and live on rice water and regular beatings for years while you learn how to punch a man’s heart out through his back, or kill someone with your pinky finger. Never saw the point, myself, as a sword is just as effective, and you don’t get blood on your fingers unless you use it wrong.”
The djinni was not noticeably amused. “Jalmeray is a wondrous island, the westernmost of the Impossible Kingdoms of the Vudrani.”
“And this thakur you mentioned is, what? The king?”
“In essence,” the djinni said.
“Hmm. I don’t owe a foreign king any obedience—”
“Oh, because you’re so obedient to local kings,” Hrym said.
Rodrick shrugged. “Local kings tend to have local soldiers who can compel obedience, though, so I walk a bit more softly around them, you have to give me that.”
“This king of Jalmeray sent a djinni,” Hrym said. “The one standing right here. You remember. Look at him. He’s got a scimitar in each hand, and when he kicks you, you get kicked with a tornado. You want to disobey him?”
“I will not compel your attendance,” the djinni said. “You are invited guests. A ship leaves the docks tomorrow at first light, the Nectar of the Gods, and there is a berth for you if you wish to board. Whether you accept the invitation or not makes no difference to me.”
“All right, fair enough, but can you give us a hint?” Rodrick said. “Does this thakur want to hire us to do something unsavory? Marry me off to his ugliest granddaughter to bring some fresh blood to the family line? Give me a medal for some act of heroism that’s temporarily slipped my mind?”
The djinni still didn’t look amused. Rodrick might give up trying soon at this rate. “I cannot say,” the creature replied. “But for a man from the barbarous lands of the Inner Sea to be granted an audience with the thakur is a great honor.”
“Honor doesn’t fill my belly, or my purse,” Rodrick said.
“Mmm. If you proved hesitant, I was instructed to offer this incentive.” The djinni sheathed one of the scimitars—sheathed it where, or in what, exactly, Rodrick couldn’t see, but that was supernatural creatures for you—and reached into the swirling vortex beneath its waist. Its hand reemerged holding a small leather bag, which the djinni tossed to Rodrick.
The bag clinked endearingly, and a peek inside revealed the warm yellow glow of gold, coins stamped with multi-armed women and elephant heads and roaring tigers.
“That is merely a taste of the wealth that awaits you,” the djinni said. “If you come to Jalmeray, and reach an accommodation with the thakur, you may well leave the island with your own weight in gold.”
“Every time someone says that,” Rodrick said, “I wish I were a great deal fatter.” He made the coins disappear almost as neatly as the djinni had made his sword vanish. “We will consider the thakur’s kind invitation. Do convey my thanks.”
The djinni turned to smoke and vapor, and Rodrick was briefly buffeted by a strong wind as the creature disappeared into or merged with or rode away on currents of air.
“That was unusual,” Rodrick said once the wind had died down. “Even by our standards.”
Hrym briefly pulsed with red light and giggled, the sound of a demented child who was also probably possessed, and Rodrick winced. A skylight overhead cracked, but fortunately didn’t fall in. He aimed the blade away from him, toward a dusty corner of the warehouse, and a few icicles shot forth from the sword, smashing into a shelf and knocking it over with a clatter.
The sword had spent some time the previous year in close proximity to an imprisoned demon lord, and Hrym had the ability to soak up sufficiently powerful ambient magic. He’d picked up some kind of demonic taint, which so far hadn’t proven too deleterious—he didn’t seem compelled to slaughter innocents for the sheer joy of spreading chaos, at any rate—but he had these little … episodes. Fits, Rodrick might have called them, if Hrym had been human. More and more, though, Hrym giggled horribly, and pulsed with red light, and when that happened, chaos and disorder seemed to spread. Vases broke, chandeliers fell from the ceiling, food rotted, wine turned to vinegar. And those were just the atmospheric effects. Lately the giggles had been followed by outbursts of icy magic, like lethal spasms.
