Al-Sepehr tugged his veil across his face as he stepped into the brutal glare of the courtyard. The afternoon midway between noon and evenset was one such time. The hour of fire; the hour when the sun blazed hottest. The hour of Vajhir, a pagan god of Messaline who ruled over flames and the sun. But they were not in Messaline now, and this time was important to al-Sepehr’s Scholar-God as well.
Unlike lesser deities, the Scholar-God was singular. She had no name because she needed none, being singular. The Nameless, too, were singular. It was the teaching of Sepehr al-Rachīd ibn Sepehr that there were no true prophets—not Ysmat of the Beads nor any other—and that only the naked word of the Scholar-God could be trusted.
It was an irony, al-Sepehr thought, that led some to treat al-Rachīd as a prophet himself, when the so-called Sorcerer-Prince had denied that any such existed. Al-Sepehr was not one of the ones who believed that al-Rachīd had been a prophet. Although he did acknowledge al-Rachīd’s demidivinity—a different thing entirely.
And he, of the line of Sepehr himself, as the leader of the Nameless here in Ala-Din, had al-Rachīd’s library at his disposal. It was to that library that he traveled now, past the courtyards dusty and empty in the sweltering sun, past the deep wells and cisterns with their heavy stone lids to hold the water within.
So little of sorcery was mystic circles scribed in blood and fuming censers. Oh, there was sacrifice, of course—al-Sepehr thought of the stones in his trouser pocket again—but most of his work was done bent over ancient tomes written in the crabbed handwriting of al-Rachīd or al-Rachīd’s heirs.
Al-Sepehr knew the name he wanted; he knew the book that name resided in. But it harmed nothing to be extra careful when one was dealing with djinn.
He took the book from the shelf, its bound pages heavy in their limp leather covering. It fell open to the page he wanted; the parchment was stained with strange chemicals and—perhaps—tea around the margins.
He knew better than to summon a spirit of fire and wind to a library, and so he copied the name he needed onto a scrap of eastern paper, taking pains over the vowels. He blew it dry and folded it into his sleeve before putting the volume away. Then he climbed the seventy steps from that white-pillared room to the tower’s flat roof.
Al-Sepehr kept a brazier here, for convenience. As he kindled it, he turned the name over and over in his mind, considering stresses and how he would use his breath.
At last there was flame. Al-Sepehr stood over it, the scrap of paper in his hand, and cast the djinn’s name into the fire an instant before he pronounced it, all seventeen syllables in a fluid roll like the lines of a poem.
And then he raised up his arms and said, “Come.”
It was an unnecessary bit of theater, and there was no one to observe it, but he felt the sorcery deserved a little pomp. And indeed, by the time he lowered his hands again, he had an audience. A flash of heat stung al-Sepehr’s face where the veil did not cover it. A hot wind fluttered his loose garments like banners.
Sparks rose about the djinn’s sinewy feet where they rested on the brazier’s deep cherry coals. It was smaller than al-Sepehr had expected, having taken the form of a slight man with indigo hair and lapis lazuli skin that caught flashes of gold in the sun. Its eyes blazed in their sockets like orange-yellow embers, though its hands were thrust insouciantly into the pockets of white pantaloons. It wore nothing else.
It lifted its chin, straightening from a curve-backed slouch, and pulled its shoulders back. “So you’re the new al-Sepehr.”
“These twenty years gone by,” al-Sepehr said, conscious, as he was usually not, of the gray streaks in his hair and beard. He tugged his veil down to show his face. “I suppose that might be new to a djinn.”
“Barely born,” the djinn said. It drew hands overlarge for its frame from its pockets, spreading them as if for balance as it stepped down from the brazier. Its feet left soot smudges. Pressing its palms together, it performed the mockery of a bow. “Shall we dispense with the pleasantries and get right down to the haggling, then?”
“I did not call you because I wanted to haggle,” al-Sepehr said.
The djinn looked around, craning its neck this way and that. The stone smoked under its feet. “Well, I don’t see a binding circle, and there’s a distinct lack of bottles and lamps. So you don’t intend to imprison me. I don’t hand out wishes to just anybody who can say my name. That leaves haggling.”
It smiled and spread outsized hands again. The face it wore was youthful, diamond-shaped, crooked-nosed, under curly hair that swept up into the kind of appealing tousle one might expect in an indulged bed-slave. The eyes might even have looked sultry if they had not blazed like fire opals. Al-Sepehr wondered from whom the djinn had borrowed the face.