One such demonic fit had ruined their attempt to break into the little lord’s vault the night before. It was such a good plan, too—look tough, get hired to do security at the ball, slip away to the basement, freeze the guards watching the vault, turn the locks to ice, smash them open, steal the wonderful relics within, get on a ship before the little lord even noticed the theft, sell the loot to a not-terribly scrupulous fence named Skiver in Almas, enjoy ill-gotten riches, etc.
But Hrym had one of his fits just as Rodrick was creeping toward the vault, his titter and the attendant crack of a roof beam breaking neatly in two overhead alerting the guards to their presence in time to yank a cord that set an alarm bell to ringing somewhere up above. Worse, Hrym had fired off spears of ice, seemingly as involuntarily as Rodrick loosing a sneeze, blowing holes in the wall and ceiling above and calling even more attention. They’d escaped and tried to make their way to the ship bound for Almas anyway, but the little lord’s men were there, and they’d pursued Rodrick and Hrym relentlessly through streets until they ended up here in the Coins.
The worst part—all right, one of the many bad parts—was that Hrym wasn’t even aware of his condition. He had no memory of his giggles, or the chaos, or the ill-timed bursts of ice magic. As far as Hrym was concerned, the guards had just noticed them when they were sneaking up on the vault—it was pure bad luck.
Rodrick hadn’t yet figured out how to tell Hrym he was demon-tainted. After all, who among us doesn’t have some little quirk or another? But the fits were becoming more frequent, and violent, and Rodrick was considering the appalling prospect of finding a priest and asking for help.
“Did you hear something?” Hrym said.
Just your terrible giggle and aura of destruction. “A shelf fell down, or something. Everything’s busted-up and broken in here. No surprise really.”
“Hmm,” Hrym said. “So. Do we get on the ship and travel to a faraway land?”
“There are pluses and minuses.” He put Hrym in the sheath at his belt, ignoring the sword’s protest—walking around the Coins with a naked blade, especially that blade, would draw too much of the wrong kind of attention. “Pluses include that whole weight-in-gold thing.”
Hrym’s voice was muffled by the sheath, but audible. “Minuses include the fact that no one gives you your weight in gold without expecting you to work for it.”
“I do hate work. But being in close proximity to my weight in gold might provide the opportunity to steal it, thus getting the gold without doing the work.”
“How much gold would that be, anyway?” Hrym asked. “In terms of coins, I mean. Gold is awfully heavy, so it might not be so many, and you know I like to rest on a good bed of coins. He’d better not pay you in gold bars—they’re not nearly as comfortable to sleep on. Why aren’t you fatter, anyway?”
“However much it is, it’s certainly more gold than we have now, by quite a large margin. Also, I’ve never been to Jalmeray. Could be interesting. All djinn and monks and tigers and temples in high mountains. And, hmm—women who dance around wearing nothing but scarves, and translucent scarves, at that. Am I remembering that right?”
“As always, you’re a keen student of cultural matters,” Hrym said.
“I suppose I should see if I can find a map. Perhaps read a book. No, no time for that—but perhaps I should talk to someone who’s read a book.” He turned a corner and walked along the back of a warehouse, past stacks of empty crates piled up twice the height of a man—or once the height of a djinni, apparently.
“A whole book?” Hrym said. “I don’t think we know anyone who’s gone quite that far.”
“True.” Rodrick paused in the mouth of an alleyway. Had he heard the scrape of a boot on stone back there? He drew Hrym and whirled, blade outstretched. He was quite good at the drawing-fast-and-whirling bit, as it made quite an impressive display; it was the parts that usually came after—actually trying to kill someone with a sword—that he’d never been much good at. Luckily, Hrym’s ice magic made him lethal at a distance.
Except against these two. That buffoon Kelso and the other guard, the old one with the disreputable mustaches, approached with blades drawn. “What now?” the old one said, and grinned. “Gonna summon your djinni again?”